Gay Marriage: a Dietrich Bonhoeffer Moment?

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Larry Tomczak of the “Here’s the Deal” blog is mightily concerned about this whole gay thing. In a post from 2015, “Church Is Facing a Dietrich Bonhoeffer Moment,” he says it’s the church’s great test.

Here’s what the church faces:

Opposition to Christianity is becoming more aggressive and hostile. Nowhere is this more evident than in the areas of natural marriage and sexual purity.

I’ll grant that opposition to Christian stupidity can be aggressive, but where Christians expect no more than the U.S. Constitution grants them, I support their rights as strongly as I do mine. That attitude is widespread in the atheist community.

As for “natural marriage” and sexual purity, it’s an odd world where the sky is falling on Christians and yet they aren’t being forced to do anything.

Same-sex marriage

Tomczak works himself into a frenzy as he imagines modern Christians in the same position as Christian martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

After 5,000 years of Western civilization defining marriage as the union of a man and woman, we are on the precipice (barring miraculous intervention) of the Supreme Court imposing homosexual “marriage” on all 50 states.

Allowing someone else to have consensual sex in a way that’s not your cup of tea is not an “imposition.” Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide, and no thoughtful person is surprised that the sky hasn’t fallen.

You want an imposition? Remember Bonhoeffer, the man you reference in your post. He was hanged in Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany just weeks before the end of the war for working with the Resistance. That’s an imposition.

As for your anxiety about marriage being redefined, it’s redefined all the time. Just in my lifetime, laws forbidding interracial marriage have been struck down, divorce is much easier, adultery has been redefined, and marital rape is illegal. Don’t pretend that it’s been unchanged since God invented it.

Recently the largest Protestant denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, changed the wording of its constitution to fully embrace sodomy-based “marriage.”

So what kind of marriage do you have, Larry? A screwing-based “marriage”? I guess I’m old fashioned, because I thought love was a major part of it. Marriage vows say nothing about making either whoopee or babies. Instead they have a promise “to have and to hold, from this day forward; for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; until death do us part.” But perhaps Larry has no use for traditional interpretations of marriage.

I think I’ll stick with my version of marriage. It’s based on reality instead of hysteria.

Scary times ahead

Apparently it’s time to circle the wagons, because he tells us we’re in the “perilous” end times foretold by the Bible.

We are facing a “Dietrich Bonhoeffer Moment.” You recall that he chose civil disobedience and disobeyed Nazi law that stated that protecting Jewish people was against the law. He was hung for his stand. He also said prior to his death, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

It’s hard to believe that he’s doing it even as he’s doing it, but Tomczak is equating these two things:

  1. Christians speaking out against same-sex marriage in the West, which is not especially perilous, given that Tomczak has freely done it, and
  2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s standing up to the Nazis, protecting Jews, returning to Germany in 1939 when he had been safe in America, working to overthrow Hitler, and getting executed.

Our host next translates this into examples of biblical heroes obeying God at the risk of their lives: Daniel and his three friends, Esther, the disciples of Jesus.

Take deep breaths, Larry. Maybe a cold compress on the forehead. Tell yourself that it’s just the vapours. You’re back in America, where you can avoid getting gay married all you want.

You’re confusing (1) being imposed upon with (2) being allowed to impose your views on the rest of the country by law. No, you can’t do that. Don’t expect an apology.

Two things stand out here. First, of course, is the arrogance of equating the difficulties of anti-gay Christians today with those of Bonhoeffer in the 1940s. It’s his own example, and it demolishes his position. Unlike Bonhoeffer, Tomczak can say or write or hand out on the street corner just about anything he likes.

And that brings up the second point. He has the freedom to say these things because of the U.S. Constitution. The secular U.S. Constitution, the one that tells Congress not to make laws based on how they would please God. But the same secular public square that protects me from Christian excesses acts the other way as well. How about a little appreciation for that?

In one final failure of this argument, according to a 2015 biography, Bonhoeffer was likely gay.

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller (1892–1984),
who spent the last seven years of the war
in German concentration camps

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/1/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

 

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Christian Cowardice and the Suicide Tactic

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A popular tactic within the Christian apologetics community is to identify and reject self-refuting arguments that are used against them. There is some wisdom here, but dig into this advice and you’ll find that it betrays a fear to confront the actual arguments.

