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The
Grotesqueness and Absurdity of Christianity |
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The Grotesqueness and Absurdity of Christianity Contents Introductory Remarks Christianity truly is grotesque. There are numerous aspects of the religion that are utterly gruesome or disturbing, that should horrify any person living today, so long as he is neither utterly devoid of compassion nor lacking the most meager sense of decency. Of course, even a heartless scoundrel, if he possesses a modicum of honesty and anything more than the most rudimentary intellect, should still turn from the religion, since it is based upon thoroughly unreliable testimony and is suffused with so much that is completely absurd that the entire system is an assault on reason and an offense against intelligence. Admittedly, the religion's ridiculousness and ugliness have not always been so obvious. There was once a time when Christianity so dominated European culture that any intellectual endeavor had to be pursued either within the context of the religion or with the blessings of its temporal hierarchy. Any reasoning that contradicted Christian doctrines was likely to put the person following such heretical thoughts in danger, possibly even of losing his life. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the most sophisticated systems of philosophy from such times support the religion. I might add that these systems, which are frequently impressive displays of logic and ingenuity, are genuinely worthy of admiration (even if they often include defenses of the indefensible), as are the truly great thinkers who produced them, persons who, moreover, ought not to be faulted for not seeing the weaknesses of the religion they supported, since they did live in an intellectually confined world in which, as I have said, heterodoxy could be lethal. The days of a single orthodoxy are, however, over. The world we live in today is quite different from that of the past. It is teeming with a variety of intellectual traditions, both philosophic and scientific, and though we can be ostracized for advocating some of these, we can still expose ourselves to them. Being thus free both to search for the truth and to be honest about the evidence presented to us, we who enjoy this present liberty cannot but discover the horrors and grotesqueries of Christianity. These are not only numerous and extreme, but some of them also entail such ridiculous consequences that they reveal the falsity of the religion. The age of the theologian has, consequently, come to an end. Unfortunately, though their church has been weakened by centuries of attack, there are still innumerable Christians who are eager to suppress intellectual discourse and impose their bigoted ethics on others. It is in opposition to these persons, who are a real danger to freedom, compassion, and progress, that I make my accusations. For its advocacy of a primitive morality which is hurtful both to its practitioners and others, I condemn Christianity, for its dependence upon thoroughly unreliable sources, I reject it, and with its contradictory doctrines I refute it. The religion is hurtful in practice, unjustified, and demonstrably false. Topic I: Religion and Life in This World Part I: Otherworldliness and Asceticism Christianity's worldview, its devaluation of the physical universe in favor of an imaginary spiritual plane, its claims that God's "kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) and that "they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts" (Galatians 5:24), has done tremendous harm to every culture that the religion has influenced. Countless opportunities to relish life have been squandered by countless Christians as a result of their believing that this world and the delights of this world are evil, that they, and all other human beings, are somehow guilty for tasting these pleasures, and that they must, for that guilt, endure punishment, whether this is self-imposed in this life or is inflicted by god in an otherworldly hell. What is more, not only has the religion caused ordinary people to make their lives less enjoyable, but it has also led many of its more devoted adherents to strive actively for personal misery. There can be no denying that numerous individuals, often of dubious mental health, have been prompted by the religion to perform savage, absurd, and revolting acts of penitence to free themselves of any attachment to their bodies, to tear themselves, as gruesomely as possible, from the fetters of this "vale of tears" (as the world is characterized in the Salve Regina). Fortunately, the briefest of descriptions of even a few of these sad creatures should be sufficient to make my point. St. Simeon Stylites squandered a large portion of his life dwelling on top of various pillars. The last of these, on which he spent twenty years, was sixty feet high and six feet wide. Perched there, exposed to the elements and isolated from temptation, he starved himself and preached to anyone who would come to listen to his ravings. St. Abraham Kidunaia "walled up the door of his cell, leaving only a little window through which food could be passed...His only remaining possessions were a cloak, a goatskin garment, a bowl for food and drink, and a rush mat on which he slept. 'He was never seen to smile..and he regarded each day as his last...And, what is even more surprising, never once, in fifty years, did he change his coat of goatskin.'" (Butler's Lives of the Saints, Walsh, ed., pp. 81-82). One more example should suffice. St. Rose of Lima lived in a shed in her parents' garden and, having heard others praise her beauty, "used to rub her face with pepper, in order to disfigure her skin with blotches. A woman happening one day to admire the fineness of the skin of her hands and her shapely fingers, she rubbed them with lime, and in consequence was unable to dress herself for a month" (Ibid., Walsh, ed., p. 260). Imagining the sufferings these people inflicted upon themselves is thoroughly unpleasant, but worse than this is the realization that innumerable others have been tricked into thinking such masochistic actions are admirable and have been inspired by these examples to do harm to themselves when they might not otherwise have done so. That said, such extreme, grisly, and genuinely disturbing asceticism has never been performed by the majority of Christians, since most people, remaining affected by their natural impulses as living beings, even if they are corrupted by religion, still want to live in this world. Nonetheless, a significant number of deluded individuals, living at every time Christianity has existed, have, as a result of being misled by the teachings of that faith, indulged in various forms of self-harm, in flagellation, self-starvation, and physical disfigurement. I am truly horrified to think of how Christianity has caused so many human beings to injure and torture themselves. Such practices, I should add, are not things that have come to be appended to the religion, which are not integral to it. They have been performed by Christians throughout the religion's history precisely because they are based on injunctions and ideas stated in the Bible itself. Let us remember that Jesus himself said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). Many of Paul's admonitions elaborate on this. "But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway" (I Corinthians 9:27). Even more explicitly, he stated, " If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: For which things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience" (Colossians 3:1-6). Later developments of these doctrines into macabre ballets of self-torture in various Christian traditions are nothing more than attempts to flesh out concepts that are present in the religion's scripture. This glorification of asceticism is, moreover, grounded in the religion's fundamental disdain of the physical world. The goodness of both the discarnate soul, which is pure and god-like, and heaven, its perfect and immaterial true home, are repeatedly contrasted in the New Testament with the evil of both the body, which is the seat of sin, and this world, which is a deadly wilderness, where the enfleshed, imprisoned soul dwells in exile, beset with temptations. A few samples from that text should illustrate my point and demonstrate how much the sinfulness of the physical body is stressed and set against the purity of the spirit. We read:
With such claims, the real, this world, and all the wonders, beauties, and pleasures that can be found in the numberless physical entities existing therein, are rejected as sinful, and the unreal, the realm of the spirit, is lauded as worthy. Even the simple joys of this painful yet beautiful universe, the tastes of its various foods, the pleasures of its diverse sexual acts, the majesty of its natural features, the sweetness of the relationships existing among its inhabitants, the rejoicing in the works of art or systems of philosophy created by the skills and minds of men, and so on and so on, are, at most, reduced to mere expressions of the divine will or, at worst, denigrated as aberrations. St. Augustine of Hippo, for example, rails against the pleasures of the flesh and warns his reader against indulging in them. He claims that there is "an ominous kind of enjoyment" in eating and that food should be viewed merely as a necessary medicine, since taking pleasure in food is a "snare of concupiscence" (Augustine, Confessions, R.S. Pine-Coffin, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 1985 reprint), X.31, p. 235). The good saint was no more comfortable relishing the delights of the other senses. St. Augustine's battle with the joys of the flesh was, perhaps, the most violent struggle against his body that he fought, and he moans that "Nothing prevented me from plunging still deeper into the gulf of carnal pleasure except the fear of death and your [god's] judgement to come" (Ibid. VI.16, pp. 131-132). His (probably related) dread that the sight of beautiful shapes and colors might take possession of his soul prompted him to ask for god's help to avoid "being caught in a trap" by such allurements, which are "sweet and tempting, but dangerous" (Ibid., X.34, p. 240). St. Augustine goes on to thank god for freeing him from his enthrallment to the delights of sound, though he does worry that, when listening to hymns (which he concedes are a profitable use of music), he might pay too much attention to the music itself and so let it lead him astray. Even the sense of smell, the pleasures of which, he says, do not tempt him, made him nervous, since (this life being the "perpetual trial" that it is) he was wracked by the fear that he could be wrong about such a lack of temptation (Ibid., X.32, p. 238). Though St. Augustine is unusually systematic in his denunciations of the pleasures of the body, he is hardly alone. A dread of the physical world pervades Christian thought, and this fear, which is often transformed into loathing, both of the world and of anyone who indulges in its delights, whether this person is the Christian himself or someone else, has adversely affected many adherents of the religion. There are, consequently, unnumbered millions of ordinary people, many living today, who, though they might not burn the skin from their hands, wear hairshirts, or whip themselves, still have turned their backs on this world and its joys while pining away for some Cloudcuckooland. Instead of relishing the here and now, they have cast away opportunities for real delights for empty promises of something better. Listening to the teachings of their religion, these Christians have denigrated the enjoyment of food and drink as gluttony, of sex in its countless forms as licentiousness, and have even attacked art, whether by demanding that it whore itself by serving some doctrine or by condemning some entire medium, as the religion has, for instance, frequently been opposed to the theater (e.g., until the modern age, actors in Catholic nations were often denied burial in hallowed ground, and some Protestant states banned theatrical performances altogether, as was the case in several American colonies). Indulgence in any of these delights has been characterized as 'worldly,' and rejection of them as 'godly,' thereby devaluing the former and valuing the latter, which misguided characterizations have led innumerable men and women to reject the marvels of this world or, at the least, to burden themselves needlessly with guilt for having enjoyed these. Sadly, by so shunning the real and adoring the imaginary, these pathetic, deceived creatures are throwing their lives away, or, at the least, wasting countless opportunities for joy. I am not being unduly harsh in saying this, either. A person is, after all, nothing but a physical being. I have never been shown even the shakiest evidence that there is anything to a person other than his body, while I have been shown considerable evidence that the mental activities ascribed by Christians to the soul can be explained by actions of the brain. It would, consequently, be foolish of me to posit anything else to a person besides his body. Similarly, I have strong evidence that bridges stand as a result of particular substances being arranged in particular ways, which substances and arrangements are together sufficient to explain how a bridge stands. I have no evidence that bridges are really supported by invisible, immaterial fairies. Nor do I require the existence of such creatures to explain how bridges stand. I do not, as a result, posit the existence of bridge-supporting fairies. With regard to the case at hand, the nature and actions of a human being can, as I have said, be explained by his body, which is known from observation (that is to say, the nature and actions of the body can, in many cases, be seen in daily life, and, when they are not amenable to being so observed, they can still be discerned through scientific investigations using rigorous methods and specialized equipment). Medical science has even demonstrated how particular areas of the brain are responsible for certain types of cognitions, certain emotions, certain mental capacities and the like, and how stimulation of or damage to any of these areas can affect the mental functioning of a person. As a result of this empirically demonstrated linking of consciousness to brain activity, it is unnecessary to posit the existence of some other entity, some soul, evidence of which is completely lacking. I must, as a reasonable person, thus conclude that I am nothing more than my physical body. There simply is no reason to posit the existence of something totally unneeded and totally unsupported by empirical evidence, namely a soul. Happily, nothing is more noble than the physical, though Christianity endlessly teaches that the physical is wicked, polluted, or simply base. The human body is a not a temple of the soul, some container of a treasure that can itself be discarded. A person's body is who that person is. It is itself the treasure. It is all there is of a person and so contains the whole of a person's worth. We should, therefore, relish this body and the world around us, which affords us so much delight, and not live with some hope of coming to another world after death. Paradise is here and now. Even when Christians do appreciate the beauties of this world, they generally seem to do so because these things display the skill of some maker, because they point to something that is supposedly greater than they are. I thoroughly disagree with such a viewpoint. It devalues the things of the world, which can (and should) be appreciated because they are beautiful in themselves. They are not signposts pointing to unseen marvels on the other side of death; they themselves are marvels. They are, in fact, the only marvels, as the unseen marvels on the other side of death are just illusions. Unfortunately, Christianity turns us away from the real, making us think it is without worth, and directs our eyes to the imaginary, making us think that mere chimeras are what actually have value. The way the religion steals people's lives away with empty promises of some otherworldly paradise while preventing them from immersing themselves in the intoxicating, numinous magic of the wonders of the here and now all around them truly is grotesque. Part II: Ethics of the Bible Though Christianity's otherworldliness is repulsive, the morals of the religion are just as disgusting. I am thoroughly horrified by the ethics of the Bible, both as these are stated in injunctions and as they are expressed in the actions of god and his righteous followers. The book, rather than being the pure spring of morality, is a fountain of pollution spewing out the most repugnant of effluvia. Though the Bible's moral code is tempered with the occasional compassionate sentiment, the book, more often than not, provides instruction on how one should not behave. First of all, there is present in that scripture the idea that only a single god exists, one that accepts only those who