“If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.” –H.P. Lovecraft
What if good and evil were dictated to you by a single person? What I mean is what if you as a thinking, perceiving, judging being with a vested interest in organizing the desirability of your actions and the actions of others toward you were granted these tools by an entity who forbade you to use them? Instead you were simply instructed in the correct way to behave with the threat of punishment and/or the promise of reward motivating you, like an animal when first domesticated. Whether your logical instinct (yes, logic is a natural human instinct, honed vastly more in some individuals than others but every person wields some degree of reasoning ability) agreed with or objected to these instructions is irrelevant because you must obey. Your instincts must be muted or warped in order to avoid conflict. Does this reek of sadism to you? If not then chances are the rest of what I am about to say will be way over your head, but you are welcome and encouraged to read on anyway.
“God punishes us for what we can’t imagine” –Stephen King, Duma Key
Is it God who dictates what is good and evil? Why? I will not discuss the historical origins of Judeo-Christian morality partially because it is irrelevant to me as a creative individual fully capable of originating a unique and practical (i.e. subservient to me) ethic for living. Mostly the reason is because for this journey, we will assume that there is a God exactly as characterized in the Bible and that morality originated from Him. God created the sun and the earth and all of the creatures that inhabit it. His special project was man, into whose nostrils He breathed the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). Then He puts Adam, the first man, and later Eve, the first woman, into this lovely garden where everything necessary for sustaining life grows from the trees which they are free to eat from (Gen. 2:8-9). There is no death or suffering whatsoever, also Adam is comfortably nude. He also places there, so conveniently accessible, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He warns Adam that if he eats from that tree he will die (Gen. 2:16-17) though one must wonder if Adam could really have understood the meaning of that having no basis of knowledge. Later Satan visits Eve in the form of a serpent and coaxes her into eating the fruit, saying that her eyes will be opened and she will know good and evil (Gen. 3:4-5). Long story short, she ate it and Adam had a few bites as well, their eyes were open and God was angry for the first, but certainly not the last, time. He cursed the whole earth, all the little critters that had nothing to do with Adam and Eve’s transgression, and took away Satan’s legs making him a regular everyday snake although it seems like he can shape shift pretty well so one can only wonder how that constituted a punishment. They got kicked out of the garden too, that almost goes without saying. Now animals had to eat each other to survive, childbirth became painful for women, and men had to work much harder to harvest the fields. Day-to-day living was burdensome in other words. Did I mention that all future generations are grandfathered into this? Yes, when God gets angry nobody is safe from His wrath.
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” –Isaiah 45:7
From that point on, God would pop up from time to time instruct His children to carry out His bidding. This includes gathering armies to kill off whole nations because he decided some other nation should occupy the land or because the leader of that nation did something He was not keen on. Those of us who grew up going to church probably remember how Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped off the map by two angels. The angels first paid a visit to Lot, a teetotaling and righteous old man with a wife two daughters, to warn him that the villages would soon be destroyed and they should leave. When the angels came, some of the townsfolk, who were into group activities if you know what I mean, asked Lot to turn the two angels over to them. Lot, being the righteous man he was, offered up his two daughters instead. No dice, these people were getting all hot and bothered and would settle for nothing less than two angels. So Lot leads them all out the backdoor (no pun intended, honestly) and they escape just as the towns go up in flames. As they were escaping the angels told Lot and his family not to look behind them. Lot’s wife, naturally curious about all the fire and brimstone raining from the sky, instinctively looks behind her. And she became a pillar of salt as punishment for her insolence. There were no other survivors of Sodom and Gomorrah since no one else was apparently fit to live. Are we to believe then that all of the residents were rapists or otherwise “wicked”? Probably not. Aside from a town of nothing but rapists being a pretty far-fetched scenario and settling in such a place with your wife and two daughters unbelievably stupid, it’s just not God’s style to only punish those who actually did something wrong. As for Lot and his daughters, they settled in the wilderness. His daughters, having no eligible suitors around decided to get him drunk and become pregnant by him while he was passed out. God had nothing to say in the matter so we can safely assume that he approved.
