Compassion is, after all, a characteristic of being human. When someone commits a horrible act, what do we say? “That was an inhuman thing to do!” We assume that the natural “human” attitude is nonviolent and peaceful. We are not corrupt, evil creatures. A few of us are off to the side of “saintliness” (to borrow a word), and a few of us are off to the other side, the side of mental disease, with sociopaths and criminals. On the bell curve of morality and compassion, however, most of us fall somewhere in the large middle area.
Many believers, including Christians who are ordered to “bring into captivity every thought unto the obedience of Christ,” have an underlying distrust of human reasoning. Yearning for absolutes, they perceive relativism—the recognition that actions must be judged in context—as something dangerous when it is the only way we can be truly moral.
Theists are afraid people will think for themselves; atheists are afraid they won’t.
When theists make a case for “natural rights,” they often point to Locke, Jefferson, Paine and other enlightened thinkers of the Age of Reason. It is enlightening to notice that they rarely quote from the bible. Nowhere in Scripture will you find an acknowledgment that each individual has an “inalienable right” to be treated with fairness and respect, or that “We, the People” are capable of governing ourselves. There is no democracy in the “word of God.” In the bible, humans are “worms” and “sinners” deserving damnation and “slaves” who should humbly submit to all kings, heavenly and earthly.
Championing the “consent of the governed” over the authority of a sovereign, the Declaration of Independence is unabashedly anti-biblical. We Americans are a proudly rebellious people who fought a Revolutionary War to kick the King of England out of our affairs. Then, we produced a godless Constitution, the first to separate church and state.
But many American Christians see it differently: “Had Jefferson been influenced by Darwin instead of Locke,” writes Clifford Goldstein, editor of the Seventh Day Adventist
Liberty Magazine,
“Joseph Stalin’s views on religious liberty would have been deemed progressive.” In a “Darwinian universe,” Goldstein contends, truth rests “on a foundation as whimsical as the electorate or whichever despot happens to be in control.”
Oh? How does truth fare in the “theistic universe” where the despot is named Jehovah? We saw in the previous chapter how horribly immoral the God of the bible and his son, Jesus, acted. The God of Scripture slaughtered entire groups of people that offended his vanity. “Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones,” he advised (Psalm 137:9), threatening those with the wrong religion that “their women with child shall be ripped up.” (Hosea 13:16) He also sent bears to attack 42 children who teased a prophet (II Kings 2:23-24), punished innocent offspring to the fourth generation (Exodus 20:5), discriminated against the handicapped (Leviticus 21:18-23) and promised that fathers and sons would eat each other (Ezekiel 5:10), among other actions that we would find repugnant in a human being. In this theistic universe, morality is severed from reality and reduced to flattering the Sovereign.
If on a Saturday, for example, you notice a man gathering wood to warm his family, what should you do as a Christian commanded to “remember the Sabbath?” According to Numbers 15:32-36, you should stone him to death! Is this not whimsical?
Jesus incorporated slavery into his parables as if it were the most natural order, only cautioning masters to beat some slaves less severely than others (Luke 12:46-47). The Heaven’s Gate cult, like Origen, accepted Jesus’ advice: “There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” (Matthew 19:12) Is this good advice?
There are some good teachings in the bible, of course, but is a garden overrun with weeds still beautiful? Jefferson thought that most of Jesus’ words were insulting, although he spotted a few good teachings that were as “easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” (To John Adams, October 1813)
Goldstein has it backwards. Had Jefferson been influenced by Jehovah instead of Locke, Adolph Hitler’s views on religious liberty would have been deemed progressive! Hitler allowed Darwinism to be twisted for a political purpose, framing evolution in a “social” way not intended by Darwin himself. But it wasn’t Darwinism that gave the theistic Hitler his basis for morality: “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.” (
Mein Kampf
) Hitler credited
Jesus
as his inspiration. In a 1926 Nazi Christmas celebration, he boasted, “Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews… The work that Christ started but could not finish, I—Adolf Hitler—will conclude.” The creationist Hitler shared a thirst for blood with the bombastic biblical God in whose “image” he thought he was created.
There is no practical value in claiming that “natural rights” are rooted outside of nature. People who find “moral absolutes” in the revelation of a deity have never agreed what those absolutes are. Take any of society’s moral issues of the day—capital punishment, abortion, stem-cell research, physician-assisted suicide, women’s rights, divorce, gay rights, corporal punishment, animal rights, slavery, pacifism, environmental protection, birth control, overpopulation, state/church separation—and you will notice that praying, bible-believing Christians have come down on opposite sides.
If the bible gives us absolute moral guidance, then where is it? Why don’t sincere believers agree on these important questions? It’s clear that the bible is an inadequate behavioral guide, and that the tyrannical god of Scriptural mythology leads us to a lack of values.
When Jefferson wrote about the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence, he was not talking about the Christian god. As a Deist, he viewed the “Creator” as a much less personal being than the biblical deity. The god of Deism was more like “nature” than “Jehovah.”
