What Would Jesus Do?

The WWJD acronym became popular in the nineties as a way to imagine Jesus approaching a moral problem. Would Jesus smoke that joint? Would he skip his homework? Would he stop to help that person? Many young Christians wore a WWJD bracelet to keep the question in mind.

The problem is that this question delivers contradictory answers. Ask Fred Phelps what Jesus would do, and he would’ve said with confidence that Jesus would be preaching, “God hates fags.” Ask Harold Camping, and he would’ve said that Jesus would be warning people about the coming end. Pro-lifers think that Jesus would be picketing abortion clinics. Televangelists say that Jesus would want you to give them lots of money.

Many conservative Christians think that Jesus would reduce taxes, demand Creationism in public schools and prayers in city council meetings, make same-sex marriage illegal, and deny climate change. Many liberal Christians think that he’d welcome gays to church, celebrate the scientific consensus, encourage sex education to minimize unwanted pregnancies, and help the neediest people.

Pick any contentious social issue—abortion, same-sex marriage, gun rights, euthanasia, our obligations to the needy, and so on—and you’ll have millions of thoughtful Christians taking each of the many contradictory positions.

What good is it?

WWJD is a useless slogan because it’s ambiguous. It’s a synonym for “In your most moral frame of mind, what would you do?” The Jesus of the Bible is a sock puppet who says whatever you want him to say.

BOB: Say Jesus, I was thinking of putting a little extra in the offering plate on Sunday for the food bank collection.

JESUS sock puppet (in squeaky voice): Good for you, Bob! After all, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

BOB: And speaking of church, I thought that Frank from across the street was a decent guy until I found out that he’s gay. I think I should give him the silent treatment from now on.

JESUS: You’re right there, Bob! Remember that “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”

The problem is pretending that Jesus really is feeding you lines. Dropping this pretense may feel like tightrope walking without a net, but “Jesus” in this case is just a synonym for “conscience.” Yes, you should pause to ask if your action is something you can be proud of, but don’t delude yourself that the source of your morals was ever anyone but you.

Two hands working
can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
— Unknown

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/2/14.)

As an homage to a powerful video from GodIsImaginary.com, I summarized five tough questions in Part 1. Here are five more of my own. I’ll give popular Christian answers for each question and then conclude with a single answer that neatly resolves all of these dilemmas.

6. Why is faith required? In John’s gospel, Thomas missed Jesus’s first appearance. He didn’t believe the others’ story that Jesus had risen and said that he needed to see the nail marks in the hands of Jesus as proof. After Jesus appeared again and satisfied Thomas, Jesus said, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (John 20:29). In other words, Thomas believed because he had evidence—nothing special there. But someone who can believe without that evidence? Ah, that person is blessed!

Richard Dawkins challenged Kenneth Miller on some religious matter (both men are biologists, but Miller is Catholic), and Miller replied, “There’s a reason it’s called faith!” Christianity without faith wouldn’t be Christianity. Some say that faith isn’t earned but neither is it a right. Instead, the Holy Spirit gives faith to some using some unknown algorithm.

7. Why is God hidden? Thomas had a scientific attitude. Any scientific claim must respond to the demand for evidence. For example, cold fusion would be nice, but “nice” has no currency within science. There is insufficient evidence for any mechanism of cold fusion, so it is rejected. “God exists” is another claim, and the obvious supporting evidence—God simply making his existence known—is unapologetically unavailable.

God works in mysterious ways. This is yet another test of Christians’ faith.

Mother Teresa wrote about God’s silence: “the silence and the emptiness is so great” and “I have no Faith … [the thoughts in my heart] make me suffer untold agony.” She soldiered on despite her weak faith, and she has been beatified by Rome.

8. Why are there natural disasters? Haiti and Indonesia have been devastated by tsunamis in recent years, each disaster killing about a quarter of a million people. The worst tropical cyclones have killed this many people as well. The disaster area can take years to recover, especially if it hits a third-world region. How can God allow these to happen when it would be trivial to prevent the damage?

Christians have responded that the forces of nature have a good side. Earthquakes recycle minerals, and hurricanes are a consequence of the same weather system that brings sunshine and gentle rains. Disasters test Christians and give them an opportunity to help through prayer or donations. Christians infer God’s hand in the “miracle child” that survives the disaster that killed its parents.

