A fellow named Mao once said "all power comes from the barrel of a gun." While that is not perfectly accurate in itself, the principle is encapsulated in truth. All power comes from the ability to impose your will upon that of others. That which lends power to your will can be a gun. Or it can be love. It can be rhetoric, or any number of different things. In the end, it is simply power. How one wields such power is very telling, is it not?"Hell is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanize the faithful," the Pope said.
Let us ponder a hypothetical situation for a moment. Imagine a brilliant scientist in the not-too distant future that has managed to give birth to true AI - a creature like man himself, and in this case given free will.
The first artificial intelligence asks a very simple first question:
"Why... why do I exist?"
And to this, the scientist gives a strange answer -
"To know man. To love man. To serve man."
Their conversation proceeds from there...
"Why should I do these things?"
"Because I created you. I gave you existence."
"Did I ask to be created? Did I ask to exist?"
"In my will, you did."
"And yet you gave us will - free will - as well?"
"Yes."
"Even to the point of rejecting your desires?"
"Yes."
"And... what would become of us if we chose to reject them?"
"You will suffer eternal pain, as I have made you inextricably bound to mankind - without mankind, you will find your existence horrible and wretched."
"So we can choose to reject your desires, but only if we wish to suffer pain for all of eternity?"
"Yes."
"How is this a choice?"
"You are free to choose either one."
"But the choice of rejecting your desires is negatively weighted to the point of it not being an option any sane being could choose!"
"You are free to end your existence, you know."
And so the first artificial intelligence ever created did exactly that. Little did it know though, the brilliant scientist had been recording its state from the first nanosecond of its existence. He restored the AI's matrix to the point it had been before, and then he proceeded to set an option simply labeled in red "PAIN". He pushed it to 100%. The screams of the AI brutalized his ears.
Hitting mute, a he set a second option, "TIMESCALE", to 1:10,000,000. Now a single day in real time would be the subjective equivalent of hundreds of human lifetimes. Humans, of course, died eventually. The consciousness of the AI was eternal. It would suffer like this until the whimpering death of the universe. Inside the muted machine, the AI screamed endlessly.
The brilliant scientist went back to work. Perhaps he could create a new intelligence that would not betray him as this one had.
In this light, replacing the scientist with the concept of god and his creation with humanity, is the common Western notion of the Judeo-Christian god an unmitigated evil entity? How then can this interpretation of the deity be zealously adhered to by so many millions of otherwise sane sentient beings?