“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.” –H.P. Lovecraft
Now onto Leviticus, we have God handing down the Law for the nation of Israel to Moses. Actually it started in Exodus and some laws are mentioned in Deuteronomy and Numbers but Leviticus is where all the laws are dictated very matter-of-factly. God’s Law seems pretty straightforward at first: if you murder somebody, you get murdered back, compensation for property damage, trial by judge, etc. Reasonable, right? Not a chance! As the Law gets more nuanced, any semblance of rationality that hitherto existed just disintegrates. In fact, it’s rather comical in a bleak, absurd, postmodern sort of way. I will now mention some of my favorites.
•If two men are fighting (physically) and one man’s wife intervenes by grabbing the other man’s testicles, her husband must cut off her hand and “show her no pity” (Deut. 25:12).
•If two men or two women have sex with one another, they must “certainly” be put to death (Lev. 20:13). So apparently those Westborough Church people saying, “God hates fags” are entirely correct.
•If a man or woman has or tries to have sex with an animal, they, and the animal (whether or not it was consensual) must be killed (Lev. 20:15-16). There is no mention of furries, but they should probably be killed too just to be safe. After all, you wouldn’t want to anger God by not killing everyone you’re supposed to.
•Interestingly enough, if you accidentally harm a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry but doing no other damage, you only pay her monetary compensation (Exodus 21:22). So then abortion isn’t really murder and all the pro-life people are totally incorrect?
•Incest of any sort is a capital offense. Having sex with your mother, father, brother sister, aunt, or uncle results in public execution of all parties involved (unless you’re Lot or one of his daughters I suppose) (Lev. 20:17). There is no mention of cousins so if you have an attractive cousin who is open to experimentation, the both of you should just go to town on eachother. Oh, and marrying two sisters or a woman and her mother is bad and will result in being burned to death (Lev. 20:14).
•Rape. This is one of the most confusing. If a man rapes a woman and is not caught in the act then he is to be killed. However, if he is caught in the act then the rapist must pay the father of the rapee fifty silver shekels and the woman and the rapist must be married and are never allowed to divorce (Deut. 22:25-29). As if being raped wasn’t bad enough, now the woman has to spend the rest of her life with her rapist. I’m not sure how this amounts to a punishment for the rapist other than he’s only allowed to rape the one woman for the rest of his life.
•If you buy a male slave, his service lasts for six years. However, any sons or daughters he bears while a slave belong to his master (Exodus 21:2-4). Also if you have a daughter and want some extra cash, you are allowed to sell her into slavery or prostitution. Unlike the male slaves, female slaves are never allowed to go free (Exodus 21:7-8).
•If a child is constantly disobedient and does not listen to his father and mother; he must be stoned to death (Deut. 21:18-21).
•Is your family telling you that you should worship a different god? Guess what you have to do? If you said stone all of them to death “showing no pity” then you are absolutely correct! (Deut. 13:6-10)
•In fact, if anyone in any town is telling you to worship the wrong god then it is your duty to slaughter all of the town’s residents, even if they had no part in it. The entire town is to be demolished and remain “a ruin for all time” (Deut. 13:13-17). I start to wonder, is God simply not able to differentiate between individual organisms or does he just love killing for its own sake?
•If you’re a man and your genitals were injured in some freak accident, or you were married to Lorena Bobbitt, you aren’t allowed in church. Period (Deut. 23:1). As much as God despises when people enjoy sex, he’s not terribly fond of eunuchs either.
•Other things: magicians must be killed, women who falsely claimed to be virgins before marriage must be killed, and when you defecate outdoors you must bury it.
Now you might be thinking to yourself that most of these things are totally absurd and perhaps even immoral. Remember, God is the source of morality and if He says it is right then by God it is right! You think you can determine what is right or wrong on your own? Oh, brother are you in for it now! God will now single you out for endless torment! (Deut. 29:19-20) And you thought he was angry before!
“And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” –Exodus 32:14
One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is the story of Job. Job was by all accounts a righteous and decent man living on his farm in the merry old land of Uz with his wife, seven sons, three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 oxen, 500 donkeys, and a lot of servants (Job 1:1-3). Everything was going pretty well for Job and his family until one day God and Satan got to talking. To paraphrase, the conversation went something like this:
GOD: What have you been up to lately?
SATAN: Wandering the Earth, this and that.
GOD: Have you by any chance noticed my faithful and righteous servant, Job? Yeah he pretty much worships me.
SATAN: Well no wonder, look at all the stuff you gave him! Wealth, health, property, a beautiful family, why wouldn’t he be faithful to you? But take all that away, he’d probably curse you to your face.
