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The New Testament is all about love. Sure, there was some practices promoted in the old testament that could be considered a bit brutish by today’s standards, but Jebus fixed all that, not by recanting any of those barbarous edicts, but by saying ‘love your neighbor’. So you see, all you christian naysayers, the new testament represents a much nicer and loving image of god. Oh, yeah, one more thing, he also invented hell.
I was quite shocked to learn that the old testament doesn’t speak once about a lake of fire or eternal suffering anywhere within its dreary pages. Brimstone and torture that lasts forever was introduced by the new testament. Now up until I learned that, I was of the mind that the new testament was just as horrible as the old, but with this new tidbit of knowledge I find that the new testament is far worse than the old in terms of brutality and moral perversion. Allow me to illustrate.
For this thought experiment, we need to be able to quantify the amount of suffering, or evil, that a person could do in his or her lifetime. Just for the sake of humourous triviality, I will call the units of this quantification “sin points”.
Let’s say we have an absolutely wonderful person, a real saint. Nice to everyone, very giving goes the extra mile to make the world a better place. Now, people being the fallible entities that they are, it wouldn’t be realistic to say that this person would acquire zero sin points throughout his life, so let’s say someone like that would only get one. The average person, let’s say, would get something like 1000 sin points in their life (that first guy was really REALLY nice) and your average rapist murderer type person would get 1 trillion.
Now, since we imagined one of the best people that could exist (only one sin point, for goodness sake!) lets also imagine the worst. This individual not only hates people enough to do horrific things to them, but through some unlucky circumstance, he also acquires the longevity and resources to take out this hate on more people over a longer period than anyone ever has in history. Imagine if, say, a Hitler type decided that anyone who did not have green eyes deserved much worse than death. So, this super Hitler successfully creates a worldwide totalitarian regime wherein he lives a long life of torturing billions of people death in the most excruciating ways possible. Even after his death, it takes the globe about 3 generations to recover from super Hitler’s reign of terror. Now this is one bad hombre. How many sin points does he get?
Well, a murderer gets 1 trillion. If the murderer uses torture, let’s say, it’s upped to 1 trillion squared. Multiply that by the number of people Super Hitler tortured to death (let’s say 10 billion people, just to say he was extra mean) and square that for all the suffering involved in the global recovery (a bit excessive, but we are making this guy the worst possible person) and just for good measure, lets square it again. Grand total that’s 1X10 to the power of 128 sin points (that’s 1 with 128 zeros after it, in case it’s been a while since your last math class).
I have found, through my travels, that many people cannot understand Christians, Muslims, Jews, or any religious people at all. I confess, initially, I could not comprehend how anyone could belong to any faith either. After much study, I think I’ve come up with some answers and I put them all in this diagram. I hope it helps.
I have found, through my travels, that many people just cannot understand Christians, Muslims, Jews, or any religious people at all. I confess, initially, I could not comprehend how anyone could belong to any faith either. After much study, however, I think I’ve come up with some answers and I put them all in this diagram. I hope it helps.
For those who want to print this off, lets give this a try. I’ve put up the poster at picturepush.com and it can be found here at
http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/3004133/img/My-Work/TheBelieverPrintPeg.jpg
Ladies and Gentlemen! Here for your enlightenment, a champion of truth and master of wit. I present to you Mr Pat Condell!
I had a tough time picking which of his movies to link, so I must encourage you to watch as many of them as you can. It is definitely worth your while. Peace.
I am continually astounded by Christian claims to moral supremacy, that they somehow have access to a pinnacle of ethics that non-believers just don’t share.
When I point out that non-believers do a great deal of good in the world, I find myself mostly ignored by theists. Apparently atheist acts of love and charity don’t count. So I tried another angle. If the good-deed doing Christians were to suddenly give up their faith, would they cease their acts of good will? Not a chance. If they actually cared about their fellow humans (which, in most cases, I believe they do) then the belief in some external sky faerie would have no bearing on their desire to help out their brothers and sisters. Again, my point is most frequently met with avoidance. And so, as I cannot get anywhere by promoting the morality of the faithless, I will now try lighting the candle of enlightenment from the other end. In this post I intend to debunk the validity of Christianity’s cornerstone of ‘ethics’: the ten commandments.