embrace his favored ideology. Jesus, after all, states, "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad" (Matthew 12:30). In fact, all those persons who do not follow this one true god face an eternity in hell. The Bible is again quite precise about this. It says, "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3:36). Such an unbeliever really does not have a pleasant future according to the Bible, for "When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power" (2 Thessalonians 1:7-9). This exclusivism, which is so nicely put by St. Cyprian of Carthage in that charming phrase he originated, "Outside of the Church, there is no salvation," is, frankly, monstrous. It is an offense against common sense and the most elementary sense of decency. For one thing, this demand by god that men believe in him without proof is utterly unfair to those who have heard of him but who, being reasonable men, demand some proof of his existence, however slight. One does not, after all, believe any statement of importance without some proof, whether this is sensory perception of the entities about which the statement has been made, corroborative testimony, or simply an inference about the honesty of the testifier based on prior experience of his veracity and accuracy. In this case, god, if he does exist, has provided us with absolutely no sensory evidence of his existence; there are, moreover, the voices of other religious teachers, which not only fail to corroborate his claims, but actually contradict them, and, since god's testimony is known only through the Bible, and can be tested only by testing the veridicality of the Bible, we are forced, being reasonable persons, to doubt the accuracy of that testimony since we cannot fail to notice inaccuracies in the Bible, which even point to that text not having been composed by men guided by divine revelation. God, though he claims to be just, is instead being utterly unfair to those who have heard his word. Of course, this one true god is even more unfair to all those unfortunate enough to have been raised in regions of the world where his worship is not the dominant religion. In his boundless mercy, he excludes from heaven every such person, and, I might add, every child who died before being baptized. This idea is clearly conveyed in the text of the Council of Florence, which states, "But the souls of those who depart this life in actual mortal sin, or in original sin alone, go down straightaway to hell to be punished, but with unequal pains" (Council of Florence, Session 6). God, it would seem, wants us to roast in hell, but then perhaps he's planning a celestial barbecue for his saints, with the great mass of humanity to be served up as the main course. In fact, this doctrine of exclusivism is nothing more than an expression of tribal bigotry, of a fear of those who are different, who are, because they are different, evil and dangerous, mingled with an extreme self-affirmation that overcompensates for one's fallibility and that allows the Christian to feel right and noble at all times, assured that whatever he is doing he is doing rightly, because he is one of the few who serve the one true god, even while he arrogantly looks down with disgust and hatred at all who dare differ from him. I can certainly see how such a doctrine would have psychological appeal for the converted, a capacity for evoking fear in weak minded and doubtful heathens, thereby prompting them to convert, and utility to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, since, by keeping the fearful Christian in the church and bringing into it the fearful non-Christian, it would help to diminish competition. Such a vision is hardly surprising, however, considering that the god of the Bible himself is like some homicidal, psychopathic super-villain who is brutal to and demanding of his followers while even crueller to those who oppose him. He commands his people to commit countless acts of savagery in the Old Testament and goes on, in the New Testament, to control a harsh, unforgiving, and militaristic universe in which he and his servants wage an interminable war against Satan and his minions (i.e., everyone who isn't a Christian). The god of the Old Testament really is a nasty character. At one point, he is described as having killed twenty-four thousand people with a plague as punishment for a Jewish man's having married a Midianite woman, and having only stopped the plague's depredations when one of his decent servants stabbed the mixed couple to death (Numbers 25:6-9). Later, Moses, following god's will, ordered the Israelites to exterminate the Midianites, except for their virgin daughters, whom god's chosen were to take as sex slaves (Numbers 31.15-18). God, apparently, hated Midianites like Hitler hated Jews. Of course, god seems to hate everyone who doesn't adore him and is quite willing to kill such persons for the sake of his followers. He, for instance, smote an army of Ethiopians that opposed Asa (2 Chronicles 14:8-12) and delivered both the Canaanites and the Perizzites into the hands of the Israelites, who slaughtered them by the tens of thousands (Judges 3:28-29). This same god butchered every first born child in Egypt, irrespective of the deeds of their parents (let alone their own actions), only because he himself had caused the ruler of that nation to make a particular decision (Exodus 11:1–12:33). He even had Moses command his men to kill three thousand of his own people for their adoration of an image of a calf (Exodus 32:26-28). God is not simply vicious to his enemies, however. He can be extraordinarily cruel to his servants as well. I cannot but mention how god commanded Abraham to offer up his son Isaac as a human sacrifice. Though an angel did intervene at the last moment and prevent the murder, god, by testing his follower in such a wildly sadistic manner, must still have put the man and his son through an horrific and heart wrenching ordeal (Genesis 22). He is even more vicious to Job. After god gambled with Satan about whether Job would remain as faithful to him in adversity as he had been in prosperity, god allowed the latter to torment that man in innumerable horrific ways, including even the murder of his children. Though Job, in the end, does regain his former prosperity, this no more justifies god's allowing him to be outrageously victimized than would a similar outcome justify the persecutions of a human tyrant, nor does this restore the lives of Job's slaughtered children. The wrongs committed, or allowed to be committed, remain wrongs. The brutality of god and his faithful can be especially vicious when directed towards women. There is, for instance, the story of the Levite whose concubine left him to return to her father's house. In this, it is related how, after the man had journeyed to the house of the runaway concubine's father, regained the girl, and was travelling back to his home, he stopped in Gibeah, where he lodged in the house of an old farmer. While he was there, a group of men beat at the door and demanded that the old man give them the Levite so that they could enjoy him sexually. To avoid being so used, the Levite showed them his concubine and offered her to them. Apparently finding her to be an acceptable alternative, the men gang raped the woman throughout the night with such brutality that they killed her. The following day, the Levite, having found her corpse upon the threshold of his host's home, threw it upon his ass, took it home, chopped it up into twelve parts, and sent one of these to each of the tribes of Israel so that they would know the wickedness of the men of Gibeah (Judges 19). This is hardly the only instance in which women are brutalized by god or his servants. While waging genocidal war against the Ammonites, Jephthah vowed that if god gave him victory over his enemies, he would make a burnt offering of the first thing that came out from his house upon returning home (Judges 11:30-31). God, in his goodness, saw fit to answer this prayer and allowed Jephthah to commit a great slaughter of the Ammonites. Jephthah then returned home and first saw his daughter, but, being a good and faithful man, he did not flinch from fulfilling his vow. He sacrificed her to god, murdering his own child (Judges 11:39), an act which is never condemned in the Bible but instead, given Jephthah's later repute as a good and faithful man (Hebrews 11:32), appears to have been condoned. I will admit that god is no more cruel to those women who overtly oppose him or his people, but then, he still is just as cruel. He does, after all, turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for the heinous crime of looking back at the home she was fleeing because god was planning to burn to death every other citizen, man, woman, and child, of that city (Genesis 19:24-26). He also causes his fanatical, bigoted worshippers to murder the foreign demoness Jezebel, who dared worship some other deity, that of her childhood, and to leave her corpse in the dust to be devoured by dogs (II Kings 9:30-37). There is also that first of sinners, Eve, who, for the horrendous crime of eating a piece of fruit, is told by god that "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Genesis 3:16). While, in the New Testament, god might not be quite as actively violent to the living as he was before, he is still just as bad. For one thing, he fails to repent of his former sins and ask man to forgive him. I, for one, would be more than willing to pardon god for committing even the disturbing atrocities he boasts of committing in the Old Testament were he simply to express regret, but he never does so. What is more, god reveals that he is ready to commit further crimes, both in the present and in the future. While god, in the Old Testament, tortured, murdered, and otherwise victimized both his followers and their foes, he, at the least, never showed interest in them after they were dead. His cruelty was severe, but it was limited. In the the New Testament, god usually allows sinners to commit their sins with impunity in this life, but afterwards, in the next life, he torments them without end in ways far more savage than anything he had inflicted upon human beings before. In this new revelation, it is revealed how sinners, upon death, are to be plunged into an eternal darkness (Jude 13) of everlasting fire (Matthew 18:8-9), where, eaten by worms (Mark 9:43-49), they will ceaselessly weep and gnash their teeth (Matthew 8:12; 22:13). Unsatisfied with this regular revenge upon all those persons who fail to grovel before him, god also promises a future of true horror. He reveals how he will someday preside over the Apocalypse with all its myriad pornographic horrors, including plagues, attacks by weird monsters, and mass killings, that will end with god's enemies, human and supernatural, being thrown into a lake of fire and brimstone while the deity and his angels relish their agonies (Revelation 14:10-11, 20:10). The god of the Bible is one of the most cruel, violent, petty, and unfair rogues to have appeared in any literary work. After all, not only are the punishments of hell, being eternal, disproportionate to the crimes for which they are inflicted (no matter how severe these were), but they are, moreover, decreed by a being who claims to be all merciful and loving. Whoever is making such claims must surely be lying. God, if he exists, must be a fiend. For one thing, the punishments of hell are not intended to lead wayward children to heaven. They are nothing more than acts of retaliation, and I, for one, do not hold that the infliction of punishment, unless corrective, is an expression of love. God apparently believes that revenge is justice. Of course, this is a god who is incapable of unconditional forgiveness. Flawed, petty, and spiteful as I am, I can forgive others even though they are unrepentant, even though they hate me. It is disturbing to imagine the universe being run by a being more flawed, petty, and spiteful than I am, a being who will only forgive those who beg him to forgive them. God's actions do not exhaust the immoralities propounded in the Bible, however. There are, in addition, the endless vile moral injunctions contained in that text, which are far too numerous to list here. I'll just note that, in one place or another, the Bible states that women who have premarital sex should be stoned (Deuteronomy 22:20-21), that men who have sex with men are sinful (Romans 1:26-27), that women ought to obey their husbands in every way (Ephesians 5:22-24), that women should, moreover, dress modestly, always be subject to men, remain quiet, and never teach (1 Timothy 2:9-14), that transvestism by both men and women is offensive to god (Deuteronomy 22:5), and that a father has the right to sell his daughters into slavery (Exodus 21:7). There is, moreover, a fantastic variety of sins listed in the Bible for which persons are to be executed. These monstrous commandments to kill one's fellow living beings would have us put to death those poor sinners guilty of working on the sabbath (Exodus 31:12-17, Numbers 15:32-56), of disobeying their parents (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), of worshipping gods other than that of the Bible (Deuteronomy 17:3-5), of proselytizing for such deities (Deuteronomy 13:6-9), of patronizing wizards and mediums, of having sex with a person of the same gender, of committing bestiality, and even of being the animal sexually assaulted (for a long list of these and many others, see Leviticus 20). Clearly, I could give many further examples, but I think my point is obvious. The moral injunctions of the Bible are frequently cruel, horrid, and utterly immoral. They are the products of a brutal, ignorant people who were fearful of outsiders and lived in a primitive, superstitious age. They certainly are not arrived at by means of a rational examination of human desires and interactions which might point to what these should be. Much of the Bible, in fact, consists of a litany of crimes either committed by god and those obedient to his will or given as injunctions by god to his faithful. The book teaches men to worship a monstrous celestial rogue and to behave like rogues themselves, denying themselves the ordinary but marvelous pleasures this world offers and, at the same time, tormenting and victimizing their fellows. Quite simply, the Bible is no guide to morality. Although there are, without a doubt, many genuinely beautiful stories and inspired moral commandments included within the Bible, these can be arrived at by reason, without recourse to revelation. At the same time, that text includes countless vile narratives, sadistic injunctions, and utterly repugnant doctrines that, having been accepted by innumerable persons who have accepted the Bible to be revelation, have prompted such men to do hurt to themselves and to others. Regrettably for the Christian, if he is to claim that the Bible is the source of morality, then he will have to accept the latter sort along with the former. If he rejects the latter, then it is clearly because he admits that the Bible is not the font of morality, that, perhaps, reason is, and that the Bible is moral only on those occasions when it, by accident, agrees with such reason. Accepting the Bible as the source of knowing morality entails accepting as moral much that is utterly immoral, that is opposed to reason, compassion, and, frankly, common sense. Accepting reason as the source of knowing morality means accepting only the noble, since the ignoble will be disregarded as irrational. In other words, while commandments to be honest, to be merciful, and not to commit murder, as well as the Golden Rule, can and have been arrived at by means of empirically based logic, commandments to persecute unbelievers, witches, breakers of tribal taboos, and those who perform various unfashionable sexual acts, which belong to a primitive code of behavior, are accepted now only because they are sanctified by their being understood to have been ordained by a deity. I will not, I should add, accept the excuses of those who, upon reading of some moral horror demanded by god in the Bible, claim that such an injunction cannot be accepted since it, by being immoral, must not have been intended literally. Such a person is clearly not looking to the Bible as the source of his morality. He has moral standards he has arrived at by other means and is applying these to the Bible. When the Bible matches up with these, he declares it to be literal. When the Bible does not match up with these, he declares it not to be literal. Though such an individual may be loathe to admit it, it is obvious that the Bible is not the source of his morality, and that, for him to trick himself into accepting its validity, he must read it in a selective way so that it conforms with his moral standards. Admittedly, as nasty as is the Bible's moral vision, this nastiness simply proves that we would be better off not following its practical teachings. This, however, is not itself proof that the Christian god does not exist. The universe could well be run by the fiendish deity