#44: Morality and Purpose in a Christian Universe

As an atheist, I am sometimes asked how I find any purpose in life and how I can distinguish between right and wrong. But even if Christianity were proven true, it would not resolve these questions.

Above: St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague (photo my own)

I had dinner recently with a devout French Catholic wearing an elaborate crucifix. He told me he could not imagine what it would be like to go from believing in God to believing in nothing. “It must have been very difficult for you,” he said. “I could never do it.” “Of course,” I told him. “It was a very dark time.”

He looked at me sorrowfully. I was a person lost in a world that must seem empty and meaningless. Adrift in a universe where I existed merely by chance and where nothing happened for a reason. My life was void of any innate purpose whatsoever. I might be a humanitarian worker or a serial killer, but either way the end would be the same. There would be neither reward nor punishment awaiting me after death, only oblivion. Whatever I suffered, I could find no comfort in the knowledge that God was in control. A sad and hopeless way to live. And to him, my worldview was all the more tragic because it was a lie. God does have a plan for me, only I refuse to recognize it.

“I could never do it,” my dinner companion told me. “I’ve always been a Catholic.”

“I used to be a Calvinist,” I said with a chuckle. “I thought the pope was the antichrist.”

He cringed. My disrespectful frivolity had offended him. I was unable to find any sympathy within me for the respect he felt for the Pope. I was unwilling to speak more kindly about the supreme western celibate simply because the man beside me adored him. He looked at me not with anger, however, but with pity and sadness. He felt bad for me. The gaze in his eyes made me remember the old days of my late teenage years. I was living then through a crisis of faith. I shifted over several months between agnosticism and Protestantism. At 19, I told a Calvinist theologian that I had gone through an agnostic phase, but I was back to believing in God. I said it had all been very difficult for me. He nodded solemnly. “I’ve been there myself,” he said. “It’s terrible. It was so depressing for me, just to think that life was so meaningless.” Without God and the Bible, we agreed, there was not even any basis for a certain sense of morality. Purpose aside, there was no way to even know right from wrong.

My entire life, I had believed God created me with a purpose in mind, and I had been unable to imagine that there could be any true morality without God presiding as its judge. God knew every hair on my head, and he had special plans in store for me. Jesus, they told me, was my best friend, and I could speak to him every night. Because it’s “not a religion; it’s a relationship,” and it was through my relationship with Christ and the study of his Word that I would find meaning and become a good person.

Atheism was almost unimaginable. Believing in God seemed essential to human nature, and the universality of some kind of god within every culture testified to God’s actual existence. Humans simply perceived him. His existence was baked into our consciousness and our sense of morality. As my old hero John Calvin said, “there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as to not be imbued with the conviction that there is a God.” In the Scriptures, those who doubt god’s existence and refuse to follow his commands have no real excuse. Deep down, the Bible says, they know he is real, because all of Creation testifies to the existence of its designer.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. (Romans 1:18-21)

I wondered in horrified amazement at the atheists who claimed to be good people. Long before I read Brothers Karamazov, I clung to the Dostoevsky maxim, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted.” The godless communists governing the Soviet Union and China had proven that the absence of God in a society goes hand-in-hand with evil. “If you’re an atheist,” I would ask my godless acquaintances, “how is it not okay for you to just kill and rape people?” They simply laughed in my face. And yet I could not comprehend their mockery.

For how - if not for God, His commandments, and the certainty of Judgment Day - could they have any basis for saying that rape and murder were wrong? And how, if they did feel that sense of morality, could they claim it came from anywhere but God? God’s existence must be evident to them on the basis of their own sense of good and evil. If they continue despite this to deny God’s existence, they would truly be left “without excuse” on Judgment Day. And by refusing to use the Bible as the source for their morality, they would never be able to truly know right from wrong. They would fall back on their own flawed human conclusions, and they would find idols in nature and popular culture to worship in place of God. And as a result, they would descend into every imaginable kind of immorality, even homosexuality. As St. Paul continues:

Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them. (Romans 1:22-32) (emphasis mine)

Even as a fundamentalist who claimed certainty that homosexuality was wrong, I always secretly struggled to understand why these “unnatural relations” would be lumped in with envy, murder, strife, deceit, etc. And for Christ’s apostle to suggest that those practicing homosexuality “deserve to die!” I suppressed my doubts. As a fallen human contaminated by Original Sin, I knew I was too evil to differentiate good from bad. The Bible was God’s infallible Word, and the moral teachings of the New Testament in particular required unquestioned acceptance. So if the New Testament said homosexuality was wrong, then it must be wrong, regardless of what flawed logic my sinful brain could muster in reaction to the Bible’s declarations.

