Source: Adam Lee’s Daylight Atheism website
As an atheist, I reject all gods and all religions alike. But this does not
mean I spend an equal amount of time and effort arguing against each one I do
not believe in. Since it is invariably the fundamentalists and conservatives of
a given religion who feel the need to proselytize and preach to others, who
attempt to gain secular power, and who – in some instances – use force and
coercion to impose their views on those who believe differently, I mainly
target them and their arguments, as opposed to the moderates and liberals who
do not try to impose their beliefs on others.
More specifically, since the power-seeking fundamentalists and invasive
proselytizers in the nation I live in are mainly right-wing evangelical
Protestant Christians, it is their views I spend the most time educating myself
in and learning to refute. This essay is derived from my understanding of the
Bible and conservative Christian theology and explains one of the principal reasons
(other than the lack of evidence) why I reject the Christian fundamentalists’
god.
Simply put, the Christian fundamentalist god is a colossal screwup. Anyone
who reads the Bible can see for themselves that he just can’t do anything
right. He designs an originally beautiful and immaculate creation which almost
immediately becomes polluted with sin, suffering and death. Both times he tries
his hand at creating free will, his created beings immediately turn around and
reject him. He chooses a people and continually attempts to redeem them from
their fallen state, attempts which continually prove to be complete failures.
He dispenses punishments for the evildoers and the wicked that utterly fail to
stem the spread of evil and wickedness. He deals with crimes and transgressions
by lashing out in childish rage, killing not just the evildoer but, often, all
the innocent people around him. His final, crowning attempt to save the world
from its sin was almost unanimously rejected by his chosen people. And his repeated
promises to return to the Earth to set everything right have now been
thoroughly broken. I find it impossible to believe that an omniscient and
omnipotent deity, if there was such a being, could so consistently and
thoroughly screw up; the contradiction between what this god is claimed to be
able to do and what I am told he did do is so stark that it defies all reason
that such a being could actually exist. But even if he did, such a sorry excuse
for a deity would be deserving of no one’s worship – which makes the audacity
of his followers all the more incredible, to insist in the face of his long
string of failures that he is a wise and loving ruler worthy of our adoration!
Let us consider in more detail some of Yahweh’s more notable blunders.
In the beginning, according to the Bible, there was nothing but God and the
void. After a timeless eternity, God decided that this was an unsatisfactory
state of affairs, and in six days created the heavens, the Earth and all the
life upon it. Adam and Eve, the first couple, lived in a bounteous, peaceful
paradise where all was bliss and there was no unhappiness, no pain and no
death. So far, so good. Unfortunately, this was to be the first thing Yahweh
would get right for a long time.
As it turned out, at some point during those first six days God had also
created the angels, to serve him and praise him for all eternity. However, one
angel didn’t care for this arrangement. Satan – who according to some sources
was the highest and wisest of all the angels – denounced God, declared war on
his maker, and convinced a full third of the heavenly host to join his
rebellion against the throne. How he was able to accomplish this is not clear.
Did God create one-third of his angels defective?
At this point, God could have used his omnipotent power to zap Satan and the
rest of the rebel angels out of existence entirely. Or he could have changed
them with a snap of his all-powerful fingers, fixing the flaws in their
personalities and returning them to a state of goodness and obedience. But he
did neither. Instead, for unclear reasons, he actually engaged the rebels in
battle, and of course defeated them easily. He then cast them out of Heaven and
created a fiery pit called Hell in which he would imprison and torture them
forever as punishment for their treason.
This solution was much crueler than the other options described, since it
produced an enormous amount of unnecessary pain and suffering, whereas the
other options would have produced none. Still, it would have sufficed to end
the threat that Satan and his followers represented – except for one thing.
Somehow, God failed to specify that the rebel angels would actually have to stay
in the fiery prison he created for them. Instead, he allowed them to leave
whenever they wanted, to roam the Earth tempting and inflicting suffering on
humans.
And of course, this is exactly what happened. Almost immediately after
creation was complete, according to the fundamentalists, Satan took the form of
a snake and traveled to Eden to entice Adam and Eve to sin. He easily succeeded
in doing so, apparently because Adam and Eve were also defective; God’s
complete failure to warn or protect them doubtlessly also played a part. (God’s
failures in regard to the whole Eden affair are too numerous to list here; for
a full catalogue of them, see “Sins of the Father” and “That Fateful Apple“.)
