“We don’t realize how fundamentally all of our worldviews are shaped by the Enlightenment. Throughout the vast majority of human history, it was unthinkable to discount the spiritual, boil reality down to our material experience, or approach history apart from the narrative of human storytelling.”

If you’ve ever said something vaguely to directly pro-Enlightenment, I’m sure you’ve received a response like this. It’s a very popular type of balance. I could sum it up in less words by saying: “Let’s take all the ways people have viewed the world and average them out.” And it’s very unpopular to criticize what appears to be such a thoughtful line of reasoning.

I understand the desire to keep the baby safe as the bath water is poured away. Nothing we have today – ideologically or materially – would have been possible at the arrival of homo sapiens on the scene; we have gradually accumulated ideas and knowledge about the world, sometimes moving backward but generally moving forward. We owe much to those who came before us.

However, if a previous view of the world was incorrect, it is more virtuous to discard it than to cling to it out of obligation or reverence. Imagine if we still honored flat earth theory in the way that we honor various other pre-Enlightenment ideologies. It would be backwards and harmful – and ridiculous.

I will be among the first to admit that there are many things wrong with our world today, and some things about the past were indeed better (although, I would submit, less than we typically, nostalgically imagine). It can be beneficial to look back to a time when, for example, people seemed to invest more time in relationships.

Yet I cannot make a case for something simply because people have thought that way before. Every case needs to be made in its own right. If the Enlightenment led us to a better understanding of the world, let us not apologize for leaving the incorrect, childish things behind us.

In the case above, my friend was making an anti-war argument; essentially: “killing people is at odds with Christian values.” If you substitute “moral values” for “Christian values,” I view this as a sound (though not necessarily valid, depending on the premises) argument. When I challenged him with the fact that both historic Christianity and the Bible itself are often pro-genocide (see my previous post for Biblical references), he said that he was just talking about the teachings of Jesus.

I’m pretty sure this same person would say that Jesus is God, and that God is unchanging (Malachi 3:6). Sometimes we like what God says. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes that distinction falls along the line between the “Old” and “New” testaments. Regardless, I cannot understand why it is so easy for Christians to ignore massive parts of their book while holding other parts in such high esteem that they would say it is central to their life and identity.

My guess is this: if you do not cherry-pick certain parts of the Bible – focusing only on the characteristics of God that you already believe to be good and moral, and then applying them to the whole – then your faith will collapse among the roar of cognitive dissonance.

Another example: the “historical Adam.” I believe that Evangelical Christians oppose the fact of evolution (and the established theory of natural selection, which explains it) not so much because it degrades “the dignity of man” as because it chips away at a necessary myth. This is orthodox theology: that there must be an original sinner (Adam) who was created perfect in a perfect world but who rejected God on behalf of all who were to come after him. We now know, however, that there was never a time when just a single human couple existed. We know that the results of “the fall of man” (which Christianity defines as death, pain, destruction, lack of perfection, etc.) were always present, in some sense, on earth.

Even modern, progressive Christians who understand our evolutionary past will talk about a historical Adam in church; they just won’t talk about him in the same conversation with evolution. I personally know many, many Christians like this. It’s a Sunday-morning-vs-the-rest-of-the-week distinction. And why? Because the apostle Paul’s Christology utterly collapses without a historical Adam. If there’s no fall, there’s no explanation for sin, death, or lack of perfection; there’s no need for salvation; and there’s no justification for God’s punishment. It all becomes a primitive “just-so” story to explain the complex world that we now understand just a little better – though still imperfectly.

So they pay lip-service to Adam. They focus on the New Testament God to the exclusion of that same, immutable God’s commands in the Old Testament. They won’t excise the concept of hell from their theology, but they live happily and ambivalently with unbelieving friends. And the cherry-picking doesn’t just consist of skipping over uncomfortable bits: sometimes new, foreign bits are added in. Can anyone make a biblical case for the spiritual fervor with which some Christians oppose consuming alcohol?

Reality: the Bible was written by a lot of different people with a lot of different views and understandings of God (or gods, in some cases). In a sense, cherry-picking is necessary to synthesize all this into a coherent life philosophy. But if your justification for which parts you exclude (or view as “figurative”) is based solely on what you and your culture already like or believe, I beg you to recognize that you don’t need the Bible. You don’t need religion. You can think about life’s difficult moral questions – along with others in your community – and come to real answers: answers that don’t require miscellaneous redaction to be coherent.

