Godless (27 page)
I know you have tried to get me off the hook. You explain that Yours Truly is not responsible for the sufferings of unbelievers because rejection of God is their choice, not mine. They had a corrupt human nature, you explain. Well, who gave them their human nature? If certain humans decide to do wrong, where do they get the impulse? If you think it came from Satan, who created Satan? And why would some humans be susceptible to Satan in the first place? Who created that susceptibility? If Satan was created perfect and then fell, where did the flaw of perdition come from? If I am perfect, then how in God’s name did I end up creating something that would not choose perfection? Someone once said that a good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit.
Here is the title for your next theological tome: Was Eve Perfect? If she was, she would not have taken the fruit. If she wasn’t, I created imperfection.
Maybe you think all of this gives me a purpose—putting Humpty Dumpty back together—but it actually gives me a headache. (If you won’t permit me a simple headache, then how can you allow me the pain of lost love?) I could not live with myself if I thought my actions were causing harm to others. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Since I think you created me, I suppose I should let you tell me what I could live with. If you think it is consistent with my character to tolerate love and vengeance concurrently, then I have no choice. If you are my creator, then I could spout tenderness out of one side of my mouth and brutality out of the other. I could dance with my lover on the bones of my errant children and pretend to enjoy it. I would be very human indeed.
I have a thousand questions, but I will ask you just two more:
I don’t know how I got here, but I’m here. Let’s just say that my purpose is to make good people out of my creations. Let’s say that I am here to help you learn how to be perfect like me, and that the best way to achieve that is for you to act just like me—or act like I want you to act. Your goal is to become a mirror of me. Won’t that be splendid? I’ll give you rules and principles and you try to follow them. This may or may not be meaningful, but it will keep us both busy. I suppose that from your point of view this would be terribly meaningful, since you think I have the power to reward and punish.
I know that some of you Protestant theologians think that I give rewards not for good deeds, but simply for believing in my son, Jesus, who paid the punishment for your bad deeds. Well, Jesus spent only about 36 hours of an eternal life sentence in hell and is now back up here in ultimate coziness with me. Talk about a wrist-slap! He was not paroled for good behavior—he was simply released. (He had connections.) If my righteous judgment demanded absolute satisfaction, then Jesus should have paid the price in full…don’t you think?
Beyond that, it is entirely incomprehensible to me why you think I would accept the blood of one individual for the crime of another. Is that fair? Is that justice? If you commit a felony, does the law allow your brother to serve the jail sentence for you? If someone burglarized your home, would you think justice was served if a friend of the burglar bought you new furniture? Do you really think that I am such a bloodthirsty dictator that I will be content with the death of anyone for the crime of another? And are you so disrespectful of justice that you would happily accept a stand-in for your crimes? What about personal responsibility? Should I welcome believers into heaven who have avoided the rap for their own actions. Something is way out of kilter here.
But let’s ignore these objections. Let’s assume that Jesus and I worked it all out and that evil will be punished and good rewarded. How do I know the difference? You are insisting that I not consult any rulebook. You are asking me to be the Final Authority. I must simply decide, and you must trust my decision. Am I free to decide whatever I want?
Suppose I decide that I would like you to honor me with a day of my own. I like the number seven, I don’t know why, maybe because it is the first useless number. (You never sing any hymns to me in 7/4 time.) Let’s divide the calendar into groups of seven days and call them weeks. For harmony, I’ll divide each lunar phase into roughly seven days. The last day of the week—or maybe the first day, I don’t care—I’ll set aside for myself. Let’s call it the Sabbath. This all feels good, so I suppose it is the right thing to do. I’ll make a law ordering you to observe the Sabbath, and if you do it then I will pronounce you good people. In fact, I’ll make it one of my Ten Commandments and I’ll order your execution if you disobey it. This all makes perfect sense, though I don’t know why.
Help me out here. How am I supposed to choose what is moral? Since I can’t consult any authority, the thing to do, it appears, is to pick randomly. Actions will become right or wrong simply because I declare them to be so. If I whimsically say that you should not make any graven or molten images of “anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth,” then that is that. If I decide that murder is right and compassion is wrong, you will have to accept it.
Is that all there is to it? I just decide, willy-nilly, what is right and what is wrong? Or worse, I decide based on whatever makes me feel good? I have read in some of your literature that you denounce such self-centered attitudes.
Some of you say that since I am perfect, I can’t make any mistakes. Whatever I choose to be right or wrong will be in accordance with my nature. And since I am perfect, then my choices will be perfect. In any event, my choices will certainly be better than your choices, you feel. But what does “perfect” mean? If my nature is perfect, then I am living up to a standard. If I am living up to a standard, then I am not God. If perfection means something all by itself, apart from me, then I am constrained to follow its path. If, on the other hand, perfection is defined simply as conformity to my nature, then it doesn’t mean anything. My nature can be what it wants, and perfection will be defined accordingly. Do you see the problem here? If “perfection” equals “God,” then it is just a synonym for me and we can do away with the word. Actually, we could do away with either word. Take your pick.
