or punish anyone. People are even more insane if they actually believe
this, let alone teach it. In reality, God cannot turn away from us or even
look at us with a frown. To do any such thing would be against his
essence, and what is against his essence is against himself.57 The dominant opinion nowadays is that the omnipotence of God is
like the absolute power of a monarch in the world, who can do whatever
she or he wishes on a whim: absolve and condemn at will, make the
guilty innocent, declare the unfaithful to be faithful, promote undeserv-
ing and unworthy people above those who are worthy and deserving.
Under any pretext whatever, he or she can even seize citizens’ assets, sen-
tence them to death, and so on.
Through this ridiculous opinion, belief, and teaching about divine
omnipotence, the same number of falsities, errors, and fabled monsters have
poured into the church as there are movements, branches, and new sects of
the faith. There is still room for more—as many more as the jars you could
fill with water from a great lake, or as many as the snakes in an Arabian
desert that could crawl out of their caves to enjoy basking in the sunshine.
All you would need [to start a new movement, branch, or sect] are those
two little words, “omnipotence” and “faith,” and a program to spread
enough conjectures, fables, and blithering to be physically stimulating.
Each of those two words pushes reason aside. Once our reason is dis-
engaged, our thought process is no better than that of a bird flying over-
head. What then becomes of the spiritual aspect that we have but
animals lack? It becomes like the smell in a zoo: it suits the wild animals
that are there but does not suit people unless they are particularly beastly.
If divine omnipotence extended to doing evil as well as good, what
difference would there be between God and the Devil? They would be no
different than two rulers, one of whom is a monarch and also a tyrant,
while the other is a tyrant whose power has been curtailed so that he or
she cannot be called a monarch anymore. They would be no different
than a shepherd who is allowed to keep a sheep and a leopard, and another
shepherd who is not allowed to do the same. Surely anyone can see that
good and evil are opposites, and that if God by his omnipotence were able
to will and do both good and evil, he could do absolutely nothing. He
would have no power at all, much less omnipotence.
This situation would be much like the way two wheels going in
opposite directions act against one another, causing each wheel to come
to a stop. It would be like a ship whose course ran against a strong current