But the discussion made me think: based on what conservative Christians already believe about God and the Bible, how can they express outrage at this? Even if you view early-term abortions as the equivalent of murder (which is at least a coherent position we could dialog about), aren’t there much more pressing matters to be outraged over in your own belief system?

Granted, nobody is completely consistent in this way. It’s difficult to set our moral priorities in a complex world where smaller issues sometimes seem more imminent and larger ones fade into background noise. But most conservative Christians would claim that the Bible and its complete message are absolutely central to their lives; its content should be difficult to ignore. If your house is burning down, are you going to set aside time to be outraged that your husband didn’t load the dishwasher properly, or are you going to run out as fast as you can?

And yet that’s exactly what it looks like to me when Bible-believing Christians complain about abortion–even granting their initial claim about the “murder” of unborn children. The God of the Bible is a monster who has absolutely no respect for human life. How can you adore this god and simultaneously be outraged about abortion? Almost off the top of my head:

• Genesis 6:7: “So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.’” Pretty straightforward. This is God wiping everybody out. Don’t forget all the unborn children who were killed in this event.
• Genesis 19:24-25: “The LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land.” Again, this is just God annihilating a group of cities. Don’t forget all the unborn children who were killed in this event.
• Exodus 12:29-30: “At midnight the LORD struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.” This is God killing the firstborn of every Egyptian family. Can anyone even try to justify this?
• Numbers 31:15,17-18: “Have you allowed all the women to live? …Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” The context of this passage is that God commanded Israel to completely destroy the Midianites, but the soldiers left the woman and children alive. Hopefully I don’t need to spell out the irony that average people are more moral than God.
• 1 Samuel 15:2-3: “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” Nothing new or unusual by God’s standards. Just wipe everyone out, women and children, you know the drill.
• Deuteronomy 20:16-17: “However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you.” This is in the context of Israel’s conquest of Caanan, a bloody extermination of several different cultures and the brainchild of Jesus (who is the same as God, right?). Don’t forget all the unborn children who were killed in this event.

Really, there are too many examples to quote here of God directly commanding the Caananite genocide (killing every living thing, every mother, every child). Read the book of Joshua; for example: 10:40, 11:10-12, 11:14-15.

Also, when it comes to crimes against humanity, it doesn’t matter to me who does it or for what reason. Genocide is genocide–I don’t care if it was committed by Ghandi or Gaddafi or God. And it doesn’t matter to me that God is supposedly really powerful, or a supreme being. This line of reasoning is: might makes right.

Moving on:

• Numbers 5:20-22: “‘But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband’—here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—’may the LORD cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.’” In context, this passage is describing an ancient practice (and also one of God’s direct laws) called “trial by ordeal” where a woman’s guilt was determined by surviving some sort of poison or test. In this case, God is directly aborting children conceived outside of a biblical-style marriage. There are serious gender-related issues to discuss here as well, but we’re just sticking to the abortion issue for now.
• 2 Kings 2:23-24: “From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.” In this case, God calls out bears to kill 42 kids. There is no conceivable justification for this bloody display of power.
• Hosea 13:16: “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” This is infanticide. And God is in favor of it, because these people don’t love him.

These gruesome stories, and others, show what God is capable of–if the biblical accounts are to be believed. But to me, the most appalling doctrine is the concept of hell–the idea that anyone could do anything so bad during a finite lifetime that they would be worthy of eternal punishment–the idea that we are all (by proxy, apparently, via Adam) so awful and sinful that without the undeserved grace of Jesus, we would be guilty of a crime that could only be handled fairly with permanent damnation.

To me, this is the nail in the coffin of God’s morality and respect for human life. It is this doctrine that comes to my mind when I hear a conservative Christian talk about the horrors of abortion.

Hey, your house is on fire. Stop yelling about the dishwasher.

No matter how many times the courts spell out American government’s mandated neutrality toward religion, those in favor of public, state-sponsored prayer will spin this issue as a suppression of religious liberty. And I just don’t get that.

So I’ve developed a simple rubric for religious people that brings startling clarity to the issue. First, think of the prayer you’re currently supporting (in this case, we’ll use the public school’s prayer before football games). Second, think of the religion you hate the most (in this case, let’s use Satanism). Now, think about that prayer again and substitute every mention of “Jesus” with “Satan.”

Try to imagine the public outcry that would occur if a public school led a prayer to Satan before a football game. Seriously: think about it. There would be outrage.

This is why it’s essential that the government remain neutral on religious matters. People of every religion can pray to whatever god, demigod, demon, or fairy they want to before, during, or after football games. That’s what religious freedom is about. But it’s also, necessarily, about the government keeping the fuck away from those prayers.