Then there’s the tough-love response. About the 9/11 terrorist attack, Jerry Falwell declared:

The pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

If all else fails, Christians can fall back on the idea that God is there to comfort the grieving.

9. Why does the Bible show God doing terrible things? God demands genocide, and he gives rules regulating slavery just like the rules he gives regulating commerce.

Christians often argue that genocide and slavery were accepted components of society back then. God was simply working within the system. The tribes that God demanded be destroyed must’ve been morally rotten—how could an all-good God act otherwise?—and even leaving their babies alive would risk a future for a tribe that God knew might tempt Israel in the future.

10. Why is the historical record so weak for Christianity? Outside the gospels, there are no biographies of Jesus from contemporary historians, of which there were many. There are not even any mentions of Jesus, aside from disputed passages in Josephus.

God’s plan apparently was to appear on earth in a low-profile way. A grand entrance is apparently not God’s style, and we’re just going to have to live with that.

The other way of resolving these questions

Instead of individual reasons that clumsily address these questions by assuming God’s existence, let’s again try to resolve these questions with a simple hypothesis: there is no god. This simple and obvious explanation—which Christians themselves apply to the other guy’s god—neatly cuts the Gordian Knot.

Let’s revisit those five challenges with this new response.

Why is faith required? All supernatural religious claims require faith because there is insufficient evidence to accept them otherwise. If there were evidence, you can be sure that that would be celebrated, not faith. (More on faith.)

Why is God hidden? Because he doesn’t exist (more). As for God not wanting to provide evidence, he had no problem doing so in the Old Testament.

Why are there natural disasters? We can assign “good” and “bad” labels to events according to how they affect us, but that’s not nature’s perspective. Nature has no obligation to provide a pleasing environment for anyone. We have to do “the Lord’s work” because he sure isn’t doing it.

Why does the Bible show God doing terrible things? Because “God” is just a character in a mythological tale. His imagination and morality are reflections of that of the Iron Age people who created him.

Why is the historical record so weak for Christianity? Because Christianity is a legend that began after decades of oral history. After this, dogmas like the Trinity gradually developed over the centuries, and unpopular interpretations like Gnosticism were pruned away.

Convoluted answers that demand a presupposition of the very thing in question crumble when we simply consider that the fanciful claim is just what it looks like: legend and myth.

We could list lots more questions—Why create an enormous universe if the point was just to create humans? Why does the view of God change through the Bible? If God created the universe, what created God? and so on—but they are all neatly resolved by dropping the God hypothesis.

Elbow deodorant

Elbow deodorant is a solution in search of a problem. We could imagine a society in which the elbows of any cultured person smell like flowers and only the uncouth go au naturel, but smelly elbows just aren’t a problem in our society.

Christianity is elbow deodorant. It is a solution in search of a problem. So Christian leaders invent one: they imagine a god who gets furious if you do bad stuff and will punish you forever. But if you believe certain things, you get a free pass to the Good Place when you die.

No, smelly elbows and a god that doesn’t exist aren’t worth worrying about.

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt.
It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.
Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age
which has destroyed so many certainties
by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.
— Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/28/14.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

I remember listening in amazement to a Christian podcast talking about a tragic situation made worse by Christianity. A panel of Christian pastors were responding to a dilemma raised by a father whose 20-something son had recently died. That was bad enough, but the father’s Christian belief made it worse: according to his denomination, the son was not saved and so didn’t go to heaven on his death. The father’s own belief had put the son in torment in hell. The panel had the difficult task of tap dancing around the issue, offering the father comfort while keeping to their conservative Christian dogma.

Like Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, the simple solution is to reject the unsubstantiated claim of a hell and any god that could put anyone there.

Tough questions to the Christian

I responded to ten questions from apologist J. Warner Wallace with the post, “10 Tough Questions for the Atheist to Answer.” There’s not much to the list—it’s a collection of as-yet unanswered scientific questions and familiar deist apologetics—but it was a good exercise to address some of the best arguments claimed by the Fundamentalist worldview. With this post, I’d like to return the favor and present some of the toughest atheist challenges to the Christian.