Similarly, before I started really reading the New Testament, I lacked a conviction that women needed to be subordinate. I was no liberal, but many of my friends were feminists. Many of my female friends in particular were much smarter and more accomplished than I was. I had no basis for imagining an innate male superiority. But who was I to question the New Testament as the ultimate guide to morality? My faith in the New Testament, and my distrust in my own ability to think through right and wrong without its aid, left me with the most sexist opinions I have ever entertained.

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. (Ephesians 5:22-24)

The women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached? (1 Corinthians 14:34-36)

With the Bible as the guide for my definitions of right and wrong, I relentlessly maintained the view that both feminism and homosexuality were immoral. But when it came to rape, murder, and genocide - the sins I assigned to atheists - my sense of morality was significantly more muddled. Even as I asked my atheist friends how they could stop themselves from raping and murdering people, I was uneasily aware of the fact that, according to the Bible, both rape and murder were sometimes justified.

That God routinely commanded atrocities in the Old Testament sometimes seems lost on Christians. But the basic story is familiar to most of them. Having promised the Holy Land to the Israelites, God told them to slaughter all the Canaanites and others already living there. In God’s eyes, wholesale genocide was the only way to prevent conquered minorities from religiously contamination of his Chosen People. 

In the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Per′izzites, the Hivites and the Jeb′usites, as the Lord your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their gods, and so to sin against the Lord your God. (Deuteronomy 20:16-18:)

Throughout Deuteronomy, the Israelite scribes are proud documenters of the devastation wreaked upon local populations by their invading armies. And whenever they slaughter every man, woman, and child, they justify their actions by claiming that God gave that land to them to steal and occupy.

And the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and his land over to you; begin to take possession, that you may occupy his land.’ Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Jahaz. And the Lord our God gave him over to us; and we defeated him and his sons and all his people. And we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed every city, men, women, and children; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took as spoil for ourselves, with the booty of the cities which we captured. (Deuteronomy 2:31-35)

So the Lord our God gave into our hand Og also, the king of Bashan, and all his people; and we smote him until no survivor was left to him. And we took all his cities at that time—there was not a city which we did not take from them—sixty cities, the whole region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan. All these were cities fortified with high walls, gates, and bars, besides very many unwalled villages. And we utterly destroyed them, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon, destroying every city, men, women, and children. (Deuteronomy 3:2-6)

There was a slightly more merciful deal for cities outside the areas which God had given to his supposed “Chosen People.” Women were sometimes allowed to live, at least as property.

“When the Lord your God gives [the city] into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. (Deuteronomy 20:13-14)

Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. (Numbers 31:17-18)

Where the Israelites failed to execute the commanded genocide, the Scriptures condemn them as sinful. Tolerating religious minorities and adapting any of their rituals was a mortal sin for God’s Chosen People. The Lord even sent foreign enemies against them as punishment.

So the people of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Per′izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb′usites; and they took their daughters to themselves for wives, and their own daughters they gave to their sons; and they served their gods. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, forgetting the Lord their God, and serving the Ba′als and the Ashe′roth. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cu′shan-rishatha′im king of Mesopota′mia; and the people of Israel served Cu′shan-rishatha′im eight years. (Judges 3:5-8)

These days, I sometimes ask Christians how they can justify the genocide and rape which God himself commanded in the Bible. And usually, they looked at me with utterly puzzled expressions. What genocide? What rape? What am I even talking about? The faith in God’s goodness is so powerful that many Christians can spend decades learning about the Israelites slaughtering and raping people in the “Promised Land” without ever perceiving who the real bad guys in these stories are. Instead, they continue to worship the god who was on the side of evil.

But what is more likely? That God told the Israelites to kill and rape all those people? Or that the Israelites, intent on the brutal conquest of fertile land for themselves, simply claimed that God told them to clear the area of its inhabitants? And if the latter, does that not mean that a significant portion of the Bible itself is not the Word of God, but rather the propaganda instrument of a genocidal and theocratic regime? Similarly, what is more likely? That this Judeo-Christian god is real? Or that he is the mythological invention of an ancient culture, and that his moral values accordingly reflect that culture’s military and ideological imperatives?

Then again, as one more thoughtful Christian pointed out to me, ordering people to rape and kill does not actually mean God is evil. The Israelites were engaged in ancient warfare. Back then, it was standard practice to raze cities, kill or enslave all the inhabitants, and take women “as booty for yourselves.” If God told the Israelites to pursue these scorched-earth tactics, he was only instructing them according to the norms of the time. But this insight seems even worse for the Christian god. It confirms that God’s moral values are a product of the culture which invented him. He does not represent an unchanging, eternal goodness that stretches across time and space to transcend the relative values of human culture. He merely reflects or builds upon whatever values are found within the culture writing about him at any given moment in time. The basis for God’s Word as an essential guide to morality breaks down. The Christian god suddenly seems as much a source for evil as he is for goodness, and the Christian is provided with no greater certainty about right and wrong than is any atheist. There is no clear or coherent verdict in the Scriptures, and so each of us must think through morality for ourselves.