So, again, God failed. For the second time, his experiment in free will
backfired, and his created beings disobeyed and rejected him. Adam and Eve
joined Satan’s rebellion and were tainted by sin.
At this point, God could have forgiven the humans, who after all had sinned
only out of ignorance, and used his almighty powers to cleanse and redeem them.
But he did not. Instead, he threw a temper tantrum, tossed them out of his
Garden, and condemned them with a curse to live mortal lives of suffering, toil
and death. But apparently God’s aim was off, because it wasn’t just the two of
them who were affected. The curse fell upon the entirety of creation,
affecting not just Adam and Eve, but every other living thing, all of Adam and
Eve’s descendants, and all the descendants of every other living thing for all
of time, even though all these other beings were completely innocent of the
apple incident, even though most of them did not even exist at the time. The
original perfection was shattered and twisted, the curse of sin infected all
living creatures, and the entire Earth became a place of suffering and death.
By now Yahweh’s original creation was a failure, in ruins. One-third of his
angelic servants had rebelled and abandoned him, his perfect world was ruined
and spoiled, his human children were lost in sin and darkness, and Hell was
empty as the demons roamed the world and tempted humanity still deeper into
evil.
Apparently unable to deal with this, God inexplicably turned away from the
universe for a while – perhaps to sulk. For many centuries he was absent from
the world, doing essentially nothing while it slid deeper into sin.
Unsurprisingly, when he finally chose to come back, things were a mess.
Humanity had become a race of hopeless, irredeemably evil sinners who had
forgotten about him. (“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually” –Genesis 6:5).
At this point, a solution was needed – this evil had to be stopped. God
could have used his powers to make all the sinful people and only the sinful
people vanish, blinked out of existence instantly. But he did not. Instead, he
spoke to the last righteous man on earth, Noah, and told him to build an ark
and take aboard his family and two of every kind of animal. He did so, and God
sent a massive, catastrophic flood which decimated the planet and wiped out the
sinners, as well as killing millions of innocent animals, plants, and human
infants and children in the bargain.
Finally the floodwaters receded. Noah disembarked and released the animals
to somehow survive on their own in the now lifeless and barren earth, with no
food and no supportive ecosystems, and he and his family repopulated the globe.
But once again, God had failed. Though the worldwide flood had been sent to
wipe out evil, it utterly failed to do so. Noah’s descendants spread throughout
the world and, within a matter of years, forgot God entirely and became just as
sinful and evil as the pre-flood people. In fact, Noah’s very first act after
the flood, after sacrificing some animals to God, was to plant some grapes so
he could make wine, following which he promptly got drunk, passed out, and
slept naked inside his tent. Noah’s son Ham accidentally looked into the tent
and saw his naked father; for this terrible crime Noah, apparently with God’s
approval, cursed Ham’s son Canaan – his own grandson – and all of Canaan’s
descendants to a lifetime of slavery.
But, in any case, Yahweh was undaunted. Flush with pride at his “victory”
over sin, he again took some time off to pat himself on the back. And when he
returned, he noticed that the people of Earth had banded together and were
building a mud-brick tower high enough to reach Heaven.
At this point, God could have moved his Heaven higher up – perhaps higher
than the few hundred feet it must have been at the time – and enjoyed a hearty
laugh at the silly antics of his creations. Instead, he panicked, expressed
real fear that they would actually reach him and become as powerful as he was,
and frantically responded by scattering the people of Earth, confusing and
separating them by afflicting them with many different languages. (It should be
noted in passing that God eventually forgot about this whole affair and allowed
later humans to build much taller skyscrapers with no ill effects.)
Perhaps realizing by now that his large-scale plans kept failing, God
decided to think small in his next attempt. He selected a man named Abraham,
appeared to him, and vowed that his descendants would be the Almighty’s chosen
people, would enjoy divine favor (“And I will bless them that bless thee, and
curse him that curseth thee” –Genesis 12:3) and would inherit a great nation.
Suitably impressed, Abraham left his home at God’s urging and set out to the
promised land.
