Who is to Blame?

How often have any of you heard this refrain:

"Blame people for bad acts, not Xianity..."

or this:

"People will use Xianity to prop up their evil deeds, but they'd be just as evil without it..."

It's an old refrain. People are bad/sinful/wicked/evil, and if we get rid of religion, they'll just find some other reason to be bad/sinful/wicked/evil. So, why focus our efforts on stopping religion?

But, is this really so? Certain behaviors and thoughts are learned, and learning that it is OK to be bigoted or sexist is not OK. Why should we not point out when a teaching fosters and encourages these types of thoughts or deeds? If someone grows up being taught that women are meant to be subservient to men and then acts on it thinking nothing is wrong, should we really lay all the blame on the man and not on the teaching that lead to his actions?

No, we should point out those teachings that are wrong and we should seek to correct them and/or end them. It's not enough to simply shrug our shoulders and say, "People are evil, what can you do?" We should raise up and proclaim quite loudly how immoral most religious teachings are and advocate that people should throw off the shackles of these antiquated religions and strive to become the moral people that they should be. It's a much better idea that giving up. In fact, that's just what apologists hope we will do so that they can continue to propagate their ideas without resistance and enjoy their unearned and undeserved place in culture. We must not let them have it without a fight.

By Whose Standards?

When evil acts of god are brought up in debate with a Xian (like genocide, rape, etc) one apologetic that is frequently heard is that we can't judge god by our standards, because god is well above us. IOW, god should go by his own standard.

Really? Well, there's a few problems with that.

It's first and foremost an appeal to relative morality. We have our moral system here, where we generally try not to steal, kill, rape, etc. while god is able to do those things at will...simply because he is god. Also, Xians believe that god will judge us by a standard of perfection, however, yet the actions of god are decidedly less than perfect, so he is also advocating having different standards - one for him, one for the rest of us.

But, really the thing that I see as the worst aspect of this is that god is held to a lower standard, yet god is supposedly perfect. This is like taking the A+ student and asking them only to write a paper with their name on it, while the student that is struggling in the class is required to write a paper that would pass a Ph.D. dissertation. Why would we hold a supposedly perfect being to a lower standard than beings that are decidedly less than perfect? It makes no sense. If anything, god should be the exemplar of morality and perfection, instead of someone we have to make excuses for and hold to lower standards.

Things like genocide and rape and murder shouldn't come from such a being and instead of making excuses for this being when the do, we should rightly be outraged by the behavior of a being that should know better. If a child does something wrong, we know that the child may not know better, but god doesn't have that excuse. If a person errs and messes up, we might take pity or think of leniency because we all make mistakes, but god does not have that excuse. So, why are apologists excusing god's actions?

Focus on the Good

Most Xians, when confronted with the evil of god, have some sort of defense mechanism that kicks in and allows them to overlook all of god's evil deeds. One of those mechanisms is to counter that atheists only focus on the evil deeds of god and unfairly forget about the good that is in the world. Does this argument have any merit?

Not really. It's actually quite simple. If god is omni-benevolent, as Xians contend, then the existence of evil is a huge problem for them. Hey, maybe god does do some good things sometimes, even maybe lots of times, but that's not what the issue is. To focus solely on the good and claim that it shows that god is good is to count the hits and ignore the misses or paint the bulls-eye around the target. If I argue against god being omni-benevolent, I don't have to show that god never performs any good act, I simply have to show that god performs evil acts. Only the most twisted mind could argue that god does not commit evil (genocide, world-wide floods, etc) so it's rather silly for apologists to cling to this idea of omni-benevolence and even sillier to complain about the atheist focusing on evil too much.

Nekkids

OK, so Adam and Eve were created "good" by god, and what they did was "good" until they ate the fruit, right? Well, after they ate the fruit is when they realized they were naked and were embarrassed by it. Apparently, before they ate the fruit, they were naked and they realized afterwards that it is bad to be naked. But, they were wholly good before eating the fruit even though they were naked.

This creates a contradiction. Either they were good when they were naked and it is still good to be naked, which modern Xians don't agree with and certainly those who wrote the Bible didn't agree with. Or, they were not good when they were naked, meaning that there was sin before they ate the apple. Which is it?

There is another way, of course, but it requires the theist to resort to relative or situational morality. This, however, is anathema to most Xians in that they claim to believe in absolute morality, so this option is not actually open, no matter how often they cling to relative morality when it suits their whims.