I suppose liberal Christians have to some extent embraced this. It does not bother them to see what the god they worship once had to say about homosexuals. “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them” (Leviticus 20:13). This hardly disturbs the liberal Christian’s confidence that “God is good.” They write off anything bad in the Bible as “the Old Testament,” as if God gets a free pass for all that stuff. Nothing God has ever done or said seems to dissuade them from worshipping him.

In the New Testament, the liberal Christians simply ignore the disagreeable parts. Many of them seem to lack any sense of the “sexual immorality” so frequently condemned throughout the New Testament. They may see verses against homosexuality and women’s equality in the New Testament, but they simply push these to the side, even as they cling to the Bible as a fundamentally legitimate source of morality. Sometimes, they are unaware that the eternal fires of Hell are not “Old Testament” but rather a core component of Jesus Christ’s teachings in the Gospels. Since they could hardly care less about actually reading the Bible, they sometimes react with disbelief when they are informed that Hell is only in the New Testament. They seem endlessly content to simply reinvent God according to their own values. For the sake of women and LGBTQ people, I am glad that the liberal Christians are so willing to pick and choose from the Bible according to their own biases. But it is difficult for me to take liberal Christians’ religious beliefs very seriously. Their faith testifies to a god who is simply a creation of their own imaginations.

Like the ancient Israelites, the liberal Christians worship a fictitious god who simply reflects their own values. The same god who once ordered mass slaughter and put homosexuals to death is now a champion of marriage equality. He even thinks women can be pastors. The liberal Christians of today claim to worship the same god as the Apostle Paul and Jesus’s disciples, but they have changed him and reshaped him for themselves. They thus show that the Christian religion does not actually provide any certainty about the difference between good and wrong. We humans must work that question out for ourselves, whether we are religious or not. Over time, we change the content and interpretations of our religions to reflect new moral understandings.

I concede, however, that the morality of the Bible can be rendered totally coherent and void of contradiction. The genocide of the Canaanites and other ethno-religious deviants is perfectly justified by the Gospel itself: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The logic behind this statement excuses all manner of horrors against human beings. Why, to begin with, would only those who believe in the Son gain eternal life? Because according to the Bible, human beings are irredeemably sinful and innately rebellious against God. In Genesis, God created the world good, but when Adam and Eve disobeyed him by eating that apple, the whole of creation was corrupted by sin, and sin became the core part of human nature. An apple may not seem like a big deal, but God demands obedience, and to disobey God’s commands is almost the definition of the sins which killed Adam and Eve. These two, when they were good, were supposed to live forever. Instead, they only made it to around 900 years, and every subsequent generation saw life expectancy gradually decrease. The sinfulness of our flesh is why we die at all. And in the end, according to Jesus and the various authors of the New Testament, God will throw us into Hell as the final punishment for our disobedience. To ensure some of us can avoid that fate, God sent his Son to die in our place. Anyone who repents of his sins and believes in him will be saved. Everyone else, however, will burn in Hell forever. Because that is the fate which humans, thanks to our innately sinful and disobedient nature, deserve by default.

In this moral framework, there is no one who will escape Hell by virtue of “deserving” to go to Heaven. If anyone is allowed into Heaven, it is only by the grace of God. That humans even still exist at all is purely thanks to God’s mercy. In the early days, “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). He accordingly decided to send floodwaters to end the world. He would have been justified in killing absolutely everyone during the Flood, and it was only by his awesome mercy that he allowed Noah to survive on the Ark. Yet even after that reset, humans still deserve a similar fate. As the New Testament declares, “there is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12). Despite our continuous evil, the rainbow testifies to the incredible mercy God shows us by promising never to use water to kill us all again. But that does not mean we are exempt from his righteous judgment.

According to prophetic visions of the Last Day, “anyone whose name was not found in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15). The rainbow here becomes a reminder of the flames which await us after death and judgment. As Jesus is quick to clarify, God will now use fire, not water, to punish us for our sins.

“Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

“The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.” (Matthew 13:41-42)

“And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell to the unquenchable fire.” (Mark 9:43

In Luke 16:19-31, Jesus describes a rich man in Hell who seeks a way to warn his loved ones, “lest they also come to this place of torment.” But Abraham, who is talking to him from the other side of a great chasm between Heaven and Hell, simply says that “they have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.” The man argues that if his loved ones see someone rise from the dead, then they will believe and repent, but Abraham disagrees, saying that “if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” The man pleads with Abraham for a single drop of water, “because I am in agony in this fire,” but Abraham says there is no possibility of anyone crossing the space between them. Liberal Christians often deny or dismiss these brutal scriptural realities, but the god they claim to worship is quite clear about the eternal fire which humans deserve.

