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Is the Bible's God Perfect?
In the past, I have received criticism from certain Christians regarding my comments about the Judeo-Christian God. Of course, this is to be expected whenever someone attacks another person's beliefs. One of the more frequent things I hear from many professed Christians is that the God I am commenting on and calling an asshole is not, in fact, the Christian God.
Christianity is a very widely-spread religion, and the existence of some thousands of different sects within the overall framework is simply inevitable. When it comes right down to it, there are a billion Christians in the world, and it's ridiculous to expect that they'd all believe the exact same things about their faith. Just about every Christian has his own take on Christianity. This is derogatorially referred to as "Cafeteria Christianity" by the politicians in Rome, in that Catholics often like to pick and choose what they believe, because Rome expects all Catholics to believe the everything spewing out of its craw. But we live in the real world, so we'll acknowledge that people exist as separate, dintinct individuals, and not all (though there are plenty) as mindless followers of men in silly white robes.
So, do I have the wrong idea about the Christian God? Well, which Christian God are you talking about? Anyone can come up with their own personal God who fits within the framework of Christianity. So who am I attacking? Good question. I'll respond by asking this. Is it really feasible for me to add, "... except in the case of Lizzy from New York's god; he's an okay guy" to everything I write? I'm attacking the god perpetrated by Christian establishments like the Catholic Church, the Mormons, the Free Presbyterians, the Locked Up Presbyterians ... those people. I'm attacking the official Christian God. Every major church tends to agree on certain things about their god, but they managed to divide into factions over whose idle speculation is better. One thing that everyone agrees on, though, is that God is infallible and perfect.
So, I figured it would be appropriate to write an article dedicated to a critical evaluation of this claim that God is perfect, which is shared by every Christian. How do Christians arrive at this conclusion that God is perfect? They are taught this growing up, and they are selectively given examples of God's perfection. One common theme is that "God so loved the world that he gave his only son ..." You know the drill. God loves us so much that, in order to save us from damnation, he sacrifices his only son. It's a very touching story. Unfortunately, there are simply too many irreconcilable flaws to make it more than a children's fairy tale.
I said that I'd look at this claim objectively and critically, so I will. Firstly, I'll make it clear that I'm suspending disbelief and pretending that there really is a God. In other words, I am evaluating a hypothetical scenario. I am also pretending that everything in the Bible is true and that the Bible gives an accurate account of what God is like. Yes, I know that lots of Christians don't believe that everything in the Bible is true, but plenty of them defend God's actions in the Bible, regardless, so I think it's a perfectly valid assumption to make for these purposes. If you don't believe that everything in the Bible is true and acknowledge that certain events in the Bible are not consistent with your vision of God, then this critique doesn't apply to you, anyway. Armed with these two basic assumptions, we can move on to evaluating Christians' claims of God's perfection.
When using critical reasoning as a method to evaluate the validity of a claim, we look at what predictions the claim makes. If these predictions are shown to be true, the claim can be considered valid. This is an overly-simplified description of the process, but you should get the idea. If Miss Cleo claims that she is psychic, that carries certain predictions with it that we can use to evaluate her claims. If she possessed psychic powers, then her clairvoyance would have forewarned her of an impending class-action lawsuit. She did not see it coming, so it's safe to conclude that she's full of shit.
So, if God was perfect, what would we observe in the Bible? That's a difficult question to answer. Perfection is a very general term. You'll never hear something being labeled as "perfect" in an all-encompassing context, just within very specific contexts. I could say that my iPod is a perfect design for me, but it still has some failings compared to other players (it's battery life could be longer, it doesn't play Ogg Vorbis, things like that). So, instead of looking at this nebulous claim of God being perfect all-around, we can narrow our scope to perfection in certain things. This not only makes our job easier, but it also still carries the capacity of disproof with it. The one prediction that the claim that God is perfect makes is that he should be perfect in everything. Thus, all it takes is poking one hole to completely unravel it.
We can start with the obvious context, perfect love. The more progressive Christian denominations believe that God loves everyone. The right-wing fundamentalists claim that God only loves them (gee, what a shock), but I'm going to skip over their lunacy for now, since the complaints that spurred this article were from the moderate Christians. The fundamentalists just outrightly tell me that God hates me, and I'm going to Hell, anyway.
What is perfect love? Well, again, the moderate Christians claim that God's love is perfect and, most importantly, unconditional. No matter what you do, God will always love you. You could burn down a church, rencounce Christianity and kick a cat, but God will always love you. Parents will often display similarly unconditional love for their children. Even if their child was in prison for murder, the parents wouldn't stop loving him. That's how love works; it's not a bond easily broken, if it's ever broken.
So, we can start with a basic question. Does God have a parent's love for his children? Well, how has he treated us in the past? Remember Genesis? God was so disappointed with humans that he threw a temper tantrum and flooded the entire planet killing everything. No reasonable person could interpret an act of genocide against the human race as indicative of unconditional love for it! Anyone who does has a very strange definition of "love." What about the time he had Moses kill 3000 Israelites for worshiping the golden calf? Is this the kind of behavior we should expect from a loving parent? There are also lots of other questions that this claim of "perfect love" raises. God is all-powerful, loves everyone very much, but he ... does nothing to feed starving children in third-world countries? We humans have limited resources, and there's only so much we can to toward the end of eliminating poverty and hunger. God has unlimited resources at his disposal, and yet he does nothing. Loving parents feed their children before feeding themselves. Why is God to be presumed perfect in light of his failure to provide for those who are literally incapable of providing for themselves?
What about Hell? Hell is the ultimate punishment. If you're bad, you're going to suffer for eternity. Can you think of any crime that would really demand such a sentence? Here on Earth, we're limited to the death sentence as a maximum penalty, but I seriously doubt that anyone would advocate handing out eternal suffering as a punishment for any crime, even if we had the option open to us. Would you really expect a perfectly loving God to sentence people that he loves to suffer for all eternity? Would you expect a perfectly just God to?
Now I know that lots of Christians like to skirt around this issue by saying that people "choose" to go to Hell by consequence of their actions. In other words, they know what will happen if they do a certain thing, but they do it anyway. This analogy is simply absurd. It still takes a judge to send someone to prison. Does a car thief put himself in prison after he boosts a car? Of course not. There's a process to go through, and ultimately, the sentence is at the judge's discretion within certain limits (i.e. a judge cannot send someone to the needle for boosting a car). Our justice system has ranges of sentences that can be applied to a given crime under the circumstances. In God's justice system, there is only one sentence. If there was a country where death was the only penalty for any infraction, would Christians who believe in Hell defend such a system by saying, "Well the criminal knew what would happen"? If a man has a gun to your head, and he kills you for not doing what he says, is it your fault? Of course not! No one would! It's a fucked up justice system! We've designed our justice system to accommodate for human imperfections. God has practically set us all up for failure.
When you raise any of these questions with Christian apologists, they inevitably try and place the blame on human failings. God can't be held accountable for people going to Hell; they send themselves there. God only killed every living thing on the planet because they were all sinners and deserved it. God only butchered the first-born of Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn't free the Israelites. There are a whole litany of atrocities committed against humans by God or with his approval in the Old Testament. He's a lot of things, but perfectly-loving and perfectly-just he is not. The scenario with God's mistreatment of humans and Christian apologists is something like an abusive husband and his wife. There are scumbag husbands or boyfriends out there who physically and verbally abuse their spouses, and these poor women are so afraid of them that they convince themselves that their boyfriend's abuse is their own fault. We normally consider these women in need of serious psychological help because we, as outside observers, can clearly see that their spouses do not love them. If they were being rational, they'd see the same thing.
This is the problem with the claim that God is perfect. It's not so much a claim as it is a premise. When looking at the Bible, lots of Christians start from the perspective that God is perfect, so they are forced to rationalize his abusive tendencies with that preconceived notion. This is known as circular reasoning. Assume that God is perfect, and if you find an example of his imperfection, rationalize it, no matter what kind of mental gymnastics it takes. We can go back to the Miss Cleo example. Whenever her "psychic powers" fail to come through, she attributes it to the will of the spirits or other such bullshit. No doubt she'd be singing that tune if a group of scientists ever got her in a lab, under controlled conditions, and started seeing just how good she really is. Of course, Christians are free to believe in an all-loving God, but the belief in Hell runs flatly contradictory with that belief, as do many of the depictions of God throwing hissy-fits in the Old Testemant. The more enlightened Christians will often say that the Old Testament God was ruthless and really just an asshole, so those stories are not accurate depictions. The more conservative Christians who believe in Biblical inerrancy simply choose to remain in the dark.