What is a self-refuting statement?

A self-refuting statement is one that defeats itself. You can reject it without additional evidence or argument. Here are a few examples.

  • “This sentence is false.” If we assume that it’s true, the statement itself tells us it’s false.
  • “I will not respond to that.” Uh . . . you just did.
  • “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded” (Yogi Berra). The place can’t be both empty and crowded.

Popularity of this approach with Christian apologists 

Identifying a self-refuting argument is a quick way to parry an attack. You needn’t bother with a rebuttal if there’s no argument to rebut.

This is called the “Road Runner tactic” in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (2004) by Geisler and Turek. The atheist whose argument has self-destructed is like the coyote in the cartoon who suddenly looks down to discover he has run off a cliff.

The approach is called the “Suicide Tactic” in Tactics (2009) by Greg Koukl. He wants the Christian debater to point out that the argument has committed suicide.

Here are some examples from Koukl’s book that are more relevant to apologetics.

  1. To someone who says, “There are no absolutes,” the Christian could point out that that sentence gives no exceptions and so claims to be an absolute. It defeats itself. Or to “There is no truth,” the Christian shows that the sentence claims to be true, thus defeating the claim.
  2. “The Bible must be flawed because people make mistakes.” But if people make mistakes, that sentence is itself subject to error. And if the atheist wants to salvage his position by arguing that people don’t always make mistakes (and that his sentence was correct), then the Bible might also be correct by the same loophole.
  3. “Only science gives reliable truth.” But why is that statement trustworthy? Where is the science behind it?

And that’s that! (Or is it?)

Koukl says, “When a view commits suicide, it cannot be revived, because there is no way to repair it. Even God cannot give life to a contradictory notion.”

Not necessarily. Only through a strict and uncharitable interpretation can we dismiss these statements as meaningless. They might be clumsily worded, but they’re not meaningless. In fact, each of these examples is easily salvageable.

  1. Instead of “There are no absolutes,” say, “I see no evidence for moral absolutes” or “If you claim that there is absolute truth, provide evidence to back up that claim.”
  2. Instead of “The Bible must be flawed because people make mistakes,” say, “The Bible can’t be declared flawless if it was written by flawed people” or “Bible manuscripts disagree, so we can’t be certain what the originals said.”
  3. Instead of “Only science gives reliable truth,” say, “Science delivers—consider the computer you’re typing on” or “If religion gives reliable new insights about reality, like science, I want to see examples.”

If the point were that clarity matters and that we should be careful how we construct arguments, that’s valid, but Koukl is not interested in careful wording. He wants to use this as a caltrop or rhetorical trick, an excuse to avoid dealing with the argument. This is what a debater does; this is not what someone interested in exploring the evidence does.

Christian cowardice and avoiding the burden of proof

The honest Christian would want to find any truth behind a claim. Is it poorly worded? Then fix the wording. Watch out for games like this where the Christian looks for the easy out rather than actually confronting any issue that’s there.

Used this way, the Suicide Tactic is just a dishonest gimmick to avoid the issue. The larger goal of apologists like Koukl—and they’ll often admit this—is to avoid the burden of proof. Making a claim and defending it is difficult, so he looks for opportunities to dupe the other person into doing that. He wants to attack, not defend.

In the first place, the Christian is the one making the remarkable claim—“God exists” or “Jesus resurrected,” perhaps—and so is obliged to gives reasons to accept the claim. But more important, the Christian can never win the argument if they shirk their burden of proof. Sure, they sidestep being embarrassed by not being able to defend their position well, but they also sidestep the opportunity to convince someone that they’re right.

Apparently they find that shouldering the burden of proof for defending the Jesus story is actually a burden.

Religion is a byproduct of fear.
For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil,
but why was it more evil than necessary?
Isn’t killing people in the name of God
a pretty good definition of insanity?
— Arthur C. Clarke

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/30/15.)

Image from Miroslaav Vajdic, CC license

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Two Sizes Too Small: For What Social Errors Will History Condemn Us?

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Social conventions change. Think of examples where we look back on Western society past and shake our heads at how morally wrong they were. Slavery. Chopping off hands for stealing. Debtor’s prison. Workhouses. Slow public executions. Voting rights given to landowners only.

But does it end there?