So yes, there were already people in the Promised Land when the Israelites arrived. But like all other humans, they did not even deserve to be alive. If they lived at all, it was only by the grace of God, who could have wiped them out by natural disaster. To be sure, humans would not have a right, on our own, to execute a genocide upon another group of humans. But God has the right to kill any of us at any time as immediate punishment for our sinfulness. So there is no moral issue if God saw fit to order the Israelites to wipe the Canaanites off the face of the Earth. Yes, the Israelites, too, were sinners, and God would have been justified in killing them off as well. But it was a part of God’s plan that a certain portion of humans should be saved. And at that time, he chose the Israelites as the vehicle to accomplish these plans. Every action they took was moving world history closer to the coming of Christ and his sacrifice. They did not deserve to be chosen for this anymore than a Christian deserves to be saved, but God, by his merciful grace and according to his plans, chose them anyway.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul addresses the question of whether God behaved “unfairly” by choosing one nation (Israel) for his blessings and others for destruction and defeat. Paul explains that God does not make these choices based on who “deserves” what. He chooses according to his own plans, which to us might seem arbitrary. Some he chooses to bless; others, he chooses to condemn. But whether a person is shown mercy or has his heart hardened, God’s actions are justified. Paul:

And not only so, but also when Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of his call, she was told, “The elder will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob [ancestor of Israel] I loved, but Esau [ancestor of the Edomites, Israel’s future enemies] I hated.”

What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills. (Romans 9:10-19)

Even those who do evil are acting in accordance with God’s plan. God actively “hardens the heart[s]” of certain people in accordance with his own will. For God is in control of everything that happens in the world, whether good or evil. “I form the light and create darkness,” says God, “I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7) Everything does indeed happen for a reason, according to God’s overall purpose for the universe, and humans, both when they commit good and when they commit evil, both when they go to Heaven and when they go to Hell, are serving God’s twisted purposes. Not even the most powerful leaders can subvert the will of God. And all they do, whether they are starting wars or making peace, building concentration camps or liberating them, is done only according to God’s will, who maintains total control of the world. “Who,” the Bible asks, “has commanded and it came to pass, unless the Lord has ordained it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?” (Lamentations 3:37-38)

In terms of God’s absolute sovereignty, we are left with an awful truth. Most will burn in Hell. A few will find salvation in Heaven. And all of this, good or evil, is happening in accordance with God’s plan. Only those God chooses for salvation can be saved. “For no one,” Jesus says, “can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). These are the Elect, whom God “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). The rest will continue with hardened hearts, but they too will glorify God. When they are burning in Hell for eternity, their punishment will testify to God’s perfect justice. In this sense, their very wickedness ultimately serves to glorify God, and so all things, good and evil, work toward the Lord’s purposes in the end.

As a former fundamentalist Christian, I cannot help but every so often be haunted by the idea that my apostasy was a mistake. Maybe the Christian god is real. Perhaps I will go to Hell for not believing in Jesus. But in that case, questions about purpose and morality still lack conclusive answers. Even if he is real, the Christian god’s behavior and moral proclamations make him seem like a force for evil to me. I cannot accept his arbitrary selection of some human beings for blessings and some for brutal destruction. I cannot worship the self-proclaimed author of all evil in the world. I cannot agree that he has any right to order genocides, condemn homosexuals, or decree the subjugation of women. I cannot recognize that, simply because he created us and claims to be innately good, he has any right to sit in judgment of our actions, sending some of us to Hell and others to Heaven. And unlike the liberal Christians, I am unable to simply invent some nicer version of him that contradicts how he appears in the Scriptures. I take him as he is in the Bible: a genocidal homophobe with deep contempt for women, a petty desire for unconditional obedience, and a willingness to use his sovereignty over the world to unleash evil as much as he unleashes good. Belief in him does not eliminate moral uncertainty. When his own actions are so morally questionable, his existence cannot resolve the questions of right and wrong.

The morality and meaning which Christianity provides, and which the good Christian so pities the atheist for lacking, seem even worse than the confusion and purposelessness stemming from disbelief. Christianity’s condemnation of countless human beings to Hell, despite the fact that God himself claims to be the ultimate author of their evil, strikes me as far more disturbing than the difficulties and relative “meaninglessness” of atheism. The Christian reality is a far darker one. The Christian universe is one where a genocidal maniac wields unfathomable power over the world and its affairs, and where all of us are mere cogs in a machine built solely for the ultimate purpose of glorifying the tyrant. I would be eager to trade the certainties of that world for the uncertainties of a godless one. My only fear is that, in the face of God’s awesome power, I would lack the courage to do the right thing and rebel against him. Fortunately, I do not allow my drive for rebellion against the Christian god’s wicked reign to consume me. I remind myself that the Lord cannot be real. He is a social construct; his moral values reflect the cultures who create and re-create him.

About The Severed Branch

---

---