Outgrowing God Read online

  ‘When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess.’ (Numbers 33: 51–3)

  ‘For I have given you the land to possess.’ What? Is that a good motive for going to war? Adolf Hitler in the Second World War justified his invasion of Poland, Russia and other lands to the east by saying that the superior German master race needed Lebensraum, or ‘living space’. And that is exactly what God was urging his own ‘chosen people’ to claim by war. He was nice enough to make a distinction between those tribes who merely got in the way on the journey to the Promised Land, and those tribes who already lived in the Promised Land itself. The first group were to be offered peace. If they agreed, they got off lightly. At worst, only the men were to be killed and the women taken as sex slaves.

  But less gentle treatment awaited the unfortunate peoples who actually lived in the Lebensraum which God had promised his chosen people:

  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. (Deuteronomy 20: 16)

  God really meant business, and his ruthless wishes were carried out to the letter. Not just during the conquest of the Promised Land but throughout the Old Testament:

  Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys. (1 Samuel 15: 2)

  God’s orders were to kill even children. Especially boys. Girls were worth keeping for…well, read it for yourself and use your imagination (you won’t need much).

  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. (Numbers 31: 17–18)

  Nowadays we’d call it ethnic cleansing and child abuse.

  Theologians are embarrassed by these and the many similar passages in the Bible. They have reason to be grateful that modern archaeology and scholarship can find no evidence that any of these Old Testament stories are historically true. Theologians explain away the many horror stories as symbolic myths, moral tales like Aesop’s Fables rather than history. Fair enough, although you might wonder how you could possibly find a decent moral in almost any of these terrible tales: tales of violent bloodlust, fighting for Lebensraum, genocidal ethnic cleansing, and treating women and girls as the property of men, to be raped and used as sex slaves.

  Modern Christian theologians sometimes write off the Old Testament altogether. They point with relief to the New Testament, where Jesus comes across as a lot nicer than his terrifying heavenly father. Jesus himself was not so sure of the contrast. The gospel of John has him saying: ‘I and the father are one’ and ‘The father is in me and I in the father’ and ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the father’. Nevertheless, the Jesus character in the gospels did say some pretty nice things. The Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew shows Jesus as a good man, far ahead of his time. Or if he didn’t exist, as a minority of scholars think, the fictional character called Jesus is a nice character. But however nice the sentiments in the Sermon on the Mount may be, the central doctrine of Christianity, as preached by St Paul, the main architect of that religion, is another matter.

  The Christianity of St Paul – and that means of almost all modern Christians – regards everybody – you, me, everyone who ever lived or ever will live – as ‘born in sin’. As we saw in Chapter 2, Mary’s ‘immaculate conception’ signifies her almost unique freedom from the stain of sinful birth. Paul was obsessed with sin. You get the impression from him that God is far more interested in the sins of one species, living on one little planet, than he is in the vast expanding universe that he had created. Paul and the other early Christians believed that we all inherit the sin of Adam, the first man, who was tempted by Eve, the first woman, after she in turn was tempted by a talking snake. As we saw in Chapter 3, their sin was to eat a fruit which God had expressly forbidden them. This terrible sin – so terrible that it provoked God to drive them out of the Garden of Eden and condemn them and their descendants to a life of hard labour and pain – is thought to be inherited by all of us. According to St Augustine, one of Christianity’s most revered theologians, ‘Original Sin’ is inherited from Adam down the male line in the semen, the fluid that carries the sperm.

  Even a newborn baby, too young to have done anything, let alone anything wrong, is born with the great burden of Sin on its tiny shoulders. It’s as if Paul and his Christian followers think that Sin (with a capital S) is some kind of brooding spirit: a dark, hereditary stain, rather than simply those bad things that particular people do from time to time. Born in sin, the only way we can escape everlasting damnation in the fires of hell is by being baptized and ‘redeemed’ by the sacrificial death of Jesus. Jesus’s death was a sacrifice, like an Old Testament burnt offering, to appease God and ask him to forgive all human sin, especially the ‘Original Sin’ of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

  Nowadays, we know that Adam never existed. Everybody who ever lived had two parents, and the line of great-great-great-grandparents goes on back through various apes and early monkeys to fish, worms and bacteria. There never was a first couple – never an Adam or Eve. There was nobody to commit the terrible sin for which we’re all supposed to share the guilt. God presumably knew that, even if Paul and the early Christians didn’t. And did people ever really believe in the talking snake? Actually, I’m afraid they probably did, because a disturbingly large number of people, especially in America, still do. But, setting that on one side, what about this notion of Jesus’s death ‘redeeming’ or ‘atoning for’ the sins of humanity, from Adam on? It’s the idea – and it really is central to the whole Christian religion – that Jesus died for our sins. He paid with his life so that our sins could be forgiven.