portrayed in the Bible. It does, however, make clear that the god of the Bible is hardly omnibenevolent. The deity venerated in that book is cruel and violent, and he promotes an ethical code that is brutish, xenophobic, bigoted, and dangerous. The Bible, frankly, is a pit of immorality and evil which should, by no means, be followed. Topic II: The Reliability of the Bible Part I: The Nature of Testimony A Christian could grant that while the moral injunctions of the Bible are apparently at odds with reason, which is admittedly fallible, they are still valid, since they have been proclaimed by god, who is infallible. This opponent will go on to say that the Bible is a means of valid knowledge by being god's testimony and that it informs us of his nature and his commandments. This is, I concede, a possibility. In order to determine whether the testimony of the Bible might be a more trustworthy means of knowledge than is reason, that it can provide us with cognitions (e.g., cognitions about god's existence and what is morally right) that sublate the cognitions produced by reasoning (to which the former cognitions are opposed), we should see if this testimony meets those criteria that would establish its reliability. To do this, to ascertain how reliable a source of knowledge the Bible is, we must treat it as we would any other testimony and look at both the testifier and the subject of his testimony. As for the former, we must first ask if the testifier is honest. Clearly, a person can be trusted to the degree that experience has demonstrated that his testimony has repeatedly been shown to be true. Next, we must ask if, in a particular situation, there is a reason why the testifier might make untrue statements, whether these are deceitful or not. After all, even an ordinarily honest person can provide false testimony, whether intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of fear, delusion, hope of personal gain, mental illness, intoxication, various physical conditions, or some other factor. Third, we must ask if the person has, through repeated experience, demonstrated himself to be knowledgeable about the subject about which he is testifying, since a person, though knowledgeable about one field, might not be knowledgeable about another. Even an honest person can, it must be conceded, believe himself to be knowledgable about a subject and provide testimony about it (testimony that he believes to be true), while, in fact, he might actually be woefully ignorant about that subject. Though, for instance, a given carpenter might be a thoroughly reliable source of information about carpentry, this does not mean that he is a reliable source of information about physics, even though it is possible that he regards himself to be such. A person's reliability must be established for each subject about which he testifies. Fortunately, I can know whether an individual is a reliable source of information about a given subject through experience. Specifically, when this person provides testimony about various purported facts, I can corroborate or disprove his claims. Through such means I can determine that he is a reliable source of information about a given subject, such as carpentry, but is an unreliable source of information about another, such as physics. Repeated corroboration of testimony is thus required for every subject about which a person makes claims until such a time as a person has established himself as an authority with regard to that subject. Taking all of these factors into consideration, we can apply them to particular cases of testimony. While doing so, however, we must also ask ourselves how important the subject of the testimony is. If it is trivial, if there are few consequences to being deceived, we might accept even testimony from an unreliable source. In asking where the exit to a building is, I might ask and believe a complete stranger or a man I know to be a liar. If I am led astray, I will still likely find my way out and will only have been briefly delayed. If, however, the subject is one of importance, if the consequences of being deceived are substantial (if, for instance, the testimony relates to something like making a large purchase or deciding how I am to live my life), then I will be highly skeptical of the testifier and examine his testimony closely. I do not believe that anyone, Christian or unbeliever, would deny that the teachings of the Bible constitute an important subject. Since this is the case, then, obviously, we must scrutinize the Bible closely. So, is the testimony of the Bible dependable? Let us see if the assertions made in that book reveal an honest author, one who is not motivated to lie or overcome by some state that prevents him from speaking accurately and who is knowledgeable about the subjects about which he testifies. Unfortunately, it might be impossible to determine whether the author or authors of the Bible are generally honest. If the book was composed by human authors, then we have nothing but the testimony presented within it to determine whether or not they were honest men (since we cannot know these individuals ourselves and they left no other works for us to examine). When determining if they were honest, we must also be aware that any inaccurate statements that are made in the Bible might have resulted from ignorance rather than from deliberate lying, and we do not, in many cases, have enough information to make such determinations. We can, however, see whether the statements such individuals make in the Bible are corroborated. If they are, then we can say that the testifiers are honest. If they are not, while we cannot, perhaps, say that the testifiers are dishonest, we can, at the least, say that they are not reliable sources of information. Of course, if these men were divinely inspired, or were merely instruments used by god for the composition of the Bible, so that the author is really god himself, then we can discuss the honesty of the author. Since this being is, according to Christian claims, omniscient, he cannot be mistaken about particular facts and so cannot make errors. When he makes a false statement, it cannot simply be due to ignorance or a faulty memory. In other words, the false statement has to be a lie. It follows, then, that, if a person insists that the Bible was composed by god, and the Bible is found to contain false statements, then he will be forced to conclude that his god is a liar. All of this said, we still can (and must) infer how liable the author or authors of the Bible were to make false statements, whether deliberately or not, on particular occasions. Most importantly, we must try to find out if there are times when such a person or persons were motivated to lie. If we find statements about some subject that are not true or cannot be verified, and we can perceive a condition or ulterior reason that would prompt the author to make these statements, then we have discovered a subject about which the author might have intentionally or unintentionally made untrue statements. We can also, conversely, when looking at some subject and failing to find either inaccurate statements about it or reasons for the author to make such inaccurate statements, decide that the author had no motive to lie or cause to make inaccurate claims about that subject (or, at the least, even if he had an undetected reason to lie or to lead him to make false assertions, that he did not do so, if the statements have been verified, or possibly did not, if the statements are unverified). In other words, we can take as veridical, at least tentatively (that is to say, before taking into account the final criterion), both those statements that are corroborated and those that, though not corroborated, are not likely to have been made for ulterior motives or as a result of some condition capable of misleading the testifier. Of course, we absolutely must determine whether the statements made in the Bible with regard to a particular subject reveal a testifier who is knowledgable about that subject. To do this, we need to see if any such referential statements can be corroborated and if any made with regard to that same subject are contradicted. The proportion of such corroborated to contradicted statements will then allow us to make determinations about the knowledgableness of author of the Bible about that subject. If all such statements which can be corroborated are corroborated, we can tentatively take the Bible's author to be knowledgable about the subject in question and place a degree of faith in those unverified comments made in the Bible about that subject. If most such statements (those that can be corroborated) are corroborated, we can still regard the author of the Bible as probably being generally knowledgable about the subjects in question. If, however, a substantial number of the verifiable statements made in the Bible are found to be incorrect, then we will be forced to admit that the Bible's author is not knowledgable about the subject of these. While making such investigations, we must also make certain that the statements made in the Bible are consistent with one another. Even if a given statement cannot be verified or discredited from another source, it might still be contradicted by another statement in the Bible, which contradiction will entail one or both of the statements in question being untrue. Clearly, while we cannot determine the general honesty of the author of any portion of the Bible, we can, nevertheless, potentially determine how knowledgeable this testifier was about a given subject and, perhaps, whether he had reason to lie or make untrue statements on a given occasion. When statements made in the Bible about a given subject are consistently contradicted, or when there is evidence that these are false, either as lies or otherwise, then we must regard the author to be an unreliable source of information. However, when statements made in the Bible about a given subject are consistently corroborated, and when there is no evidence of dishonesty or some impediment to speaking truly with regard to those that cannot be corroborated, we can take the author of those statements to be a reliable source of information. As was stated above, however, establishing that a given source of testimony is reliable with regard to one subject does not necessitate that it is reliable with regard to another subject. Regrettably for that person who accepts the testimony of the authors of the Bible, even if the claims made by these authors about certain purported facts are corroborated, this corroboration will not entail that claims made about other subjects should be given credence. In other words, even if claims made in the Bible about the nature of the universe and historical events are supported by scientific and historical sources, this does not mean that other claims made in the Bible are true. Similarly, though my plumber might prove himself to be generally, or even invariably, correct when diagnosing my plumbing problems, this does not mean that he will invariably be correct in his understanding of biochemistry. His knowledge of biochemistry must be tested apart from the testing of his knowledge of plumbing. This has some severe consequences for the Christian. While it is possible that I could corroborate historical or scientific claims made in the Bible, and so accept that text as a reliable source of knowledge about such subjects, such corroboration will not allow me to accept the Bible's metaphysical claims. If I am to accept these, I will need corroboration of them. Only when I have received such corroboration will I be able to accept the claims of the Bible by acknowledging the authoritativeness of that text. Unfortunately, every other religion makes contrary claims in its scriptures about those very subjects, providing me not with corroboration, but with contradiction. The Christian could reply to this by noting that Christian mystics have provided corroboration of statements made in the Bible. There are such individuals who claim to have had experiences of heaven, hell, god, angels, and the like. However, if these experiences are true, that is, if they are of entities that exist outside of the experiencer's mind, then they should be amendable to experience by persons of other religions. Just as a Buddhist perceives the same flower, stone, chair, or cloud that a Christian does, so a Buddhist mystic should perceive the same transcendent entities that a Christian mystic does. If he does not, then any experiences that are not being corroborated, that are, in fact, being contradicted, have to be questioned. After all, if a thing is amendable to some type of perception, then it should be perceptible to all capable of perceiving it. Obviously, non-Christian mystics do not experience the transcendent entities of Christianity, but have contrary experiences, meaning that the experiences of Christian mystics are not being corroborated. This, of course, means that we ought not to place credence in accounts of such experiences. Instead of taking them to be reflections of external realities which would be perceptible to any person capable of perceiving them, we must acknowledge them to be internal occurrences. They must, in other words, be the products of the mystic's mind. It is quite probable that visions of god or angelic hosts, heaven or hell, are merely hallucinations the specific forms of which are determined by the perceiver's education, his cultural environment, his consequent expectations, his hopes, and his fears. I might add to this that while many such experiences undoubtedly reflect cultural biases and psychological expectations, many persons might claim to have had these experiences when they had not. As I mentioned above, if a person has reason to lie, his testimony cannot be accepted without doubt. Although many Christians may be loathe to admit this, it is possible that the works of any given mystic (whether Christian or not) include deliberately false testimony that was given in the hope of bolstering the mystic's reputation, of helping him to advance himself within his community, or of achieving some other end. When such particular reasons are provided which indicate that a person might have a cause to lie, it is only by means of corroborative testimony that we can know that this individual is telling the truth. Regrettably, we are lacking in testimony coming from outside the Christian community that would verify the claims of Christian mystics, while we have a plethora of testimony from non-Christian mystics that contradicts the claims made by these Christian mystics. Such corroboration is, moreover, absolutely necessary if the more extraordinary claims of the Bible are to be countenanced, such as those relating to the existence of god and the means to enter his heaven. After all, the more unusual, the more outside of our ordinary experience, a claim is, the greater the corroboration that will be required for it to be accepted, even when the testimony is provided by a person who has met all the conditions of reliability that have been discussed above. A few examples should help to illustrate this. In all of these, I should add, let us assume that the person giving the testimony has been established as being reliable. If this person informs me that should I walk down a particular road I will come to an intersection, I will believe him without any corroboration, since I have repeatedly experienced that virtually all roads intersect with some other road. If he reveals to me that his brother lives in the same town where my sister lives, which is a thousand miles from where we live, I would again believe him. Though it is relatively unlikely that two persons will have siblings who live in the same distant town, I have previously encountered similar coincidences, and I know that, even if I had not, such coincidences are completely in accord with the accidents of human life. If he told me that he had just seen a polar bear walking down the street outside of his house, I would, however, probably suspend making a judgment about his veracity, simply because such an event is, according to my experience, extremely unlikely. That said, were I to receive independent corroboration of such an event, say, for example, from a local news broadcast, I would believe the testimony, since the event being claimed, while unusual, is by no means impossible. It simply includes entities, a polar bear and a location in the town in which I live, that have not been previously connected and that, for whatever reason, are unlikely to be connected. Should my reliable witness now claim that he saw a gigantic, fire-breathing dragon walking down his street, I would require considerably more verification of his statement. Since I have never encountered a dragon and know of no one who has, I am disinclined to believe in the existence of dragons. In fact, I am so disinclined to believe in their existence because of this lack of evidence, and because of my awareness that the perception of a dragon could be explained by hallucination, mistake, fraud, or the like, that I would demand to be provided with some