If I am perfect, then there are certain things that I cannot do. If I am not free to feel envy, lust or malice, for example, then I am not omnipotent. I cannot be more powerful than you if you can feel and do things that I cannot.
Additionally, if you feel that God is perfect by nature, what does “nature” mean? The word is used to describe the way things are or act in nature, and since you think I am above nature you must mean something else, something like “character” or “attributes.” To have a nature or character means to be one way and not another. It means that there are limits. Why am I one way and not another? How did it get decided that my nature would be what it is? If my nature is clearly defined, then I am limited. I am not God. If my nature has no limits, as some of you suggest, then I have no nature at all and to say that God has “such-and-such a nature” is meaningless. In fact, if I have no limits, then I have no identity. And if I have no identity, then I do not exist.
This brings me back to the conundrum: if I don’t know who I am then how can I decide what is right? Do I just poke around in myself until I come up with something?
There is one course I could pursue, and some of you have suggested this for yourselves. I could base my pronouncements on what is best for you humans. You people have physical bodies that bump around in a physical world. I could determine those actions that are healthy and beneficial for material beings in a material environment. I could make morality something material—something that is relative to human life, not to my whims. I could declare (by conclusion, not by edict) that harming human life is bad, and that helping or enhancing human life is good. This would be like providing an operation manual for something I designed and manufactured. It would require me to know all about human nature and the environment in which you humans live, and to communicate these ideas to you.
This makes a lot of sense, but it changes my task from one of determining morality to one of communicating morality. If morality is discovered in nature then you don’t need me, except maybe to prod you along. I saw to it that you have capable minds with the ability to reason and do science. There is nothing mysterious about studying how humans interact with nature and with each other, and you should be able to come up with your own set of rules. Some of you tried this millennia before Moses. Even if your rules contradict mine, I couldn’t claim any higher authority than you. At least you would be able to give reasons for your rules, which I can only do by submitting to science myself.
If morality is defined by how human beings exist in nature, then you don’t need me at all. I am off the hook! From what I have read, most of you have your feet on the ground with no help from me. I could hand down some stone tablets containing what I think is right and wrong, but it would still be up to you to see if my rules work in the real world. I think we all agree that grounded reason is better than the whim of an ungrounded deity.
This is a wonderful approach, but what bothers me is that while this may help you know what is moral in your environment, it doesn’t help me much. I don’t have an environment. I’m out here flapping in the breeze. I envy you.
Nor does the humanistic approach help those of you who want morality to be rooted in something absolute, outside of yourselves. It must be frightening for those of you who need an anchor to realize that there is no bottom to the ocean. Well, it’s frightening for me also. I don’t have an anchor of my own. That’s why I’m asking for your help.
Thank you for reading my letter and for letting me impose on your busy schedule. Please answer at your convenience. I have all the time in the world.
Sincerely,
Yours Truly
PART 3
What’s Wrong With Christianity
Chapter Ten
The Bible and Morality
Believers in God do not have a corner on the morality market. During all my years of preaching, I simply assumed that the bible was the rock-solid foundation of morality, and it never crossed my mind to examine that assumption. Yet as I morphed from faith to reason, I started looking at the “Word of God” in a different light. In the next chapter I lay out a natural basis for morality—how to be good without God—and show how we nonbelievers actually have a better grasp of ethics than those who take the bible seriously. But first I need to shine the light on why I no longer consider the bible to be a “Good Book.”
The word “moral” appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does “morality,” “ethics” or “ethical.” To inquire if the bible is a good moral guide is to ask a question that originates outside the bible.
This does not mean that the bible has nothing to say about behavior. The phrase “to do right” appears throughout scripture, but this is usually followed by “in the sight of the Lord.” To do right in one’s “own eyes” is considered evil. There are a few passages that talk about doing that which is right or good without an explicit connection to deity, but taken in the general context of biblical theology all behavior that Christians and Jews consider to be good is measured against the “righteousness” of God, not against moral or ethical principles of humanity. Proverbs 16:25 says, “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
Ironically, the first place the phrase “do right” is used in the bible is when Abraham questioned the morality of God. Abraham argued with God and succeeded in getting him to change his mind about slaughtering innocent victims in Sodom: “That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked; and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee; Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25)
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?
God did change his mind about the minimum number of good people required to prevent the slaughter, but he went ahead and murdered all the inhabitants of Sodom anyway, including all of the “unrighteous” children, babies and fetuses. It appears that Abraham was more moral than his god, a matter to be examined later. And his question is quite valid: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” When a parent who smokes tells a child not to smoke, the child can be forgiven for asking, “What about you?” If the basis for morality rests with a single entity, then what makes that entity accountable? What makes God moral?
True Christians should not ask if the bible is moral, or if God is moral. If God is the source of morality, then asking if God is moral is like asking if goodness is good. To ask seriously if God or the bible is moral (with a possible negative answer) is to assume that “moral” means something apart from God, and that we already know what it means independently of the bible. If the word “moral” has meaning by itself, then right and wrong can be understood apart from God, and judging the morality of God puts him under the jurisdiction of a higher level of criticism. This is true even if the judgment is favorable. To the believer, questioning the morality of God is blasphemy. It implies that the “supreme judge” can be judged.
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