A group of freethinking friends saw the James Randi biopic “Honest Liar,” and we were chatting afterwards. One person raised this question about how morality has changed and continues to do so. Let’s not imagine that we’ve got it all figured out. Though we’d like to think otherwise, our descendants will look back on our society and find their own examples of moral error.

So here’s the question (feel free to participate in the comments): What social attitude changes will happen this century such that future Americans will look back on us with bemusement or horror?

Prediction 1: sex!

Let me get you started with examples from our conversation. Paul had raised the question, and he predicted the widespread acceptance of both polyamory (having multiple romantic or sexual partners at a time) and polygamy (marriage with more than two partners) and that today’s views will seem prudish and backwards.

Yes, he’s saying that the conservatives’ prediction is right: from mixed-race marriage comes same-sex marriage, and that opens the floodgates to even more redefinition. (What they forget is that this isn’t new, since marriage has always been in flux.)

It’s interesting to imagine this evolution. In the past, we had one man and one woman, same race, the bride is treated like property and comes with a dowry, and with few restrictions on the bride. We’ve gotten past the racial restriction and are moving past the gender restriction, and Paul imagined loosening up the number restriction.

But note that this isn’t a Sexual Revolution free-for-all. There are new rules, and now the bride must be old enough, must consent, and must not be a close relative. Divorce is now allowed, marital rape is forbidden, both parties are legally equal, and so on.

Prediction 2: climate change

Scot anticipated that both policy makers and ordinary voters will universally accept human-caused climate change. People will be shocked and outraged that we had the evidence for climate change but fiddled while Rome burned. He illustrated it by imagining members of our future society shocked that someone would drive a 3000-pound car for fifteen minutes, spewing out carbon dioxide all the way, just to deliver a pizza.

Prediction 3: animal rights

My proposal was that synthetic meat will be widely available, and future society will look back on us with horror that we raised animals solely to be killed, butchered, and eaten. Today, we are outraged at the idea of clubbing baby seals for fur and at bays red with blood from Japanese dolphin kills, and our future selves will have the same revulsion at our killing cows for cheeseburgers.

Given the enormous environmental impact of livestock, they will also wonder why the financial argument wasn’t enough of a driver even if the moral one wasn’t.

Your turn

Which practice or attitude, customary today, will our descendants look back on with surprise or shock? Maybe they will be outraged that we had capital punishment or that euthanasia was illegal. Maybe they will shake their heads thinking back on when abortion was legal. Maybe they will laugh at our prudishness about sex on television but be disgusted at our appetite for violence. Maybe they will marvel that we let every bonehead vote for no better reason than that they were a citizen, with complete disregard to understanding of the issues and mental capability.

It doesn’t have to be a positive prediction—you might hate it but see it as inevitable anyway.

What do you think?

I think hedonism is one of the most
morally defensible philosophies.
If the purpose of life is pleasure,
it becomes hard to justify suffering.
— commenter smrnda

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/26/15.)

Image from Marlon Cureg, CC license

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“Four Blood Moons” Film, John Hagee’s Intellectual Train Wreck

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John Hagee likes to get overwrought about astrology, which is odd given that he’s a Christian pastor.

Background: Hagee’s thesis

The Bible speaks of a blood moon: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Joel 2:30–31). Hagee proposed a fun new way to look at that. The Jewish spring festival of Passover and fall festival of Sukkot always begin on a full moon. Lunar eclipses only happen during full moons, and with an average of two per year, an eclipse at the beginning of these festivals (somewhere in the world, anyway) is common.

Hagee’s innovation was to (1) call a lunar eclipse (which often makes the moon reddish) a “blood moon,” (2) assign significance to these events happening on the Jewish festivals, and to (3) declare that four in a row (not three or five or some other number) is God telling us something. With the launch of his 2013 book, Hagee said, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”

Remember that period? Who hasn’t said, “Where were you during the period April 2014 through October 2015 when that really dramatic thing happened?” We’re lucky to be here talking about it!

It’s refreshing to see a Bible scholar with no reluctance to make God’s unchanging word into a marionette that tells us a new story.

Hagee’s Four Blood Moons became, not only a bestseller (I’ve critiqued Hagee’s book), but a movie. I attended the premiere and made it out to tell the tale.