GOD: Oh yeah? Sounds like a wager to me! Go ahead, I will let you do whatever you want to him as long as you don’t harm him physically. Then we shall see!
SATAN: You’re on!
Later, Job and his family are sitting at the table having a nice quiet dinner when he gets word from one of his servants that all of his oxen and donkeys were stolen and the servants who were tending them killed by Sabeans. At that very moment another servant came to tell him that all of his sheep and the servants who were tending them were immolated by fire from the heavens. And then another servant came and told him that all of his camels were stolen and the servants tending them killed by Chaldeans. Then another servant runs up and tells him that his sons and daughters were all killed when the house collapsed on them (you leave the house for one second and everything falls apart!). So Job’s response was to shave his head and lay on the ground nude, accepting his fate. Never did he curse the Lord’s name (Job 1:13-22). Then God and Satan are talking again, paraphrased (Job 2:1-5):
GOD: See, he didn’t curse my name! Even though you persuaded me to destroy his entire life for no reason whatsoever!
SATAN: OK, OK, but I bet if you strike him with illness he won’t be so fond of you.
GOD: Well, since proving you wrong is more important to me than anything else, I will let you do just that. Only do not kill him.
And so Satan goes off and strikes Job with painful boils all his body. Job responds by sitting in a pile of ashes and dung outside of town and cutting himself with shards of broken pottery. This, I think, captures the spirit of masochism so pervasive throughout the Bible in the Old and New Testaments.
Even his wife comes up to him after a while and says, “Are you still holding on to your perfect righteousness? Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9). His wife certainly saw the writing on the wall. God is a depraved lunatic!
Job, like any righteous man, refused to listen to his wife. Instead he counters her foolish blathering with perfectly sound reasoning, “You speak like a foolish woman! Shall we accept what is good from God and not also accept what is evil?” (Job 2:10).
Of course we must accept whatever God has planned for us, because He is God and His infinite wisdom cannot be questioned, even if His plan is “evil”. What are we to try to understand God’s motivation? We are just cogs in His machine, created for his own cryptic purposes, made to suffer for what appears to be a histrionic need for praise and approval. But wait! There’s more! Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar heard that Job’s life was in the crapper and decided to come cheer him up. They saw him in his dung heap covered in boils and self-inflicted lacerations and didn’t recognize him at first. But then when they saw it was him and realized the severity of his suffering, they fell to the ground and wept before him for seven days and nights not saying anything. Those are some devoted friends.
And then Job finally says, “Why is life given to those in misery, bitter in soul, longing for a death that does not come?” (Job 2:11-3:21).
Then Eliphaz says, “Blessed is the man who God corrects! Do not despise the discipline of the Lord. He wounds, but he also bandages. He strikes, but he also heals.”
Job responds, “Where have I done wrong? Show me, and I will be quiet. But do not judge me falsely, for my righteousness is intact.”
And Bildad says to Job, “Does God pervert justice? Certainly God would not forsake a perfectly righteous man, nor give aid to an evildoer.” Clearly Bildad doesn’t know God very well!
Job, finally beginning to understand, replies, “How can a man argue his innocence before God? Who contends with him and survives? Who dares to question his actions? He overturns mountains in his anger. He does not restrain his fury. Even though I am innocent, if I summoned God, he would not listen to my case–he who crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my injuries for no reason. He destroys the righteous and the wicked. When a disaster brings sudden death, he laughs at the despair of the innocent.”
Deeply offended by Job’s totally unfounded cynicism about God, Zophar says, “Is all this talk to go unanswered? How I wish God would speak and reveal to you his wisdom, for then you would know that God has punished you less than your sin actually deserves!”
After some more dialog along these lines a fourth man named Elihu shows up to condemn Job, “I have heard you say, ‘I am without transgression, clean, and without sin, and yet God treats me like an enemy.’ But you are wrong about this. Far be it from God to do evil. God does not act wickedly. He does not pervert justice. He repays a man for his deeds. He watches the righteous carefully, exalting them. When they are bound by affliction, he tells them what sins they have committed, so they me be corrected. Take heed: do not turn to sin. It is for this you are being tested by affliction. Who is a better teacher than God?”
