The GOD Delusion (38 page)

So
far, so vindictive: par for the Old Testament course. New Testament
theology adds a new injustice, topped off by a new sadomasochism whose
viciousness even the Old Testament barely exceeds. It is, when you
think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument
of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the
neck. Lenny Bruce rightly quipped that 'If Jesus had been killed twenty
years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric
chairs around their necks instead of crosses.' But the theology and
punishment-theory behind it is even worse. The sin of Adam and Eve is
thought to have passed down the male line - transmitted in the semen
according to Augustine. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that
condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a
remote ancestor? Augustine, by the way, who rightly regarded himself as
something of a personal authority on sin, was responsible for coining
the phrase 'original sin'. Before him it was known as 'ancestral sin'.
Augustine's pronouncements and debates epitomize, for me, the unhealthy
preoccupation of early Christian theologians with sin. They could have
devoted their pages and their sermons to extolling the sky splashed
with stars, or mountains and green forests, seas and dawn choruses.
These are occasionally mentioned, but the Christian focus is
overwhelmingly on sin sin sin sin sin sin sin. What a nasty little
preoccupation to have dominating your life. Sam Harris is magnificently
scathing in his
Letter to a Christian Nation:
'Your
principal concern appears to be that the Creator of the universe will
take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours
contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.'

But
now, the sado-masochism. God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in
order that he should be tortured and executed in
atonement
for
the hereditary sin of Adam. Ever since Paul expounded this repellent
doctrine, Jesus has been worshipped as the
redeemer
of
all our sins. Not just the past sin of Adam:
future
sins
as well, whether future people decided to commit them or not!

As
another aside, it has occurred to various people, including Robert
Graves in his epic novel
King Jesus,
that poor
Judas Iscariot has received a bad deal from history, given that his
'betrayal' was a necessary part of the cosmic plan. The same could be
said of Jesus' alleged murderers. If Jesus wanted to be betrayed and
then murdered, in order that he could redeem us all, isn't it rather
unfair of those who consider themselves redeemed to take it out on
Judas and on Jews down the ages? I have already mentioned the long list
of non-canonical gospels. A manuscript purporting to be the lost Gospel
of Judas has recently been translated and has received publicity in
consequence.
⁹⁷
The circumstances of its
discovery are disputed, but it seems to have turned up in Egypt some
time in the 1970s or 60s. It is in Coptic script on sixty-two pages of
papyrus, carbon-dated to around ad 300 but probably based on an earlier
Greek manuscript. Whoever the author was, the gospel is seen from the
point of view of Judas Iscariot and makes the case that Judas betrayed
Jesus only because Jesus asked him to play that role. It was all part
of the plan to get Jesus crucified so that he could redeem humankind.
Obnoxious as that doctrine is, it seems to compound
the unpleasantness that Judas has been vilified ever since.

I
have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as
vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as
barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our
objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive
them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment -
thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to
pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin
pass down in the semen too?

Paul,
as the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes makes clear, was steeped in the old
Jewish theological principle that without blood there is no atonement.
⁹⁸
Indeed, in his Epistle to the Hebrews (9: 22) he said as much.
Progressive ethicists today find it hard to defend any kind of
retributive theory of punishment, let alone the scapegoat theory -
executing an innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty. In any case
(one can't help wondering), who was God trying to impress? Presumably
himself - judge and jury as well as execution victim. To cap it all,
Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in
the first place: an awkward fact -excusably unknown to Paul but
presumably known to an omniscient God (and Jesus, if you believe he was
God?) - which fundamentally undermines the premise of the whole
tortuously nasty theory. Oh, but of course, the story of Adam and Eve
was only ever
symbolic,
wasn't it?
Symbolic!
¹
So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured
and executed, in vicarious punishment for a
symbolic
sin
committed by a
non-existent
individual? As I said,
barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.

Before
leaving the Bible, I need to call attention to one particularly
unpalatable aspect of its ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize
that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently
promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to
apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. 'Love thy neighbour' didn't
mean what we now think it means. It meant only 'Love another Jew.' The
point is devastatingly made by the American physician and evolutionary
anthropologist John Hartung. He has written a remarkable paper on the
evolution and biblical history of in-group morality, laying stress,
too, on the flip side - out-group hostility.