God’s promise passed from Abraham to his son, Isaac, who in turn had two
sons, Esau and Jacob. As Isaac’s firstborn, Esau was supposed to inherit the
divine promise through a blessing, but Jacob deceived his dying father into
giving the blessing to him instead. God, despite his omniscience, apparently
was also fooled and honored the blessing, allowing Jacob to unfairly steal his
brother’s rightful place and become the sire of the chosen people. Jacob and
his twelve sons became the Israelites, and the divine promise passed to them;
Esau and his descendants, meanwhile, were condemned to live in the harsh desert
and serve Jacob’s descendants, setting the stage for millennia of ethnic
hatred, strife and war.
However, Yahweh apparently forgot about his vow to protect and bless his
chosen people, and they were almost immediately enslaved by the Egyptians. For
several centuries, God’s chosen people labored in bitter captivity, continually
beaten by their overseers and forced into backbreaking work building monuments
and hauling massive blocks of stone. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people
were rewarded for their faith by living and dying as slaves, trusting in a
deliverance that never came for them. And what was the reason for God’s
allowing all this? The Bible gives none. It does not say that the Egyptian
captivity was punishment for any misdeed, nor does it say it was intended to
teach the Israelites any lesson. As far as we know, it happened simply because
God inexplicably failed to deliver on his promise.
However, after about four hundred years (a time period far longer than the
United States has been in existence), God finally noticed what was going on and
decided to do something about it. He manifested himself to an Israelite named
Moses and promised to use him as the vehicle through which he, God, would free
his people.
At this point, God could have used his omniscience to determine exactly what
punishment he had to mete out to Pharaoh to cause this. Instead, he began to
punish the entire nation with progressively worse punishments, thereby
inflicting much pain and suffering on innocent people who had no hand in the
decision anyway. However, each of these failed to persuade Pharaoh to release
the Israelites, and since God must have known ahead of time that they would
fail, the inescapable conclusion is that he caused vast amounts of innocent
suffering for nothing. Pharaoh was not persuaded to free the Israelites until
God killed every completely innocent firstborn child in Egypt. Why didn’t he
just punish the one person responsible with something that would have been
adequate from the start? Who knows?
But after all this innocent death and suffering, the people of Israel were
free, and God led them out of Egypt. Then, through Moses, he burdened them with
a long and arbitrary set of rules covering every aspect of daily life – what
kinds of animals they were not allowed to eat, what activities they were not allowed
to engage in on certain days of the week, how they had to mutilate their
genitals to show their faith in him, and so on – and specified the horrible
punishments for breaking any of them, most of which involved death in various
cruel ways. The Israelites hated these rules so much that they rejected God’s
deliverance, preferring their slavery in Egypt. (No surprise there. According
to fundamentalist Christians, the Mosaic law is impossible to faithfully
follow. It is little wonder the people preferred their Egyptian taskmasters –
at least they could please them some of the time!) As punishment, God
forced them to wander in the desert until most of them had died. This included
his great prophet Moses, who had given his entire life to leading the Israelites
out of Egypt and was rewarded for his service by never even getting to set foot
on the earth of the promised land.
Finally, God allowed his people to enter Palestine. Unfortunately, it was
already occupied by other people who had taken up residence there during
Israel’s Egyptian captivity and by now had been living there for generations.
At this point, God could have invited the native Palestinians into his
covenant, given them the same laws he had given the Israelites, and established
an egalitarian society where people of all races could live together in
harmony. Instead, he ordered his people to invade and slaughter the natives,
killing them to the last man, woman and child, specifically instructing them to
show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances. What followed were a series of
terrible, bloody battles in which tens of thousands of people died violently.
Finally, God pronounced his campaign of genocide a success (Joshua 11:15) – but
this was not true. Somehow, he had failed to notice that many of the people he
had ordered his chosen to exterminate were still alive (as is shown by repeated
biblical references to them after that point; see, for example, Judges 3:5).
There was even one instance in which some of these people had survived despite
God’s efforts to kill them, apparently because their iron chariots defeated his
omnipotence (Judges 1:19).