The Movie

The single showing in my neighborhood was a nearly packed house, and the Christian audience murmured occasional appreciation.

The movie was a string of supposed scenes from history to illustrate the three times in the past 500 years when we’ve had these tetrads (four blood moons on four consecutive Jewish festivals six months apart) interspersed with commentary by various experts.

A JPL scientist was an early expert, and he explained why lunar eclipses are usually red (what little sunlight remains passes through the earth’s atmosphere so that the moon is illuminated only by sunsets), so we’re off to a good start with a grounding in science and logic.

That didn’t last.

Hugh Ross, a retired astrophysicist who’s now an evolution denier, played a surprising and refreshing role as skeptic, but more on that later.

As we began the look at prior tetrads, John Hagee told us to “put doubt aside and believe.” But why? Don’t you have a burden to show us a reason first? He repeated the book’s subtitle, “Something is about to change.” I wondered if the omniscient creator of the universe could be a little clearer—or am I asking too much?

Tetrad 1: Spanish Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion, 1492

I’m sure the script writers couldn’t get a “damn!” or a bare breast into this Christian script, but they have a torture scene where an ex-Jew, passing as a Catholic during the Inquisition, is tested for his loyalty. I must get offended at the wrong things.

Next, Christopher Columbus is portrayed as a Jewish patriot carrying these Spanish Jews to safety in the New World. A girl in one of the families gives the great explorer a yellow cloth star, an obligatory label the Jews had to wear. (In Nazi Germany, yes, but in Spain five centuries ago? I wasn’t able to find anything to support this, and it sure sounds like artistic license.)

While Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 did have colonization as a goal, it carried just 1200 men (Wikipedia mentions nothing about the Jewish families shown in the movie). The voyage began over a year after Spain’s 100,000 Jews were supposed to have left.

Also a year late was the first blood moon. Hagee would have us believe that God’s 18-month show began a year after the problem. Hagee says that God is shouting his message, but he needs to enunciate a little more clearly.

The movie continues with scenes in America. The goal was to show Jews as part of the American fabric from the beginning, which invited blather from history revisionist David Barton about America as a Christian nation.

Tetrad 2: Establishment of Israel, 1948

This event lines up with a tetrad no better than the previous one. Here again, the first blood moon was a year late. Notice also that the most significant recent event for Israel, the Holocaust, apparently didn’t deserve a tetrad.

We’re told that Israel’s victory in the war launched by Arab states the day after independence was a miracle. If you want surprising tales of victory, you can read about Hannibal’s victories over the Romans or Alexander’s over the Persians or even George Washington’s over the British. No effort was made to show how Israel’s victory—which might indeed have been unexpected—rose to the level of miracle.

Hagee tells us that God has blessed the U.S. because the U.S. has blessed Israel, and we come to see that this is the point of the movie: the U.S. must continue to support Israel financially, militarily, and diplomatically. Or else something.

Tetrad 3: Six-Day War, 1967

We see scenes from the war. Two Israeli soldiers capture an Egyptian platoon. A bomb landed among some civilians but didn’t explode. There’s a story of Egyptian soldiers surrendering to an army of angels.

Happy events? From the standpoint of Israel, sure. Evidence of divine intervention? I don’t think so.

Another expert tells us that our moral compass is broken when we leave God and Judeo-Christian values.

Tetrad 4: 2014 and 2015

Hagee says that this tetrad is even more super-duper than the previous ones since it overlaps a Shemitah (Shmita) year. The Shemitah is the seventh year in a 7-year cycle. It’s a time to let the land go fallow and to forgive debts with fellow Jews. However, Wikipedia says, “There is little notice of the observance of this year in Biblical history and it appears to have been much neglected.”

Hagee has dusted off this old concept and declared that this confluence is unique in human history. First, I’m sure that if we go back before Hagee’s cherry-picked tetrads, we’ll find Shemitah years in there and periods where no dramatic event happened to Israel or to Jews, even with Hagee’s generously sloppy criteria. Second, this Shemitah year only overlaps two of the eclipses. And third, why expect divine wrath if Shemitah is a time of forgiveness?

Panel discussion

The movie ended with a panel discussion with astrophysicist Hugh Ross, rabbi Aryeh Scheinberg, pastor John Hagee, and history revisionist David Barton.

