An Almighty Screwup
Why I reject the fundamentalist Christian god
As an atheist, I reject all gods and all religions alike. But this does not mean I spend an equal amount of time and effort arguing against each one I do not believe in. Since it is invariably the fundamentalists and conservatives of a given religion who feel the need to proselytize and preach to others, who attempt to gain secular power, and who - in some instances - use force and coercion to impose their views on those who believe differently, Ebon Musings mainly targets them and their arguments, as opposed to the moderates and liberals who do not try to impose their beliefs on others.
More specifically, since the power-seeking fundamentalists and invasive proselytizers in the nation I live in are mainly right-wing evangelical Protestant Christians, it is their views I spend the most time educating myself in and learning to refute. This essay is derived from my understanding of the Bible and conservative Christian theology and explains one of the principal reasons (other than the lack of evidence) why I reject the Christian fundamentalists' god.
Simply put, the Christian fundamentalist god is a colossal screwup. Anyone who reads the Bible can see for themselves that he just can't do anything right. He designs an originally beautiful and immaculate creation which almost immediately becomes polluted with sin, suffering and death. Both times he tries his hand at creating free will, his created beings immediately turn around and reject him. He chooses a people and continually attempts to redeem them from their fallen state, attempts which continually prove to be complete failures. He dispenses punishments for the evildoers and the wicked that utterly fail to stem the spread of evil and wickedness. He deals with crimes and transgressions by lashing out in childish rage, killing not just the evildoer but, often, all the innocent people around him. His final, crowning attempt to save the world from its sin was almost unanimously rejected by his chosen people. And his repeated promises to return to the Earth to set everything right have now been thoroughly broken. I find it impossible to believe that an omniscient and omnipotent deity, if there was such a being, could so consistently and thoroughly screw up; the contradiction between what this god is claimed to be able to do and what I am told he did do is so stark that it defies all reason that such a being could actually exist. But even if he did, such a sorry excuse for a deity would be deserving of no one's worship - which makes the audacity of his followers all the more incredible, to insist in the face of his long string of failures that he is a wise and loving ruler worthy of our adoration!
Let us consider in more detail some of Yahweh's more notable blunders.
In the beginning, according to the Bible, there was nothing but God and the void. After a timeless eternity, God decided that this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and in six days created the heavens, the Earth and all the life upon it. Adam and Eve, the first couple, lived in a bounteous, peaceful paradise where all was bliss and there was no unhappiness, no pain and no death. So far, so good. Unfortunately, this was to be the first thing Yahweh would get right for a long time.
As it turned out, at some point during those first six days God had also created the angels, to serve him and praise him for all eternity. However, one angel didn't care for this arrangement. Satan - who according to some sources was the highest and wisest of all the angels - denounced God, declared war on his maker, and convinced a full third of the heavenly host to join his rebellion against the throne. How he was able to accomplish this is not clear. Did God create one-third of his angels defective?
At this point, God could have used his omnipotent power to zap Satan and the rest of the rebel angels out of existence entirely. Or he could have changed them with a snap of his all-powerful fingers, fixing the flaws in their personalities and returning them to a state of goodness and obedience. But he did neither. Instead, for unclear reasons, he actually engaged the rebels in battle, and of course defeated them easily. He then cast them out of Heaven and created a fiery pit called Hell in which he would imprison and torture them forever as punishment for their treason.
This solution was much crueler than the other options described, since it produced an enormous amount of unnecessary pain and suffering, whereas the other options would have produced none. Still, it would have sufficed to end the threat that Satan and his followers represented - except for one thing. Somehow, God failed to specify that the rebel angels would actually have to stay in the fiery prison he created for them. Instead, he allowed them to leave whenever they wanted, to roam the Earth tempting and inflicting suffering on humans.
And of course, this is exactly what happened. Almost immediately after creation was complete, according to the fundamentalists, Satan took the form of a snake and traveled to Eden to entice Adam and Eve to sin. He easily succeeded in doing so, apparently because Adam and Eve were also defective; God's complete failure to warn or protect them doubtlessly also played a part. (God's failures in regard to the whole Eden affair are too numerous to list here; for a full catalogue of them, see "Sins of the Father" and "That Fateful Apple".)
So, again, God failed. For the second time, his experiment in free will backfired, and his created beings disobeyed and rejected him. Adam and Eve joined Satan's rebellion and were tainted by sin.