However, after all this death and bloodshed, the Israelites were at last in
the promised land. At this point, God formed them into a loose confederacy of
tribes and appointed the judges to govern them. This failed. The people
continually fell into sin, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from
neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. Each time this happened,
they cried out to God and he raised up a judge to save them, after which they
promptly fell back into sin.
After several iterations of this, God became fed up and decided that there
was only one way to break this cycle of sin and retribution: establish a
monarchy in Israel. His first choice for king was Saul, who turned out to be a
complete failure. Saul fell into sin, suffered punishing military defeats from
neighboring nations, and finally committed suicide rather than be captured or
killed in battle.
God’s next choice for king was David, and just once – for the first time
since creation – it looked as if he might have made the right decision. David
and his son Solomon succeeded in rallying the Israelites behind them, and ruled
over a glorious and powerful united monarchy, God’s ideal state and the
culmination of his promises to his chosen people (although God did break his
promise, in Genesis 15:18, to give Abraham’s descendants all the land from the
Nile to the Euphrates: Israel was never this large even at the height of its
power). However, Solomon’s son Rehoboam proved to be an inept ruler, and in a
move God failed to do anything to prevent, his united monarchy, after existing
for only two kings, shattered into two separate, warring kingdoms. The vast
majority of the tribes seceded, joining the new state of Israel in the north,
while only a tiny rump state named Judah was left for David’s throne.
In subsequent years, things got even worse. The kings of both nations
continually fell into sin, taking all the people with them, routinely suffered
punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly
enslaved. The crimes of Israel finally grew so intolerable that God threw a fit
and sent the legendarily cruel Assyrian empire to destroy them, carrying ten of
the original twelve Israelite tribes off into slavery where they vanished
forever from history.
The kingdom of Judah still existed, however, and God tried one last time to
save it. He raised up a devout king named Josiah, who was faithful to a degree
undreamed-of by any of his predecessors (“And like unto him was there no king
before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul,
and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him
arose there any like him” –2 Kings 23:25). Josiah instituted religious reforms,
burning the groves and smashing the idols of pagan religions, and made a great
covenant with the people to follow the law of God. It seemed as if Judah might
finally be saved from disaster – and then Josiah went out to battle with an
invading Egyptian army, God failed to protect him, and he was promptly killed
by an Egyptian arrow.
The last few kings of Judah were disastrous sinners, undoing all of Josiah’s
reforms. Realizing that once again he had failed, Yahweh threw another of his
temper tantrums and allowed the Babylonian empire to destroy his nation
entirely, razing his holy temple to the ground and carrying the last of his
chosen people off to slavery in a distant land.
A lesser deity might have concluded by now that the experiment begun with
Abraham was a failure, but God was determined to see things through.
Grudgingly, he let some of his people return to Israel and rebuild the Temple,
and he appointed prophets to keep them on the right track this time. This
failed. The chosen people continued to sin, becoming prideful, legalistic
hypocrites, and refused to turn from their ways despite numerous punishing
defeats and eventual enslavement by the Romans.
At this point, God realized he had one last chance to redeem his people, and
he came up with a daring, drastic plan to do it. He descended to Earth and took
mortal form, incarnating himself in a human body. Upon reaching adulthood, he
sought out his people and told them he had come to give them a completely new
message, abandoning his old promises that the Messiah would be a king and
military leader. He revoked all the old, cruel laws he had once given them,
letting them know that he had changed his mind, that they were no longer
necessary. In their place he substituted new, simple principles, teaching them
about forgiveness, about their shared humanity, and most importantly, about the
deep and abiding love he had for every one of his precious children.
For once obeying the law they had been given so long ago, the Jews promptly
seized this incarnated god, charged him with blasphemy, and killed him.
Christians, of course, claim that this was what God had in mind all along,
that only through the shedding of his blood could we be forgiven for our sins.
However, I am not so sure. Throughout all the millennia God knew the Jews, he
failed to ever tell them that this was the method of redemption he had in mind.
There is not a single prophecy anywhere in the Old Testament that clearly
predicts the sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection of an incarnated
god. Besides, God is supposed to be all-powerful. If he wanted to forgive us,
why couldn’t he just forgive us? Why was the agonizing and bloody death of an
innocent person necessary for human salvation? Perhaps it was not, and God’s
propagandists only attributed this significance to it afterward to avoid this
debacle being labeled as another complete failure.
