You can find more by Uk artist, Doug at QualiaSoup, his YouTube Channel.

(My cupboard has several indigo drawers and handles shaped like rabbits that glow in the dark. How’s that for metaphors?)

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently with my moderate (or even liberal) Christian friends. In fact, one of the hardest parts of “coming out” as an atheist has not been the scorn of fundamentalists but the outcry of mischaracterization that arises from moderates when I explain my reasons for rejecting theism. It would be hard to number the times that I’ve heard the cry, “what you’re talking about isn’t true Christianity!”

Essentially, moderates love love. They love Jesus because they think he embodies love. With Zen-like fervor, they focus on a few New Testament passages about giving away your wealth, turning the other check, and selflessly loving others. When pressed, they will admit that God is holy, absolute perfection, and they accept the fact that he cannot accept humanity…because they are also quick to admit that the world is a messed-up place. But that is about as far as they will go.

The difference between moderates and fundamentalists is how seriously they take the Bible and how willing they are to reject modern morality in favor of what the Bible says. In both cases, the fundamentalists are far more serious, and in that sense, more in touch with reality—however repulsive that reality might be (and, of course, it is repulsive to moderates, who validate their religious modernization by claiming that those who don’t come along with them are “hijacking” the religion for their own bigoted agendas).

Fred Phelps knows the Bible better (and takes it more seriously) than any moderate pastor or theologian I’ve heard. Why is he denounced by reasonable Christians? Not because he’s wrong by biblical standards, but because he’s obviously bigoted, hateful, and doesn’t restrain himself to quoting from the safe sections of the Bible that moderates embrace. As a society, we’ve decided that the best way to deal with homosexuals isn’t to stone them to death. The Bible hasn’t quite caught up.

Once we get past the point that the most shocking and horrific parts of the Bible are in the history and law books, which were never meant to be read as metaphor, the most common excuse moderates give to biblical examples of God-endorsed misogyny, genocide, infanticide, homophobia, rape, etc., is that there were certain contexts under which those things were okay, but that we are now under a new covenant of grace and love. This is position is inconsistent (God is immutable), immoral (why was that crap ever okay?), and dangerous (if God “tells” you to do something, it’s great!), but the point I bring up with moderates is that ultimately, Jesus is even worse.

As evil as the God of the Old Testament was(/is), he only dished out crap in the present life. Sure, you might have been slaughtered by God via the Jews if you were an Amalekite (1 Samuel 15:3) or taken as a sex slave if you were a young virgin (Numbers 31:18), but your time of suffering (or punishment for sin?) was limited by your mortality. In the New Testament, as Thomas Paine famously pointed out, the concept of infinite torture for finite transgression was introduced. (To be fair, the first-century BCE Pharisee movement developed the idea, but Jesus was the first to speak it into the biblical canon.) Either way, how can Jesus be the embodiment of love if his main message of salvation was that you are going to be cast into a previously-unintroduced place of eternal torment if you don’t intellectually assent (believe) that he exists and was executed with you in mind?

Here’s the rub (listen up, moderates): love doesn’t have conditions. If your parents say they love you and then utterly reject/disown you when you don’t fulfill their vision for your life, you assume that they either stopped loving you or didn’t love you in the first place. The cliché (but true) claim of parents to “love you no matter what, even when I’m disappointed in you” is what love is about: constant, unconditional, and independent of what you do or think.

If you want to go even a step further than most moderate Christians and accept universalism, that’s fine; it’s just not biblical. And as long as moderates aren’t taking the words of the Bible seriously, they’re not within a biblical tradition either. Jesus took the law seriously (Matthew 5:17-19), and he made the punishment for failing at a harder task (belief) infinitely worse. Don’t claim to be a Christian unless you can affirm the words of your infallible book without yards of yellow tape and hours of contorted explanation.

At its core, Christianity isn’t about love: it’s about worshipping an unloving god, no matter what immoral acts he commands or permits. Those who haven’t had an experience or seen enough evidence to permit honest belief are automatically damned, as are those who can believe but refuse to worship an essentially immoral being whose precepts are trumped easily by basic modern morality. Moderates: this is your religion, as long as you choose to go by the name “Christian.” No matter how enamored you are with love, your God is not.