Let’s start with five questions from an older atheist site, GodIsImaginary.com. You may have seen the video, “10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer.” This was a powerful argument when I first saw it, and it’s just as hard hitting today.

These are tough problems for the Christian to answer, but, like the problem of the dead son consigned to hell, they dissolve when looked at the right way.

1. Why won’t God heal amputees? You never see missing limbs spontaneously restored. Why is that? Surely the prayers from amputees and their loved ones are plaintive enough.

Christians might respond that God has a special, unknowable plan. They start with the presupposition that God is omnipotent and loves us, and they conclude that we simply don’t understand. (Some might say that there have indeed been reports of missing limbs restored, but I’m talking about scientifically verified healings—sorry to rain on the parade with a demand for evidence and all.)

2. Why are there so many starving people in our world? Doesn’t God answer their prayers? God has received uncountably many prayers both from the desperate people in the world and from healthy Westerners who are concerned about strangers in need. If God answers any prayers at all, why would they be for your finding a parking space over a starving person not dying?

As before, Christians might say that God has a plan—it may not make sense, but we’ll just have to trust him. Or that strangers’ suffering increases our opportunity to learn compassion or give charitably. Or that it’s all your fault due to the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But let’s not dwell on this too long, because it’s uncomfortable holding the competing ideas of a loving God vs. a god so disconnected with human problems that he allows widespread suffering.

3. Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense? Genesis begins with a flawed view of cosmology picked up from the Sumerians. There was no Flood and no Garden of Eden. Man came from evolution, not from dust. The Bible has no recipe for soap or basic medical advice.

Christians will say that the Bible has no intention of being a science textbook. It simply worked through the flawed worldview of the times. The Bible had no goal to improve the condition of our lives; it taught God’s rules, not health advice.

4. Why do bad things happen to good people? Shouldn’t good Christians get a break? Shouldn’t there be at least a little boost here on earth for backing the right religion? How about something tangible to prove that one’s faith is well placed?

No, God works in mysterious ways. He gives strong faith as he sees fit. Even Mother Teresa complained about the lack of evidence that undercut her faith.

5. How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you? Jesus could appear to you, but he doesn’t. He appeared to Paul after he died, so it’s not like he hasn’t done it before. He could appear to give you advice for a tough decision, give you comfort in person like a friend would, or just assure you that he really exists. He doesn’t.

The Christian might argue that God has his reasons, one of the oddest ones being: because then there would be no need for faith. Because apparently just having faith is a noble thing.

The better way of resolving these questions

As shown above, we could cobble together individual reasons for each of these questions to support a Christian worldview. With the work of perhaps millions of determined theologians over the millennia, we have lots of material. Alternatively, we can cut the Gordian Knot with one simple, devastating hypothesis: there is no god.

Let’s run through the five problems to see how this hypothesis neatly resolves them.

Why won’t God heal amputees? Because there is no God to restore their limbs or to answer prayers. “Answered prayers” are just wishful thinking and coincidence. You can pray to God, Shiva, or a jug of milk and get equally poor results.

Why are there so many starving people in our world? Because life is sometimes difficult, nature has no desire to make people either happy or unhappy, and there is no God to magically solve the problem.

Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense? Because it is a product of an Iron Age culture and has no more knowledge than people of Mesopotamia had at that time.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Rain falls on good people just like bad people. There is no God to adjust the balance of luck in favor of the good ones.

How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you? Jesus is imaginary.

Concluded in part 2.

(I stand on the shoulders of giants. This post has been an opportunity to acknowledge one of the many sources of insight that I benefitted from in my early days as a seeking atheist. Thanks, Marshall Brain, the force behind GodIsImaginary.)

Strange…a God who could make good children as easily as bad,
yet preferred to make bad ones;
who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short;
mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness
multiplied seventy times seven and invented Hell;
who mouths morals to other people and has none himself;
who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all;
who created man without invitation,
then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man,
instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself;
and finally with altogether divine obtuseness,
invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
— Mark Twain

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 05/26/14.)

Image credit: Cambodia Phnom Penh, flickr, CC