In any case, God returned to Heaven and appointed apostles to spread his new
faith to the Jews. This failed, as the evangelists were viciously persecuted
and soundly rejected in town after town, winning relatively few converts.
Flustered by his chosen people’s rejection of him, God had no choice but to abandon
them entirely and pass his promise of salvation on to the Gentiles, creating a
new religion called Christianity. A church formed and almost immediately
fragmented into numerous squabbling sects, all deeply divided as to the nature
and intent of God.
At this point, God could have simply stepped in and set the record straight
by letting all concerned know what he really meant. He failed to do so, and the
church continued to splinter, breaking off into many smaller sects and
denominations, consumed by infighting. God could also have sent more signs and
wonders, as he routinely did in Old Testament times, to let the world know that
the new religion really was of him; but he failed to do this as well, and for
several centuries Christianity remained a small fringe group on the verge of
extinction, heavily persecuted, its followers routinely tortured and
slaughtered by the authorities.
It was only by luck that the new church caught the eye of a Roman emperor
and survived. (Of course, God may have had a hand in this, but his inexplicably
waiting so long to do it can be considered a failure. Certainly it was no
comfort to the thousands who had already been tortured to death or mauled by
wild animals in great stadiums for the edification of the masses.) But finally
Christianity caught on, and became the dominant religion of Europe.
At this point, God could have used his dominance over the civilized world to
bring forth a new golden age of enlightenment and peace. Instead, he suddenly
decided to completely stop sending new revelations and miracles, and his church
stultified and dragged humanity down into the Dark Ages. Knowledge declined and
superstition and ignorance ruled; innocent people were imprisoned, tortured and
killed in vicious inquisitions, scientists whose findings contradicted holy
scripture were silenced and forced to recant, and plague after plague decimated
humanity because, incidentally, God had failed to tell people that washing
one’s hands, and not whipping oneself or singing hymns, would keep illness
away. New denominations arose that almost immediately became embroiled in
savage religious wars, including a series of military expeditions called the
Crusades that sent millions of people to their deaths, and conquistadors in
foreign lands enslaved and slaughtered millions more in God’s name. (Somehow,
throughout all the thousands of years he had been speaking to humanity, God
failed to ever provide a single clear-cut condemnation of slavery.) Kings and
popes claimed divine right, stifling democracy and free speech. And all this
time, the lot of the common man remained full of misery and suffering.
At any point during this time, God could have stepped in to stop these
atrocities and correct people’s ignorance. He failed to do so, and it was not
until the Enlightenment, when people rediscovered the principles of science and
democracy and began to investigate and think for themselves, that things began
to improve – no thanks to humanity’s cosmic absentee landlord.
And this brings us to today. God has been silent for thousands of years,
perhaps realizing that the problems of this world have grown beyond his ability
to contain. Humanity now has the power to completely destroy itself, and nearly
has done so on several occasions. We are multiplying beyond our planet’s
ability to sustain life even as we destroy our environment, recklessly
expending our natural resources, driving species to extinction, polluting our
water and air. Terrorism and armed conflict threaten our safety. Weapons of
mass destruction continue to proliferate. The Christian church has fractured
into hundreds of sects, some of which are tainted by allegations of
institutionalized sex abuse, others of which are convulsed and splintering
further over the issue of ordaining gays, and false religions abound. People
continue to kill and die over religion, and nowhere on Earth do they do so more
fervently or more often than in what was once God’s promised land. And, to hear
certain Christians tell it, by far the worst sins of society out of all of these
– gay marriage and safe and legal abortion – continue to gain ground and
societal acceptance.
Soon, according to the fundamentalists’ millennialist theology, God will
become sick of it all and throw his ultimate temper tantrum, consigning this
entire failed experiment called creation to the flame. Soon, Judgment Day will
come, humanity will be wiped out, and Satan will have won. Only a select few, a
small fraction of all the people who have ever lived, will have made it to
Heaven, while billions upon billions of souls will be in Hell, condemned to
endless, eternal agony in the flame. The screams of the damned will completely
drown out the joyous songs of the saved. And this is supposed to be a positive
outcome? This is what God’s grand plan will amount to in the end?
