About
Power not Love
Religion claims that as God is perfect goodness, he comes first and everything we do must primarily be done for the love of him.
To
believe in a good God is to say that moral beliefs are defective if they
exclude him. It is saying you are a
harmful person if you don’t give God much time in your life and if you don’t
proclaim the rules that are allegedly from him and if you don’t believe or
don’t promote faith in God. It is to say
that the law of God should be the law of the state too because the state can
have no right to dictate what people should do if it is not doing its best to
be ethical. This belief has such a huge
potential for people to acquire power that it is no wonder the state is so fond
of the God belief and most people in general are – or think they are.
It is
bad enough to say that right and wrong is corrupted and defective without God
but some go further and say there can be no sincere belief in right and wrong
without God end of story.
Those
who say that there is no right and wrong unless there is a God are saying that
there is no morality unless there is a God to invent it. They hate those who do not believe for they
say that they must believe in amorality and are therefore to be counteracted
and discriminated against in jobs and public office and everything and yet they
do the same themselves. Better to be
immoral than amoral because at least then you believe and teach that wrong is
wrong. They are effectively encouraging people
with little or no faith in God to be immoral or to do evil.
People
who believe in the morality that God invented are evil for God is at liberty to
invent whatever brutal rules he likes and they can pass off their evil rules as
his. It also means accusing people of
doing wrong when they haven’t and enslaving them to fantasies. If God is out there then he did not create good but he just conforms to it. He is under its authority as much as we
are.
There is more chance of a person believing in right
and wrong without God especially when God has to invent the rules.
They often won’t admit it but those who say there is
no morality without God are really saying that there
is no morality without belief in God. Their
real attitude is this, that there is no morality without people who create belief
in God so morality really depends on human authority. It is not really about God, God is only the
cheese in the mousetrap. An implication of
their attitude is that it is better to say there is a God even if there is no
God and to carry out pious fraud to get people to believe in him. There would be no need for immorality with a
morality like that!
Even to say people who believe in God are better people than unbelievers or should tend to be is saying that it is not God that is needed but belief in him is. There is no point in people being so fussy about getting others and their children to believe in God unless it is a scam to get them to behave the way they want to see them behave. It is a scam and you can only build hypocrisy and not goodness or decency on such a foundation. The God belief is anti-decency.
When somebody does wrong to you maliciously, you want to hurt that person back. You hate the sinner and the sin. You see that the distinction between sinner and sin is a distinction without a difference. The sinner is the sin in the sense that sin shows what kind of person the sinner is. Christianity says you must hate the sin but love the sinner which really means, "Hate the sinner but pretend you don't". You feel personal about the sin. You cannot want to hurt a sin but only a sinner. Some say that loving the sinner and hating the sin is the whole point of believing in God for he loves all people and hates their sin and justifies the idea that revenge is wrong which is a basic principle of morality. If that is true then if loving the sinner and hating the sin is impossible then the whole point of believing in God evaporates. A belief that advocates hatred and lies cant be said to be fruitful to moralists or even relevant to helping them. What it does is abolish right and wrong and replace it with the autocracy of religious hypocrisy.
The Handbook of Christian Apologetics states that it is true that we cannot avoid being Pharisees when we go on about right and wrong and cannot hate sins without hating the sinners (page 127). Strangely, it conflicts with Christian teaching which says that we must hate sin so much that we would rather have an eye gouged out than sin with it. The conflict is in saying that to hate evil is to give in to evil and become evil and negative. The reason it says this is that hating evil can make us hard and cruel just like hating a sinner can. This is of course correct. But they are not suggesting we should not care about sin or love it for that would be worse than hating sin in their opinion. So they do want us to hate sin as the lesser evil. And they would say that if you really hate sin, you will hate it because you love the sinner so no matter how much you hate sin and how harsh and stern you get you are only doing it because of love and so you cannot be called hard and cruel at least as far as your intentions go. Jesus said that a man who looks at a woman with lust commits adultery in his heart and he said that if your eye causes you to sin it is better if you gouge it out (Matthew 5). He said this to indicate the abhorrence that he considers to be due to even a harmless sin of lust. The handbook says that Christ miraculously separates the sin from the sinner so that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. This is totally insane. You don't hate sin like you hate burnt custard you hate it with a bad person to person feeling. Even Christ can't change that! But it shows that if you want to believe that you can love the sinner and hate the sin you have to pretend that only God can enable you to do so. You know you certainly cannot do it yourself. Belief in God only gives you a pretend morality. It also urges you to silence as threats to morality those who oppose this pretending or who expose it. It promotes the power seeking activities of religion. The believers act as if they need God to bolster the claims of a counterfeit morality. In that case they should say that they need God not for backing up morality but for backing up a caricature of it laden with hypocrisy. To say that God enables you to love the sinner as you hate sin which is impossible without his help is to religious faith must come before everything for we need God to love. We are called upon to believe people who tell us unbelievers that they have the miracle power to love sinners and hate sins. These people are proclaiming their own superiority. Their claim is the foundation of their claim to be servants of God and good people and reflects in all they do. Its a very serious persistent insult.
By rising from the dead, Jesus claimed he was giving evidence that God must be obeyed. This is rubbish. If we see a baby in pain we will help whether we believe in God or not. We believe in God a little and help. We don't need belief in God to do good. Also, how do we know that God is good? Do we obey God because he commands us to obey or do we obey because the command is good? We can't do both. Why? Because if we think God knows what good is and commands it we are not obeying because it is good but because God believes it is good. So we are really saying that God invents morality and that there is no such thing as real good or real evil.
If we obey God because the command is good and not because he commanded it then we are not really obeying him. Our intention is to do good not to obey. It only looks like we obey him. God is irrelevant to morality and belief in right and wrong. It is only relevant to power-driven people who wish to invent right and wrong in the name of religion.
If we obey God because his commandment is good, we are saying that we would disobey God if he commanded evil and that he doesn't invent good but has to obey it himself. To obey because God commands implies that obeying is what is important to us not goodness. That is not a encouraging attitude. Who wants to obey for the sake of obeying? Also, we are evil if we don't care about goodness. The resurrection of Jesus must be dismissed as nonsense for Jesus himself inferred that if the doctrines the resurrection promotes are false then we are entitled to disbelieve in the resurrection. Jesus because of his lies, if he existed, must be regarded as a malign influence.
The God belief is a nuisance in the world. It is a bad influence for those who think about it but who still won't give it up.
* Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch Publications, East Sussex, 1995
The Future of Atheism, Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett, SPCK, London , 2008
Ethics: The Fundamentals, Julia Driver, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Edited by Michael Martin, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2007