  ‘Atonement’ means paying for a wrongdoing. You might wonder why, if God wanted to forgive us, he didn’t just forgive us. But no, that wasn’t good enough for the God character. Somebody had to suffer, preferably painfully and fatally. ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness,’ as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it (9: 22). St Paul often explained, in different words, that ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Corinthians 15: 3).

  The idea (don’t blame me, I’m just reporting the official Christian belief) is this. God wanted to forgive the sins of humankind, most prominently including the inherited sin of Adam (who never existed). But God couldn’t just forgive. That would be too simple. Too obvious. Somebody had to pay for the forgiveness, in an act of sacrifice. And humanity’s sin was so colossal, it couldn’t just be an ordinary act of sacrifice. Nothing would do except the torture and agonizing death of God’s own son Jesus. Yes, Jesus came down (‘down’?) to Earth specifically so that he could be whipped and crucified, nailed to a wooden cross to die in agony and thereby pay for the sins of humanity. Nothing less than the blood sacrifice of God himself – for Jesus is regarded as God in human form – would be enough to pay for the great burden of Sin hanging round the neck of humanity.

  I don’t know how that strikes you, but you might well think it’s a truly awful idea. At any moment leading up to the death of Jesus on the cross, an all-powerful God could have intervened – as he did in the case of Abraham’s ritual sacrifice of Isaac: ‘Stop, guys, it’s OK. No need to hammer that nail through my beloved son’s hand. I forgive you anyway. Let’s all relax and celebrate the grand universal forgiveness of the sin of humanity.’

  No, that seemingly obvious solution to the problem was not good enough for God. If I were writing a play about it, I might give God these lines to speak:

  Let me see, I c
an’t just forgive them, their sin is too great. How about if I kill three thousand of them, like I did over that bit of unpleasantness with the golden calf? No, even three thousand isn’t enough, not three thousand ordinary people, the sin is too great to be wiped out by killing a mere three thousand just plain folks. Tell you what, though, why don’t I turn my own son into a human and have him tortured and killed on behalf of all humans? Yes, that’s what I’d call a worthy sacrifice. Kill not just any old human, but God in human form! Now you’re talking. That’s the ticket. That would be a big enough sacrifice to atone for all the sins of humanity. Including the sin of Adam (oh, and – silly me – I keep forgetting to tell them, Adam never existed). On your way, son; sorry, but I can see no better solution. And no, you can’t take the chariot of fire. I’m going to put you in a woman’s womb and you’ll have to be born, brought up and educated, teenage angst and all that stuff. Otherwise you wouldn’t be fully human, so I wouldn’t feel you were truly representing humanity when I eventually have you crucified to save them. Don’t forget, by the way, it’s me myself being crucified too, because I am you and you are me.

  Making fun? Yes. Savage? Maybe. Unfair? I truly don’t think so, and please understand why I don’t apologize. The doctrine of atonement, which Christians take very seriously indeed, is so deeply, deeply nasty that it deserves to be savagely ridiculed. God is supposed to be all-powerful. He created the expanding universe, galaxies hurtling away from one another. He knows the laws of science and the laws of mathematics. He invented them, after all, and he presumably even understands quantum gravity and dark matter, which is more than any scientist does. He makes the rules. The one who makes the rules has the power to forgive whomever he likes for breaking them. Yet we are asked to believe that the only way he could think of to persuade himself – himself – to forgive humans for their sins (most notably the sin of Adam, who never existed and therefore couldn’t sin) was to have his son (who was also himself) tortured and crucified in the name of humanity. So, although the Old Testament is richer in sheer numbers of horror stories than the New, you could say that the central message of the New Testament is a strong contender for the grim distinction of being the most horrific of all.

  The disciple Judas betrayed Jesus. He led the authorities to him, and identified him with a kiss. A politician who betrays his party is called ‘a Judas’. A campaign to rid the Galapagos islands of imported goats, who were ruining the natural balance, employed what were called ‘Judas goats’ – females marked with radio collars, who ‘betrayed’ the location of flocks to be exterminated. Down the ages, Judas’s name has stood for the act of betrayal. But, to repeat the question we asked in Chapter 2, is this fair to Judas? God’s whole plan was that Jesus had to be crucified, and so he had to be arrested. The betrayal by Judas was necessary to the plan. Why have Christians traditionally hated the name of Judas? He was only playing his part in God’s plan to redeem the sins of humankind.