Things didn’t have to be this way. At so many points throughout history, God
could have acted differently, even in small ways, to alter the destiny of his
creation. Yet at each critical juncture, at every single step along the way, he
failed to do so. Again and again, he failed.
He could have wiped Satan out of existence, changed him to be good again, or
at least actually imprisoned him in Hell and not allowed him to roam the world
doing evil. Or, instead of leaving the first humans ignorant, unprotected and
vulnerable, he could easily have made them so powerful and wise they would have
recognized Satan for what he was and rejected him on sight. Even if he had not
done this, he could have forgiven the first humans for their transgressions, or
at least only punished the two of them and not cast the curse of original sin
on the entire planet. It cannot be overemphasized that taking any of these
steps would have made all that followed unnecessary. All of God’s subsequent
plans were merely an attempt to clean up the mess he made by allowing
all this to happen in the first place!
Even if all these things had happened, God could have made many
different decisions afterward to produce a better overall outcome. For example,
he could have stayed with the world after the fall, not allowing it to slide
into sin; or, if things came to that, he could have used a miracle to
selectively eliminate the evildoers, rather than sending a flood that killed
millions of innocent living creatures while simultaneously failing utterly to
eliminate sin as it was intended to do. He could have ignored the attempts of
humans to build the Tower of Babel (which would itself have taught them a good
lesson about humility), rather than punishing them for it with the confusion of
languages which would only lead to more misunderstanding and division among
people in the long run. He could have ignored Jacob’s attempts at deception and
bestowed his blessing upon the son it was supposed to go to, preventing
millennia of ethnic hatred, resentment and strife. He could have kept his vow
to Abraham and prevented the Israelites from ever being enslaved, or at least
sent only one sufficient punishment to Pharaoh to obtain their release rather
than building up to it and making innocent people suffer pointlessly.
He could have given the Israelites laws that were actually possible to
follow, rather than impossible and restrictive ones that would inspire them to
hate and resent him. He could have invited the native people of Palestine into
his covenant rather than setting the horrible precedent of sanctioning warfare
and genocide in the name of God. He could have instituted democracy among his
people rather than absolutist monarchy since, after all, there is no guarantee
that the son of a good king will be a good king himself. In this way, bad
rulers would have been promptly removed from office rather than dragging the
entire nation down with them. He could have actually protected the good kings
from harm by enemies. He could have given his people messianic prophecies that
clearly applied to Jesus, so they would not have rejected him. He could also
have chosen to forgive sinners merely through his omnipotent will to do so,
rather than through the torturous death of an innocent which itself inspired his
followers to commit countless acts of retributive bloodshed throughout the
centuries. At any of numerous points throughout history, he could have stepped
in with just a little clear guidance, letting confused humans know what he
really wanted or meant. He could have exerted just the smallest amount of his
omnipotent power to steer people away from sin until they were wise enough to
avoid it on their own. He could simply make his presence more obvious to
prevent any one of the numerous problems and arguments humanity finds itself
afflicted with. The list goes on and on. Suffice it to say – at any time in
history when it was possible to make a good decision, Yahweh made a bad one.
And these are just the improvements possible in the plan he actually did use.
If God had wanted to make radical changes to this plan, there are many that
would have resulted in a tremendously better outcome.
To name one, he could have created, instead of defective humans and angels,
free-willed beings who would all freely choose to obey him and do only what is
good. Despite what Christian apologists say, this is clearly possible. Although
Christians believe God never sins, he is still believed to have free will.
Therefore, whatever quality God possesses that enables him to avoid sin, he
could have given this quality to his created beings as well. Perhaps it is his
holy nature that causes him to detest and avoid sinful behavior, or perhaps it
is the intelligence and rationality necessary to fully understand that sin is a
futile and self-destructive course. (Surely Christians would agree that this is
in fact true?) Doing this would have eliminated the need for a Hell entirely.