At this point, God could have forgiven the humans, who after all had sinned only out of ignorance, and used his almighty powers to cleanse and redeem them. But he did not. Instead, he threw a temper tantrum, tossed them out of his Garden, and condemned them with a curse to live mortal lives of suffering, toil and death. But apparently God's aim was off, because it wasn't just the two of them who were affected. The curse fell upon the entirety of creation, affecting not just Adam and Eve, but every other living thing, all of Adam and Eve's descendants, and all the descendants of every other living thing for all of time, even though all these other beings were completely innocent of the apple incident, even though most of them did not even exist at the time. The original perfection was shattered and twisted, the curse of sin infected all living creatures, and the entire Earth became a place of suffering and death.
By now Yahweh's original creation was a failure, in ruins. One-third of his angelic servants had rebelled and abandoned him, his perfect world was ruined and spoiled, his human children were lost in sin and darkness, and Hell was empty as the demons roamed the world and tempted humanity still deeper into evil.
Apparently unable to deal with this, God inexplicably turned away from the universe for a while - perhaps to sulk. For many centuries he was absent from the world, doing essentially nothing while it slid deeper into sin. Unsurprisingly, when he finally chose to come back, things were a mess. Humanity had become a race of hopeless, irredeemably evil sinners who had forgotten about him. ("And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" --Genesis 6:5).
At this point, a solution was needed - this evil had to be stopped. God could have used his powers to make all the sinful people and only the sinful people vanish, blinked out of existence instantly. But he did not. Instead, he spoke to the last righteous man on earth, Noah, and told him to build an ark and take aboard his family and two of every kind of animal. He did so, and God sent a massive, catastrophic flood which decimated the planet and wiped out the sinners, as well as killing millions of innocent animals, plants, and human infants and children in the bargain.
Finally the floodwaters receded. Noah disembarked and released the animals to somehow survive on their own in the now lifeless and barren earth, with no food and no supportive ecosystems, and he and his family repopulated the globe. But once again, God had failed. Though the worldwide flood had been sent to wipe out evil, it utterly failed to do so. Noah's descendants spread throughout the world and, within a matter of years, forgot God entirely and became just as sinful and evil as the pre-flood people. In fact, Noah's very first act after the flood, after sacrificing some animals to God, was to plant some grapes so he could make wine, following which he promptly got drunk, passed out, and slept naked inside his tent. Noah's son Ham accidentally looked into the tent and saw his naked father; for this terrible crime Noah, apparently with God's approval, cursed Ham's son Canaan - his own grandson - and all of Canaan's descendants to a lifetime of slavery.
But, in any case, Yahweh was undaunted. Flush with pride at his "victory" over sin, he again took some time off to pat himself on the back. And when he returned, he noticed that the people of Earth had banded together and were building a mud-brick tower high enough to reach Heaven.
At this point, God could have moved his Heaven higher up - perhaps higher than the few hundred feet it must have been at the time - and enjoyed a hearty laugh at the silly antics of his creations. Instead, he panicked, expressed real fear that they would actually reach him and become as powerful as he was, and frantically responded by scattering the people of Earth, confusing and separating them by afflicting them with many different languages. (It should be noted in passing that God eventually forgot about this whole affair and allowed later humans to build much taller skyscrapers with no ill effects.)
Perhaps realizing by now that his large-scale plans kept failing, God decided to think small in his next attempt. He selected a man named Abraham, appeared to him, and vowed that his descendants would be the Almighty's chosen people, would enjoy divine favor ("And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee" --Genesis 12:3) and would inherit a great nation. Suitably impressed, Abraham left his home at God's urging and set out to the promised land.
God's promise passed from Abraham to his son, Isaac, who in turn had two sons, Esau and Jacob. As Isaac's firstborn, Esau was supposed to inherit the divine promise through a blessing, but Jacob deceived his dying father into giving the blessing to him instead. God, despite his omniscience, apparently was also fooled and honored the blessing, allowing Jacob to unfairly steal his brother's rightful place and become the sire of the chosen people. Jacob and his twelve sons became the Israelites, and the divine promise passed to them; Esau and his descendants, meanwhile, were condemned to live in the harsh desert and serve Jacob's descendants, setting the stage for millennia of ethnic hatred, strife and war.
However, Yahweh apparently forgot about his vow to protect and bless his chosen people, and they were almost immediately enslaved by the Egyptians. For several centuries, God's chosen people labored in bitter captivity, continually beaten by their overseers and forced into backbreaking work building monuments and hauling massive blocks of stone. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were rewarded for their faith by living and dying as slaves, trusting in a deliverance that never came for them. And what was the reason for God's allowing all this? The Bible gives none. It does not say that the Egyptian captivity was punishment for any misdeed, nor does it say it was intended to teach the Israelites any lesson. As far as we know, it happened simply because God inexplicably failed to deliver on his promise.
