The Sins of a Nation

The United States is not the greatest nation on Earth. It’s not a great nation among many. In moral or ethical terms, it’s not even a good one. While there is indeed much that is positive about who we are as a nation and what we stand for — personal liberty; democracy by the people, for the people; hard work; perseverance; and innovation — from the context of history and current events, we are and have been, a failure.

And I am going to elaborate on this troubling reality, not to needlessly slam the country and its legacy, but because I genuinely want us to be better: more compassionate in our societal and political policymaking, more accepting of and loving toward everyone without exceptions and provisos, more open to progress, more concerned with leaving behind a bright future and a cleaner planet for future generations, more interested in science, more welcoming to immigrants and, perhaps more importantly, more embracing of our central axiom, “all men are created equal.”

Is America a Christian nation?

One of the main ideas that bring many to conclude that America is, indeed, a great nation is the set of principles that many hold dear, namely that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and by extension, this must make us inherently good. The idea comes mainly from Christian members of the Republican Party, but plenty of Democrats also believe it. Inherent in this argument, of course, is that the country is, by extension, morally upright because, well, how can a nation be founded on Christianity and not be moral?

I could make a completely different post arguing that the central tenets of Christianity, which include scapegoating, or letting someone else pay for the sins of another; compulsory love, God the father demanding that people love him or be threatened with eternal hellfire; and human sacrifice, are, in fact, hideously evil and come down to us from a barbarous age. You can click the links for more of what I’ve already written on the subject. Take these three evils, along with the Bible’s shameful record on mass genocide and slavery, and powerful evidence to conclude that neither Christianity or its god are a source of goodness. It’s actually the other way around. It is the people who believe in Christianity who are good in spite of what their religion teaches in a holy book. Yes, of course, Jesus supposedly said some nice things, but oddly enough, the Republican Party, which routinely claims for itself the moral high ground, has abandoned most of them.

Our second president, John Adams, rejected the idea that the United States was founded on Christianity, and so did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And so do I.

The Founding Fathers were a mix of deists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and other denominations. The Declaration of Independence, which is not a legal document and shouldn’t be construed as such when arguing about the religiosity of America, contains only a couple vague references to a deity and has no mention of Jesus or Christianity. Almost every public document in this time period contained similar nonspecific references to God. The Constitution includes one reference to God, the customary “in the year of our Lord” sign off at the end, and anyone who claims this — the vaguest reference of all and the closest one can possibly get to having no reference whatsoever — as proof that we are a Christian nation or that the country was established on Judeo-Christian principles is grasping for straws in the dark.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright denied the wonderworking power of Jesus, going so far as to reconfigure the Gospels to his liking, leaving what he considered the good parts and cutting out all references to miracles and the supernatural. The other founders were mostly churchgoers, as was pretty much everyone in the 18th century, but nearly all of them hewed to a rather subdued brand of faith than what has been considered evangelical Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The First Amendment statute to protect people’s ability to worship, or not, as they saw fit was important to Jefferson and the other founders. As Jefferson said in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.” Jefferson was said to have rejoiced when a proposal to insert “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute preamble was defeated.

In his autobiography, he said:

(Freedom of religion was) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s (sic) protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

It is incontrovertible that we are now, as we were then, a Christian-majority nation, but the United States is obviously composed of many other religions and faith traditions, along with an increasing number of atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people in America who are irreligious has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent in the last couple years.

Nonetheless, it is still very difficult for anyone who does not openly profess their Christianity to get elected to public office. Even John F. Kennedy, who took a lot of heat just for being Catholic — in the mind of many evangelicals, he wasn’t the right “kind” of Christian — refused to allow his faith to influence his public duty to the nation.

During a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, Kennedy said:

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

So yes, Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, and probably will be for decades to come, especially in the Republican Party. To this day, while many Democrats are certainly Christian, they tend to deemphasize their faith when it comes to making decisions, except in vague references to God in speeches or prayers, whereas Republicans usually wear their faith on the sleeves and openly use religion to influence how they govern, even though many of their own constituents do not follow the same faith.