sort of physical evidence from which I could infer the existence of this creature before I accepted the claims even of numerous independent witnesses. At best, I would suspend judgment about the accuracy of their testimony, and it would require substantial amounts of independent testimony to get me to do even that. Of course, were a sufficient number of people to claim to have encountered some sort of mythical being, whether dragons, fairies, space monsters, the gods of the Norse pantheon, or something else, I would not automatically disbelieve them (even though I would be very strongly inclined not to believe them). I cannot, after all, deny that I have previously heard of entities with capacities, appearances, and other characteristics which are different from those of entities I have encountered and then, at some later time, actually encountered such entities or, at the least, encountered evidence of their existence that was strong enough to convince me of their reality. There was once a time, for instance, when I had heard of an animal called an echidna, but had never seen one. Later, I saw an echidna. I had a sensory experience that such a creature existed. Based on such experiences, I will even accept the existence of creatures I have not personally seen. I have not, for example, ever encountered a giant squid, yet I believe in the existence of such creatures because of my own experiences and because I have seen a substantial amount of evidence of their existence. I do not, however, believe in the existence of fairies because, though I am aware of the testimony of persons who claim to have seen them, this testimony is often suspect and it has never been corroborated by physical evidence. That said, were someone to present a sufficiently substantial amount of physical evidence that fairies exist, I would concede that they do. Since I have heard of beings I have not personally seen and then been presented with evidence of their existence, I cannot rule out that any given class of beings, fairies, dragons, space monsters, the gods of the Norse pantheon, or something else, exist, even though I do think, in the absence of such evidence, that their existence is so highly improbable that I effectively reject that existence. In other words, I am ready to believe in the existence of what I consider to be outlandish and wildly unlikely, but yet not wholly unlike things I have encountered, if I am presented with sufficient evidence, though this evidence must be so overwhelming as to quash my considerable doubts. Returning now to my reliable witness, let us imagine him claiming that he has encountered some non-physical but omnipresent entity who rules over a kingdom that exists beyond the universe we know. Unlike the situation just discussed, I have no experience of first hearing of such an entity and then encountering one, nor have I ever been presented with physical evidence from which I could reliably infer that this entity existed. My witness's claim is, thus, so extraordinary that the totality of my experiences tells me to disbelieve it. Even to consider that his assertion is true, I would require an overwhelming amount of corroboratory testimony and no contradictory testimony of equal reliability. Unfortunately, as was discussed above, claims about the existence of such a being are repeatedly contradicted by other claims, which have been made by persons who are just as reliable as are the individuals making the former claims. Should my reliable witness now assert that he has drawn a square circle, I will be forced to call him a liar, or, at the least, console him for being deluded. Since such a thing is quite impossible, I simply cannot accept that he is telling the truth. Even if he were to show me the circle, I would have to doubt the veridicality of my sensory experience. Similarly, were this witness to say that he had encountered an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing being, I would have to reject that testimony. Since these three traits are opposed to one another, I cannot accept their presence in one entity. Because their co-presence is impossible (as will be discussed below), I cannot accept as veridical any apparent means of knowledge indicating that there is an entity in which all three exist. All testimony is outweighed by this impossibility, as is any inference and even any direct perception. Whatever means of knowledge seems to reveal such an entity I would be required to regard as erroneous. Having said all this, it might still be worthwhile to look at how reliable the Bible is as a source of information about subjects that can be known by other means, means which can corroborate or contradict statements made in the Bible. Happily, we can look at the scientific and historical claims made in that book and determine whether they are corroborated by research conducted by scientists and historians. This will not establish that the author or authors of the Bible are knowledgeable about other subjects, but it can potentially reveal that such an individual or such individuals are not invariably reliable. If, I might add, the author or authors can be established as being dishonest on occasion, then we must always be ready to doubt the book's veracity. If he or they can be shown to be wrong at times, then we must reject any claim that the Bible is universally correct. Regrettably for the Christian, the author or authors of the Bible seem habitually to provide false information. He or they are often grossly ignorant while being certain about being knowledgeable, and he or they do sometimes appear to be lying. Part II: Inaccurate and Inconsistent Statements about the Physical World The Bible does not, whatever its adherents might claim, provide an accurate description of the physical universe. To begin with, the very structure of the universe presented in the Bible is at odds with that described by modern science. According to the Bible, the universe is a small, closed system, at the bottom of which is the Earth, which is flat (Isaiah 11:12, 40:22, 44:24). This flat little cosmos is topped with heaven, which is located above the sky and separated from the atmosphere by the firmament, which spreads across the sky (Genesis 1.20). In this firmament are set the sun, the moon, and, apparently, the stars (Genesis 1:16-17). Thus, it is not the Earth that circles the sun, but rather the sun that moves across the sky above the Earth (Joshua 10:12-13). The crystalline (Ezekiel 1:22 ) firmament does not serve only as a support for this moving sun, and all the little moving stars. It also divides the waters, half of these, our lakes, seas, etc., being below it and the other half being above it, in heaven (Genesis 1:6-8). Although it seems somewhat silly to do so, I will mention that we now have an overwhelming amount of evidence indicating that the world is spherical and circles the sun, that the atmosphere merely thins to nothing above the Earth's surface, instead of being topped by a solid roof, and that beyond this atmosphere is the impossibly vast void of space, in which are to be found innumerable other suns, many with other planets, but no heavenly abode with its own oceans. It this nonexistent celestial water, that which god has supposedly stored in his great heavenly reservoir, which, so the Bible says, he dumps on us through convenient slats cut in the firmament (Genesis 7:11). Of course, this means that clouds have nothing to do with rain, but, then, according to the Bible, they aren't even composed of water. Clouds are just the smudges god's dirty feet leave on the sky (Nahum 1:3). Again, these claims are wildly at odds both with the structure we currently know the Earth to have and with the whole of our meteorological knowledge. Nearly all Christians now try to ignore these passages, though their co-religionists in former times were more than willing to persecute those heretics who dared doubt the accuracy of such statements (such as Galileo, who dared listen to the evidence marshalled by Copernicus and wonder about how accurate the Bible's geocentric claims were). There are, nonetheless, still innumerable Christians today who are not willing to abandon the Bible's accounts of the creation and the age of the world. Unfortunately, though these persons take statements made in that text regarding these matters to be reliable testimony, such testimony is never corroborated. Instead, it is consistently contradicted by other sources of knowledge. On these subjects, the Bible is, in all ways, as silly as it is when it makes pronouncements on the form of the universe, since, in all these matters, it expresses the worldview of an ancient, superstitious age during which people had severely limited knowledge about such realities. I see no point in going into this debate in any great detail as so many others with far more specialized knowledge have done so before. A brief account should be more than sufficient to make my point here. Although there have been a number of different calculations of the age of the Earth based on information given in the Bible, which calculations do not agree with one another, they are all reasonably close and their differences are based on biblical ambiguities and differences in the specific texts used. Some authorities claim that the Earth is roughly five thousand seven hundred years old (as does the Jewish calendar, according to which the world was created in 3760 BC), roughly six thousand years old (as does Ussher, according to whom the world was created in 4004 BC), roughly seven thousand five hundred years old (as does the Coptic calendar, according to which the world was created in 5493 BC), or roughly seven thousand five hundred years old (as does the Byzantine calendar, according to which the world was created in 5509 BC). All of these calculations are all clearly wildly off from the four and a half billion years established and repeatedly corroborated by science to be the age of the Earth. They are even more off from the nearly fourteen billion years similarly established to be the age of the universe. Whatever the precise age this world and the universe might be according the Bible, the testimony of that book is grossly wrong. The claims of various scientists who have researched these subjects have been repeatedly corroborated by the work of others, and even those claims such individuals have made which have been shown to be wrong have allowed their successors to hone their own views so that, through trial and error, these persons have refined their views and eliminated one mistake after another, making their claims ever more accurate. In contrast to this, the testimony of the Bible has received absolutely no support, but has, instead, been endlessly contradicted. The Bible's claims about how this Earth and the creatures living upon it came to be are no more reliable than are its claims about how long ago it was brought into existence. For one thing, the tales of creation given in Genesis are are wholly at odds with scientific theories about the Big Bang, planet formation, and geology. What is more, these stories are thoroughly contradicted by the overwhelming amounts of evidence that scientists have uncovered relating to the evolution of all living things. Instead of these persons corroborating the Bible's assertions that whole classes of entities were instantly brought into existence by divine edict on a succession of days in a single week, they have shown that all living things slowly developed over billions of years from the simplest of forms to the most complex as a result of innumerable minor or major mutations, each of which rendered an entity more or less likely to survive, and so more or less likely to perpetuate its genes. The scientific mistakes made in the Bible are not always on such a grand scale as are those just noted, but those that are not can be both wildly incorrect and truly funny. For example, in Leviticus 11:6, the Bible states that rabbits chew their cud, which they do not. It goes on to say that bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) and that insects and some birds have four legs (Leviticus 11 20-23). As humorous as these mistakes are, they are, perhaps, not quite as funny as is god's ignorance of the the value of pi. According to the Bible, Solomon had a great brass vessel made, which was round and ten cubits from brim to brim. Using elementary mathematics, this vessel must have had a circumference of 31.4 cubits, but, somehow, "a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about" (1 Kings, 7:23). Clearly, not only is the celestial engineer an inept mathematician, but he is also a bit forgetful about his creation. Even before scientific research came to demonstrate the falsity of biblical claims, the Bible itself revealed its own falsity by including two contradictory creation stories, one in the first chapter of Genesis and one in the second chapter. Do what he might to explain away the outright contradictions of these narratives, the Christian cannot succeed in this endeavor. The simple fact is that the two stories are not reconcilable. In other words, the Bible, by providing contradictory evidence, demonstrates itself to be unreliable. The entire order of creation is, after all, completely different in the two accounts, as can clearly be seen when these are compared. (The table below is reproduced from: S.H. Hooke, Middle Eastern Mythology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, reprinted 1983), pp. 105-106).
Obviously, the Bible reflects an ancient society's view of the world, with all the limitations inherent in such a view (though with the poetic imaginativeness these so often have). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it includes innumerable claims about the physical world that are either refuted by other sources of knowledge, such as those employed in modern science, or are contradicted by other statements in the Bible itself. The book, quite simply, shows itself to be a thoroughly unreliable source of information about the physical world. Although this does not prove that the Bible cannot be a reliable source of information about another subject, it does demonstrate that the composer of the Bible was liable to error or, if he was omniscient, to deception. The book cannot, therefore, be considered to be absolutely veridical. The truth of its statements will simply have to be tested. Part III: Inaccurate and Inconsistent Statements about History I have no doubt that a Christian, upon hearing that I am challenging the accuracy of the Bible as an historical document, will point out that numerous events recorded in the Bible have been corroborated by other textual sources and by archeology. I will freely admit that this is the case. The Bible contains an enormous amount of historical information. In fact, it is our primary source of information about the history of the ancient Jews. That said, the Bible also contains innumerable false statements. It is filled with legends, with accounts so biased that the truth has been distorted, with a variety of mistakes, and, frankly, with a number of accounts that appear to be deliberately deceptive. In other words, though the Bible is useful as a source of information, its testimony is highly dubious and so requires a critical examination before it is used. First of all, the stories of the early Jewish patriarchs demonstrate considerable evidence of having been composed in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The tale of Abraham mentions the use of domesticated camels, the export of balm, gum, and myrrh from the Arabian peninsula, the presence of the Philistines in Canaan, and the city of Gerar as an important, well-known location. Archaeological evidence, however, associates all of these things with a much later time period than that during which Abraham could have lived, given biblical chronologies (which vary from one tradition to another, but which would generally place him at c. 2000-1600 BC). Camels were not widely used as mounts until after 1000 BC. The trade in balm, gum, and myrrh became significant only during the period of the Assyrian Empire, in the eighth through seventh centuries BC. The Philistines did not arrive in Canaan until after 1200 BC, and Gerar was merely a village until the eighth century BC (See: Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (Touchstone: New York, 2002), pp. 36-38). Instead of being an historical person, Abraham appears to be a character from legend, the mythic progenitor of the closely related tribes that collectively constituted the ancient Israelites. What is more, the genealogies given in Genesis reveal the political interests of the Jewish states of the eighth and seventh centuries BC and even provide mythic justifications for the interests of these states. The Moabites, who were frequent rivals of the Jews, are, for example, slandered as being the progeny of the incestuous union of Lot and his daughters (Finkelstein and Silberman, pp. 39-40). The Arameans are recognized as relations of the Israelites, though ones with whom they are often at odds, and Jacob establishes a border with them that matches with the