In a recent thread, I challenged Christians and other believers to explain why their supposedly loving God treats people so poorly. Toward the end of the thread, I commented:
We’re more than 1200 comments into this thread, and still none of the believers can explain why their “loving” God shits all over people, day after day.
If you loved someone, would you purposely trap them under the rubble of a collapsed building? Or drown them? Or drive them from their home and destroy their possessions? [Or stand by, doing nothing, while a maniac mowed them down using automatic weapons?]
Your supposedly loving God does that. Why?
As you’d expect, the Christians struggled to find a good answer. One of their failed attempts was to appeal to the Cross. Fifthmonarchyman, for instance, wrote this:
I just think that the way to understand God’s love is to look at the Cross and not at the latest natural disaster.
That’s fairly typical. Christians do see the Cross as a great symbol of love. Jesus was willing to lay down his life for us, after all. What could be more loving than that?
The problem is that they haven’t thought things through. When you do, the Cross becomes rather appalling. Here’s how I put it in response to FMM:
That’s right. God had the power to forgive Adam and Eve. A loving God would have forgiven them. The Christian God refused to forgive them, banished them from the Garden, made their lives miserable, and then blamed their descendants as if they had anything to do with it.
The Christian God is an unloving asshole. Thank God (so to speak) that he doesn’t exist.
And just to complete the picture, he decides that since Adam and Eve ate a particular fruit — something he knew would happen before he even created them — everyone must be tortured for eternity after they die. (Can’t you feel the love?)
But wait — there’s a way out! This psychotic God is willing to forgive us after all, because he tortured himself to death! He just needed a little more blood and gore in order to forgive us, that’s all. (Can’t you feel the love?)
So FMM comes along and says “ignore the natural disasters, ignore all the ways God torments people, and look to the Cross,” as if the cross were some great symbol of love. It isn’t. It’s the symbol of a creepy God who
a) creates people and sticks them in a Garden;
b) gets the bright idea of putting a tree in the Garden that he doesn’t want them to eat from;
c) blames them for eating from it, even though he knew that would happen before he even created them;
d) blames their descendants, as if they had anything to do with it;
e) decides that everyone must be tortured for eternity, because Adam and Eve ate from a tree that he was stupid enough to put in the Garden;
f) decides that he might be willing to forgive everyone in exchange for more blood and gore;
g) in the ultimate act of self-loathing, tortures himself to death; and
h) with his blood lust satisfied, finally agrees to forgive people;
i) except that even with his bloodlust temporarily satisfied, he’s still an asshole; so
j) he decides that he’s still going to torture for eternity the folks who don’t believe in him at the moment of death, and only forgive the ones who suck up to him.
Can’t you feel the love?
Christians, pause and ask yourselves: What happened to me? How did I end up believing something as stupid and ridiculous as Christianity? Why am I labeling this monstrous God as ‘loving’?
The Holy Spirit is a wondrous thing. It descends on people, making them incredibly stupid. It even makes them forget what love is.
Now, I’m fully aware that Christians don’t all agree on the historicity of the Adam and Eve story or on how atonement works. We can discuss some of those differences in the comments below. But I do think it’s striking that Christians have not come up with a story that makes sense, and that a large number of them unwittingly hold beliefs that paint God as monstrous, not loving, and the Cross as the symbol not of love, but of a petty and ungenerous refusal to forgive until blood is spilled.
The Cross truly is an embarrassment, right at the heart of Christianity.
??? Paul is saying (to me) that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who have not accepted salvation. Whereas this message is “the power of God” to those of us who are being saved. Paul was a crossophile.
But hey, it’s human nature to regard those who disagree with us on matters we consider important, as fools or worse. Even you and I can’t help doing this.
Flint:
Yes. That’s my point.
He’s conceding that intelligent people see it as foolishness, but he’s arguing that it’s really true after all. Hence the Isaiah quote:
As I said:
Flint,
You’d have to establish its existence first. And you’re neglecting confounding factors, such as this one: Suppose the other gods exist, too. How could you tell that the benefits accruing to a people P came from its god G, and not from another god H? Ditto for suffering. Your idea just wouldn’t work, Flint.
The question at hand is not whether religious belief confers benefits on believers, but whether God does. Your proposal wouldn’t answer that question.
Flint,
There’s a huge difference between merely declaring your opponents to be fools and demonstrating why they are wrong.
I’ve made the case that the Cross is an embarrassment to Christianity, and I’m inviting Christians to present their counterarguments, if they have any.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, fully embraces Paul’s anti-intellectualism:
In other words, “Believe what we tell you to believe, no matter how stupid it is. Someday God will reveal that down is up, that folly is wisdom, and that the Cross makes sense. Just have faith, and for God’s sake, stop thinking.“
Worshiping a cross and the immaterial, imaginary, eternal “god” that dies on it (who doesn’t really die) is worshiping a mirage, AKA a graven image.
Christians are compelled to deny that they are idolaters. If they stopped and thought about it, they wouldn’t be Christians.