To say that we are founded on Christianity full-stop, however, is to deny reality. Not only were we not established as such — our founding had more to do with the Enlightenment, governing principles from the motherland and political philosophy far predating the Revolutionary Era — we’re not a particularly moral nation either, and we never have been.

Make America … Good Again?

I have outlined why we aren’t a Christian nation or a good nation based on the dominant religion. What about based on history? I’m afraid the nation also gets an F in that category. Here’s a far-from-exhaustive laundry list of our “sins” (The word “sins” is in quotes because the idea of “sin” is a construct of religion, but it has value here in showing the seriousness of our collective crimes).

The United States and the founders protected the extension of slavery for 20 extra years in the Constitution. Many of the founders owned at least one slave. John Adams, bless his soul, owned none.

Our government subjugated native Americans after the colonists arrived and killed off many of them with guns and European diseases.

The nation fought a bloody war over the right of the South to continue the institution of chattel slavery, on which its economy was built, and at one time, the entire national economy, which was largely built on the backs of black folks. The North as well as the South profited from the “peculiar institution.”

After Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Co. crushed the rebellion, slavery by a new name called the Reconstruction was established by which many black people in the South returned to their previous subservient positions.

On Good Friday, of all days, Abraham Lincoln, the man who brought emancipation to 4 million black people, was murdered by a racist named John Wilkes Booth, thus punctuating the fact that bigotry and sympathy for the Southern cause was alive and well after thousands fought and died for four years defending both.

After a brief flicker of democracy in the late 19th century when black men in America got the right to vote, Jim Crow took root. A full 100 years passed — replete with voter suppression, segregation and lynchings — from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination at the polls and segregation in schools and public places were officially outlawed, much to the chagrin of racists everywhere, like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who would be revered by conservatives in my home state for decades to come.

One of the brightest beacons of love, hope and equality the nation had ever seen was extinguished on April 4, 1968, handing racism yet another victory in the long, frustrating and bloody march toward ultimate emancipation. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a message of peace and solidarity among all men and women, and he was killed for it.

Americans watched and laughed at shows like, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” and perhaps some people secretly thought, “We’re making progress on race” now that all these black folks are getting high-profile spots on television. Meanwhile, systemic racism took hold across the next five decades, no longer the bold, firebrand bigotry of old, but the more insidious, viral kind that seeps into schools, police stations, courthouses and public seats of power. The federal government, state governments and local municipalities were all complicit.

America watched with either horror, vague sympathy or apathy as Rodney King was beaten in the early 1990s by cops in Los Angeles. In the subsequent years, Americans watched as unarmed black person after unarmed black person was either choked out or gunned down by overzealous or racist police officers. Many of us stood with Black Lives Matter and demanded change in the justice system. Many of us, far too many of us, however, did nothing. Many of us, like the current president, stoked racial tensions, and many of us dug in our heels on how our whiteness was superior to their blackness. Many of us turned our backs on our fellow Americans, and we abandoned whatever moral compass we thought we had, and by doing so, we abandoned our own humanity. No less than 21 race riots have occurred in this country since 1978.

At the same time the BLM matter demonstrations have been occurring, we have seen the true colors of a disturbingly large segment of the population, most of them claiming to be Christians and Republicans, yet apparently caring little for their own health or for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens by refusing to wear face masks. Racism has brought the nation the most shame throughout history, but anti-intellectualism and selfishness is closely behind.

These grievances and trespasses against morality and ethics, among a people who declare so vigorously that faith, which they say is at the very center of morality, is such an important part of our lives and the national conscience, only cover issues related to race.

If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already made sure to take whatever steps necessary to end or drastically reduce hunger, poverty and homelessness.

If we, as a nation, actually care about people, we would have already happily accepted a little more in the way of taxes to ensure that every person has access to free health care. We would have already neutered the unfair and grossly mismanaged insurance industry. We would have already placed stop-gaps on the pharmaceutical industry’s runaway price-gouging practices.