When Jefferson claimed that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” he could not have meant “endowed” in the sense of a sovereign granting a privilege that might be denied. If something can be endowed, then it can be un-endowed. If a right is inalienable, it can’t be withheld or withdrawn, not even in principle. An “inalienable right,” if rights are endowed, is an oxymoron.
Human rights, if they are inalienable, could not have been granted—not by a government, society or god. A “natural right” is a claim to a freedom, privilege or power that you possess inherently, by nature (though you still might have to convince others to recognize and grant that right). Natural rights, if they exist, are indeed inalienable—but then they could not have been “endowed.” We simply own them.
Jefferson meant, figuratively, that since we are “endowed by nature” with common human needs, we are justified in expecting society to honor our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Christians think we should treat others nicely because we were all created in the “image of God.” This gives us value, they suppose.
But they don’t explain why. Why does the image of a god provide greater value than some other image? Why does it give any value at all? What does “image of God” mean?
“God is a Spirit,” Jesus supposedly said, but what is that? The word “spirit” has never been defined, except in terms that tell us what it is not: immaterial, intangible, noncorporeal, supernatural. No one has ever described what a spirit
is.
“To talk of immaterial existences,” Jefferson wrote, “is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.” (To John Adams, August 1820.) This does not mean Jefferson was an atheist. He conceived of God as a material being, or as nature itself, which is consistent with Deism.
Since “god” has never been defined, much less proved, its “image” can’t be used as a basis for anything. “Nature,” on the other hand, means something. Darwinism shows us that all living organisms are the result of a natural evolutionary process. We have been fashioned by the laws of nature.
This revelation can only fail to impress you if you have been taught that there is something wrong with nature, something shameful about being a mere animal in a debased realm beneath the supernatural, whatever that is. Many theists seem eager to play this game of nature bashing. The “blind chance” of evolution, they say, is a brute force incapable of producing something as “lofty” as us humans.
But evolution is not blind chance. It is design that incorporates randomness—not intelligent design, but design by the laws of nature, by the limited number of ways atoms interact mathematically and molecules combine geometrically. It is design by extinction, by the way a changing environment automatically disallows organisms that happen not to be adapted, leaving the “fittest” behind, if any. The randomness of genetic variation is a strength of evolution, providing a greater chance that something will survive.
This is amazing. Instead of speculating about an unknown “creator,” we can actually look at our origins. Evolution shows how complexity arises from simplicity. Creationism can’t do that. Creationism tries to explain complexity with more complexity, which only replaces one mystery with another mystery. If functional complexity requires a designer, then how do you account for the functional complexity of the mind of the designer?
Darwin’s enlightening concept is empirical, testable, provable and relevant to creatures that inhabit a physical planet. It shows us who we really are. We are not above nature. We are not just a part of nature. We
are
nature. We are natural creatures in a natural environment. Through the startlingly sloppy, painfully unpredictable, part-random, part-determined process of natural selection, life has become what it is: imperfect yet doggedly hanging on.
And that’s what makes life valuable: it didn’t have to be. It is dear. It is fleeting. It is vibrant and vulnerable. It is heart breaking. It can be lost.
It will be lost.
But we exist now. We are caring, intelligent animals and can treasure our brief lives. Why is eternal better than temporal, or supernatural “higher” than natural? Doesn’t rarity increase value? God is an idea, not a natural creature. Why should his “image” be more valuable than our own “nature?” What right does an immaterial existence—a ghost in the sky—have to tell us natural creatures what is valuable?
If we were created in his unknowable image, then we have no idea who we are. But being fashioned in the “image of nature,” we do know who we are and we can find out more. Right in our backyard, here on earth, we can investigate, study and continue to improve conditions on this planet. It wasn’t faith that eradicated smallpox. Contemplating the “image of god” will not cure cancer or AIDS.
Science has given us much. What has theology ever provided?
Theology has given us hell.
The threat of damnation is designed to be an incentive to right action, but this is a phony morality. Humanists think we should do good for goodness’ sake, not for the selfish prospect of reaping individual rewards or avoiding punishment. Any ideology that makes its point by threatening violence is morally bankrupt. (Hitler’s horrible ovens, at least, were relatively quick. The torment Jesus promised is a “fire that shall never be quenched.”) Anyone who believes in hell is at heart not moral at all.
If the only way you can be forced to be kind to others is by the threat of hell, that shows how little you think of yourself. If the only way you can be motivated to be kind to others is by the promise of heaven, that shows how little you think of others.
Most atheists will say, “Be good, for goodness’ sake!”
Chapter Thirteen
Bible Contradictions
“It ain’t those parts of the bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
—Mark Twain
Paul said that “God is not the author of confusion” (I Corinthians 14:33), yet never has a book produced more confusion than the bible. There are hundreds of denominations and sects, all using the “inspired Scriptures” to prove their conflicting doctrines. Why is this? Why do translations differ? Why do educated theologians disagree over Greek and Hebrew meanings? Why such muddle? “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound,” Paul wrote in I Corinthians 14:8, “who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air.” Exactly! Paul should have practiced what he preached. For almost two millennia, the bible has been producing a most “uncertain sound.”