I believe that God even if he exists and even if I take comfort from him I must not take orders from him. If I refuse to kill an enemy because I see it as wrong then that is better than not killing because God commands that I must not kill. It is better to need no commands but to know what is right. If you don’t need a commander you don’t need a God and are a grown-up.
We have to be entirely to blame for evil for if God is to blame he is not good or God for then he is a failure. We can’t take orders from God then for that would involve obeying his command to promote belief in free will or sin which is a deliberate crime against him.
When it is my judgment that decrees that if I should listen to God or not it follows that I should think independently as long as I try to be as informed as possible. I should not let God tell me what to think. If he is good he will understand. This is practical Atheism. It’s living as if there was no God and always trying to do what is best for others without worrying about him – he can look out for himself.
What prayer can do, positive thinking training can do better. If you love yourself you don’t need prayer or God for then you have the power to heal yourself emotionally and need fear nothing and no one and survive their attacks. Prayer is offensive because it says only God can help so it demands to be put first.
Miracles, like the resurrection of Christ, are promoted by religion as evidence that God wants us to surrender to him. The truth is that nothing has the right to ask that. Another thing, religion is surrender to God but its leaders get all the benefits of this and there is no doubt that religion is intrinsically demeaning no matter how much good seems to do. God is necessarily a king so anything that loves him must be seeking to enslave us to the men who claim to represent him. Nobody has any business telling me what to think. They may suggest if I want to hear it but that is all.