Like Canada and many Western European nations, we would have already put in place a string of provisions that improve the health of well-being of every person in the country, not just white people or privileged people or rich people. If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already rooted out each politician, Republican or Democrat, who did not support the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that every American should enjoy. It is a near impossibility to pursue any of them without fundamental things like safety, health and a fair wage.

That said, imagine Jesus looking out over the multitude of 5,000 hungry people before him, which, if the story even took place, was probably more like 10,000 or 15,000 because women and children didn’t count as people. Imagine Jesus seeing the people holding out their baskets in quiet desperation to sate their gnawing appetite. Imagine that he opens his mouth and says, “I can help you, but I won’t. You will have to fend for yourselves,” as he turns away and leaves them to languish in starvation and destitution. From a political standpoint, by failing to meet people’s basic needs with all the resources in the world to make it happen, this is essentially what we have done.

In ethical terms, we’re starving. We are supposedly the richest and most sought-after nation in the world, yet we routinely fail the most vulnerable among us. We fail the working class. We fail the poor. We fail the sick. We fail the uninsured. We fail immigrants. We fail children. And most of all, we fail black people. And we have failed every single one of these groups of Americans under the leadership of people who say they are Christians. This is even more true with evangelical Republican politicians, many of whom have presided over some of the most callous and harmful pieces of legislation the nation has ever seen in our 244-year history.

How good are we, really? How much do we, as a nation, actually care about people? I don’t mean some people. I mean all people. How has our status as a supposedly “Christian nation” moved the needle? It has not, and in some cases, it has moved the needle in the wrong direction.

I don’t offer any easy prescriptions; I am simply diagnosing the illness. The cure can be found in doing the opposite of all that I have laid out: in continuing to fight systemic racism, firebrand racism and subtle racism; in establishing compassionate economic and sociopolitical policies that raise all of the boats in society; in following the path of science and free inquiry; and in abandoning anti-intellectualism once and for all. When religion in the United States peters out or becomes irrelevant — and it will one day — the path forward toward a more just and ethical society will be found in secular humanism.

[Cover photo: A modified version of “Cross” by DeviantArt user Steinn-Hondkatur.]

Suggested Readings in Atheism, Science and Critical Thinking

… always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear — 1 Peter 3:15 (NKJV)

***

For those who are questioning their faith in religion or are looking for answers about God, the Bible or the historicity of Jesus, below is a personal list of books that I highly recommend for exploring these topics further. Every suggested reading list is different, but the books below helped me at various points along the way to unravel the many layers of theology and biblical teaching and ultimately, to answer the following questions:

  • What are the reasons for believing in God or following Christianity? The Bible, in 1 Peter, charges believers with being able to understand and articulate to others why they believe. I tried to do this with an open mind in a sincere and authentic quest for the truth, or the closest that I could get to it, and ultimately, I could not find any reasons to believe other than wanting it to be true.
  • How reliable is the New Testament? Since none of the writers in the New Testament were physically present when they wrote down the comings and goings of Christ — Mark, the first gospel in the New Testament canon is thought to have been written in 70 A.D., and earlier works on which Mark is based have been lost to history — are they to be believed? Since research in psychology tells us that even first-person accounts of events are not reliable, how are we to reconcile gospel accounts that were written three or four decades after the death of Jesus?
  • Did Jesus exist, and did he say and do what the Bible claims he did?
  • How can we know what is true? Why does knowing what is actually true matter?
  • And a question that isn’t asked enough, but is a very important one: If a person concludes that there is no god and humankind is slowly moving away from religion, where do we then find our comfort, our strength and our inspiration? Art? Music? Literature? Nature? Other people? Much like homosexuals who come out of the closet, former Christians who no longer believe — which is, much like being gay, not a choice — often face an uphill battle dealing with, not just, in some cases, losing disappointed family and friends, but existential questions about how to move forward in a universe that is governed solely by the laws of nature and not by a benevolent guiding hand. Where do we find our peace? Joy? Hope? How do we face mortality? Oftentimes, belief is the comforting position, and when you leave the faith, it can feel like the bottom has dropped out and you’re now falling into the abyss. But it gets easier, and I hope anyone who may be struggling with these issues finds some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in their feelings. Many of us have been there. If you would like to talk anonymously or otherwise about your situation, I’m here. I can be reached at styron @ hotmail.com (remove spaces).