border between these peoples that existed in the ninth through eighth centuries BC (Finkelstein and Silberman, p. 39). The Edomites, though also recognized as relatives of the Israelites, being the descendents of Jacob's older brother Esau, are told that they will ever be subject to Jacob's heirs, so providing "divine legitimation for the political relationship between the two nations in late monarchic times" (Finkelstein and Silberman, p. 40). Lastly, various peoples of the Arabian deserts are said to have descended from the children of the wild, animal-like Ishmael, though none of these people appear in historical records prior to the eighth century BC (Finkelstein and Silberman, pp. 41-43). In every one of these cases, the Bible places peoples with whom the ancient Jews had relations in an anachronistically early time and thereby betrays its own unreliableness as an historic record. The narratives relating the origins of these peoples do not, however, simply contain errors, mere innocent mistakes. They expose the willingness of the authors of the Bible to manipulate facts for the sake of propaganda. In other words, since the ulterior motives of the authors of the Bible are, in places, clearly visible, along with historical claims that are just as clearly false, the reader of that text is necessarily compelled by reason to be wary of other claims since these too might have been made for self-serving reasons rather than simply to record events. There is, moreover, no evidence that the Jewish people were held in captivity in Egypt, or that they even dwelled there. Admittedly, Semitic peoples did migrate to Egypt, and one of these, the Hyksos, who happened to be from Canaan, ruled over Egypt prior to being expelled and returning to their homeland. The Hyksos were, unfortunately, rulers, not slaves. They were also driven from Egypt around 1570 BC, which rules them about as the Hebrews of the Bible since that text says the Hebrews labored on a city named Raamses, and the first pharaoh named Ramesses, for whom such a city could be named, came to the throne in 1320 BC. It is, however, Ramesses II who built what is most likely the Raamses of the Bible, the city Pi-Ramesses (for the construction of which he probably did employ Semitic peoples), but he did not become pharaoh until 1279 BC. What is more, Canaan was then controlled by Egypt. It was not a place to which persons fleeing Egypt would escape. Of course, the political realities reflected in the story are not those of such earlier times, but those of the seventh century BC, when the text was likely set down in writing (though the narrative, undoubtedly, existed in varying forms prior to this). The story of the Jewish captivity in Egypt is, thus, set in a world based upon memories of Canaanite migrations to Egypt, of the employment of these people there, and of the expulsion of the Hyksos, mingled with the historical realities of the world in which the authors lived (Finkelstein and Silberman, p. 48ff). Not surprisingly, evidence supporting the Bible's assertions that six-hundred thousand Hebrews lived in the Sinai Peninsula and the borders of Canaan for forty years after their escape from the pharaoh are just as unsupported as are its claims that these people were ever in Egypt. Archeologists, even when trying to prove the accuracy of the Bible, have been unable to find a single shred of physical proof of the Jew's long wanderings through the wastelands between Egypt and Palestine. For most of this time, thirty-eight years, according to the Bible, they even dwelt in a single place, Kadesh, which has been identified, but excavations there have failed to reveal any evidence of its having been inhabited. (Finkelstein and Silberman, pp. 61-64). Though lack of evidence does not necessarily constitute proof, it does constitute proof in certain cases. Specifically, when the conditions of a thing's being known are fulfilled but that thing is not known, then we know that it is absent. I know, for instance, that there is not a turtle on my desk because, upon looking at the desk under conditions that allow me to see what is on it, I fail to perceive a turtle. Similarly, since groups of people leave evidence of their occupation of a particular location, when we fail to find such evidence, we can infer that this location was not occupied. Regrettably for those who take the Bible to provide reliable historical accounts, the absence of evidence that the Hebrews wandered through the deserts south of Canaan indicates that these Hebrews were themselves absent from those wastes, that, in other words, the Bible's accounts are not true. In fact, the Jewish people appear not to have come to Canaan from elsewhere and conquered the the local peoples in a bloody, destructive campaign. For one thing, Canaan was, at the time of this supposed conquest, tributary to Egypt, an imperial power that probably would not have been amendable to a group of escaped slaves taking part of their empire from them, and, for another, the cities the Bible says the Israelites put to the torch were, in some case, long gone and, in others, insignificant, unwalled villages. Most importantly, only a few of the cities that did exist suffered any devastation during the appropriate period. Most show no evidence of conflict, let alone destruction. Yet again, the archeological evidence, and the testimony of records composed at the time these conquests would have occurred (as opposed to six hundred years afterwards, as is the case with the relevant books of the Bible), contradict biblical accounts of some group, the Israelites, arriving in and conquering Canaan. Instead, it would seem that they emerged from amongst Canaanite pastoralists who, following the collapse of Canaanite society (rather than causing it), were no long able to procure grain by trade and so took to agriculture in order to supply themselves, and who, eventually, came to regard themselves as a distinctive ethnic group (Finkelstein and Silberman, pp. 72-122). Biblical narratives of a captivity in and escape from Egypt and a subsequent arrival in and conquest of Canaan combine myths about the Israelites' origins and uniqueness, old legends, and a peculiar theology that emphasizes how a monotheistic god made a covenant with that people, who prospered when they obeyed his commands and suffered when they did not. While details of the political situation of the Orient at the time that these tales were being set down in writing and often vague recollections of past events are interwoven with such elements, the tales certainly do not record historic events. They are, quite simply, nearly if not entirely fictional. The Bible's narratives relating to the united monarchy do, however, seem to have some basis in fact, though these stories are filled with extreme exaggerations. While it is probable that David and Solomon did actually live, unlike Moses and Abraham, it is unlikely that they ruled any sort of empire. Instead, they seem to have controlled a minor, sparsely populated kingdom that was surrounded by wealthier neighbors. They both did, however, become the focus of numerous legends, which made David into a great hero and Solomon into the richest and wisest of kings. Such tales magnified the bygone reigns of these men into a golden age, but the splendor ascribed to this, once again, has no historic basis (Finkelstein and Silberman, pp. 123-148). Fortunately, the tales of the kings of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (especially those ruling in later periods) are considerably better, and some do seem to be reasonably accurate historic accounts. Nonetheless, though they might relate a number of events that actually happened to people who really lived, they still include numerous distortions, a fair number of clearly fanciful events, and are presented in wildly biased and propagandistic ways. They are, in other words, still not consistently reliable. Even accounts of the Babylonian Captivity are filled with errors. For example, the author of the book of Daniel is habitually confused about the kings of Babylon, stating that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 5:2), when he was actually the son of Nabonidus, who was himself Nebuchadnezzar's son, but who is completely forgotten about in the Bible. Moreover, the book's author even gets the city's conqueror and his entire people wrong. He says that Babylon was conquered by Darius the Median instead of Cyrus the Great of Persia (Daniel 5:31). These are not trivial mistakes. I will grant that, generally speaking, the later in time some event of which the Bible gives an account is, the more accurate that account is likely to be. Thus, the latest books of the Old Testament, such as the first and second books of the Maccabees, contain substantial historical information. They cannot be taken as completely accurate, as they are still obviously works of propaganda and were not composed using critical methods, but they are probably as accurate as are many other ancient histories. Such an endorsement does not, however, mean that they should be taken as more accurate than such histories, and certainly not that they are infallible. Even these books need to be read critically, with an awareness that they are biased, can distort events, and even include events that never occurred. The New Testament, while generally more reliable than the Old, also contains a fair number of errors. In many cases, one statement will be contradicted by another. The genealogy of Jesus through the male line given in Matthew (1:1-16), for instance, is different from that given in Luke (3:23-38). These lists include different numbers of generations and very few names in common. They cannot both be correct. This is not the only error made in the Gospels, however. In fact, another glaring contradiction relates to the birth of this messiah whose ancestry is so dubious. Jesus' birth is said by Luke to have occurred during the census that was carried out in 6-7 AD by Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, who was then governor of Syria (Luke 1:1-2). This was conducted when Coponius was governor of the new province of Iudaea, which had been created after the exile of Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great. Elsewhere, however, the Bible claims that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the king (Matthew 2:1), who is clearly Herod the Great, since he is the father of Herod Archelaus (Matthew 2:22), even though Herod the Great had died in 4 BC, ten years prior to the census. Either the one date, the other, or both are wrong, which means that the Bible contains errors. There are, additionally, in the New Testament, a number of events that are highly unlikely to have happened, but the occurrence of which cannot be disproved. For example, the darkness that supposedly covered the Earth at the time of the crucifixion (Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:44-45) is not, as Gibbon points out (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 15, final paragraph), mentioned by either Seneca or Pliny, despite their interest in such prodigies, and Herod's massacre of the male infants of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16-18) is not noted by Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, Book XV), despite his interest in mentioning that king's atrocities. While such lack of corroborating testimony does not establish that these events did not occur, the fact that they are the sorts of events that would have been recorded by these men had they occurred does seem to indicate that they probably did not. While the Bible does provide valuable information about the history of the people of ancient Israel, it is frequently wrong. It is not, in other words, a reliable source of information. One cannot, as a result, infer the general honesty of the Bible's author or authors from its historical statements. Part IV: Bible Stories as Metaphors Perhaps a Christian will claim that all these apparently erroneous statements made in the Bible are, in fact, metaphorical, that they ought not to be taken literally. I would then ask him how it is that we should determine which statements are to be understood as being metaphorical and which are to be understood as being literal. Before attempting to answer this question myself, I will note that I do grant that there are statements in the Bible that clearly are not meant literally. The parables of Jesus come to mind as narratives not intended to refer to external events. References in the New Testament to a flat earth (such as that in Revelation 7:1) appear to poetically conjure up Old Testament cosmography, and several of the verses of praise in the Song of Solomon include descriptions not intended to refer to real external attributes (these, after all, include ascribing to a person the eyes of a dove (1:15), having honey and milk beneath the tongue (4:11), and so on). Obviously, these statements should not be taken as referring to actual events or entities. The reasons why they should not be taken literally can, however, be applied to texts other than the Bible. Jesus' parables are overtly presented as fictive narratives that illustrate that man's teachings. The other two instances both rely upon clear metaphorical usages. Statements made in a later book of the Bible that allude to some earlier book can associate a given entity, event, etc. mentioned in the later book with characteristics associated with the earlier book, in the same way that allusions in other texts, which refer to some artistic work, historic event, or the like, conjure up the characteristics of the thing being referred to. Though the statement that so elicits a memory of whatever work, event, etc. to which reference is being made might, but need not be, taken literally, depending upon the demands of context, the statement is important primarily as the means to arouse in the reader an awareness of the characteristics of what is being alluded to. Finally, such metaphors as those employed in the Song of Solomon ascribe to one entity identity with or possession of a second entity, which the first entity neither is nor possesses, in order to emphasize the presence in the first entity of a characteristic perceived to be present in both entities. There is, in other words, a property possessed by both entities which is emphasized by associating the first entity with the second. Of course, this is not the only type of metaphor there is, but whatever the precise meaning conveyed by a metaphor, this will be clear if the metaphor is successful. I would, of course, assume that god is a competent enough writer to create a successful metaphor. Figurative usage, after all, occurs only under particular circumstances, and these are neither arbitrary nor that difficult to discern, even for simple, limited beings such as we are. First, such usage can occur (in order to emphasizes a particular characteristic in the way just discussed) as a result of the primary meaning of the word metaphorically employed being blocked, which blockage occurs because of the inherent absurdity of the connection of the two objects mentioned. Clearly, when one says of an overweight woman, "The girl is a cow," one cannot actually be saying that this female member of the species Homo sapiens is actually a female member of the species Bos primigenius. Such inherent absurdity, I should add, does not include connections that are simply incorrect. The statement "The girl is French" will only be a metaphor if it has already and obviously been established that the girl is not French. If her not being French has not been clearly established, then the statement is one of fact and must be determined to be either correct or incorrect. Second, a metaphor can be based on a relationship that exists between two objects, such as those of proximity or of possessor and possessed, which relations are established by other means of cognition, such as sense perception. A thing can, thus, be referred to indirectly by overtly mentioning something near it, something it possesses, or the like. For example, were someone to yell out, "The redcoats are coming!" he would be understood as meaning that persons wearing red coats were coming, not simply the coats, the connection between the two, the soldier and the coat, being known by means of sense perception or testimony from history books. Finally, a metaphor can be employed (again, like the first type, to emphasize a given characteristic) when there is some obvious reason for moving from one meaning of a word to another, such as an inability otherwise to express valor, holiness, or beauty. In such a usage, there is neither a blockage of the meaning of one word nor a perception of it and the other word being associated. Thus, for example, when we say that "the man is a god," we find neither an inherent absurdity nor a perceived connection. Nonetheless, the person making this statement clearly does not intend to claim that the man is actually a deity. Instead, he is praising the man for his greatness, beauty, or for some other trait, which praise he could not otherwise express. (Ingalls, Daniel