All powerful and stuff......could he not have appeared to the pharaoh and demonstrated his power and devinity? One simple act and all the bloodshed and suffering of innocent people would have been avoided. Or is 'god' just the ultimate serial killer?
All right, that's it! No more Mr. Nice Gaius!
(I won't use "He" for the Creator because that word kind of gives gender to It, as It doesn't have a gender as we define it. It is one single being with ultimate power and knowledge, that created everything else, has no equals or partners, who wanted to be known, hence the creation - those we know of and those we don't know of.)
The Creator (that is, if you believe) created this universe and everything inside it and organized everything the way It wanted (galaxies, stars, sun, planets, earth, moon, summer, winter, day, night, mountains, water, plants, animals, humans, minds, hearts, cells, atoms, electrons...). Not the way we want, not the way we would wish or not the way that would make perfect sense to us.
Once you accept that, you won't expect the Creator to show up to anyone who did not believe, to convince them. If It wanted people to be convinced by seeing It, then most probably it would have been that way. One can very well believe in the Creator simply by looking at the creation and realizing that we are not in control of anything at all (as also this movie tells to some extent). But of course, the key is "free will" here. I think that's why "being believed by Its creatures with free will and intelligence without seeing It" is a lot more valuable for the Creator.
We are inside the system (universe), which is an ever-growing but closed system (consider it like Matrix or an online game world). The Creator is not inside the system (that is how I understand it and how it makes sense to me), hence nobody can see It. On the Judgment Day, we and the universe will be recreated in a new way of creation in a way we will (hopefully) be able to see our Creator, and there, everyone will find out the truth, including the Pharaoh(s). Since there can be only one truth, some of us will be happy and some of us will be sad. May it be an easy judgment for all of us...
Do not be sorry for the innocent, because if they are truly innocent, the Creator, as I understand it, will reward them for their sufferings. After all, this life is just a moment of play, which is the key to the eternal life and how our eternal lives will be, will be based on how we live this life. When you believe (or "know" I should say) that there is a perfect justice at the end (there is), then you stop trying to make sense of everything and leave everything to the Creator's justice peacefully but still continue to live your life as justly as you can.
For the record, the source for my comments and opinions are Quran.
That is of course assuming that the gods are singular, but of course throughout most of human existence they have been many. With an almost infinite multiplicity of gods, their 'truths' likewise must also be manifold.
An infinite number of gods likewise have an infinite number of outcomes to existence. In fact a separate and individual 'truth' for each & every simpleton sufficiently deluded by these childish god-concepts to expect some form of 'reward'.
The so-called monotheistic 'Abrahamic' cults are worse still! These bronze age Asian faiths promise all but deliver nothing at all.
Talking specifics, muzzies are expecting 72 virgins each, and 28 'comely' pre-pubescent boys to molest and despoil after death plus an additional 80000 slaves. EACH!! Given the current world population, and ignoring already dead adherents., that's about 150 BILLION innocent virgins getting deflowered and anally raped and despoiled in the name of their own specific cult. A greater number in fact than have ever lived in the 13.5 billion years of the universe's existence. Virgin what? Insects? Rats? Space aliens? Because they sure won't be virgin HUMANS. There aren't, never have been nor ever could be that many available! Then there's the 'small' matter of some 120 TRILLION slaves needed too. All from 'the religion of peace'!
Fantasist fairy stories indeed, specifically created by semi literate peasants to enslave their illiterate fellows. For jews it's 'mansions in the sky', whilst the christ-cultists are promised riches and relaxation.
Seeing a pattern here? Talk is cheap. Promises to be delivered post mortem, being unfulfillable, are mere lies to enslave the gullible and weak-willed. This cynical, despicable, lying, outright EVIL 'religious' manipulation is what has instilled (in ALL the Abrahamic cults) a mentality of martyrdom, that in turn fosters despicable, depraved conflict, intertribal, internecine and intercult warfare, murder, torture and brutality.
For that is the true face of religion: licence for otherwise good men and women to perpetrate evil upon their fellows. For whilst the gods aren't real, the evil perpetrated in their name/s surely is.
Your detailed description of "reward" kind of made me smile. I don't know where you got that idea from but that's definitiely not my expectation from my Creator as a reward, that is if I am deemed worthy of being rewarded. In addition to everything I have been given in this world without me doing anything to earn them (the air, the water, the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the appropriate distance between Earth and Sun, the Moon being a protector for asteroids, the atmosphere being a protector from harmful Sun radiation, the seasons, the stars, the winds, the clouds, the rain, the snow, the rivers, the mountains, the trees, the flowers, the fruits, the animals, the vehicles, the fuel that is used for running the vehicles, my body, my head, my mind, my ability to think and to build, my brain, my skull, the membrane between my brain and my skull, my eyes, my eyebrows, my eyelashes, my ears, my mouth, my teeth, my tongue, my speech, my understanding of other people when they speak, my hands, my legs, my feet, my fingers, my nails, I guess I can't count them all) which are enough for me to know, love, respect and obey my Creator, the perfect reward for me will be being forgiven for my wrongs, being free of worry, pain and grudge, in short anything negative that is attached to the human nature in this world.
