Divinity of Doubt

Christianity, we know, is the religion of those who believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God and savior of mankind. Indeed, the very first words of the gospel of Mark are “Here begins the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John purport to record the life of Jesus—his words and the significant events of his life from his birth in Bethlehem through his crucifixion at Calvary, just outside Jerusalem, and his believed resurrection three days later. The four gospels are complemented in the New Testament by the epistles, twenty-three letters from several of Jesus’ disciples, mostly Paul. Christianity came into being, not by name but, in effect, after Jesus’ death^q and resurrection when his apostles and disciples began to preach the teachings of Jesus, later memorialized in the four gospels.

The inevitable question is how, pray, can millions of people the world over believe with all their heart not only in the Jesus of the New Testament but also in his father, Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, the creator of the universe, when the essence of the story of Christianity is fanciful in the greatest degree possible? Remarkably, Christian apologists actually argue that the fact that more than 2 billion people the world over believe in Christianity is itself powerful evidence that the whole story is true. But the number of people who believe in something is not, by itself, an argument for its validity. If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it’s still a foolish thing. And everyone knows there are far more horses’ asses at a race track than horses.

What makes the belief by billions in Christianity even more difficult to comprehend is that the forty or so authors of the books of the Old and New Testament lived thousands of years ago, and we don’t even know for sure who, precisely, they were. As Sam Harris puts it, “People who demand evidence for everything else in their lives are somehow all too happy to accept the word of long-dead biblical authors in a corner of a long-dead empire.” (This is an example of the irony noted by Montaigne that nothing is so firmly believed by people as that which is least known by them.) Of course, these people also believe that the words of these authors were inspired by God.

Christians cannot even agree on who their God is. Christianity, like most other major religions, such as Judaism and Islam, is monotheistic—that is, it believes there is only one true God. But though Christians don’t like to talk about it, as is well known there are really two very distinct, contradictory—vengeful as opposed to forgiving—Gods in the three main branches of Christianity (Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodox): the God of the Old Testament, who is a monster of the first order (Mark Twain said the Old Testament “is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere”), and the God of the New Testament, who is mostly (more on this later) an exemplar of compassion and morality. Whereas the Old Testament God couldn’t possibly have been more vindictive⁴ and cruel to those who incurred his wrath, Jesus couldn’t possibly have been less so, actually teaching that one should “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:41).

Indeed, Jesus, the God of the New Testament, is so different from the God of the Old Testament that he actually preached in express defiance of what his father had instructed the Israelites through Moses. “You have heard the commandment, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ [Exodus 21:24]. But what I say to you is: when a person strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other” (Matthew 5:38–39). So much for the famous dictum of St. Augustine, who to this day is considered a doctrinal authority by Catholics and Protestants alike, in his treatise The Creed, that “there is only one will of the Father and Son because there is only one nature. The will of the Son cannot, in any degree whatsoever, be separated from the will of the Father. God and God, both one God.”

How is it possible for Christians to believe that Jesus Christ and God are one when they are so totally different? What previously recognized form of logic would one employ to reach this conclusion? The problem that Christianity has in this regard is that it has never said that there are two completely different Gods and that the one in the Old Testament has little to do with the God in the New Testament. They believe it’s the same God, and that Jesus, the God of the New Testament, is the Son of the God of the Old Testament. But though he is the son, he is not separate. As Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:9). And, “the Father and I are one” ( John 10:30). “When you see me,” Jesus said, “you are seeing the one who sent me” (John 12:45). Indeed, Christianity believes that God is one but at the same time three persons, the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Ghost or Spirit. Tolstoy said it well: “One may say with one’s lips, ‘I believe that god is one, and also three,’ but no one can believe it because the words make no sense.”⁵

Here are some, but certainly not all, of the monstrous acts the God of the Old Testament committed at the very same time, by the way, that he was demanding high morality of the Israelites.^r Though one or more are well known to many people, in the context of the point I am making it is very advisable to mention many of them together. As I set them forth, I would ask the reader to keep in mind that in the eyes of Christianity and Judaism, this God is all-perfect and all-good.

The Book of Genesis tells us that in God’s eyes the humans populating the earth had become corrupt and depraved. Instead of saying, “I made them in my image; I have only myself to blame,” he told Noah he was going to solve the problem by destroying all living creatures. How is he going to do this? By flooding the earth. What about Noah? God told Noah he was the only “righteous” person on earth, so he intended to spare Noah and his family. Instructing Noah to make himself a boat (Noah’s Ark) to survive the flood and to put his wife and sons and their wives on it (God apparently wanted to try his luck again with a new civilization of people starting with Noah and his family), in addition to every kind of animal, male and female, he tells Noah, “I am about to cover the earth with a flood that will destroy every living thing. Everything on earth will die. . . . I will begin forty days and forty nights of rain. And I will wipe from the earth all the living things I created” (Genesis 6:5–8, 13–19, 7:1, 3–4).