H.H., Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, and Patwardhan, M.V., The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 85ff.) Unfortunately, in explaining away the cosmography of the Bible, the apologist often, even most of the time, claims that the Bible is referring to things which are obviously not metaphorical in such ways. Take such a statement as "And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven" (Genesis 1:20). The sentence is not inherently absurd, though it might be wrong. It does not evoke one entity by referring to a second that is known to be associated with it, and, being simply a statement of fact, it is obviously not intended to emphasize some quality in a given entity, whether god or the living creatures that he is said to create. It is, in other words, not a metaphorical statement. The Christian, instead of determining what are metaphors by employing rules and conventions that can be applied to other texts, simply claims that particular statements made in the Bible are metaphorical because they are clearly wrong and the Bible cannot be wrong. This, however, is like some man, upon being caught lying or making a mistake, claiming that he did not really mean what he said. He only means what he says when he is not so caught. The only method to such a use of metaphor is that it covers up patently false statements. What is more, to apply such a system of interpretation only to the Bible is wholly arbitrary, and to apply it universally would mean that every source of testimony, every single person, every single book, and so on, would be infallible, in that only their true statements would be taken literally and all their false statements would, after the fact, be taken metaphorically. Nobody would ever be wrong or dishonest again. We could trust absolutely everything we hear. If, by chance, some statement turned out to be incorrect or deceitful, it was only because we failed to grasp that it was merely a metaphor. I need hardly refute such an absurd position in greater detail. It is not impossible that a Christian might grant that the Bible does contain a number of erroneous statements, but then assert that these relate only to pesky facts, not to salvation, the book's most important and conveniently unverifiable topic. This person might then point out that even the most skeptical of historians makes use of ancient histories, of the accounts of Herodotus, Suetonius, and the like, even though he is well aware that they are riddled with errors. With regard to the second of these issues, historians do undoubtedly make use of the writings of ancient authors as useful tools with an awareness that they are not always reliable. When a statement by one of these writers can be corroborated, it is accepted as true, when such a statement is contradicted by stronger evidence, it is rejected as false, and when it cannot be contradicted, it is taken as being potentially either true or untrue. I have absolutely no problem with reading the Bible in such a way. If we accept as true those statements made in the Bible which have been corroborated, while rejecting as false those that are contradicted, and granting, at most, possible accuracy to those that have not yet been corroborated or contradicted, then we have come to that very method of reading the Bible that I myself endorse. If, however, the Christian says that such rules of interpretation do not affect those statements made in the Bible that are relevant to salvation, then he is again venturing into the realm of error. He cannot, with such an understanding, claim that the Bible's general reliability reveals a reliable author whose statements can be trusted. Quite the opposite, the Bible's unreliability reveals an author whose statements cannot be trusted. In fact, he will be claiming that while the Bible's author, when he makes claims that can be tested, frequently exposes himself to be wrong or, if the author is god, whether directly or indirectly, actually dishonest (since god, being omniscient, cannot make mistakes), this same author can, nonetheless, be trusted when he makes completely untestable claims. This Christian will then be following a path of reasoning that is the exact opposite of that required to establish that a person is a reliable source of information. Topic III: The Problem of Evil Part I: Original Sin In addition to the moral horrors taught in the Bible, there are countless absurdities in the Christian system, some of which have some pretty severe consequences and so present the Christian with real issues with which he must deal. Some of the religion's doctrines are, in fact, in such contradiction with one another that they reveal Christianity to be so internally inconsistent as to be impossible, despite the sophistry of innumerable apologists to explain these obvious contradictions away. The single most important of these problems, without mentioning which no criticism of Christianity would be sufficient, is the problem of evil. This is, obviously, only a problem for a tradition that accepts a deity that is, at once, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but as Christianity does posit such a being, the religion does have some things it needs to explain. Virtually all Christian apologists attempt to justify the existence of evil by positing a fallen world, a world that has been alienated from God. The reason invariably given for this state of the universe is the disobedience of Adam and Eve. This hoary couple committed the first sin, and responsibility for it has been passed on to all human beings as a result of some peculiar collective guilt (that makes the child responsible for the actions of his parent or ancestor). Surely, the import of this narrative is based on some primitive sense of retaliatory justice in which whole clans were to be punished for the misdeed of one member. God, it would seem, has never moved past such archaic ideas. He is stuck in the world of blood feuds and tribal genocide. Regrettably, not only is such a perspective morally repugnant, but it is also nonsensical. After all, this particular understanding of original sin conflates the individual with the class to which he belongs, which is just incoherent. Except for classes with only one member, a class and the members of that class are not coterminous. The term "Frank" does not have the same scope as the term "human being." Though "Frank" is included amongst human beings, the terms cannot be interchanged. A predicate applied specifically to "Frank" will apply only to "Frank," not to the class "human being" or to any other member of that class. Only a predicate applied to the class as a whole will apply to all individuals of that class (whether this predicate is one the presence of which defines the members of a class or one that, by some accident, has come to be applicable to every member of a class). Guilt, or responsibility, being that quality which is nothing more than having performed a particular act, is, necessarily, something that attaches to an individual member of a class rather than to the class itself. It is not, therefore, correct to say that an act for which Frank is responsible is an act for which human beings generally are responsible. A given human being, Frank, for instance, is obviously an individual separate from all others and is responsible only for his own actions, as are all other human beings. If Frank commits murder, neither I nor any other person is responsible for that murder. In Christianity, however, Frank, I, and every other person who has ever lived is responsible for the sin of Adam, even though not one of us committed it. The sin of the individual is the sin of the class. God must indulge in some pretty sloppy thinking. I suppose if he saw one yellow fish he would insist that all fish are yellow or, were he mugged by one black man, that all black men are muggers. Now, a Christian could point out that there are characteristics that define what a class is, the possession of which make particular entities members of that class. Possession of the quality "being round" makes a thing a circle, for example. For such a Christian, then, "possessing or being guilty of original sin" would be a trait that defines a thing as human (which, incidentally, would make Adam and Eve nonhuman before they committed the sin). In such cases, however, we are creating a category by observing a quality first and then differentiating those possessing it from those not possessing it. Regrettably, no one has observed the quality "being guilty of original sin" and used its observed presence to define those possessing the quality as "human." Though I have seen people commit a variety of wrongs, I've never seen one person commit Adam's original sin. Nor am I aware of any justifiable inference that could establish the existence of the quality "being guilty of original sin." I might be able to infer that some person is responsible for some particular act, that, for instance, my friend ate my sandwich, but I cannot imagine any inference that could establish that one man is responsible for the actions of another who lived thousands of years ago. Doing so would be like inferring that I am responsible for Caesar's conquest of the Gauls. Sadly for the Christian, for a quality to define what a thing is, that quality simply has to be observed or, at the least, inferred. Thus, we can identify a particular entity as a man as a result of our noting that he possesses those qualities that every single man we encounter possesses, namely, those particular qualities that make an entity human. We do not identify an entity as a human by simply saying, but never observing, that this entity has a particular quality which we say is, but never observe to be, present in all human beings. So identifying an entity as a man is no more rational than our identifying him as such as a result of saying (without any justification) that he has invisible antlers, which we say (again without justification) that all other human beings have. Even when a certain quality is not what defines a given category, but is merely something that is, as a result of some accident, possessed by all members of the category, we still base our judgement that the quality and the quality-possessor are connected on observation. We do not, however, perceive the presence of the quality "being guilty of original sin" in all human beings. We might observe that some different guilt is present in particular human beings, such as in the murderer or the thief, but we do not observe that this particular guilt is present in all. It is, consequently, absurd to say that one man's sin is the sin of all. In fact, we never perceive that any person possesses that particular quality "being guilty of original sin," because no one has seen any person commit this sin. We might as well claim that a person is guilty of eating gryphon eggs. The assertion has every bit as much basis in observation as does the claim that a person is guilty of original sin. I suppose, for the sake of argument, that we can know by the testimony of the Bible that Adam and Eve were guilty of original sin, but this will not help my opponent since, as I have said, we do not observe others possessing this guilt, and the sin of one person cannot be ascribed to another. Nor can we infer that people are guilty of original sin from observing how they commit other sins. Being responsible for one action or possessing one quality does not entail being responsible for another action or possessing another quality, unless there is an established causal link between the two. If I see a man kick a dog, I see a man who possesses the quality "being responsible for kicking a dog." I do not witness a man possessing such qualities as "being guilty of original sin," "being guilty of shooting John F. Kennedy," or "being the shape and color of a mango." I could only infer that original sin is the cause of the observed sin if I perceived the observed sin being produced by original sin, but, since I have never perceived original sin, I have never seen it produce anything. It is possible, however, that the Christian could say that Adam's guilt has, somehow, been transferred to his descendants without their having committed the sin in question, but he must then provide some explanation of how guilt could be transferred. As far as I can see, this transmission could occur by two means. First, it could happen as a result of physical transmission, as a disease is transmitted. However, moral guilt is not something physical and cannot so be transmitted. A Christian might then claim that there are non-physical things that can so be transferred from one person to another and point to ideas. Indeed, ideas are non-physical yet are transmitted by physical means. Specifically, a person with an idea can state it verbally, in writing, or by some other means, which physical act or its results are encountered by another person who processes the information so received and becomes aware of the first individual's idea. I will grant that the idea of moral guilt could so be transferred. I could, for instance, be given the idea that I possess moral guilt, but this is not the same thing as possessing moral guilt. An admission that the transference of ideas occurs does not, after all, establish the reality of the transference of any other non-physical entity. Thus, no matter how much a delusional person believes he is guilty of a crime, his belief does not actually make him guilty of it. If a Christian wants to show me that a predicate, specifically, guilt itself, rather than the idea of guilt, can be transferred by non-physical means, he will have to provide me with an indisputable instance where such a predicate has so been transferred. He could then perhaps point out that the application of a predicate can be spread, that is to say transmitted, by linguistic usage. He could note that when a new word is coined, all things to which that word applies come to be qualified by that word. Once the word "Westerner" was applied to persons from Europe and their descendants on other continents, every such person came to be qualified by the predicate "being a Westerner." There need not even be transmission of the usage of the word, itself expressing an idea, from one person to another for this application to occur. The application can occur when a single person mentally uses a given word in a particular way. Being unattracted to Eskimos, I could, for example, apply the predicate "being ugly" to all Eskimos. Unfortunately, such a predicate is nothing more than a mental construction and merely expresses the cognitive processes, the perspectives and biases, of a particular person. It does not actually affect the object to which it is applied. My belief that Eskimos are ugly does not somehow apply ugliness to these persons outside of my own mind. There is no external transmission of the predicate and its application is nothing more than an expression of my personal bias. For the record, I have never met an Eskimo and so do not believe that Eskimos are ugly. There is, however, an easy reply to this argument, specifically, that god imposes guilt upon all of Adam's descendants. This is what St. Augustine claims when he says, "the whole mass of the human race stood condemned, lying ruined and wallowing in evil, being plunged from evil into evil and, having joined causes with the angels who had sinned, it was paying the fully deserved penalty for impious desertion" (Augustine, Enchiridion, Albert C. Outler, trans., VIII, 27). Guilt, then, is not having committed a given act; it is simply an ascription of a characteristic by one person (god) to another by an act of judgment. If this is the case, however, then god is deliberately ascribing guilt to persons who have committed no wrong. He is cruelly punishing the innocent, persons he knows have not committed that sin the guilt of which he lays upon them, and such an act is opposed to his omnibenevolence. A Christian opponent could, I suppose, still retain the heart of his position by conceding that original sin has not been passed on, that only Adam and Eve possessed it, but then saying that their having committed the sin so corrupted them that it changed their bodies, their souls, or both of these. This changed, corrupted nature was then inherited by their descendants, all human beings. There really is no way to disprove this, any more than there is any way to disprove that there are currently billions of non-material fairies dancing on the tip of my nose or that invisible space monsters from the planet Waggawagga came to Earth, mated with protohuman primates while these slept, and so spawned our species, but there is no way to prove any such assertion, either. A Christian might reply to this by claiming that we do observe man's sinful nature. He might, for instance, say that, by looking at how children lie, steal, commit acts of violence, and so on, we can infer that such children have an inherently sinful nature. He will then say that these children have such a sinful nature because their nature has been corrupted by original sin. This argument is, however, flawed. For one thing, even