It baffles me to hear the claim that “They took prayer out of schools.” No, “they” didn’t. What the Supreme Court put an end to in 1962 was government-endorsed prayer and support of religion. Individuals can and do still pray in schools, before tests, and in school clubs. Private schools dedicated to Christianity or Islam or Wiccanism can and do offer up various prayers on a daily basis. But what doesn’t, or shouldn’t, happen is public (government) schools, which are open to every person of every religion, endorsing a certain religion’s prayer in their official capacity.

It’s that simple. Can we stop now?

I do a lot of listening during these meetings. The anecdotes are interesting, not only for their content but for their implications. I’ll give two examples in the order they were related to me, and I’ll try to represent them as accurately as possible.

The first story was about an older woman who was in a coma at a Christian medical center. When the missionary couple arrived, the nursing staff were all gathered around praying for her. The woman said she was “of little faith,” but her husband said a prayer over the woman and left. About a month later, they got a call from the center saying that just a week after they had prayed, the woman came out of the coma, finally accepted the Lord as her savior, sang a song with the nurses, and then passed away.

But this was the conclusion of the story: she said, “This taught me so much about the love of Jesus. That woman didn’t do anything for his kingdom. She was only awake for a couple hours. But he loved her so much that he woke her up and led her to accept him before she died so that she could go on and spend eternity with him.”

This is a great example of a story that, given a certain religious context, sounds nice until you think about agency. When you make the assumption, even for one anecdote, that Jesus is both willing and capable of altering life circumstances to accomplish some goal (such as bringing someone out of a coma for their “salvation”) it makes him a monster for every other case where there were circumstances that weren’t altered and people died as unbelievers — to spend eternity without him. Even if I shared the religious perspective of the people who told this story, I would have been depressed by its message instead of encouraged.

The second story was told by the husband regarding an incident that occurred when he was washing the feet of church planters in India. One of the men in the circle stopped him and asked to wash his feet instead. As he got up to change places, a massive tree branch fell down and crushed the seat where he had been sitting moments earlier. This was interpreted as a divine blessing, but it creates a complex problem in the realm of cause and effect.

I can sum this up by asking a simple question, which I did not actually ask the man who told the story: if Jesus could influence you to stand up at that time, could he also influence the tree branch not to fall, simultaneously leaving a smaller footprint on human free will? And if he can make you stand up, couldn’t he also have saved the lives of other Christians who have been hit by tree branches and died? Is he not then responsible for those other deaths?

I believe that both of these stories happened, more or less as presented, but I am shocked at how readily the spiritual “explanation” jumped to the minds of the storytellers, free of further critical analysis. If you’re going to tell a story about something as weighty and significant as supernatural intervention in a human life, you at least have the responsibility to examine your logic and theology along with your facts.

Just one of the tracts is written for atheists; it is entitled “Who has the most to lose?” and predictably puts forth a summarized version of Pascal’s Wager–a closed dichotomy between evangelical Christianity and atheism:

When confronted with the claims of Christ, many people want to know what happens if Christians are wrong and there is no God. Conversely, the major concern of Christians is what happens to unbelievers if THEY are wrong. Who has the most to lose?
…
Suppose unbelievers are wrong….Most of all, dwelling in hell for all of eternity is the most horrible consequence imaginable.

I’m sure you can imagine where it goes from there. But wait, what about all those other religions? What if Christians are wrong and Muslims are right? What if neo-paganism is the best way to go and Mormonism is wrong? Why did the author of these tracts seem so ready to talk about other religions before he narrowed in on atheists and had to establish a false dichotomy that ignored other options beside Christianity?

This is the disingenuous reasoning behind every variant of Pascal’s Wager. If the best thing you can put forward in a tract for atheists is “better play it safe,” then the alternative option to atheism should simply be the religion that promises the worst hell. That would probably be Islam. But heck, I could make up a worse hell right now. On what grounds would that not become the new exclusive option in the dichotomy?

On no grounds whatsoever, of course. And those are the same grounds upon which Christianity is the exclusive option. There are other significant issues with Pascal’s Wager, but this one stands out to me the most. Can any serious person take the Wager seriously?

For example, I often hear something along these lines: “You are never going to be able to get the kind of scientific proof for God that you’re demanding.” The term “scientific” in these conversations subtly invokes the “non-overlapping magisteria” concept, implying that the atheist is locked into a laboratorial philosophic naturalism that prevents him/her from considering the possibility of something that by definition cannot be known.