  Even worse, the entire Jewish people has suffered persecution through the centuries because Christians have blamed them for the death of Jesus. As recently as 1938, Pius XII (a year before he became pope) spoke of the Jews as people ‘whose lips curse [Christ] and whose hearts reject him even today’. Four years later, during the war (Italy was on the side of Hitler), Pope Pius spoke of Jerusalem as having the same ‘rigid blindness and stubborn ingratitude’ that had led it ‘along the path of guilt to the murder of God’. And it wasn’t just Catholics. Martin Luther, the German founder of Protestant Christianity, advocated setting fire to synagogues and Jewish schools. Luther’s pathological hatred of Jews was echoed by Adolf Hitler in 1922:

  My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

  Don’t take Hitler’s claim to be a Christian too seriously, by the way. Whatever else Hitler was, he was a chronic liar. He may have claimed to be Christian in that speech, but in his so-called ‘table talk’ he was sometimes anti-Christian, although he was never an atheist and he never renounced the Roman Catholicism of his upbringing. Even if he wasn’t really a sincere Christian, though, his speeches found a willing audience in a German population prepared by centuries of Catholic and Lutheran hatred of Jews. And it all started, as in the rest of Europe, with the legend that the Jews were to blame for Jesus’s death.

  Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who finally approved Jesus’s execution, called for water and publicly washed his hands to indicate that he took no responsibility for it. The Jews are supposed to have accepted responsibility when they cried out, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’ (Matthew 27: 25). Much of the cruel persecution suffered by Jews throughout history stems from these words. Yet – do I need to repeat the point? – the crucifixion of Jesus was the pivot of God’s plan. The Jews who allegedly called for his death were only calling for what God wanted to happen anyway. By the way, don’t you think that ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children’ sounds a rather unlikely thing for anyone to say, and suspiciously as though it was added later by a prejudiced hand?

  Throughout this chapter, I’ve said again and again that the stories told in the Bible probably aren’t true. As we saw in Chapter 2, the biblical books were written long after the events they claim to describe. If there were any eye-witnesses, most of them would have been dead by then. But that doesn’t affect the main point of this chapter. Whether or not God is a fictional character, we are entitled to choose whether he’s the kind of character we’d like to love and follow, as Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders all tell us we should. What’s your choice?

  In the exceptionally vigorous American election campaign of 2016, the Democrat party was trying to choose between two leading candidates, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. A senior party official, Brad Marshall, wanted Hillary. He thought he’d found a way to discredit Bernie. He suspected (as though it were something wrong) that Bernie was an atheist. He wrote to two other senior party officials (Hillary herself knew nothing about it) suggesting that Bernie should be challenged, in public, to state his religion. When previously asked, he had said he was ‘of Jewish heritage’. But did he really believe in God? Brad Marshall wrote:

  I think he is an atheist…This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.

  ‘Peeps’ means ‘people’, and he was talking about the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia. ‘Several points difference’ means an important effect on votes in those two states. He thought (with good reason, unfortunately) that many Christians would rather vote for any religious person than for an atheist, even if it meant voting for someone of a different faith from themselves, in this case a Jew. Any kind of ‘belief in a higher power’ will do, even if it’s a different higher power from their own. Opinion polls have shown the same thing again and again. There are voters who would be somewhat reluctant to vote for a Catholic, or a Muslim, or a Jew. But they still would prefer any of those to an atheist. Atheists are bottom of the list, even if the atheist is highly qualified in all other ways. Disgraceful as I think it is, it’s no wonder t
hat Brad Marshall wanted to expose the alleged atheism of the candidate he didn’t favour.

  The United States constitution says that ‘no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States’. Admittedly Marshall wasn’t asking for a legal ban on atheists standing for the presidency, which really would have violated the constitution. Of course voters are allowed to notice a candidate’s religion when privately casting their votes. But Marshall was deliberately appealing to voter prejudice, against the spirit of the constitution. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in anything supernatural. Like not believing in flying saucers. Or fairies. Politicians have to make decisions on things like economic policy, foreign affairs, health and social welfare, legal matters. Why should belief in the supernatural make someone take better political decisions?

  I’m sorry to say that lots of people seem to think you need to believe in some sort of god, any kind of ‘higher power’, in order to have any chance of being moral – of being good. Or that, without belief in a higher power, you’d have no basis for knowing right from wrong, good from bad, moral from immoral. This chapter looks at the whole question of ‘morals’ and ‘morality’: what ‘good’ means as opposed to ‘bad’, and whether we need belief in God or gods or some sort of ‘higher power’ in order to be good.

  So, why should somebody think you need God in order to be good? I can think of only two reasons, both bad ones. One is that the Bible, the Quran, or some other holy book tells us how to be good, and without a book of rules we wouldn’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. We dealt with the ‘Good Book’ in the previous chapter and we’ll return to whether we should follow it in this one. The other possible reason is that people have such a low regard for humans that they think we, politicians included, will only be good if somebody – God, if nobody else – is watching us: the theory of the Great Policeman in the Sky. Or, to update it a bit, the Great Spy Camera (or Surveillance Camera) in the Sky.