I have included a few theological works in this list because I think it’s important to have a balanced perspective, and it can be quite a jarring experience after you wake up to realize just how unconvincing, fallacious and logically bankrupt many of the apologetic arguments are.

  • The Portable Atheist” by Christopher Hitchens — A survey of writings by atheists and freethinkers throughout history. This book alone is a rich source to find other writings and authors on the subject.
  • The End of Faith” by Sam Harris — In my mind, one of the seminal disavowals and excoriations of religion. Harris’ logic is impenetrable.
  • Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris — A short and concise open letter to Christians about the suffering that has been heaped on mankind by religion or policies of the evangelical right in America. It also addresses many arguments put forth by Christians to support the faith. As Harris said in the book, “In ‘Letter to a Christian Nation,’ I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretension of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
  • The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins — Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist with a crisp and clear writing style that often includes humor. One of his main arguments is that people do not need religion to be good and that people who believe in their religion without evidence, and in fact, with strong evidence against their faith, can properly be called deluded: “… when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”
  • The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins — This is a good primer for studies in evolution. Dawkins does a great job of writing about the beauty and simplicity of evolution by natural selection, and he conveys his personal sense of scientific wonder about the gradual process by which complex species evolved from simple organisms by slow degrees over millions of years. Dawkins also has a very clear style, and he makes understanding scientific principles, well, understandable for lay people.
  • God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” by Christopher Hitchens — In my view, Hitchens was one of the most eloquent, well-read writers and speakers of my generation or any other. “So when I say as the subtitle of my book that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. We must be afraid. We must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of the sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship, and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil.”
  • Godless” by Dan Barker — Barker is a former pastor who makes the case in detail why he could not believe anymore, with many examples from the Bible.
  • Why I Became an Atheist” by John Loftus — Loftus is another former pastor whose chapter called “The Outsider Test for Faith” is one of the most compelling ideas I have read. Essentially, it is a challenge for believers to apply the same skepticism to their own faith as they apply to different religions.
  • Why I Am Not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell
  • The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” by John Dominic Crossan — This is an important resource for those looking into the claims of the New Testament and might be wrestling with whether Jesus said what the Bible says that he did. Crossan goes line-by-line through the sayings of Jesus in the four gospels and weighs them, based on collaboration with other scholars, on how authentic they seem to be. He has a scale for the verses from least authentic to most authentic. Mark proves to be the earliest, and thus, least embellished of the gospels, while John is the most embellished.
  • The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” by Carl Sagan”
  • Basic Writings of Existentialism” — Contains a selection of writings from de Beauvoir, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and others, and is a good starting place for nonbelievers who have just left the faith and are wondering, “What now?”
  • Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles — These last two are literary analyses of the old and new testaments. They evaluate the Bible as if God and Jesus are characters in a novel. From the perspective, they are fascinating reads.

Other recommendations

  • Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis — I read these Lewis works as I was questioning faith and found them to be well-written and thought-provoking. In hindsight as I revisited them after deconverting and didn’t find them terribly convincing, but since he is considered one of the greatest writers of his century, I recommend being familiar with what he has to say.
  • “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis
  • The Screwtape Letters” by C.S.Lewis — A novel of religious satire.
  • Handbook of Christian Apologetics” — Contains many counter-apologetic arguments. I went chapter-by-chapter through this work years ago. The posts are archived on this site and can be found through the search bar.
  • The Question of God” by Armond Nicholi
  • Paradise Lost” by John Milton — Milton, an early advocate of freedom of speech and the press, was blind when he wrote “Paradise Lost,” and yet, it is an epic poem, masterfully written, of dizzying work in breadth and scope. It is rich in religious and mythological references, which gives it educational value, and it is proof that religiously-inspired high art is still art, regardless of the content or intent of the author, and can be appreciated as such.