Wait, didn’t we already read several times that God does commit evil acts? Well, anyway, after Job asks God several times to appear and explain why he has wrought such disaster on his life, God finally does appear as a whirlwind and says, “Who is this speaking in ignorance? Gird your loins like a man and I will question you, and you will answer me! Where were you when I was laying the foundation for the earth? Who determined its measurements? On what are its foundations sunk? Who laid its cornerstone? …Have you ever in your life commanded the dawn to know its place that it might take hold of the foundations of the earth and shake the wicked out of it? …Can you comprehend the expanse of the earth? Do you know where light dwells and where darkness lives and how to get there? Surely you know, for the number of your days is so great! …Do you know what time of year mountain goats or deer give birth? Do you know how many months their pregnancy lasts? Did you give the horse its strength? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, or the eagle dwells in rocky crags? Its young ones feast on blood wherever a carcass lies. Will the one who argues with the Lord correct him? He, who disputes with God, let him answer!” Apparently everything God does is just simply because he is powerful. Might is right.
Prompted for response by an angry force of nature, Job understandably quiets down, “I am insignificant. How can I answer you? I put my hand over my mouth and will say no more.” God then reproaches Job for questioning him, then reproaches his friends for whatever and commands them to make burnt sacrifices with seven bulls and seven rams. I never understood how God benefits from people killing animals in his name, but then again there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense about Him. Then God leaves, having successfully evaded Job’s question, but rewards Job with twice the fortune he had before and a replacement family, seven sons and daughters. From God’s perspective everything was fixed, even though he allowed Job’s first family to be killed, a new one is just as good, right? Again, God seems to be incapable of recognizing the uniqueness of individual organisms and thus the emotional bonds that form between them are foreign to him. In a sense, God is like an omnipotent sociopath who only feels anger, jealousy, and desire for control, but is mostly unable to feel or even comprehend compassion, joy, love, or any other positive emotion. God cannot explain his own actions because they are entirely impulsive with no sound rationale behind them. Also, there is no mention of what happened to Job’s boils.
“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” –Jesus Christ, Luke 14:26
Many Christians will tell you that when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born it was the end of the old covenant between God and man and thus the end of the old God’s reign of terror. From now on, God would be a God of love, forgiveness, and all the other things he wasn’t before. Jesus Christ was immaculately conceived by God’s design in order to die with the burden of all the sins of mankind so that they may be forgiven and achieve eternal life with their Creator. According to the Christ’s own words, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact he explicitly states that he did not come to abolish, but fulfill, the Law of Moses (Matthew 5:17). It is still the duty of God’s children to obey the commandments and put homosexuals and non-believers to death. What exactly did Jesus teach that made him so popular? Let’s start with Jesus’ more uplifting messages:
•Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, etc., love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back (Luke 6:27-35). Sure, that sounds like pretty smart way to conduct your life.
•Forgive and you will be forgiven. If you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you (Matthew 6:14). Shouldn’t it matter more whether other people forgive my actions toward them rather than God? It doesn’t make sense for a third party to be involved in the forgiving process.
•Give unconditionally without asking for anything in return (Luke 6:30).
•Sell all of your possessions and give the money to the poor, which does not include you, despite now being poor yourself (Mark 6:21). The point being that since the goal is eternal salvation after death, having nice things in this life is only a distraction. You are not living for this life. But if this course of action is beneficial to the Christian, then why give your money to the poor? Wouldn’t that distract them from the Kingdom of God?
•Sex and marriage are idle distractions from the Lord. Self-castration will bring you closer to God (Matthew 19:10-11). So being a eunuch is okay again?
Okay so the last one wasn’t so uplifting, but the rest of these teachings seem pretty benevolent, right? Give, forgive, love your enemy, and don’t be distracted by possessions—certainly he was a man of peace! Not according to his own words, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have come not to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). And, “I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already!” (Luke 12:49). He came to divide people, the believers and the non-believers. While he certainly advocated “turning the other cheek,” the reasoning goes back to the idea that this life does not matter, that true justice will be done in the next. What is this justice? If you become a follower of Jesus Christ, you will be transported after death to the Kingdom of God to live for all eternity. If not, you will be cast into eternal fire with the Devil and his angels to suffer eternal punishment (Matthew 25:41-46). The kicker here is that before Jesus Christ, there was no heaven or hell at all. When you died you stayed dead and had the peace of not suffering under God’s demented persecution anymore. I can only assume God was getting irritated that people were allowed to escape his torture simply by dying so he changed the rules. Now anyone who refused to obey his confusing and asinine rules would not have the satisfaction of dying as dissidents. Now they would burn in a pit of fire for all eternity. As for the very few who actually make it into heaven (144,000 in all according to Revelation), their reward is to spend eternity locked in a cell with a homicidal maniac. The precedent for all this is of course Original Sin, the sin that Adam and Eve committed in the garden well before any of us were ever born. God’s logic holds all of us accountable for it, and thus he is completely justified in torturing us however he wants.