But they don’t think about it. It’s too dangerous.
Luther put it much more succinctly than Paul or Mohler:
For what little it may be worth, I think Kierkegaard deserves credit for having been one of the few Christian philosophers to understand that the “absurdity” of Christianity is precisely the point: that one cannot make sense of how the transcendent God became a mortal of flesh and blood.
I have to say, I’m definitely one of those atheists who enjoys and admires Kierkegaard. A lot of philosophers do. Can’t say whether that’s true of normal people or not.
After admiring someone who points out that emperor is naked, one might contemplate the fact that applying force and social sanctions to make people say they believe absurdities is Orwellian.
KN,
It’s worth stressing that my OP is not about the goofy metaphysics of the Incarnation. My point is that even if you swallow the Incarnation hook, line, and sinker, the Cross is still an ugly embarrassment, not a symbol of God’s love.
petrushka,
Has KN actually advocated the application of “force and social sanctions to make people say they believe absurdities”?
I’ve seen him support laws exempting religious beliefs from criticism, which is bad enough, but I don’t recall him urging the use of force to compel the profession of absurd beliefs.
I already lamented our lack of a control universe. I agree any cross-cultural approximation would be a lousy proxy. Even the best minds ever to consider these questions have been unable to establish the existence of any gods external to the human imagination, except by presuming them a priori.
And if the countless gods invented so far ARE all imaginary, assuming them into existence is our only choice.
You don’t seem to distinguish between being wrong and being irrational. After all, “you can’t prove me wrong” remains the strongest support of any gods.
Flint:
But you went on to say:
I disagree. That isn’t a reasonable expectation, for reasons I’ve already given.
Flint,
How did you get that idea?
I don’t see how that relates to the preceding statement. Could you elaborate?
Good answers are given. its not accurate to say otherwise even if rejecting the answers.
first thing is GOD never said he did any negative thing to anybody.
All negative things comes from Satan. Its satan that is causing us to decay in our bodies until it kills our bodies.
Many Christians might argue God also clobbers people but I suspect not.
He just takes responsibility. like in the Job story.
Its an equation.
In fact justice demands all men to be instantly, painfully, executed.
god just gives us a chance, 70 years , to get saved.
Until Jesus/jewish customs correctly done, this never worked.
God in reality is the one who helps all men avoid car accidents, have fun vacations,
and heal us. He does nothing but love and kindness. He never does evil or allow evil unless it can’t be helped.
remember job.
Byers:
So you think the Bible gets it completely wrong, then?
So your “argument” is a question. That’s all it’s ever been. Then you wonder why Christians don’t accept your “conclusion.”
What argument? You admitted that all you did was ask a question.
Why not ask phoodoo to answer the question, and then when his answer, or lack of answer, fails to satisfy you, explain exactly what follows from that and why it follows.
It’s been done already and you ignored it. Chalk one up for your side!
Mung,
I can’t answer any more questions until he answers how much money he wants God to give him.
You do love to rip bible verses out of context, don’t you.
It is foolish to the Jews, who ask for signs from heaven. And it is foolish to the Greeks, who seek human wisdom.
You should take that to heart.
He wants enough money to enable him to prevent flooding.
I repeat:
Christians,
Your fellow Christian, Mung, is predictably running away instead of defending Christianity. Can you do better?
I explain, in the OP, why the Cross is an embarrassment to Christianity. What is your counterargument, if you have one?
Mung,
What kind of God makes a world that has water.
From what you say and how you behave. I’m no fan of Christian ideas of atonement and sacrifice and cross, but you misrepresent those ideas for evidently emotional reasons. You’re right that anti-intellectualism makes Christianity look bad, but your implicit alternative is even worse, not better.
I’m curious to know what you imagine his “implicit alternative” might be.
Erik:
keiths:
Erik:
What specifically have I said that led you to that bizarre conclusion?
Provide a quote, please, and explain your reasoning.
Erik:
KN:
Me too. Erik?
Erik:
Specifics, please.
Quote me, explain why my statement is wrong, and then supply your own corrected version.
Of course you can answer it. For example, I could just say none at all.
Even if you don’t agree with that particular limitation, there has to be some sort of limitation of how much suffering the world could contain before it becomes incompatible with the idea that the world is the way a loving God wants it to be.
It’s all in the word loving, and the idea of God purportedly being omnipotent. I don’t think that if you love someone, that you want them to suffer. Generally we want the people we love to be happy. But we can’t make everyone happy, and we can’t make them happy all the time. We are limited in that way. God supposedly isn’t.
If there is no amount of suffering the world could contain, that you would take as evidence against it’s being made or orchestrated by a loving God, then your whole concept of love (or omnipotence) has to go, because then we apparently mean something completely different from each other by those words.
It becomes particularly problematic when many theists take the good things that happen in the world to be evidence of a loving God, but they don’t take bad things as evidence against it. I wonder how much of your time you spend telling christians, jews and muslims how people’s good fortunes isn’t evidence that there is a loving God. I’m going to guess none at all. Which reveals either that you have a double standard, or a fundamental misunderstanding about how evidence works.