The four evils of Christianity

I wanted to take a minute to respond to a comment I received on a post that is quite old. Here’s the original post: Harris on the immorality of Christianity, which was about the following video of a debate between neuroscientist Sam Harris and apologist William Lane Craig:

Heather had this to say:

The biggest problem with Harris’ argument, is that he isn’t using the Bible or Othodox Christianity to explain Hell, but he gets the idea of Hell from the Bible-since that is where Christians get it from (gospels-words of Jesus).

Christians do have an answer and context for Hell that Harris did not represent. We don’t fall on the sword of mystery like Harris’ claims.

What is Harris’ faith?

And my brief thoughts:

“… is that he isn’t using the Bible or Othodox Christianity to explain Hell, but he gets the idea of Hell from the Bible-since that is where Christians get it from (gospels-words of Jesus).”

This is a contradictory criticism: You claim Harris doesn’t use the Bible or Christian doctrine to talk about hell, yet you said he gets his notion of hell from the Bible. Where else should he have gotten his information?

What context for hell did Harris not cover? Christianity’s foundation rests on human sacrifice and the scapegoating of an innocent to atone for the sins of the world, and it’s in this morally reprehensible doctrine that we should place all of our hope.

Meanwhile, we are told to believe that the “burden” of original sin was placed on us before we were born, and this sin, the notion that we should somehow be held accountable for the sins of another person, will one day damn us to eternal fire if we happen to demand evidence for the claims of the Bible or we don’t necessarily like the idea of eternal life in the first place. After all, eternity life would get really boring quickly. I’ve been bored a lot in my life, and I’ve only lived a mere 36 years. In what universe should a human be held responsible for the sins of another human being, and in what universe should we expect one of our brothers or sisters to pay our punishment for us? Christianity teaches that we aren’t really responsible for our actions; we can be saved, and any time we slip up and lie, covet our neighbor’s ass or slit someone’s throat in a back alley and then proceed to rape the corpse, we can simply ask for forgiveness, and so long as we are penitent and regretful — don’t forget all the regret — and our sins are absolved.

In real life, people are free — they have freewill — to decline a gift if the giver has, perhaps, overstepped her bounds and maybe was too generous. With Christianity, we must accept the “gift” of eternal life, even though we weren’t consulted about it first, we must fear the one we are commanded to love or face the fire, and good riddance all the while. If we happen to think the four evils of Christianity, vicarious redemption, scapegoating, human sacrifice and compulsory love, are inferior doctrines of previous barbaric epochs and want nothing to do with them, well, we can be damned for that too and shooed off to hell like the carnal garbage that we are.

Oh, and by the way, since God is omniscient, he knew who would be “saved,” and conversely, he knew the face and lives of each and every person who was going to burn forever — he knew them intimately — yet he chose to put this experiment called earth into motion anyway with the full knowledge that millions would not only suffer ghastly fates in their physical lives but would be tortured forever and ever in everlasting fire, many of whom because of a mere accident of birth. He knew them all intimately, this “good” creation he made, and would watch them fall down to perdition seemingly with indifference.

This is the biblical god’s affinity for man: Love me, believe on my son or perish. This sounds more like a desperate plea than the timeless words of the god of all heaven and earth.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Harris on the immorality of Christianity

Below is as sharp a critique of Christianity, its basic tenets and why Christianity does not offer and alternative, much less a more ethical view of morality that you are likely to find:

The most cogent point, and one that I have referenced frequently, is the problem of unnecessary evil and — take your pick — either the inability or unwillingness of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God to intervene. Harris says it in unequivocal terms: the God of Christianity is either impotent or evil.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Christian dies for 45 minutes, no white tunnel, pearly gates or Jesus

I found the following news story via John Loftus. Tony Yahle, an Ohio man in his 30s, was suddenly rushed to the hospital by his wife after experiencing irregular breathing. Doctors were unsuccessful in stimulating his heart, and he lay presumably dead on the table for 45 minutes. He woke back up after almost an hour to the amazement of the doctors.