Yet how can anyone–theist or atheist–claim that a god cannot be known or claim that there will never be a rational reason for believing that a god exists? If we agree on what “existence” means (and I really think we can), it is absurd to claim that a god–by definition–cannot be known. To do so would require the exact kind of knowledge about this god and its nature that is being called “impossible.” If a god exists, I maintain hope that we could actually find out. So far, there’s just no good reason to think that one exists.

And this leads to the second misunderstanding inherent in the question above: that rational inquiry (or “science”) is necessarily unable to discover some things about the universe. Science isn’t just something you do in the laboratory in a vain attempt to put god under the microscope. Science is an approach to life and reality that cares about distinguishing between true claims and false ones. When you do something as simple as looking for a candy bar that a friend told you was on your desk, you are using the scientific method to determine whether or not the statement is accurate.

My standards of evidence are simple: anything that exists has to make its case for existing. This does not preclude the existence of God, wind, computers, or fairies. I am not committed to philosophical naturalism, and I don’t know many atheists who are. And, as I said above, it is absurd (and internally contradictory) to say that a god can never be known by rational inquiry. But what cannot be rationally accepted as evidence of a god (or anything) are isolated appeals to ignorance, arguments from personal incredulity, or incoherent emotional testimonials that continually move the target back when questioned, rendering the claims unfalsifiable. If those are the standards of evidence you require to accept a claim as true, you should be a member of every religion, past and present.

Proper standards of evidence are found in a coherent epistemology. There will be multiple ways to explain anything, no matter how absurd the claim. True claims will stand up to rational inquiry, and the most reasonable of the varied explanations is the one that must be awarded the label of truth. Is there any better way of distinguishing between fact and fantasy?

I had the privilege of cohosting an interview with Roose tonight on the Infidel Guy podcast (under the name Mikhailovich). If you don’t have time for the book, his insights are certainly worth a listen. Go to www.infidelguy.com and select the most recent podcast (#490) from the dropdown list on the media player in the middle.

Update: If you don’t want to stream, you can download an MP3 of the podcast directly here.

Abortion is not arbitrarily controversial; it’s one of those issues that lends itself to controversy by attempting to draw a line in the middle of a nine-month gray zone. Very few outside the Catholic church would claim that the potential for human life equals human life, that birth control is murder, that a frozen embryo is a child, or that one cell (the likes of which you could destroy right now by scratching your head) equals a person. Likewise, very few would claim that a newborn baby is not a human being. Drawing the line is hard (“viability” might be the most common way), but most serious ethical decisions are hard; we have to do the best we can.

I present this brief explanation of the controversy to indicate that no one I’ve heard interviewed in the past week, on either side of the issue, has claimed that killing a child is acceptable. The anti-abortion folks like to claim that the pro-choice folks thinking killing babies is okay, and this is where the communication breaks down; their definitions of what constitutes a baby are different (though they’d probably both agree it’s not a zygote). Nobody I’ve heard on TV thinks killing babies is acceptable.

In that sense, I largely view the pro-choice response to Tiller’s murder as consistent. What would strike me as laughably inconsistent if it weren’t so tragic is the anti-abortion response. Remember, these are people who openly and sincerely equate abortion with homicide (have you seen the t-shirts?). Here’s a quote from the CNN article:

Operation Rescue, which has led numerous demonstrations at Tiller’s clinic, called the shooting as a “cowardly act.” And the National Right to Life Committee, the largest U.S. anti-abortion group, said it “unequivocally condemns any such acts of violence regardless of motivation.”

Can you feel the irony here? I mean, the whole we-oppose-murder-in-all-its-forms line grants their position some superficial credibility, but let’s be serious. If you truly believe that conducting abortions is the same as running around and killing little children playing in the streets, surely this response is too passive!

National Right to Life reports 49,551,703 abortions in the United States since 1973, and I’m using their language when I say that this many murders would be far worse than the genocide inflicted on the world by Hitler (thank you, Godwin’s Law). If this is the language you use to discuss the issue of abortion, should you really be so surprised (or even disappointed?) when some guy listens to you and takes matters into his own hands?

Operation Rescue released a statement directly after Tiller’s murder, which said, “We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down.” Why on earth would you be “shocked”? In fact, wouldn’t it be more shocking if, after years of “abortion is homicide” rhetoric, nobody stepped up to the plate and took action? If you really believe that abortion in America is the greatest infanticide in history, why are you condemning Tiller’s murder at all?