When defending the morality of their faith, Christians claim that all a society needs is wholesome and is found in the commandments. Further (as discussed above) the Bible is the only place to find these teachings. The most often cited are commandments five through nine, so I will start with those. Honour your parents, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, and don’t lie. Christians will go on and on about how good these rules are and to how bad things get when they are not obeyed. Surely, they must be divinely ordained and we ought to worship the supernatural being that delivered these rules to us. You catch that? Attribute an obvious truth to your deity and suddenly its THE god. That just doesn’t work.
Let me explain.
Don’t murder and don’t steal are not revelations in morality. Indeed, these have been laws for every human society for as long as there have been laws (and in case you’re not sure, the existence of laws does in fact predate Christianity). Further, these same laws have been observed in societies within the animal kingdom. Same with honouring parents. It’s an evolutionary strength found in a multitude of species. The young simply have a better chance at survival if they are close to their parents. What about that adultery one? Animals don’t get married, so that commandment is homo-sapien specific. Right? Oh wait. Marriage is just an extension of the ‘mate for life’ behaviour which IS displayed by a number of animal species (most at higher rates than us) including pigeons and termites. That’s right. Commandment number seven has been mastered by termites. Not really your typical image of absolute moral authority, is it? Not lying is a similar case. No society has every promoted duplicity between its members. These rules just aren’t that difficult for people to come up with on their own, and they certainly do not require some god to teach them.
So far the commandments are irrelevant to societal morality, as any society is perfectly capable of deriving these rules themselves. I will call this irrelevance “best case scenario”. To see how the commandments can fall short of this, we must look to the ones not yet mentioned. The first three are basically the same while the fourth is an extension of those three.
One of the many tenets of Christianity that I strongly object to is the notion of Original Sin. Adam and Eve transgressed against the wishes of God, thus we (their descendants) are in need of saving, hence our reliance on Jesus and his crucifixion. It depends on the premise that responsibility and blame for evil acts are passed down from parent to child. For this post I will not focus on why such an idea is psychologically harmful (especially to children), although that would be a valid avenue of criticism. Instead, I think it would be more effective to just show why it is wrong.
Imagine that a man rapes and impregnates a woman. The rapist then escapes the authorities while the woman is left with child. Over the nine month gestation, the police hunt the rapist to no avail. As the mother gives birth to a son, the police get a lead on the infant’s biological father. Three weeks later the police raid the rapist’s hideout only to find that he had committed suicide via drug overdose mere hours before they arrived. At the scene they find a note where the rapist describes his life of murder, crime, and hedonism. Further, he wrote that after having committed all these atrocities, there were no more thrills left for him. And so he decided he best end his life pleasantly, lest someone else do it for him in a much less favorable manner.
What we have here is someone who has done many evil things, done nothing to make up for his misdeeds, and has escaped all punishment. He leaves behind two victims who are denied all forms of restitution, justice, and closure. This is, of course, one of the worst kinds of situations and I don’t pretend to know a good way to deal with it. But one way I know to be wrong would be to apply the principle of original sin.
If responsibility and blame are indeed passed from parent to child, then we need only go to the infant son to extract justice. If the sins of the father are the sins of the son, then the three week old baby is accountable for his mother’s rape. If original sin held true, the righteous thing to do would be to punish the newborn just as we would punish the rapist had he been caught.
If you agree with me that the previous paragraph’s conclusions are not only absurd, but monstrously unjust and immoral, then the same must be said of the Christian notion of original sin. No fair and just adjudicator would ever hold someone responsible for something that they did not do, let alone for something that happened before they came into existence. But that is what Christianity says that their god does. (a great reason to start indoctrinating your children early – ed. )
Here is another quick thought experiment. Think of the worst thing you have ever done in your life. Then categorize that misdeed with a word or short phrase like ‘neglect’ or ‘assault’, or ‘theft’, or ‘betrayal’. Now, would a just punishment for your category of transgression involve crucifixion? Do you think it would require someone to have their hands and feet nailed to planks of wood and then slowly, agonizingly asphyxiate to make up for any of the offences I just mentioned? Absolutely not. The fact is that no one human has ever done anything that deserved anything close to that kind of torture. Even if you believe that the absolute worst of history’s monsters deserve brutal punishment, those rare instances compose a negligible percentage of the population. The point being that humans, as a whole, are not evil beings and we certainly don’t deserve crucifixion or any other torturous punishment by default. But Christianity says that we are and that we do.