if it did demonstrate that children, and so all human beings, have a sinful nature, the assertion that any given child has such a corrupt nature because he has acquired it from some person, Adam, whose nature was corrupted by his committing the first sin, remains completely undemonstrated. Moreover, while I will concede that we can see that all people do bad things, this capacity for evil is not necessarily indicative of a corrupt, a sinful nature. The same characteristics that are used to show that human beings are corrupt, "aggression," "duplicity," "jealousy," and what have you, can be explained empirically as a part of our biological nature. We can explain aggressiveness, for example, by noting how aggression aids in survival. We can turn to observation to verify this explanation. There is, consequently, no need to rely on an unverifiable narrative (that of Adam and Eve's disobedience) to explain this trait. It is, of course, always wise to rely upon the argument that requires the fewest unproven assumptions. I would, after all, be wiser to assume that my foot itches because the mosquito I see flying away from me bit it than to assume that it itches because I was abducted by Atlanteans living on the bottom of some ocean who took me back in time to their ancient city, conducted experiments on my foot, returned me to my original time, and erased all my memories of my strange ordeals. The first assumption is supported by empirical evidence; the second is not. What is more, such a change of Adam's nature did not occur, according to Christian theology, simply as a result of impersonal causal factors, nor could it have since god superintends the universe. St. Augustine is quite clear about this when he claims, "through his sin he [Adam] subjected his descendants to the punishment of sin and damnation, for he had radically corrupted them, in himself, by his sinning. As a consequence of this, all those descended from him and his wife (who had prompted him to sin and who was condemned along with him at the same time)--all those born through carnal lust, on whom the same penalty is visited as for disobedience--all these entered into the inheritance of original sin" (Augustine, Enchiridion, Albert C. Outler, trans., VIII, 26). If, however, Adam's nature was made corrupt as punishment for his transgression, for his original sin, then god's imposition of such a nature upon Adam's descendants, his punishment of these innocents, is just as wrong as is his ascribing guilt to such persons. An omnibenevolent being would surely be compassionate and interested in furthering justice. He would not deliberately hurt others and further injustice. Although the doctrine of original sin is employed to explain the existence of evil in this world, it is clearly so flawed that it must be false. Original sin, though said to be the cause of man's evil nature, his capacity to do harm to his fellows, cannot be. It is, however, even more useless in explaining why the world itself is filled with violent catastrophes and unavoidable suffering, which often result from events that are not caused by human beings. If, after all, original sin is the reason for these things happening, then it must be because men possess the guilt of original sin rather than simply having a corrupt nature. Since such things as hurricanes, floods, diseases, and deformities, being causally unrelated to human nature, cannot be prompted by our nature, then, if they are caused by original sin, they must be inflicted upon us by god because of our guilt. This, however, cannot be the case, since, for the reasons given above, only Adam and Eve could possess that guilt. Clearly, the doctrine of original sin is not going to help the Christian explain away the existence of evil. Part II: Free Will Ignoring the problems discussed above, and granting man's corrupt nature, let us turn to another, related doctrine employed to deal with the problem of evil, namely, free will. Admittedly, not all Christians have accepted that human beings have free will. There have been a significant number of Christians who, emphasizing god's omniscience and omnipotence, have decided that he determines who is to be saved and who is to be damned. There are also, however, a significant number of Christians who posit the existence of free will and who then claim that evil exists because free will has been given to such beings as ourselves. I will not bother with the god of those who accept predestination. Their deity is so harsh and cruel (after all, he has arbitrarily selected certain persons for heaven and, in his boundless love, decided to let the rest roast in hell) that I do not feel it necessary to go into great details to condemn such a belief. It is obviously opposed to the Christian doctrine that god is omnibenevolent and so exposes the system that includes it to be false. For those who do not accept predestination, the standard answer to the problem of evil is little better than such a vision. I am, of course, referring to the claim that evil exists because man is corrupt and has free will. This answer is not satisfactory. First of all, I would ask: Does having free will necessarily entail the capacity to do evil? Free will is not generally accepted as being equivalent to being omnipotent. Though I may desire to fly, for example, though I will myself to do so, I cannot leap from a cliff and sail through the air. Clearly, then, I can still have free will without having the capacity to perform a given act. If this is the case, then I can have free will without having the capacity to sin. Couldn't god have created a world in which one living thing does not have the capacity to kill another? A universe in which such a thing is impossible is not innately more absurd than one in which there is the impossibility of the destruction of matter (as is the case in our own universe). In other words, such a universe is not logically impossible and so is not impossible for an omnipotent being to create. The creation of the world that actually exists by god, and his placement of human beings in it, would then seem to be unnecessarily cruel. I would further point out that a person's will is affected by his various instincts and drives, which include those that impel him to perform acts that Christianity considers sinful. Surely, if god is all powerful and all good, but considers nearly all sexual acts to be sinful, he could have avoided giving us the strong sexual urges we have. We could have been made like most other animals, with a desire to engage in sexual acts only at certain times (specifically, for us, after we married). We would not then have the drive that prompts us to commit so many sins. This would not, moreover, infringe upon our free will. We don't, after all, have desires to do many things for which many other living things do have desires, desires which impel them to perform actions humans don't perform. We don't, instance, have a desire to self-anoint as hedgehogs do. Does the absence of this drive limit our free will? I do not believe that it does, nor can I imagine any Christian theologian disagreeing with me. It is absurd to claim that not providing us with certain drives, drives that cause us to harm ourselves, would limit our free will. Why, then, couldn't god have made our minds a little bit different from the way they are, without particular destructive impulses? It seems unnecessarily cruel to give a person a strong urge and then to punish him for acting on that urge. Of course, god does not merely punish the person who commits a sin. Even were I to grant that god has done us a favor by giving us free will along with the capacity to do evil, this does not excuse him for then allowing one person to exercise his free will in a way that is hurtful to another. In such an instance, the evil of a particular act is suffered not by the one wrongly exercising his free will but by another. God's decision to allow such acts does seem to be horribly negligent and deliberately cruel. After all, he could, as has been noted, created us with free will but without the capacity to do harm to others. We would then have the benefits of free will without the agonies we currently suffer when these are cruelly exercised. What is more, Christian claims about free will create difficulties for their claims about the nature of the universe. To be specific, if free will entails the capacity to do evil (which does seem to be what is claimed in Christian apologetics), then, I wonder: Do persons living in heaven still have free will? There are several possible answers to the question. A) There is no free will in heaven, meaning that although everyone is good, each and every person is nothing more than an angelic automaton. If this is the case, then, I might add, not having free will is more perfect than is having free will, which would undermine Christian claims that having free will is better than not having it. God would be deliberately harming us, rather than helping us, by giving us free will. B) There is free will in heaven just as there is on earth. If this is the case, then there are two possibilities, depending upon the nature of existence in heaven. 1) Individuals in heaven interact with one another, which itself gives rise to two possibilities. a) An individual's free will, and his capacity to do evil, can repeatedly be exercised, meaning that there are individuals who sin against others in heaven (so even the saints could be assaulted, raped, cheated, or otherwise injured by their fellows, however such things might occur in the celestial empire); heaven might then be better than the earth, whether marginally or substantially, but it would not be perfect. b) An individual, upon choosing to sin against others in heaven, would not be permitted to continue to do so. Maybe, whenever one of the saints succumbs to his free will and does sin, he is promptly either reconditioned by a spell in some ethereal concentration camp or just jettisoned from heaven altogether (I guess that would keep the population there under control, though it would also mean that heaven is not necessarily eternal, especially for anyone daring not to conform to the dictates of the celestial totalitarian). 2) Individuals in heaven do not interact with one another. If this is the case, then the isolated celestial sinner might a) be left to stew in his anger, lust, greed, etc., which, being unfulfilled, would, it seems, transform heaven into hell for him, or b) be reconditioned or cast from heaven, just as could be done with the non-isolated individual (with the same consequences). In all of these cases, in which free will exists in both the mundane and celestial realms, though heaven is impermanent and imperfect, it is still a preferable place to this earth, which means that individuals possess free will in a universe better than is this one. If they do, however, then it would seem that god is being unnecessarily cruel by placing us in this world of pain when he could have given us the benefits of free will without having so placed us. C) It is also possible that while heavenly beings (whether isolated or capable of interacting with others) have free will, this will is different from the earthly free will, that it does not entail the capacity to do or even to will evil. This change could be the result of two things. 1) Some internal change, some change in the nature of the individual, which, though not affecting his free will, causes him to cease to have any desire to do anything that is sinful. If this is the case, however, then it would seem unnecessarily cruel of god not to bring about such a change in earthly beings, as I mentioned above. After all, even we mortals, flawed as we are, try to help a person who has been injured or who does himself harm. Surely an omnibenevolent god would do at least as much as we would. 2) Some external force so beguiles the inhabitants of heaven that they cannot think of doing evil. I suppose that god could so blind the angelic hosts with his intoxicating good looks that no one in heaven would ever think of sinning. Again, however, if this is the case, a person might wonder why god doesn't want to share his beauty with those not in heaven (or employ whatever means it is that distracts the blessed from sinning); if he is omnibenevolent, he should, after all, desire to grace man both with the capacity to have free will and with his own light that would always lead man to use that capacity for good. Of course, having free will is preferable to not having free will, but even if god has granted us the gift of free will, this does not excuse the negligence he displays in having crafted such flawed creations to receive this gift. After all, he is responsible for the nature of his creations and cannot, being omniscient, have failed to see what the consequences of giving free will to such beings as we are would be. In the same way, a human parent, knowing that his child has free will, has a responsibility to raise this child so that he will most likely (by the parent's best judgment) have a noble character and will not, thanks to this character, be inclined to commit immoral acts. The parent, in other words, has a duty to shape the child's nature, to the best of his abilities, so that the child will exercise his free will in a morally praiseworthy manner. God, unlike a human parent, whose knowledge, goodness, and capacities to shape his child's character are all limited, could, in his boundless wisdom, benevolence, and power, have made our very nature fundamentally different from what it is. Driven by his mercy and kindness, he could have made us morally perfect, so that we would always exercise our free will in a perfect manner, but he has not done so. He has deliberately created a species of predators, of gangsters, rapists, and thieves, and has since condemned us for behaving in accordance with that nature. My point here should be obvious. The existence of evil and particular Christian dogmas, specifically, the religion's acceptance of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity, jointly create issues for which Christianity does not have good answers. When the religion does provide answers, such as explaining evil as being the result of free will, the explanation is not just inadequate; it actually creates more problems and more absurdities than it provides solutions. Part III: God's Benevolence and the Nature and Purpose of Evil A great many evils, that is to say, things that cause pain, either result from another person's exercising his free will or do not result from anyone exercising his free will at all, which means that the doctrine is no more useful in explaining why we endure pain than it is in explaining why we create pain. I realize that a Christian could say that we are deservedly tested by earthquakes, birth defects, diseases, famines, and the like because Adam sinned, because he exercised his free will, and that not only am I responsible for Adam's actions, but I also deserve to be punished for his primordial sin in the most severe and macabre ways possible. With such reasoning, the Christian goes on to try to explain how there can be evil, pain, in the world which does not even result from particular sinful actions. For the first man's one great misdeed (which god does seem to have intended him to commit or, at least, tempted him to commit), we do not live in the bliss of paradise; instead, we suffer and die; we have become deserving of boundless pain and inevitable death. Even a person who has not himself committed actual sin is, because his first ancestors chewed on an apple, deserving of the greatest agony. He is incarcerated in a world of aging, natural disasters, sickness, countless gruesome accidents, and unavoidable death. What a forgiving, kind god the Christians adore! Any deity that would inflict such sufferings (or, by refusing to help, allow them to be inflicted), even to the most evil of persons, must, however, be utterly monstrous and horribly vicious. After all, if there is no original sin, then these evils are visited upon the innocent, and, if there is original sin, their visitation upon the guilty exposes god as being spiteful and cruel rather than forgiving. As petty, vindictive, and generally flawed as ordinary human beings are, many would not, unless overcome by brutal emotions, wish such pains on others. What is more, any person who possesses even a modicum of compassion is sure to be moved to try to alleviate at least a tiny portion of the sufferings of his fellow living beings. This individual, as imperfect as he is, and as limited as his actions can be, might then wonder why an all-good god would not similarly feel compassion for the beings of this world and then, using his boundless powers, put an end to this pain. Surely, god, if omnibenevolent, is less prone to tantrums and meanness than a corrupt human is. In fact, all the sufferings that are inflicted upon human beings seem pointlessly sadistic I should add to this that the pains inflicted upon animals, which are just as bad, are explained by Christians in even more unsatisfactory ways. For some Christians, animals are, at best, soulless