Now it seems to me that if God wanted to murder all humans on earth, he could have just waved his hand, or whatever he did to create the universe, and all their hearts would have ceased to beat. But God, being a nice guy, decided to dust everyone off by one of the most horrific ways of dying that there is—drowning. And to make sure that no one kept enough air in his lungs to stay alive until the raindrops stopped falling, God, according to Genesis, made sure he got everyone by covering the earth with water “for 150 days” (Genesis 7:17–24). That’ll fix those no good louses I made in my image.

I don’t know how many folks were on the earth before the flood, but one gets the sense from bible verses that there were hundreds of thousands of people whom God drowned. Now obviously, to any sensible person, this is all a fairy tale, and I don’t believe one word of it. But that’s not the point. Millions of devout Christians believe that the entire bible, of which Genesis is the first and most important book, is the word of God, and they actually believe all of this. And it’s their irrational belief, not reality, that I’m talking about here. Why talk about such irrationality? If millions throughout the world believe it; if Time and Newsweek routinely have cover stories on the bible and God and Jesus; if former president George W. Bush, during his years in office the most powerful man on earth, believes it; if a May 2007 national Gallup Poll found that an astonishing 94 percent of Americans believe or tend to believe in God, 89 percent in heaven, 86 percent in angels, 78 percent in the devil, and 77 percent in hell, can one afford to ignore this madness?

Do Christians and Jews call God indescribably evil for what he did? No, as indicated, he’s all-good and all-perfect. (What does it say about humanity that the one thing people think is important enough to talk about is not that, aside from Noah and his family, God murdered the entire human race, but “I wonder if they’ll ever find Noah’s ark?”) So Christians and Jews call God all-good and all-perfect, but when they get around to printing their bibles that describe his conduct, they describe someone who would make history’s greatest villains look like very pale imitations by comparison. Would even Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, or Tomás de Torquemada do the things the God of Jewish and Christian scripture did?

Another example of the good Lord at work: When many of the Israelites started sleeping with the women of the Midianites (a nomadic Arabian tribe that opposed the Israelites), and the women got them to worship their gods, God, to end his “fierce anger,” ordered Moses, the leader of the Israelites, to execute 24,000 of his people, which Moses did (Numbers 25:1–9).

Later, he commanded Moses to slaughter all the Midianite men, women, and boys in the tribe, which Moses, being the devoted and obedient follower of God that he was, proceeded to do. God permitted Moses’ army to spare and use the 32,000 young female virgins among the Midianites for their sexual pleasure and to keep, as plunder, all the wealth of the men they had killed (Numbers 31: 2–3, 7, 9–10, 15–18, and 35). Again, nice guy, this God.

In the Book of Joshua, we’re told of God commanding Joshua (Moses’ successor, most known for his destruction of the city of Jericho) to kill, as he did, all the people in thirty-one kingdoms hostile to the Israelites in a type of ethnic cleansing that included the slaughter of all men, women, and children (Joshua 10:1–43, 11:1–23, and 12:1–24).

The wanton murder goes on and on. In 1 Samuel 15:2–3 and 7, the precious Lord told Saul, the king of Israel, “I have decided to settle accounts with the nation of Amalek for opposing Israel when they came from Egypt. Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation—men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, camels, and donkeys,” which Saul did.

In this indictment of unfathomable horror, we should note Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, observing that “the bible tells us” that all the murders in the Old Testament “were done by the express command of God. To believe, therefore, the bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend?”

The God of the Old Testament is so monstrous that, as French novelist Stendahl put it, “the only excuse that one can make for God is that he doesn’t exist.” Christianity holds that whatever the God of the Old Testament did was justified. But to paraphrase, I am obliged to say that if murder is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.

There are other examples of the benevolent Lord being, in fact, a monster the likes of which the world has never seen, but I’ll just mention one more: the famous ten plagues he visited on the people of Egypt as recorded in the Book of Exodus. It seems that the pharaoh was holding the Jewish people in bondage as slaves in Egypt, so God sent Moses to demand the release of the Hebrews. When the pharaoh refused, our loving God, the monarch of vindictiveness, instead of just punishing the pharaoh, decided to take it out on his poor people. He proceeded to hit the people of Egypt with one plague after another, including turning their water into blood, swarming them with locusts and hoards of frogs, and blanketing Egypt with darkness. The pharaoh didn’t yell uncle until God started getting more serious by having his angel of death kill every firstborn male Egyptian child, including pharaoh’s son, at which time pharaoh capitulated and freed the Israelites (Exodus 7–12).

All of these are instances of God ordering mass murder. But let’s briefly look at just a few (there are many more) examples of how God instructed his people to treat their fellow man on an individual basis. Unbelievably, he told Moses that “all who curse their father or mother must be put to death” (Leviticus 20:9). A woman who does not bleed on her wedding night must be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:13– 14, 20–21). “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10). “The penalty for homosexual acts is death to both parties” (Leviticus 20:13).