The man is a Christian, and like a good Christian, attributed his recovery to faith. But like all other modern claims of wonder working power, Yahle giving credit to God for his “miraculous” return to life ignores the millions who weren’t so lucky. In any case, I thought it was more interesting that in these 45 minutes of limbo between life and death, he apparently had no near-death experience of heaven or angels or other delusions that are sometimes reported by the dying and particularly by the religious.

According to Yahle’s account:

I have no memory of anything. I went to bed … woke up five days later in the hospital.

Of course, even if he had reported seeing angels or felt as if he were entering the pearly gates, this wouldn’t prove anything, since a brain starved of oxygen is capable of creating hallucinations that we may perceive to be real or something similar to a dream-like state. Even so, cardiologist Dr. Raja Nazir said Yahle’s case was a on-off event, according to the report from the local TV station:

In last 20 years I’ve never seen anybody who we have pronounced dead … and then for him to come back, I’ve never seen it. Actually, I’ve never heard of it.

Forty-five minutes was impressive, but Lazarus was in the grave four days before Jesus showed up, right. Now that would be a miracle, and I’m still waiting for an amputee’s arm to grow back.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Is God good?

This post stems from a conversation over at Bunch about biblical contradictions, particularly related to the creation story and man’s fall from grace in Genesis.

For simplicity’s sake, I am mostly going to be speaking here of the Judeo-Christian conception of God, known as Yahweh in the Old Testament and God the Father in the New Testament, but a good portion of this will apply to the God of Islam or any other deity that man has created with certain transcendent, otherworldy characteristics, such as omniscience.

The following is the first definition of “god” from the Merriam Webster:

capitalized: the supreme or ultimate reality: as

the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe.

I would wager that because of our general acceptance of religion in society, “goodness” continues to be part of our working definition of what we mean when we say God. But does this necessarily have to be the case? The ancient Greeks completely understood that although humans might label a being as a god does not mean that this being is actually good just because he commands powers that might appear mystical to us. Indeed, the Greek gods were in some cases capricious, childish and downright vile in some of their dealings with humans and each other. Take the rape of Europa, for instance (see illustration).

Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre

Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre

Yahweh, likewise, is certainly capricious, jealous — by his own admission — and overbearing, and thus, not much different than his Greek counterparts in being wholly a human creation.

In any case, let’s briefly take the Bible’s word for it and assume for argument’s sake that the Judeo-Christian god is basically good. The Bible directly tells us in many places that God is good, not the least of which are Psalm 100:5, “For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations” and Psalm 107:1, “Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; for His loving kindness is everlasting” and Matthew 19:17, “And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? (there is) none good but one, (that is), God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.”

But it seems these passages belie God’s actual actions if we look at the Jewish and Christian narratives in totality, which in turn, make the strong case, once again, that the Bible is wrought with inconsistencies. First, let’s take the Jewish tradition from the Old Testament. Since there doesn’t seem to be a coherent consensus in Judaism about the afterlife, and particularly, heaven and hell, we can just look at the behavior of Yahweh toward his “chosen” people. Although the argument that God is good may be up for debate, as I argue here, the notion that he is omniscient and all-powerful are not, otherwise, we must change what we mean when we utter this three-letter construction.

If God is omniscient, he would have known there in the black chaos before speaking anything into existence that man would be seduced by the serpent and ultimately fall from grace. He would also know, in his omniscience, the precise time and place that Satan would tempt Eve to eat the fruit. He knew there in the black chaos that man would be exiled from the Garden as a result of the fall (and his seeming lack of concern that Satan infiltrated Eden) and would be relegated to a life of toil and birth pains. He knew there in the black chaos that man would soon after the fall become wicked in his sight. He knew he would have to flood the entire earth, kill untold numbers and preserve only one pious man and his family. He knew there in the black chaos that his “chosen” people, Israel, would betray him time and time again by falling into idol worship. He knew his beloved Israel would become slaves in Egypt. He knew of the wandering, the despair and the bloodlust on display against rival tribes in his name. He knew there in the black chaos that someone claiming proprietary knowledge would advocate the burning of random women believed to be witches and of stoning gay people. He knew of the impending Inquisitions; he knew there in the black chaos that Hitler, wanting to purge the world of his own “chosen” people, would maim, starve and slaughter 6 million Jews.