Drowning?

Let's say that you and I are on a boat and I push you off the boat and into the water. Not expecting it, you start to drown. I finally decide to throw you a life preserver and pull you back on board the boat. Am I a hero? Is this a good action? Should you thank me for saving you? I think most people would recognize that my actions were not good. I should not have thrown you into the water and put you in that dangerous situation. Throwing in the life preserver was not so much a good act as an act that fulfilled my moral obligation to you for putting you in that position to begin with. Are we all on the same page? Good.

Now, suppose that we change it up slightly. Let's say that god creates you in such a way that you are doomed for hell. This is analogous to him pushing you into the water and you drowning. Now, god sacrifices Jesus in order to save you, which is analogous to throwing you a life preserver. As above, we can see that god's actions are not good. Putting you in a situation where you are in need of saving just so that he can save you is not a good action or a moral action. In fact, god is morally obligated to save us for putting us in the position where we are bound for hell, and he doesn't even do that for the majority of people if the Bible is to be believed. So, why is it that apologists claim that god is good and moral?

Jesus and the whip

Let us read from the book of John, Chapter 2, verse 15...

OK, let me paraphrase...Jesus gets mad at some money changers hanging out and doing business in the temple, so he fashions a whip and goes into the temple and drives them all out under threat of violence.

But, I thought Jesus was supposed to be peaceful and sin-free? Is it not sinful to whip other people? Ah, some apologists have jumped on this and said that the Bible doesn't say that he actually whipped anyone, so it's all right. But, it's not all right. It's certainly against the law in this country to threaten someone with a weapon (it's called assault at the least). Even if Jesus merely used the whip to frighten the money changers out of the temple, he assaulted them. This is not moral, and violates the same laws that he laid forth in some of his sermons. Apparently, we find once again that god does not have to follow the same moral laws that he expects all of us to follow.

Judgement

Apologists like to claim that god is good. When atheists point out the evil deeds that god commits in the Bible, apologists like to state that we are not in a position to judge god since god is too far beyond us.

Anyone else see the contradiction?

Apologists can not simultaneously argue that we can not judge god while also arguing that they can and have judged god and found him to be good. This is contradictory and illogical. Either they have to say that we can judge god and they find god to be good, but that the question is open, or they must claim that god is above judgement and that they can't say whether god is good or not.

The Goodness of god

A logical disproof:

1. god is good
2. The Bible is god's word and true
3. The Bible describes god's actions truthfully
4. In the Bible god commands and carries out genocide
5. Genocide is not good
6. Those who commit genocide are not good
7. Therefore god is not good
8. Number 7 contradicts number 1 - therefore god is either not good or does not exist.

Some apologists will argue, of course, that god's acts of genocide are necessarily good, but this is not an envious position to be in; to have to defend genocide. It makes me wonder who else they'd like to kill. But, there's a problem still, because they are guilty of begging the question. They assume that god must be good, so they fit all the facts and data in order to fill their already assumed conclusion. This is logically fallacious. You can't simply conclude and then fit the evidence to your conclusion. Unfortunately for them, all apologetics do this.

Good vs. Evil

Typical apologist argument for god: god exists because good and evil exist and we could not have good and evil without an objective standard from god.

There are, of course, numerous problems with this argument. First, it is assumed that good and evil are objective things, which has not been shown. This would be begging the question. The best we can discern is that the concepts of good and evil are man-made. They come from our culture. This is why a Muslim man might find killing his daughter to be good if she has dishonored the family while another person would look at this action as highly immoral.

Another problem is the assumption that without god, nothing can be objective. This is simply not true, however. There are numerous philosophies devoted to developing objective standards of good and evil, like Utilitarianism, that don't depend at all on some edict given from on high from some deity.

Another problem is the fact that the argument assumes god's existence and that only god can provide such things as good and evil. This is begging the question. Since we have no evidence for god, what is left for the apologist is to argue against every other conceivable option, until only the option of god is left. This is clearly impossible though, because how would one know if all the options (known and unknown) have been examined properly?

One more issue I'd like to bring up is that the apologist in the this argument usually seems to demand that only their god can fit the bill, when in reality, if their argument actually held weight, just about any god would be capable of fitting the bill. In short, even if this argument didn't have the above problems, it would still only be an argument for some type of theistic thought and that's it.