Precisely! And this is the crux of finding out what keiths means by loving-does it mean you have to have NO suffering at all. I have explained this a hundred times.
And then your definition of a loving God means all whip cream all the time (that is obviously a euphemism for only pleasure, infinitely). So in order to satisfy such demands, that means no mosquito bites, no having to walk uphills, no dandruff, no having to wake up and work when you don’t want to, no having to comfort anyone who is sick, no having to feed your family, no heartache, no struggle.
So without a definition from your side about how much suffering YOU say a loving God would allow, you have no argument at all.
All you argue for is heaven for everyone, and who is everyone? All possible beings-so infinite souls getting infinite pleasure, with no such thing as pain. In a world with choices.
Are you starting to see the problem yet?
so christianity still going strong for over 2,000 years….and atheism still at best 5% of the population over millenium….
and keith declares the cross an embarrassment?????
ha, basic reasoning skills kill this argument with a fly swat.
keith is bored to death with atheism I take it.
The problem with emotional arguments, when they distort the actual picture, is not just that they distort they actual picture, but for the reasons why they distort, namely the emotional reasons.
In the current case, you state that the cross is an embarrassment. I understand that it’s an embarrassment from your point of view, and you give a good argument for it (mostly emotional), but that’s no reason why it should apply for Christians. From Christians point of view, if the given Christian has a hard time making sense of it (which is admittedly often the case), the cross is a mystery and for this reason difficult to discuss with outsiders, but mystery is not the same as embarrassment.
This is one aspect how you misrepresent. But you have done this with every point of Christian doctrine you ever touched.
That’s pretty lame, Erik. I didn’t claim that Christians were universally embarrassed by the Cross. Quite the contrary. I wrote:
Your claim is bogus. I didn’t misrepresent them.
In the remainder of the OP, I explained why the Cross is an embarrassment, beginning with the very next sentence:
Erik,
Don’t forget to address the other two questions.
Steve:
Hinduism has been going strong for even longer. Will you be converting, Steve?
When one criticizes something without spelling out a better alternative, the most obvious implicit alternative is either the exact opposite or NOTHING (i.e. even more anti-intellectual than what keiths is criticizing here). Either way, having no EXPLICIT alternative is bad enough, because such is not a constructive criticism, but a destructive one. Destructive criticism is good only in very limited cases, specifically when you know fully what you are criticizing (a mark of which is that you don’t veer towards misrepresentation), you know why and how it deserves to be destroyed and you also know that the consequences of the destruction won’t be harmful. In this case, keiths knows none of it.
Oh, please.
First of all, it’s ridiculous to suggest that one can’t criticize an idea unless one has a replacement in mind. Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if science operated that way, for instance?
Second, there is an obvious “implicit alternative” which I am now making explicit: Stop believing in Christianity.
Was that so hard to figure out?
You mean like evolution for instance?
So the alternative is NOTHING. How does NOTHING do any good, in your opinion?
phoodoo:
I’ve told you more than once. The answer is no.
False. I don’t need to answer that question in order to show that God is far less loving than a typical human. That’s why you are terrified of Timothy’s question. You know what comes next.
So summon your courage and answer Timothy’s question:
Erik,
No, the alternative is to stop believing in Christianity. That isn’t “nothing.” Ask anyone who’s done it after being seriously committed to Christianity.
keiths:
phoodoo:
Sure. Why not?
Our complaint isn’t that IDers criticize (or attempt to criticize) evolution. It’s that they take ID to be the default position.
Such as yourself? Describe how serious your commitment was.
Erik,
keiths:
Erik:
For my story, see this series of comments. Then imagine how much harder it is for someone who’s spent decades as a Christian!
To dismiss it as “nothing” is ridiculous.
I know that it’s hard. So why do you suggest to stop believing in Christianity? It only makes sense to stop believing when there is a clearly better positive alternative.
And I don’t see any commitment in your story. In your case, you treated it as a cultural burden from your parents. There’s no intellectual or practical commitment in that, just emotional ballast.
Erik:
Then stop dismissing it as “nothing”.
Because it’s false, and because truth matters.
Did you actually read my comments? I don’t see how you could have, while still concluding that I treated my faith as merely “a cultural burden from my parents.”
I’ve noticed that believers often try to minimize the prior faith of apostates. I guess it makes them feel better. “Oh, he never really took his faith seriously anyway.” Is that what you’re doing?
Having nothing to stand on is very hard, but it’s still NOTHING you are standing on.
About the cross you are not saying that it’s false. You are saying it makes no sense. There may be various reasons why it makes no sense to you, falsity may not be necessarily the case.
What in your story should be proving to me that you took it seriously? Because the doctrine was puzzling to you? The fact that it’s hard to convert away from Christianity? Do your personal difficulties mean you were being seriously committed?