creatures that, while they suffer, exist without any chance of escape from that pain. For others, animals are viewed as soulless automata that can be used or abused as one desires, since they feel no pain. The former position, unfortunately, exposes the cruelty and heartlessness of the Christian god, since it would make it seem that he is unconcerned about the pains of his creations. The latter position defies empirical evidence (that many non-human animals do endure pain) and provides men with a spurious justification for abusing and doing untold harm to their fellow living beings. Both positions are, frankly, grotesque. Christians have, of course, attempted to explain away the problem of evil, to provide reasons that justify the existence of pain, that make it into something that is ultimately good, or, at the least, not god's fault, but these attempts are no more than sophistry. Although I do not desire to present an overview of Christian theology here, a couple of these ought to be addressed. John Hick, drawing upon St. Irenaeus, has argued that pain exists so that human beings can make moral progress. Basically, this amounts to saying that we have been made imperfect so that we can become perfect. That's very odd reasoning. A painter, desiring to create a beautiful painting, does not slash his canvass so that he can come back and fix it. God is not, however, simply a maker of inanimate objects. He is said to be the creator of human beings as well. Saying, then, that he is doing good by having made us flawed only so that he can guide us to righteousness is like saying that a human father does good by abusing and psychologically scarring his children only so that he can later heal them of their injuries. Though it might be said that this father is, ultimately, improving his children, this help would have been unnecessary had he not previously committed crimes against them. The man isn't doing good by following such a course of action; he's behaving in an utterly reprehensible manner. The god who acts similarly is similarly reprehensible. Nor can it be claimed that since virtues like courage, hope, perseverance, and faith could not be cultivated without the presence of evil, the existence of such evil is justified. Courage requires the existence of danger, but surely a secure existence would be preferable. Hope and perseverance demand that one be threatened with despair or hardships, but surely not being so threatened would be better. Faith is nothing more than believing in something without proof of its existence. Faith, thus, requires the existence of ignorance, but surely knowledge is better than ignorance. It is very odd that anyone could claim that god is doing good by creating a world in which such virtues could be cultivated. No one, after all, applies the same reasoning to human beings. No father is praised for tossing his son into a lion's den so that the boy can cultivate courage, keeping the boy in ignorance so that he will have to rely upon faith rather than knowledge, and making sure the child's life is beset with various troubles and pains so that he can develop hope and perseverance. What is more, Hick's claims that natural evils occur because the laws of the universe operate independently of human desires and cannot, consequently, be described as truly being evil, is just as ridiculous as is the rest of his argument. Let us remember that, for Hick, god set up these laws. God designed this universe. He must, therefore, take responsibility for his design. If a man designs and builds a house with razorblades imbedded in its floor, red-hot steel walls, and acid spewing from every spigot, and then forces his children to live in it, he is responsible for any injury caused by the house's features to his children. If god designs a universe that is potentially hurtful to its inhabitants, he is responsible for the injuries those inhabitants suffer. What is more, god superintends this universe. He did not simply create a dangerous prison filled with deadly traps and painful instruments of torture; he watches over this place as an all-seeing jailor. Just as a father who watches his child approach an open fire and, by inaction, allows that child to be burned is responsible for that child's injury, so god, by watching us all, and not helping us is, by his failure to act, responsible for our pain. The frequent Christian response to such criticisms, that god's plans only seem cruel to us because we are of such inferior intelligence that we cannot understand his grand design, is hardly adequate. While this claim certainly does not raise issues with god's omnipotence or omniscience, it still does contradict his omnibenevolence. After all, if god is omnipotent, then he can bring about a given effect by any means that are logically possible. If this is the case, then, although god is bringing about a particular effect with the universe as it exists, which includes all the sufferings we know, he could just as effectively, and with as little effort, since he is omnipotent, bring about the same effect by means that do not include these sufferings. Since god, if he exists, is bringing about his intended effect with cruel means, he is being unnecessarily vicious, which reveals him not to be omnibenevolent. It does not matter whether we humans, with our limited minds, can or cannot grasp god's plan. The plan remains cruel whether we understand it or not. Similarly, though an animal used in medical experiments is of lesser intelligence than is the man conducting the experiments, and cannot understand either the means or the goal of the experiment, which latter may well be exceptionally noble, should the experimenter, who, unlike god, has limited capacities and limited goodness, inflict unnecessary pain on that animal, he would, nonetheless, be acting cruelly. There is, however, a real difference between these two instances, the human experimenter's work and god's governance of the universe, in that god, not being limited, can achieve his ends without doing any harm to those under his control. St. Augustine's assertion that evil is not a substance, that it is merely a perversion of the will, an absence of reason, which leads a man to seek after the material rather than the spiritual, is equally ridiculous (Confessions VII, 16), and St. Thomas Aquinas's similar claim that evil results from those actions that are not informed by the existence of reason or virtue in the actor, that it is simply an absence of good and so, being a mere absence, is not created by god, is no better than this (See Summa Theologica I, q. 5, II.1 q. 18). Even if I concede that one or both of these understandings of evil is correct, since god is both responsible for his flawed design (because he created the universe with such absences) and, being omnipotent, able to prevent the harm his universe does to its inhabitants, and yet fails to intervene, he is still answerable for this absence of good that is the existence of evil. Leaving aside the first of these issues for the moment, and assuming that god is not responsible for the evil of this world, since, being merely an absence of good, he did not create it, Aquinas's position is still hopelessly flawed. To explain this, I would give the following example. I will posit that there is a negligent father who permits his child to burn himself by touching an open flame. It is possible that the father, at some prior time, or even at the time the child's action was occurring, told the child that touching a flame is harmful and that he should not touch it, so providing the child with an injunction. Though supplying this injunction can be characterized as morally good and the child's failure to adhere to it as morally evil, insofar as this failure occurs because of an absence of virtue, reason, or the like, the father is still not relieved of his responsibility when the child fails to follow the injunction. If the child attempts to touch the flame, it is, after all, virtually certain that, because he has an incomplete understanding of the consequences of his action, he thinks that he will benefit from doing so. The father, realizing that the child is deluded, that his understanding is incomplete, has a responsibility to the child and ought to stop him from harming himself. When human beings fail to obey god, they, like the child, must, if Christianity is correct, have an incomplete knowledge of the universe and must be acting as a result of their delusions. God, who knows the consequences of our actions, would surely, if he loves his children, prevent them from harming themselves. Even if god is a little spiteful, and so willing, out of annoyance, to let his disobedient children injure themselves, surely he would not, however, allow one child to hurt another. Though a human father might say, after his first child burned his second, that he was not responsible for the pain the injured child endured, since he had told the first not to burn the other and that the first child's doing so was merely the result of the child's not following his injunction (which disobedience was prompted by an absence of virtue or the like), I would still hold the man responsible if he could have stopped the one from hurting the other. Not only could the father have prevented his child from suffering, however, but, what is more, the child suffering was not the one who failed to follow the injunction. The child who was harmed was not the one lacking some good. It would, therefore, seem that the painful consequences of an absence of good in one individual have nothing to do with the presence or absence of good in a second individual. The cause of evil is, thus, nothing more than a set of entities which lack goodness as one of their number and which, by exercising particular causal functions, can harm any person irrespective of his own actions. Unfortunately for the Christian, since even a person who is not responsible for a given act of evil can suffer the consequences of that act, it becomes clear that god is not concerned about justice, about performing the simple act of helping the poor creatures he has cast into this world. As bad as is god's not coming to the aid of his suffering creations, this lack of compassion is nothing compared to the viciousness that he demonstrated by crafting a universe filled with various positive entities that are devoid of good, as a result of which these entities are able to exercise their capacity for evil. I can, after all, no more excuse the carelessness or cruelty displayed by god in his making of this universe than I could excuse the carelessness or cruelty of the bridge maker who, not having secured his structure with nails (that is to say, not having created it with nails), allowed the structure to collapse when people actually set foot upon it, which collapse, undoubtedly, could be detrimental to their well-being. Failure to include what is necessary for a thing to be beneficial, whether to itself or others, is just as wrong as is creating something that is more obviously harmful. God, apparently, has no interest in making an effort to produce a world that is more complete and, thus, more perfect and less hurtful to its inhabitants than is that in which we live, nor, having created this brutal, imperfect world, does he show any interest in helping those suffering in it. I suppose that a Christian could reply that because of original sin we are all deserving of punishment, but this person must have forgotten what has already been said about original sin. There have been other attempts to explain how an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient god could allow evil to exist, but I see little need to waste much time on these. Leibniz's claim that this is the best of all possible worlds, that it is one in which virtues can be developed thanks to the presence of evils, is little more than a variation of St. Irenaeus's doctrine, and I have dealt with that sufficiently. The related claim that this is the best possible world, since a perfect world would be impossible to create, is not justified. If god is omnipotent, then he can create a perfect world. There is, moreover, nothing logically impossible about the creation of a perfect world in the way that the creation of a square circle would be impossible. The claim that evil is part of god's plan, which is something we limited humans simply can't understand, is beset with several problems. It does not address the basic issue of how an all-seeing, all-powerful, all-good being can allow evil to occur, and it adds to this its assumption that god has a plan for the universe that is implemented in a demonstrably cruel way, that is, in a way that is hurtful to living things. I see little point in going on with this discussion. The various theodicies that have been proposed by Christians over the last two thousand years are usually just variations of one another, and all fall to the same problems. There is still a way that a Christian could extricate himself from these difficulties. He could say that good is not something that exists apart from god, as something independent. This apologist could claim that an action is good because it conforms with god's will, because, in other words, god has decreed it to be good. When god commanded that the Israelites massacre the Midianites and take the daughters of the vanquished into sexual slavery, the murders and rapes committed by the Israelites, by conforming with this injunction, were good. When god decrees that a child be caught in a fire and so horribly burned (or, at least, chooses to allow such events to occur, like some abusively neglectful parent), he is doing something good, because it is god who decided to take this course of action. Clearly, the logical problems that arise for a person who believes that certain things are inherently good and others inherently wrong do not arise for someone who accepts such a vision of god. I will admit that his god is logically possible. Such a being could exist. Even if this god does exist, however, I would hardly advocate following his decrees. Though he might inflict pain upon us if we oppose him, as can any worldly dictator, because he is hurtful (that is to say, because he is evil according to any reasonable standard), we would have an obligation to fight against him, just as we have an obligation to fight the human tyrants of this world. Though we could not defeat and overthrow such a being, we could, by refusing to follow his hateful injunctions, create a better world for ourselves. We would, consequently, have an obligation to oppose this celestial madman. What is more, because this being is clearly malignant, at least from our perspective (in that he commits acts that are injurious to us), because he is not constrained by independent and consistent standards of what is wrong, since, for him, whatever he does is right, we should not forgo present delights in order to enjoy greater promised pleasures in this being's paradise. If good is simply what god does, rather than adherence to some objective standard, to which even god must accord himself, then even breaches of faith on his part are acts of goodness. If this is the case, then we cannot trust god. After all, since whatever such a god does is good, if he promises us that those who obey his injunctions will receive eternal bliss but then nevertheless sends those persons to hell, he is still doing what is good. We would be wiser to make our own good. At least then we might enjoy an agreeable present, one which has a future (in some possible next life) that is no less certain than is that of the worshipper of this god. Although it would mean that he would have to abandon particular doctrines of his religion, a Christian could also say that his god is not omnipotent, not omniscient, not omnibenevolent, not two of these, or not any of them. Obviously, a god that is not omnipotent cannot fix every wrong, a god that is not omniscient cannot know every wrong, and a god that is not omnibenevolent will not desire to right every wrong. The Christian who does accept one of these possibilities is not going to be faced with the entire host of issues discussed above, but he will be moving far from what Christians have historically believed. Unfortunately for any Christian who does ascribe to god all three of these qualities (omnibenevolence, omniscience, and omnipotence), he is positing an impossible being, given the reality of suffering. Though countless explanations have been provided to try to get past this fact, none of them have succeeded. The reason why is obvious. These three traits can no more coexist in an entity presiding over a world in which pain exists than can being circular and being square exist in a single physical object. The problem of evil, consequently, reveals the falsity of of the religion. Christianity is objectionable because its ethical codes are cruel and immoral, unbelievable because its teachings are propounded in an unreliable text, and impossible because its doctrines are mutually incompatible. The religion really is sadistic, ridiculous, and grotesque. By Keith Allen
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