Moving beyond the Old Testament into Christianity, God knew that he would one day send his son for the atonement of man. He knew of the intense suffering that Jesus would endure. He knew of the intense suffering and persecution that early Christians would endure. He knew that one day, he would have to watch as millions, exercising their “god-given” reasoning capabilities, would not be able to believe in the historicity of Jesus or accept his gift of salvation and thus be cast down to perdition to burn forever and ever.

Regardless of whether any of this is true in reality and if we take these stories at face value, God saw the misery, the suffering, the despair, the waste of life and loss that would ensue once he spoke creation into being. He saw it all in the beginning. His mind’s eye envisioned this vale of woe in the chaos, and with a poker player’s blank stare, he went about the business of creation anyway. This alone, notwithstanding any arguments we might make about unnecessary suffering and an all-loving deity, renders God evil at best and sadistic at worst.

Enhanced by Zemanta

‘The Bible’ turning off believers?

Some folks within the nonbelieving community have suggested that the History Channel’s series, “The Bible,” may produce an adverse effect than what its creators may have anticipated, as “casual” believers or fence-sitters see depictions of the mass murders and other atrocities that Yahweh in the Old Testament either caused directly or ordered through his followers. It just occurred to me that today we call the deaths of thousands of people, like on Sept. 11, 2001, a tragedy. Yet, God orders the mass slaughter of nonbelievers in the OT, and no one raises an eyebrow. Some of the people murdered on Sept. 11 were believers; some were not. Their deaths were, by all accounts that I have heard the last 10 years, tragic. Yet, a deity can order the slaughter of thousands of nonbelievers and somehow that’s OK. Today, we would call that terrorism. I’m amazed at religion’s power to desensitize so-called “morally upright believers” to violence, rape, incest and genocide.

But in any case, a question over at Bunch has been raised whether “The Bible” will turn off believers because of the many deaths the series depicts that are directly attributable to Yahweh. Matt O. wrote:

I suspect, and I might be wrong, that History’s The Bible mini-series might be one of the best things for atheism to happen in a long time. As the Bible is actively read by some 16% of Christians this is giving millions an opportunity to see parts of the cannon that are morally objectionable attributed to their god.

And he then listed numerous scenes in “The Bible” in which Yahweh wipes out mass amounts of people from Earth in the OT, to which I replied:

It may turn off some “casual” believers, but it won’t make much difference to the “church every Sunday” crowd. They know full well what Yahweh did and commanded that his followers do in the OT, and they believe anyway because any amount of wickedness or depravity can be justified in their eyes since we supposedly live in a fallen world and God’s law is supreme no matter how morally bankrupt it appears to us.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Why, God? Why indeed

In this column posted by New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd, the Rev. Kevin O’Neil asks some tough questions in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings:

How does one celebrate Christmas with the fresh memory of 20 children and 7 adults ruthlessly murdered in Newtown; with the searing image from Webster of firemen rushing to save lives ensnared in a burning house by a maniac who wrote that his favorite activity was “killing people”? How can we celebrate the love of a God become flesh when God doesn’t seem to do the loving thing? If we believe, as we do, that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why doesn’t He use this knowledge and power for good in the face of the evils that touch our lives?

The capitalization on the personal pronoun “he” is telling enough, but these questions must have sprung into the minds of Christians across the nation after the shooting in Connecticut. At least, I hope they did.