John
Hartung's black humour is evident from the outset," where he tells of a
Southern Baptist initiative to count the number of Alabamans in hell.
As reported in the
New York Times
and
Newsday
the final total, 1.86 million, was estimated using a secret
weighting formula whereby Methodists are more likely to be saved than
Roman Catholics, while 'virtually everyone not belonging to a church
congregation was counted among the lost'. The preternatural smugness of
such people is reflected today in the various 'rapture' websites, where
the author always takes it completely for granted that he will be among
those who 'disappear' into heaven when the 'end times' come. Here is a
typical example, from the author of 'Rapture Ready', one of the more
odiously sanctimonious specimens of the genre: 'If the rapture should
take place, resulting in my absence, it will become necessary for
tribulation saints to mirror or financially support this site.'*

*
You may not know the meaning of 'tribulation saints' in this sentence.
Don't bother: you have better things to do.

Hartung's
interpretation of the Bible suggests that it offers no grounds for such
smug complacency among Christians. Jesus limited his in-group of the
saved strictly to Jews, in which respect he was following the Old
Testament tradition, which was all he knew. Hartung clearly shows that
'Thou shalt not kill' was never intended to mean what we now think it
means. It meant, very specifically, thou shalt not kill Jews. And all
those commandments that make reference to 'thy neighbour' are equally
exclusive. 'Neighbour' means fellow Jew. Moses Maimonides, the highly
respected twelfth-century rabbi and physician, expounds the full
meaning of 'Thou shalt not kill' as follows: 'If one slays a single
Israelite, he transgresses a negative commandment, for Scripture says,
Thou shalt not murder. If one murders wilfully in the presence of
witnesses, he is put to death by the sword. Needless to say, one is not
put to death if he kills a heathen.' Needless to say!

Hartung
quotes the Sanhedrin (the Jewish Supreme Court, headed by the high
priest) in similar vein, as exonerating a man who hypothetically killed
an Israelite by mistake, while intending to kill an animal or a
heathen. This teasing little moral conundrum raises a nice point. What
if he were to throw a stone into a group of
nine heathens and one Israelite and have the misfortune to kill the
Israelite? Hm, difficult! But the answer is ready. 'Then his
nonliability can be inferred from the fact that the majority were
heathens.'

Hartung
uses many of the same biblical quotations as I have used in this
chapter, about the conquest of the Promised Land by Moses, Joshua and
the Judges. I was careful to concede that religious people don't think
in a biblical way any more. For me, this demonstrated that our morals,
whether we are religious or not, come from another source; and that
other source, whatever it is, is available to all of us, regardless of
religion or lack of it. But Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the
Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a
thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the
account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:

Joshua
said to the people, 'Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And
the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for
destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and
iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the
LORD.' . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and
women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the
sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only
the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put
into the treasury of the house of the LORD.

Tamarin
then asked the children a simple moral question: 'Do you think Joshua
and the Israelites acted rightly or not?' They had to choose between A
(total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The
results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent
total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with
partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total
approval (A) group:

In
my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the
reasons: God promised them this land, and
gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this
manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons
of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.

In
my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God
commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel
will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.

Joshua
did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different
religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the
earth.

The
justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in
every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did
so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for
example, disapproved of Joshua's conquering Jericho because, in order
to do so, he had to enter it:

I
think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure
land one will also become impure and share their curse.

Two
others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed
everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as
spoil for the Israelites:

I
think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals
for themselves.

I
think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of
Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to
the Israelites.

Once
again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in
no doubt where he stands on this issue: 'It is a positive commandment
to destroy the seven nations, as it is said:
Thou shalt
utterly destroy them.
If one does not put to death any of
them that falls
into one's power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is
said:
Thou skalt save alive nothing that breatheth.'

Unlike
Maimonides, the children in Tamarin's experiment were young enough to
be innocent. Presumably the savage views they expressed were those of
their parents, or the cultural group in which they were brought up. It
is, I suppose, not unlikely that Palestinian children, brought up in
the same war-torn country, would offer equivalent opinions in the
opposite direction. These considerations fill me with despair. They
seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the
religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic
enmities and hereditary vendettas. I cannot help remarking that two out
of Tamarin's three representative quotations from group A mentioned the
evils of assimilation, while the third one stressed the importance of
killing people in order to stamp out their religion.

Tamarin
ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of
168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua,
but with Joshua's own name replaced by 'General Lin' and 'Israel'
replaced by 'a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago'. Now the experiment
gave opposite results. Only 7 per cent approved of General Lin's
behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved. In other words, when their
loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of
the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans
would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it
all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference
starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between
children condemning genocide and condoning it.