You are right about one thing though, "gods aren't real", as there is only one Creator, otherwise wouldn't really make sense.
If I may ask, do you have any belief or thought about what will happen to "you" after you die? I mean, what do you expect after your death (if you expect anything), which is a certainty to happen. Just a genuine question.
I think to many simple, deluded souls that multiple gods are indeed very real. These days they take the form of evil, self serving popes, priests, pharisees, ayatollahs, mullas, caliphs, prophets, madmen and other dictatorial theocrats that claim some vague sort of spiritual authority. Real flesh & blood. Just as it's always been.
Their lies, half-truths and unfulfillable promises are remarkably similar, too. Don't mind the struggles of your current life. Let me steal it all from you; your wealth, your freedom, your dignity, your self-worth, even your life. It will get better for you... when you die. Riches shall be bestowed, you can rape, pillage, sodomise and despoil to your heart's content once you're dead. All forms of unimaginable bounties shall be yours for the taking, so the sooner you die, the sooner it can be yours. You need only submit, obey, believe and then die.
Some so called 'faiths' are worse yet: apostasy (loss of faith) is punishable by death. Yet the 1.5 billion adherents of this particularly evil sect have been given a mandate. Give all others the chance to recant/convert/join or suffer execution or sexual & physical enslavement. Driven on by the 'prophetic' delusional rantings of a medieval warlord, to this very day the sect's adherents rape, murder, pillage and enslave not only other non-believers, but their own as well. The snake eats its tail.
In regard to your question about a post mortem existence: there's as many answers to that question as there are questioners. One thing is certain, however: THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE. At least, not as the cultists would describe, anyway.
Consider your 'life' before your birth. Yes, we exist. Living, sentient beings, similar in so many ways to all other living things. Whether a tree, a snail, a moss or a bacterium is 'sentient' is perhaps a moot point. All, however, interact with their fellows, and their environment, so that must in some way be a form of 'sentience'. But our existence, prior to life, is one without any discernable form of sentience.
We are all individually and collectively beings of matter and energy. We constantly exchange elements of our constituent matter and energy with our environment, in fact we are nothing but a constantly changing assemblage of matter and energy. Just as all constituent elements of the universe does: sentient and otherwise. In this way we are no different to any form of solid, gas or liquid in the universe.
The 'miracle' of our existence, therefore, is within our awareness. This separates us from non-living existence, and we (i.e. all living things) are extremely rare and precious as a consequence. All life is 'sacred'. Despite what those false prophets would have us believe. One particular idiot, whilst hallucinating in the mountains near Medina in the Arabian peninsular, even had the stupidity to suggest that, for instance, cats were beloved, but dogs considered 'haram' or ungodly! That is perhaps what separates the so-called prophets from those over which they presume to dictate: a peculiar admixture of ego-centricity, madness and pathological psychopathy or even sociopathy. A common enough phenomenon to be both recognisable, measurable and recurrent. All that is needed is a self serving bureaucracy of greedy, dishonest sycophantic lackeys to administer the particular perverted theocratic dictatorship onto a naive and unintelligent population for a new religion to be created, and a new generation of slaves and martyrs born.
No species has dominion. Not even us. We are supposedly 'granted dominion' over all others, but evidence of the dominant status of parasites, pathogens, bacterium and non-living DNA strands in the for of viruses shows that to be a lie also. It's pathological arrogance to suggest otherwise.
And just as we are 'assembled' into a particularly rare and unique form of sentient matter and energy, we will become disassembled eventually too. We are the stuff of exploding stars, and it is to them that we all shall eventually return. Therefore I contend that our post mortem existence shall be exactly the same as our pre-mortem existence. Our lives are the sum total of 13.5 billion years of genetics, followed by some for score years or so of sentience on a small blue green rock spinning around a relatively insignificant star somewhere on the outer edge of a spiral galaxy which itself is only one of untold billions of similar star clusters. I'm just not sufficiently gullible, nor culturally arrogant enough to suggest that there's any more to our existence than that.
Life. This is as good as it gets. Anything else is mere smoke and mirrors, the lies and delusions of 'prophetic' madmen.
But at least there's one 'truth' in all this which provides me with hope: all religions will die. Any philosophy based on lies and stupidity is nothing but a house of cards. In all the innumerable religions of human history, none has lasted long. None can. As a species, we seem to have a peculiarly perverted need to ask the 'eternal questions'. Philosopy and faith supposedly provide the answers, but none can agree.
That's the human condition. In our ignorance, only fools and madmen seek to provide answers to the unanswerable, and only idiots believe them.
THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE