This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Monday! Time to once again find a seat and enjoy Monday School – “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!” (Please, no pushing – there really is room enough for everyone!)

Today’s Lesson: Sure, Old Testament Atrocities Make God Look Like A Moral Midget, But The New Testament More Than Redeems His Reputation – Right?

I’ve spent a lot of time pointing out the many awful things attributed to God in the Jewish scriptures that are referred to collectively as the Old Testament by Christians. In response, Christians have tended to say several different things: I’m misreading the OT; the OT we all know and use is actually a terrible mistranslation; the OT can’t be taken literally; who are we to judge the morality of God?

All of these responses are basically flawed (as I believe I’ve pointed out previously). The response that I think is perhaps most popular, however, and the one I want to focus on today is this: Whatever the flaws of the Old Testament, it has been supplanted by the morally perfect message of Jesus as reported in the New Testament and – when you get right down to it – it’s that message that matters.

For Christians it seems that much of God’s alleged goodness springs from His coming to earth as Jesus and allowing Himself to be crucified in atonement for the sins of all humanity – an allegedly necessary act which we should all be eternally grateful for. If you can get a Christian to admit that the God of the OT was indeed an ogre, chances are that he or she will quickly shrug that off because of this supreme act of mercy.

Unfortunately for the arguments of these Christians, a thoughtful examination of the assumptions and implications of this atonement theology reveals it to be essentially as immoral as the theology of the OT.

Consider:

1. If we deserve to be punished, for whatever reason, we deserve to be punished – period. Our not being punished constitutes a kind of injustice. Just as inherited guilt and collective punishment of whole groups for the actions of a few are immoral because they involve punishing the innocent, so is an innocent god/man’s suffering for our sins so that we may escape suffering for them. The willingness of someone else to suffer in our place is irrelevant – which is why no court system I know of allows an innocent man to rot away in jail on behalf of a convicted felon. “The person who does the crime is the person who’s gotta do the time” is a fundamental moral precept that Christianity blatantly rejects.

2. If God nonetheless wanted to pardon us for our crimes, it is impossible to see why that pardon had to involve the crucifixion of Jesus. When a governor pardons a convicted murderer moments before that murderer is scheduled to be executed, that governor is not then required to execute somebody else. Why do Christians insist that their allegedly all-powerful God has less power and discretion to operate here than governors do? On what possible moral or logical grounds can they assert that our pardon required the crucifixion of the innocent Jesus? The Bible itself seems to admit that Jesus’s death was not necessary for us to gain eternal life when it says that Adam and Eve could have obtained immortality had they eaten of the tree of life (Gen. 3:22-23).

3. There’s something wildly nonsensical and disproportionate about the Bible’s claims that Adam and Eve (and all their descendants) were punished severely just because they ate a bit of fruit but that the Jews and Romans who crucified God Himself weren’t punished – that, indeed, by this act, they actually saved us all. It is hard to find much of moral worth in a book which puts forth such a skewed value system – a book which seems to say that the simplest and apparently most innocuous act may result in unimaginable suffering and death while the cruelest of acts may actually bestow unimaginable benefits. (If you’re tempted to say that Adam and Eve were actually punished for disobedience and that the exact nature of that disobedience is irrelevant, remember: crucifying an innocent prophet of God [if not God Himself] can hardly be portrayed as an act of obedience in accordance with the commandments of God and would seem to logically require a punishment at least as severe as that meted out to forbidden fruit eaters.)

4. So what if God really was crucified while incarnated as Jesus? How can an all-powerful, all-knowing being be hurt by such a temporary, human assault? The idea is more ridiculous than that of an aged adult human being mortified by the prospect of receiving a bad grade in finger painting while visiting his or her grandchild’s kindergarten class. That such an experience might somehow offset the crimes of billions of people over thousands of years just doesn’t make sense. Systems of morality that don’t make sense hardly merit our loyalty, devotion, or respect.

5. Do you think it was the resurrection that matters rather than the crucifixion? Why? Why should God’s ability to prove Himself unkillable matter? Isn’t that part of His definition? Why should the resurrection of Jesus seem so much more important and miraculous than, say, the creation of the universe? Why should it matter at all when the Bible reports that there were numerous resurrections prior to that of Jesus? (See 1 Kings 17:17-22; 2 Kings 4:32-35; 2 Kings 13:21; Matt. 9:18, 23-25; Luke 7:11-15; and John 11:43-44 for no fewer than 6 earlier resurrections.) Exactly how does Jesus’s alleged rise from the dead balance the scales of justice and “save” humanity from hell? If you’re a Christian and you found out that the Bible actually says Jesus did not rise from the dead but just died for your sins and all you have to do to get into heaven is believe that, would you stop being a Christian? Why? What exactly is the moral or logical significance of the resurrection that renders it an essential part of your theology? If it’s not morally essential, why is it such a highly valued part of Christianity’s allegedly perfect moral system?

6. Assuming for the moment that all the above arguments are flawed, and assuming that Jesus’s death and resurrection really do somehow make moral sense and provide a means for us to save ourselves from the consequences of our sins, what exactly does that means consist of? You would think that the Bible and its God would be clear about this – but they are not. In one place, Jesus is quoted as saying that we only have to keep a few commandments (Matt. 19:16-19). Other verses (such as Acts 16:30-31) tell us that that’s not right – we only have to believe in Jesus to be saved. Still other verses indicate that who is and isn’t saved has been preordained (Acts 13:48; Eph. 1:4-11; Rev. 17:8). Still others indicate that God arbitrarily chooses who He will save (Psalms 65:4; Mark 4:11-12; John 6:44; Romans 9:15-21). Even if one wanted to do the right thing, the Bible is simply too poorly written and contradicts itself too severely on too many points for us to determine exactly what the right thing is. It’s the sort of confusion one might expect to find in the worst systems of morality – not the best.

7. Even after we’ve somehow decided what the Bible tells us we must do to earn eternal life in heaven, we are faced with the fact that the Bible’s God is placing far more weight and significance on our actions than they can rightly bear. Infinite and eternal punishment or reward allegedly flows from our doing or not doing this or that finite and temporary thing – and that doesn’t make sense logically or morally. Genuine justice demands that punishment fit the crime and that rewards fit our actual accomplishments. The Bible clearly violates these elementary requirements of justice in the New Testament just as it did in the Old. As it is, many believe on the basis of the Bible that the deathbed conversions of the vilest mass murderers may win them eternal life in heaven while pagans and atheists – however good their actions over an entire lifetime – are doomed to hell. Such a system of belief is morally reprehensible and a danger to society.

8. Even if we assume that all the preceding points are somehow wrong; even if we assume that Jesus really was the one and only begotten Son of God; and even if we believe that Jesus is God’s Supreme Judge (as John 5:22 asserts), we are still left with the fact that the Bible and its system of morality is fatally flawed. Why? Because justice delayed is justice denied. When our courts allow obviously guilty suspects out on bail, we cringe. When it takes months or years for trials to be concluded, we fume. When we see human judges permit brutal criminals to escape paying for their transgression because of a technicality, we are outraged. Yet the Bible’s Jesus seems to have acted as one of the worst judges of all. History tells of many heinous crimes which have gone unpunished. A brief look around the world reveals that the worst sorts of people often thrive while the good all too often suffer and die young. True justice is clearly being delayed, at best, and apparently being denied altogether. The fact that it’s now been delayed not for a month or a year or a lifetime but for at least the 2000 years since Jesus was born constitutes one of the greatest miscarriages of justice imaginable once we grant the Bible’s claims about Jesus. It seems we are left with one of two choices: Either the Bible is wrong and Jesus isn’t God’s Supreme Judge; or the Bible is right and Jesus is actually a supremely incompetent Supreme Judge who has allowed injustice to persist for centuries.

9. Faced with these and other criticisms, some liberal Christians (and even many non-Christians) reply, “Yes, the Bible is often factually wrong and much of the conventional Christian theology that it has inspired is patently absurd – but Jesus himself remains a great moral teacher – maybe even the most moral person who has ever lived.” It is hard to determine exactly what they are basing this opinion on. The Bible is virtually the only source for information about Jesus. Given the many ways we know it’s wrong, it’s hard to understand why we should trust anything it says that isn’t backed up by other, independent sources. Even worse for those who attempt to present Jesus as a great moral figure, much of what the Bible says about Jesus indicates he was immoral, unjust, or just plain stupid. Here are just a few of his badly flawed teachings:

—– He tells people to live for today and not to plan for or worry about tomorrow (Matt. 6:25-34).

—– He commends an unjust steward for defrauding his master (Luke 16:1-8).

—– He demanded that his followers hate their families (Luke 14:26).

—– He said he had come to bring war and to set members of the same household against each other (Matt. 10:34-36).

—– He says he deliberately speaks in parables to confuse and mislead people, lest they understand his message and be saved (Mark 4:11-12).

—– He threatens those who say “Thou fool” with hellfire while apparently never saying a word against slavery (Matt. 5-22).

—– He harshly condemned the Jews as children of Satan and thereby helped inspire hundreds and hundreds of years of violent anti-Semitism (John 8:42-47).

—– He repeatedly lied to people by telling them the end was at hand, that it wouldn’t be long before he’d be back and all he promised them would be fulfilled (Matt. 24:29-34; Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27).

—– He asserted his right to arbitrarily do what he will with people, and seems completely comfortable with the idea that “Many are called, but few chosen” – i.e., that the vast majority of the people who have ever lived will end up in hell (Matt. 20:1-16).

It would seem that those people who believe Jesus was a great moral teacher need to grab a Bible and take a close look at what it quotes him as having said.

10. Finally, let’s forget all this and pretend for just a moment that Jesus actually was the greatest moral teacher in history and that the system of justice and morality presented in the New Testament is right, proper, and even divinely inspired. The fact would still remain that millions of people lived and died before Jesus was born or the Bible was written. Since the Bible was written, untold millions more have lived their entire lives having never even heard of it or its Jesus through no fault of their own. If Jesus and the Bible are as critically important to human morality and the fate of human souls as many Christians say they are, God really messed up when He gave Jesus and the Bible to just one small group of people in the Mideast instead of to everybody on Day 1. It would be as if you had somehow known terrorists were going to attack on Sept. 11, 2001 and tried to warn the world by telling a small group of drunken teenagers who were standing on a corner in Tokyo back in 1957 and nobody else. Except what Christians believe God did was actually worse, of course, because it involved far more people, the stakes are allegedly far higher, the people who were allegedly given the crucial information are far more removed from us, the message is far less clear, and God is allegedly perfect and therefore could and should have acted in a much more effective, morally acceptable way.

For all these reasons and more, it is logically impossible to reconcile the New Testament or its God with any system of morality or justice worthy of the name.