I am consistently frustrated by organizations that repackage harsh beliefs to make them more socially acceptable. Operation Rescue and National Right to Life are certainly such organizations; any religious denomination that believes every human inherently deserves to be tortured forever simply for being human — that’s another. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from framing their beliefs in a positive way (everyone does this), but covering up harsh beliefs and pretending that they don’t have consequences is dishonest, despicable, and dangerous.

The e-mails I’ve been getting about the situation have all been from religious people. They guy writing the majority of the e-mails wanted us to “beg everyone to pray” and assured us that he would be “on my knees praying for the next six hours.” The girl who was paralyzed “needs people to believe that God can perform a miracle,” yet she “understands if it is not God’s will and she will still honor and glorify him either way.” These are real quotes.

I’m sure most people have received e-mails like this before, so I’d like to make a few general comments on the public perception of faith healing in Evangelical America, and I’d like to ask a few specific questions to people who believe in it.

I’ll start here: Do you believe God can heal? I.e., to rip of Epicurus, do you believe that God is both willing and capable of healing? (Some Christians would say no, claiming that God does not interact with the world, but the kind of Christians who send out prayer request e-mails like the one I’m referring to believe that God can heal.) If you do believe this, have you ever grappled with what kind of a God would base his help on how many hours you pray or on how firmly you believe that he’ll answer positively–while at the same time keeping openness to “God’s will” in the back of your mind so you’ll be submissive if his will is negative? Why do we “need people to believe that God can perform a miracle”? Why do we need to be “on our knees for hours”? If it’s not enough to ask once (nicely) for God to heal, then we’re dealing with a situation where cajoling and coercion can produce divine results–the exact scenario presented as a failure of pagan prayers in 1 Kings 18:25-29. Similarly, in the gospel of Luke, Jesus himself describes God as an eager giver of good things:

So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:9-13)

If anyone has to reinterpret this passage away from its clear meaning (and I haven’t yet met a Christian who doesn’t), it is not because the context demands a different meaning by itself; it is solely because the promise of Jesus is not true and has to be squared with reality in some way. The paralyzed girl I mentioned at the beginning of this post is in a situation where her earthly father wants her to be in better health than God does–in contradiction of Luke 11:13. If her father was given the opportunity to snap his fingers and make her better, I don’t think for a minute that he’d say, “Let me go talk with God and make sure it’s his will, because maybe you’re supposed to stay like this.” He’d just heal her–like Jesus apparently did. And if it’s clearly not God’s will to heal, why are we still praying/begging him to do it weeks and months later?

These are impolite questions, and they’re usually suppressed with appeals to God’s unknowable will. I’m asking them because it’s an insult to the paralyzed woman and her family to tell them that if they just pray harder, maybe God will do something. The reason we pray so long for things is that God isn’t there to answer. When we pray long enough, 1) we feel like we’re doing something helpful, and 2) it’s easier to slap on a “creative solution” answer over time and pretend like prayer works. Christians always leave God a loophole. In this case, sadly, she “understands if it is not God’s will and she will still honor and glorify him either way.”

Another question for the believer: If you think Jesus’ promises in Luke 11 (and elsewhere: Matthew 21:22; Mark 16:18; James 5:14-15) should not be taken literally and directly for some reason, how do you explain away the fact that the promises are given in stark, unqualified, direct terms? In other words, pretend for a moment that Jesus had wanted to give believers unqualified permission to ask for whatever they wanted; how could he have said it? Would he just have had to add an “I really mean this” clause to the end of the promises? Check out the passages above. They are already as strong and unqualified as possible…and demonstrably false.

Even so, what will happen if, in a month or so, this paralyzed girl is able to wiggle her toe or gain some mobility thanks to her determination and the quality of medical care she’s received? I’m confident that God would get all the glory. I’ve seen this many times, and it’s an utterly reprehensible reaction–from anyone’s perspective, Christian or not. Not only is it an insult to the doctors and PT practitioners who might have worked hard to achieve that result, it’s an insult to God. Think about it: months of prayers to an omnipotent being, and the best he can do is a partial restoration of health or mobility? What a god! If you’re omnipotent, it’s all the same for you. (And yet, of course, God never heals amputees…only people who might have gotten better anyway.)

Again, the practical Christian understanding of God is not defined by theology and grand ideals of omnipotence; it’s defined by reality, and we are therefore left with a weak, impotent, insecure, controlling, and ultimately imaginary deity who requires hours of prayer and strong faith mixed with the constant caveat that he might just not want to do it.