Of course, it has to. If we were not responsible for evil deeds done before our existence and we did not deserve a cruel fate, then we would have no need of a savior, no need for a messiah, and no need of Jesus or Christianity. If we are on the whole morally higher than rapists and child molestors (empirical evidence says we are), and if we are answerable only to our own deeds (reason and justice say we are) then the idea of original sin is aboration of truth, a mockery of rationality, and an assault on morality.
Today started poorly.
After a woefully insufficient amount of sleep, I dragged my body out of bed, ate something for breakfast (I think it was yogurt) and drove off to face the day. Half an hour later, through the cold and bitter morning air, I trudged groggily across the six blocks from my parking space to school. Then, something blog-worthy happened.
Halfway to my destination I was greeted by two ladies, one offering me a publication. “Would you like to read a bit about discrimination and racism? It’s an awareness piece, something you can read in your free time.” Now, even in my barely conscious state, a red flag went off inside my head. This was suspiciously close to the M.O. of religion panderers. My sluggish mind did its best to make a quick assessment. The messengers? Not in white tops with name-tags, no backpacks, no religious symbols. The media? Booklet covered with the faces of people from varying racial backgrounds and the headline “Prejudice and Discrimination: Why? How Can You Cope?” Again, no religious symbols in sight.
With my suspicions abated and my interest in social justice piqued, I accepted the magazine, muttered a clumsy farewell, and continued my gloomy trek towards campus. It was not until this evening that I found out that I had been duped. I opened up the booklet to find that it was indeed religious propaganda, though it did not fully reveal itself as such until the fourth page. As I read those first four pages and the reality of the situation bore down on me, my initial disappointment was surprisingly short lived. Indeed, it was quickly replaced with mirth as I considered the implications of this ordeal.
Let’s break it down. We had two believers handing out pamphlets designed to keep other believers believing and to help non-believers to start believing. That’s an old story that’s been done billions of times over. What was novel, and the cause of my amusement, was the guile of it all. It used to be that ‘Bringers of The Word’ adorned attention grabbing robes, stood atop platforms, and called out their proclamation with fever. These messengers, on the other hand, wore non-descript, commonplace clothing, did not mention God or any religious affiliation, and quickly walked away once their media was distributed. The booklet itself was similarly shrouded. The cover lent itself to the assumption that the publication’s sole concern was the issue of prejudice. As I mentioned earlier, it took three pages of warming up before the religious slant fully made itself known.
This level of duplicity is reserved for actions we consider amoral, shameful, or just plain wrong. It was like a child who doesn’t lie, but artfully avoids telling the whole truth, then runs away while the adults are left to discover the facts of the matter. It brought me joy to see believers (not to mention their publications) displaying this kind of abashed behaviour. It means that somewhere, deep within their subconscious, the realization of wrongdoing is starting to take hold. Sure, they are very far from consciously being aware of and admitting their erroneous ways of delusion and misanthropy, but the point is that they have at least started down that path.
Sooner or later, they will ask themselves “If what I’m doing is good, then why must I be deceptive about it and why does it make me feel bad?” And suddenly they will understand. They will know that what they are doing can’t be good. They will see that “It says so in the Bible ->Why believe the Bible?->It’s the word of god->How do you know?->It says so in the Bible” is circular and cannot support any belief system. They will recognize that their previous distinctions of ‘saved vs damned’, ‘righteous vs blasphemous’, ‘believers vs heathens’, ‘saints vs infidels’, and ‘chosen vs forsaken’ were all false. They will drop their delusions and the world will enter an era of rationality and prosperity. And when that happens, they will truly be ready and mentally equipped to fight social injustices like discrimination.
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