To pause for a moment, unless God is part homosexual, which I have yet to hear anyone suggest, since the bible says that “God created man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), how could it come to pass that there are homosexuals in the world? In any event, it’s nice to know that we’ve elevated ourselves considerably since the days of the horrific God of the Old Testament. In Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a Texas statute, one of several in America, making it a felony punishable by years in the state prison for adult homosexuals to have consensual sex with each other. In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia, a darling of this nation’s right wing, bitterly criticized the Court for having “largely signed on to the homosexual agenda . . . of eliminating the moral opprobrium of homosexual conduct.” The highly enlightened and progressive Scalia allowed that “I have nothing against homosexuals” but added that they had “no fundamental right” to engage in conduct that the state of Texas deemed “immoral and unacceptable.” Scalia’s bottom line: If you’re homosexual, fine, but keep your immoral homosexuality to yourself. So under God, we kill homosexuals. Under Scalia and the view of many who agree with him, we lock them up behind bars with robbers, rapists, and murderers. I don’t know about you, but I call that progress. (I hope you know I’m being sarcastic here.)

Continuing on, God said that those who “blaspheme the Lord’s name” should be “stoned to death” by “the entire community” (Leviticus 24:11, 13–14). My God. By the way, God felt that slavery was just fine (Exodus 21:2, Leviticus 25:44). Indeed, he said it was okay if a man sold his daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7). God even got downright soft over slaves, saying that, although it was alright to beat them, if they died from the beating, the owner of the slave “must be punished,” though no punishment was specified. However, “if the slave recovers after a couple of days, then the owner should not be punished, since the slave is the owner’s property” (Exodus 21:20–21).

These are just some of the examples, on the very pages of the word of God, of what most devout Christians and Jews believe their all-perfect, all-good God to be. Though, as we have seen, it would be difficult to conjure up a more monstrous and murderous figure, the official Catechism of the Catholic Church promulgated by the late Pope John Paul II says, “God is infinitely good and all his works are good” (number 385). Christian theologian Richard Swinburne, in his book The Coherence of Theism, writes, “In our sense of ‘moral,’ all theists hold that God is perfectly good, and this is a central claim of theism.” Theologian Stephen T. Davis says that “God is good. God never does what is morally wrong. All his intentions and actions are morally right.” But by whose standards, Satan’s? With the full knowledge of what the Old Testament, God’s own word, says, how are these positions humanly possible?

I know that many Christians do not take every word of the bible literally, accepting that some language is allegorical or metaphorical, which is compatible with the parables in which Jesus spoke so often. But truly devout Christians do not question the authenticity of any language in the bible. Clearly, Christianity’s worship of the extraordinarily wicked God of the Old Testament has to be considered demented. Yet this perverse worship is so ingrained on the soul of Christianity that Christians don’t even talk about it, much less throw their beliefs out with the daily trash.

LET ME INTERJECT THE CONCERN I HAVE that by my discussing this exquisite lunacy called Christianity, often in the ridiculing, satirical way I do, the only way the folly of Christianity deserves to be discussed, some may say I begin to look foolish myself. But in discussing an insanity that has existed for more than 2,000 years and shows little sign of abating, I ask the reader not to permit any of this lunacy to rub off on me. It’s the Christian’s crazy playpen, and I’m just paying it a visit. I hope you, the reader, will kindly remember this fact as you continue to read this biting polemic against Christianity.

I WAS SAYING EARLIER that Jesus, the God of the New Testament, is the antithesis of the monster known as his father. And he was in most ways, all of which were good. But in another sense, he wasn’t any cup of tea either. In fact, in this one sense he may have made the Old Testament God look quite lenient by comparison. If we’re to believe that the bible is the word of God, it is replete with Jesus’ saying, expressly or by implication, that those who do not accept him as God’s son and their savior will suffer eternal damnation (e.g., Mark 16:16; Matthew 10:14–15, 33; John 3:16, 18; 8:24, and 11:25–26. See also, Revelation 1:1, 21:8, 22:20–21), which is described in the bible as a place where unbelievers will be “tormented with fire and burning sulphur forever and ever and they will have no relief day or night” (Revelation 14:10), a place of “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46). Evangelicals tell us, over and over again, that “Jesus loves us with an infinite love.” But how “infinite” can this love be if for those who reject him as being their savior, he consigns them to an everlasting hell? As the famous nineteenth-century agnostic and freethinker Robert Ingersoll observed, “In the New Testament [of Jesus], death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end. In the Old Testament, when God had a man dead, he let him alone.”

Although Jesus, unlike his father, was a being of great virtue, particularly shown in his love for the poor (“If you want to be perfect,” he told a rich young man, “go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor. . . . Then come follow me” [Matthew 19:21]), it is hard to ascribe total moral excellence to someone who commands that if others do not accept him as the Son of God, they should burn forevermore in hell. The notions of moral perfection and that of condemning humans to everlasting punishment seem incompatible, indeed mutually exclusive. And because of it, though Jesus was otherwise (other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?) highly virtuous and a great moral teacher, in terms of moral purity he might not quite rank in history with, say, the likes of Socrates, Gandhi, Diogenes, Mother Teresa, Buddha, and some others.