Hagee was asked why this wasn’t astrology. He said that astrology is a false science, not at all like what he does. The movie had tried to ground the idea of getting wisdom from the sky with the Star of Bethlehem, but it sounded to me more like seeing portents in comets.

(One of many interpretations of the star of Bethlehem story is full of astrology, and full of holes.)

The biggest surprise in the movie was Hugh Ross saying that this was all just a coincidence (prediction after the fact) and that the number of eclipses was arbitrarily chosen—why four? He also noted that the eclipses couldn’t be seen in Israel—wouldn’t that be important if Israel is the focus? So, yeah—it’s astrology.

Hagee wrapped up with a threat. God said: “I will bless those who bless you [that is, Israel], and whoever curses you I will curse” (Gen. 12:3). God is working through America to support Israel. Stop supporting Israel, and you’ll regret it. We were told to think of the countries who opposed Israel: Babylon, Greece, Rome. But what do we conclude from this? Empires come and go. This is like God’s warning about the fruit in Eden: eat it, and you will surely die. Uh yeah—eventually.

And if God is working through America, what’s the concern? Surely God can’t be stopped by gay-loving liberals who are soft on Israel.

As the movie ended, the audience applauded. And the screen showed an ad for yet another Hagee book.

Damn.

Ardency and sincerity
are no substitute for veracity.
— Richard S. Russell

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/24/15.)

Image from Four Blood Moons movie page, CC license

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4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we looked at the Problem of Evil, which is a powerful attack on Christianity. Christians often respond by saying that God is unjudgeable by mere humans. That fails in a number of ways, but that’s not the point of these two posts. Rather, I want to insist that Christians delay their God-is-unjudgeable argument until they’ve taken four steps that lay the groundwork necessary to support such a claim.

The first step is to admit that the Problem of Evil makes God look like a sociopath.

2. You say that God has his reasons? Like what?

There’s a second necessary step before we can consider rationalizations for God’s apparent immorality. Don’t just tell me that God could have a good reason for a child dying of leukemia or a parent killed in an accident or 100,000 dead from a tsunami, tell me what those reasons are (or could be). Give it your best shot and sketch out something plausible. If you’re embarrassed by the result—maybe it makes God look petty or immoral or not particularly omnipotent—you need to own that.

3. Are you confident that “God” even exists?

The third step is showing that trust in this God is justified. Here’s what we must avoid: an elaborate “God’s ways are not our ways” kind of argument that merely concludes that we can’t rule out God belief. Okay, but “You can’t rule out God” is no more compelling than “You can’t rule out Zeus” (or Quetzalcoatl or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster). Now that we’ve not ruled out pretty much everything, the Christian must show that God is likely.

This is another variation on the Hypothetical God Fallacy: “Well, if God exists (and is omnipotent and all-good), then he must have good reasons for evil.” Is there any reason to accept that if-clause?

If it’s plausible, like “If you wake up with chest pains,” then what follows is something that might be relevant in the real world. If it’s not plausible, like “If you wake up in Wonderland,” then what follows is irrelevant. It has no bearing on the world we live in.

Which one is “If God exists”? Our Christian opponent must show that there is a good reason to believe that this God exists so that “God could have his reasons” isn’t built on fantasy.

4. Why would God allow suffering?

The idea of the Christian god has a lot of baggage, so let’s simplify things and just imagine the Greatest Possible Being (GPB). Would the GPB allow suffering?

The GPB would be omnipotent and morally perfect and would therefore prevent all unnecessary suffering. Any necessary suffering must achieve some goal, and this goal must be logically possible to achieve. Since the omnipotent GPB could do every logically possible thing, it could achieve every such goal itself, which means that achieving those goals through suffering would be unnecessary. Given the choice, the GPB would obviously opt for achieving its goals without suffering. Therefore, a world ruled by a GPB would have no suffering.

(This is a bit dense. I’ve also made this argument slightly differently, if you want a different take.)

If God is a GPB, then he, too, would achieve his goals without suffering.

Conclusion

Next time you argue the Problem of Evil, look for responses of the form, “God’s ways aren’t our ways” or “We imperfect humans can’t judge God.” Those responses skip over four steps that the Christian must address first.