Here is O’Neil:

One true thing is this: Faith is lived in family and community, and God is experienced in family and community. We need one another to be God’s presence. When my younger brother, Brian, died suddenly at 44 years old, I was asking “Why?” and I experienced family and friends as unconditional love in the flesh. They couldn’t explain why he died. Even if they could, it wouldn’t have brought him back. Yet the many ways that people reached out to me let me know that I was not alone. They really were the presence of God to me. They held me up to preach at Brian’s funeral. They consoled me as I tried to comfort others. Suffering isolates us. Loving presence brings us back, makes us belong.

So, let me get this straight. God is experienced in family and community. Yet God isn’t actually experienced as God himself in reality? God is somehow made real through family and friends? I don’t get that. Family and friends, according to Christian dogma, are subject to original sin, and even Christians can sin — a well-documented point — so I doubt that, theologically, family and friends can take the place of Yahweh himself. But O’Neil admits it. He admits that family and friends were the “presence of God” to him and believers, so my question is: Is he also admitting, implicitly, that God isn’t actually real and that he’s really only a type of positive energy associated with fellowship?

O’Neil then concedes this point:

We are human and mortal. We will suffer and die. But how we are with one another in that suffering and dying makes all the difference as to whether God’s presence is felt or not and whether we are comforted or not.

So, people’s relations with one another determines whether God actually bestows his “comfort” on people who are dying? What strange theology is this?

The ending is the best part:

I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.

So this “presence” performs all these indispensable tasks, yet when the water hits the wheel, we still need family and friend to carry us through the hard times. Funny how that works.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Purpose driven pastor

Here is an interesting profile of Saddleback Church pastor, Rick Warren, and author of the best selling book, “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Warren seems to be attempting to make a resurgence by taking advantage of the 10-year anniversary of the work’s publication, which outlines the five “purposes” that people, specifically Christians, have in life. He is releasing a new edition of the book with a couple new chapters and well as some accompanying links to extra audio and video content, no doubt hoping to add more millions of dollars to the surge of book sales (and related instructional material) that he got from the first publication.

I was still a believer when “The Purpose Drive Life” first came out, and I can still rattle off the five main “purposes” off the top of my head: worship, fellowship, discipleship, evangelism and ministry. Indeed, my particular church had purchased long-wise banners that were hung around the sanctuary walls, almost like — cough — a graven images.

In any case, at the time, I was really struck by this purposefully vague and simple first sentence of the book and continue to be, if only for a different reason and in a different context:

It’s not about you.

Now, obviously from a Christian perspective, the sentence takes on a spiritual nature, reminding believers that they should not adopt the faith exclusively for their own gain but that they should approach Christianity looking outward to find ways to reach out to their community by way of discipleship, evangelism, ministry, etc. But from a secular perspective, the idea behind this opening can’t completely be scrapped. While I realize putting a secular spin on it would lift it completely out of the context I just mentioned, perhaps we can rework the sentence to read something like:

“Live selflessly” or perhaps “Leave the world a better place than you found it.”

This is, in my view, the more noble cause than the one purported by Warren because living with other’s people’s interests at heart does not need to be muddied by the auxiliary goals of trying to coerce people to believe in the Christian god or wasting time in worship and squandering resources that could be used to feed hungry mouths. The marriage of secular goals like helping the poor, feeding the sick and bolstering communities with spiritual ones is really an unholy union of counter-playing ideals because there’s no secret which goals take absolute precedent from the Christian worldview: if people are bound for hell, what difference does it make whether they have their carnal needs met?

I realize there are plenty of faith-based organizations feeding hungry people regardless of their “spiritual condition,” but reaching people for Christ is the mandated purpose of Christians based on the Great Commission. If their primary goal is anything else, they are simply not living up to the commands in the New Testament. Thus, while Warren’s PEACE Plan (Promote reconciliation, Equip servant leaders, Assist the poor, care for the sick, Educate the next generation) and others like it may have some laudable goals, the work that will make concrete differences in people’s lives must necessarily take a back seat, and that is the danger of any Christian-based ministry, no matter how benevolent it may seem.

Enhanced by Zemanta