However, after about four hundred years (a time period far longer than the United States has been in existence), God finally noticed what was going on and decided to do something about it. He manifested himself to an Israelite named Moses and promised to use him as the vehicle through which he, God, would free his people.
At this point, God could have used his omniscience to determine exactly what punishment he had to mete out to Pharaoh to cause this. Instead, he began to punish the entire nation with progressively worse punishments, thereby inflicting much pain and suffering on innocent people who had no hand in the decision anyway. However, each of these failed to persuade Pharaoh to release the Israelites, and since God must have known ahead of time that they would fail, the inescapable conclusion is that he caused vast amounts of innocent suffering for nothing. Pharaoh was not persuaded to free the Israelites until God killed every completely innocent firstborn child in Egypt. Why didn't he just punish the one person responsible with something that would have been adequate from the start? Who knows?
But after all this innocent death and suffering, the people of Israel were free, and God led them out of Egypt. Then, through Moses, he burdened them with a long and arbitrary set of rules covering every aspect of daily life - what kinds of animals they were not allowed to eat, what activities they were not allowed to engage in on certain days of the week, how they had to mutilate their genitals to show their faith in him, and so on - and specified the horrible punishments for breaking any of them, most of which involved death in various cruel ways. The Israelites hated these rules so much that they rejected God's deliverance, preferring their slavery in Egypt. (No surprise there. According to fundamentalist Christians, the Mosaic law is impossible to faithfully follow. It is little wonder the people preferred their Egyptian taskmasters - at least they could please them some of the time!) As punishment, God forced them to wander in the desert until most of them had died. This included his great prophet Moses, who had given his entire life to leading the Israelites out of Egypt and was rewarded for his service by never even getting to set foot on the earth of the promised land.
Finally, God allowed his people to enter Palestine. Unfortunately, it was already occupied by other people who had taken up residence there during Israel's Egyptian captivity and by now had been living there for generations. At this point, God could have invited the native Palestinians into his covenant, given them the same laws he had given the Israelites, and established an egalitarian society where people of all races could live together in harmony. Instead, he ordered his people to invade and slaughter the natives, killing them to the last man, woman and child, specifically instructing them to show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances. What followed were a series of terrible, bloody battles in which tens of thousands of people died violently. Finally, God pronounced his campaign of genocide a success (Joshua 11:15) - but this was not true. Somehow, he had failed to notice that many of the people he had ordered his chosen to exterminate were still alive (as is shown by repeated biblical references to them after that point; see, for example, Judges 3:5). There was even one instance in which some of these people had survived despite God's efforts to kill them, apparently because their iron chariots defeated his omnipotence (Judges 1:19).
However, after all this death and bloodshed, the Israelites were at last in the promised land. At this point, God formed them into a loose confederacy of tribes and appointed the judges to govern them. This failed. The people continually fell into sin, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. Each time this happened, they cried out to God and he raised up a judge to save them, after which they promptly fell back into sin.
After several iterations of this, God became fed up and decided that there was only one way to break this cycle of sin and retribution: establish a monarchy in Israel. His first choice for king was Saul, who turned out to be a complete failure. Saul fell into sin, suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and finally committed suicide rather than be captured or killed in battle.
God's next choice for king was David, and just once - for the first time since creation - it looked as if he might have made the right decision. David and his son Solomon succeeded in rallying the Israelites behind them, and ruled over a glorious and powerful united monarchy, God's ideal state and the culmination of his promises to his chosen people (although God did break his promise, in Genesis 15:18, to give Abraham's descendants all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates: Israel was never this large even at the height of its power). However, Solomon's son Rehoboam proved to be an inept ruler, and in a move God failed to do anything to prevent, his united monarchy, after existing for only two kings, shattered into two separate, warring kingdoms. The vast majority of the tribes seceded, joining the new state of Israel in the north, while only a tiny rump state named Judah was left for David's throne.
In subsequent years, things got even worse. The kings of both nations continually fell into sin, taking all the people with them, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. The crimes of Israel finally grew so intolerable that God threw a fit and sent the legendarily cruel Assyrian empire to destroy them, carrying ten of the original twelve Israelite tribes off into slavery where they vanished forever from history.