Knowing what we know about God, would you bother trying to get into heaven or take your chances in hell? Which is worse? In fact which is “moral”? To draft yourself into God’s malevolent plan and save yourself from an eternity of torment only to face an eternity of God knows what? Or raise your middle finger to God and his morals and make your own way, knowing that eternal damnation awaits? It should be obvious now that God is in fact not the source of morality, despite being omnipotent. If morals do come from God, then morality is evil, because God and his plan are, as any rational human being can so plainly see, evil.
“When God blows into town, there’s hell to pay.” –me
What is God’s plan anyway? This thing that everything and everyone are supposedly a part of, what is this huge design that we are incapable of understanding? Well at least part of it is outlined for us. The book of Revelation tells us the fate of this planet and it’s inhabitants. Not surprisingly, God plans to raze the whole thing and start over; it’s completely disposable to Him. The apocalypse, Armageddon, the reckoning, whatever, is scheduled to occur during a period of great “evil” which I can only assume means a time when people coexist in relative peace and do not suffer from an irrational guilt complex. Basically Jesus opens six seals, each containing a freaky beast of destruction. God commands these creatures to kill one quarter of the Earth’s population via all manner of disasters. War, famine, disease, earthquake, meteors, etc. While everything is going to hell, the surviving population holes up in caves. Meanwhile those 144,000 Christians mentioned before are branded with marks on their foreheads, exempting them from the sheer insanity that is about to ensue. Then the seventh seal is opened, more earthquakes and meteors (flaming hail mixed with blood?) and a third of the Earth is burned to a crisp. Then something resembling a giant flaming mountain, presumably an even bigger meteor (God loves meteors, doesn’t he?), crashes into the ocean turning a third of the oceans into blood, killing a third of the sea life. Then a “giant star named Wormwood” (another meteor? I’m not sure) crashes into the rivers poisoning a third of the water supply. On and on it goes, until the Earth is completely annihilated. So, following the holocaust of all human life, everyone who is not a Christian goes to… hell! Hell is mentioned 162 times in the New Testament, mostly spoken by Jesus as a threat. In fact Jesus speaks more about hell than anything else. It is characterized mainly as a place with lots of fire, darkness, pain, flesh-eating worms, sadness, weeping, and gnashing of teeth. It’s easy to see how hell can be used as a tool to manipulate people to conform to God’s morals; eternal unbearable physical pain is not enticing in the least. Why take a chance? Despite the obvious illogic in condemning people to eternal torment for finite transgressions against the Law, God is in fact omnipotent and whether His morality makes sense, is fair, or good is irrelevant because there is no hope of resisting Him. The truth is we are powerless subjects of an Almighty God and can either obey and become servants of evil for all eternity, or disobey and suffer unimaginable pain for all eternity. This is the horrifying reality of existence, and while we may reject God’s morality and live short lives as civil, loving human beings, damnation awaits in one form or another.
Before I posit the final conclusions of my analysis of Christian theology, I should explain why I wrote this whole essay. This malevolent interpretation of Christianity will form the premise of a novel I’ve just barely started working on and have a long, long way to go on. The novel is essentially a horror in the vein of Lovecraft, where a large part of the horror element is derived from the sense of existential dread present in so much of his work. The feeling that something terrible beyond control or understanding is at hand. Anyway, I figured it would be best to outline the point of the story before going too far into writing it. In the meantime, I hope this was at least an enjoyable read. Okay, so here are your options as I see it:
a. Reject your own morality; minimizing your physical suffering is what matters. Become an agent of God’s never-ending design for suffering. In time your sense of right and wrong will be reconciled with God’s. There will be no cognitive dissonance and you will firmly believe that you are right in serving God.
b. Reject God’s morality; you will go to hell and suffer for all eternity but you may have temporary happiness knowing you lived well while you did, and you lived without God. Perhaps this is the best we can hope for, to spite God by opting out of His plan.
I guess they ended up loving Big Brother after all.