Or, rather than waste time setting up a religion called Judaism he only
intended to supersede eventually anyway, God could have taken human form and
performed his sacrificial death and resurrection immediately after the Fall. In
this way he could have eliminated millennia of sin and strife as people
futilely attempted to obey impossible laws. With the transforming power of
Christ in their hearts and that many fewer arbitrary and bureaucratic
restrictions to follow, the Israelites would have been far less tempted by
idolatry. With the option of salvation open to everyone, God could have
prevented at least one cause of the racial and religious exclusivism which
provoked so much hatred and caused so much suffering and so many deaths – both
in the pre-Christian period as the Israelites warred with their neighbors, and
later on as Christians persecuted and killed Jews for being “Christ-killers”.
Most radically of all, God could have dispensed with the whole idea of
creating a world of imperfect material beings. Why did he need to mold us out
of fallible clay? Why not make us of pure spirit, free of fleshly temptations,
free to roam infinite space at will? God could have made us all gods, free to
create our own worlds, our own paradises. He could have given us infinite
freedom, and instead he imprisoned us in these cages of muscle and bone,
imprisoned our souls in vulnerable brains that often obscure our true natures
from shining through. He made us able to suffer and feel hurt, made us able to
become sick and injured, made us able to die. Why did he do this? Why did God
create beings as limited as us, when he could have created so much more?
Of course, the atheist’s answer to this question is the simplest. I do not,
of course, believe that all the events described above actually happened, or
that God was behind the ones that did happen. I am merely pointing out that, even
if taken on its own terms, the Christian story implies a deity who is
massively incompetent, and this creates a fundamental contradiction with the
tenets of Christian belief that there is a god who is all-knowing,
all-powerful, and completely good. Since the facts of this world’s history are
not open to change, and since we are justified in believing things would be
much better if there was such a being, the most likely conclusion is that no
such being exists. Though some Christian apologists claim the choices God made
must have been the best ones possible, based purely on their belief that those
are the choices he made, this argument is circular. To genuinely refute the
arguments presented above, they would have to show why the choices I describe
would have led to a worse world than the one we live in, and this is a
challenge I do not think they can meet. What could possibly be a worse
overall outcome than the large majority of humanity ending up in Hell forever?
If there really is a god – as unlikely as I consider that possibility to be
– the Christian story is a slander on him. It depicts him as so poor at
understanding the psychology of others that he simply cannot make free-willed
beings who all desire of their own accord to be in fellowship with him. It depicts
him as so inept that his will can be thwarted and his plans ruined by the acts
of beings who are infinitely beneath him. It depicts him as so short-tempered
and malicious that he would think nothing of punishing evil with acts that also
inflict massive harm and suffering on those who were completely innocent of the
deed. It depicts his power and his imagination as so limited that he cannot
think of any way to stop evil other than with destruction, mass death and
bloodshed; and it depicts him as so bereft of ideas that, whenever he does
destroy evildoers in this fashion, he starts over again with a small group of
people who turn out to be just as evil and rebellious as those he destroyed. It
depicts him as setting out to make a perfect creation and then blundering so
completely and so finally that he will ultimately have no choice but to consign
the vast majority of his creations to the fire of torment.
Can a rational person really accept this? Does it make sense to believe that
this scenario is the crowning work of infinite goodness and wisdom?
For my part, I cannot believe this. I reject the Christian fundamentalists’
story. I reject the theology of a perfect god who set out to bring forth good
and brought forth evil. I reject the gospel of universal sin, I reject the
gospel of total depravity, and I reject the gospel of eternal pain. I cannot in
good conscience or sound mind accept such a bafflingly and frustratingly
illogical system. This world is what it is, indifferent to us and sometimes
cruel to us, and we cannot change that – but we can stop deepening the
insult by telling ourselves that it is presided over by a benevolent deity who
approves of the way things are. Instead, we should set aside these unproductive
myths and use our intelligence to improve conditions in this life, both by
using science to bring the natural world under our control and by improving
morality to put an end to the ceaseless and pointless hatred so many people
have for each other. Ironically, the belief that there is a good god has often
proved to be a powerful impediment to progress, as believers reason that to try
to improve our lives is a blasphemous rejection of God’s ideal order. However,
we are now mature enough to look beyond that superstitious fear. Whether a god
got us to this point or not, it is now up to us to do better. We have the
tools, and we can and should use them. That is a worthy goal in life, and that
is what atheism teaches us.
Source: Adam Lee’s Daylight Atheism website