  1. Acknowledge that, even if they’re hoping that God isn’t a sociopath, he certainly looks like one. Our world is full of unevenly distributed pain and hardship. In addition, God’s actions in the Old Testament make him look as cuddly as Genghis Khan.
  2. Make a plausible (even if embarrassing) list of any reasons God could have to kill innocent people, either individually or in the hundreds of thousands.
  3. Show that trust in this god is justified. There has to be a real being, not just mythology, to be the god who has these incomprehensible reasons for evil in the world.
  4. Show that either God is not a Greatest Possible Being or that a GPB would be obliged to allow suffering.

The Bible can be made to say that God operates on moral principles that are incompatible with those that make sense to humans, but it can also be made to say the opposite. Christians take a path through the Bible’s doctrine, picking up a piece here and ignoring a piece there to create their concept of God.

The point of insisting on these steps is to force Christians to pause and see what they’re cobbling together. Like Dr. Frankenstein, you must face your Creature. Have you created a god, or have you created a fallen angel?

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed
when we realized that they were inside us.
— Charles Darwin

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Image from Eden, Janine and Jim, CC license
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4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil

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Here’s where discussions of the Problem of Evil go wrong.

Focusing on the wrong part of the Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil is the question, “Why would an omnipotent, all-good god allow so much evil in the world?” Christians often respond by saying that we can’t judge God because his ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8).

Let’s get one rebuttal out of the way first. Their response makes no sense because we’re made in God’s image and so should share his moral instinct.

It makes no sense because Abraham talked God down when he was planning destroy Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:25) and Moses talked God down when he was planning on destroying the Israelites and starting over (Exodus 32:9–10). They could do this because they shared a common moral vocabulary with God.

It makes no sense because Jesus said,

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:29–31)

If God notices all and cares deeply, then we’re back to where we started: why is there so much evil in the world?

1. Christians need to admit what God looks like because of the Problem of Evil

Christians can rationalize a response to the problem only after first admitting the problem: God’s actions are those of a sociopath. You would be an evil person if you could prevent gratuitous pain but didn’t.

Let’s not worry about examples like a vaccination, where the long-term good outweighs the short-term pain of an injection. The issue is gratuitous pain like a child dying from cancer, a robbery victim dying from a stab wound, or a deer in a remote forest dying from an injury. At the other extreme, it’s catastrophic disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (200,000+ deaths) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (100,000+ deaths). The world is full of this kind of pain, and yet examples like these are unnecessary. God is magic and could prevent natural disasters. Even if his goal was to remove a future Hitler, he could do it more surgically than with a natural disaster. On an individual level, God could improve people without the pain (but more on this later).

Sure, God (assuming he exists) is smarter and wiser than we are. He might know things we don’t know or couldn’t understand. But it’s backwards to imagine God into existence, see the contradictions in the god you’ve created, and then rationalize (without evidence) excuses so that the original God assumption can still be held. The honest approach is to first evaluate the God claims from a logical and moral standpoint. Once we have good reasons to believe in God, then we can wonder why his morality seems odd. (And why imagine God has a different moral sense? What—besides having to defend the God claim—would cause us to even imagine that?)

The Bible tells us that God is immoral

Consider how God is portrayed in the Old Testament. He isn’t a sage, floating through the story and gently correcting wrongs, passing out insightful judgements, and illustrating morality by example. No, he’s just like the other gods of that place and time such as Marduk or Chemosh. He’s the power behind the throne who demanded genocide, regulated slavery for life, approved of human sacrifice, and permitted sexual slavery.

The New Testament is no better, because this is where God (or Jesus) had the idea to create hell. Don’t tell me that the gates of hell are barred from the inside and that the inmates in hell want to be there. Jesus with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16) makes clear that hell is a terrible place and that the damned want to get out.

Christians sometimes respond by challenging the words we use. We understand what “good” means. It’s a word with a definition, and much of what God does in the Old Testament isn’t good. Said another way, if you did it, you wouldn’t be “good,” and God isn’t good for the same reason.

The Christian response is often to say that our imperfect minds are unable to judge God, but they don’t actually mean that. Rather, they mean, “we shouldn’t judge God as bad.” They’re happy to apply to use that same imperfect mind to judge God as good.

The final three steps are in part 2.

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
— Woody Allen

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Image from Ryan Hyde, CC license

Recent comments at the Cross Examined blog here.
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