The Wrath of God

So, the past few days have been really good for those of us who enjoy watching people making complete assholes of themselves publicly. Bill Bennett, for example (and there’s no one I love to pick on more than Bill Bennett, whose picture I include courtesy of the Washington Post) had a good one on his radio show the other day, when he pointed out that if we abort all black fetuses we'll have a lower crime rate. The actual quote, if you're interested, was: “I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Of course, Bennett doesn’t actually want to do that, and said at the time that it would be immoral: “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” What he means by that second statement is that abortion is immoral, even if it’s black babies you’re killing. Which, given his background, is pretty good for him, if you think about it.

Anyway, his main point might well be correct. I got no numbers on this, but I'm willing to believe that, if you abort all black fetuses, the crime rate will go down. It will also probably go down if you abort all white fetuses. Or all left-handed fetuses. Or all blue-eyed fetuses. It seems likely to me that the complete removal of any statistically significant group will reduce the crime rate. It just happened that Bennett decided specifically to mention black folks. Dumb luck, that, don’t you think? Anyway, with his later explanation, at least we know that his religious extremism is stronger than his racism. Sure, eliminating black folks from the population before they're born would make the country a better place, but we can't do it 'cause abortion is just plain wrong. Doesn’t he deserve credit for that?

I’ve gotten into trouble recently for being sarcastic on this blog. Apparently my sarcasm doesn’t transfer well to print, and folks have trouble telling when I’m being sarcastic. So, everyone, that last paragraph was SARCASM, okay? Fucking sarcasm. Grow up.

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Anyway, Bennett hasn’t been the only froot-loop in the news the past couple of days. I wrote before about the loopy-loos who think that Katrina was God’s judgment for our wickedness. Well, a new voice has weighed into this debate, and it’s a little more worrisome than the others; you see, this guy is an actual elected official in Alabama, a state senator named Hank Erwin.

Here’s what he said in his column the other day about my beautiful city and the judgment of his God:

New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness...It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God… Warnings year after year by godly evangelists and preachers went unheeded. So why were we surprised when finally the hand of judgment fell? Sadly, innocents suffered along with the guilty. Sin always brings suffering to good people as well as the bad…. We all need to embrace godliness and churchgoing and good, godly living, and we can get divine protection for that point…The Lord is sending appeals to us. As harsh as it may sound, those hurricanes do say that God is real, and we have to realize sin has consequences… If you are believer and read the Bible, you know sin has judgment. New Orleans has always been known for sin... The wages of sin is death.

Now, I’m used to random wackos saying this, and even well-known wackos like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But this guy actually has the power to make laws! Does that strike no one else as scary? And enough Alabamans voted for him for him to win this office! That’s even scarier!

I don’t know many Alabamans personally, and I don’t hold them in contempt or anything, but this is looking like a state that might need some therapy.

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Now, I’m gonna come back to this idiot in a bit, but first, I’m gonna set the parameters of the argument I’m about to make, so bear with me.

I’ve mentioned before in these pages that arguments go on frequently between my friends over whether or not there’s a God. I usually avoid this argument. It seems clear to me that the Universe was formed by something very like the Big Bang (and we’re learning more about this all the time), and that life on this planet evolved from very simple life forms into the variety we see around us today. Neither of those beliefs is inconsistent with the idea of a higher intelligence that originally set everything in motion, and since there’s no reason to believe that this Divine Creator either does or does not exist, I don’t think about it very much.

Any understanding that I adopt of the origin of the Universe requires me to believe something logically (if not physically) impossible. If I believe in one of the variations on Big Bang theory, then I must believe that, at some point in the distant past, there was no space or time and all the matter in the Universe was either crammed together in a really tight ball or spontaneously created out of nothing. That offends the experience of my entire life, where I’ve always found that nothing comes of nothing, that every effect has a cause.

On the other hand, if I believe in a Divine Creator, then I not only have to believe that all matter in the Universe was created out of nothing, but also that a superior being, whose nature runs directly counter to everything I’ve known and observed about the world around me, existed before this Big Bang, and was the one who set the whole messy operation in motion. The problem with this is that there was no “before” the Big Bang. Time just didn’t exist. Neither did space, which means that prior to the Big Bang, there was no place for this superior being to be.

So, to believe in the Big Bang, I have to believe in something that doesn’t really make sense to me. To believe in divine creation, I have to believe this same thing, plus I have to add something else to believe that doesn’t really make sense to me. Why am I going to make this more complicated than it already is? Why believe two apparently impossible things, instead of one?

It is inconvenient to believe in a divine creator; therefore, I don’t. I have no strong opinion; I just don’t believe. If you do, hey, whatever helps you sleep at night.

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This is a scientific (or at least semi-scientific) discussion here, and has nothing to do with fundamentalism. The fundamentalists are just plain wrong. Demonstrably, pathetically, and wickedly wrong. God did not create the Universe in six days six thousand years ago. He didn’t make Adam out of mud, or Eve out of Adam’s rib, and childbirth is not painful nor agricultural work laborious because the two of them ate fruit from a tree. And by the way, at no time was the Earth suspended in a great bubble surrounded by an infinite, extra-terrestrial sea, which bubble God opened up to destroy the world with a great flood, so stop looking for the damned Ark. None of that is true, okay? Also, there’s no Easter Bunny.

So, when I say that I don’t know whether there is or was a Divine Creator, I mean exactly that. But if there is a Divine Creator, I can absolutely promise you that the God of the Bible ain’t it, or is at least a very poor artist’s conception of the original.

Still, even this isn’t the point I’m making here, to Senator Erwin and all the emotionally crippled lunatics who want to impose Sharia (or its Christian equivalent) on us all because God might destroy our cities. Because these people don’t care about science. You cannot win an argument with them on scientific, or even logical, grounds, because they will refuse to argue scientifically or logically. It’s a tradition passed down from St. Paul, who though intelligent lacked the rhetorical education necessary for his arguments to prevail against the great thinkers of his day, the students of the Greek philosophical tradition that was still strong in the first century; so he decided that arguments were inferior to faith, and for some reason lots of people believed him. They still do.

You can show them all the evidence from biogenetics and cosmology, the chain of fossil evidence running from the primordial soup to the earliest man, the background radiation pictures from the COBE satellite, and they’ll disregard it. They will simply refuse to believe the evidence. So I won’t argue against them with science. I’m perfectly prepared to have a theological argument with them, and at the core of that argument is this statement: YOUR GOD IS NOT WORTH WORSHIPPING. Senator Erwin, Mr. Robertson, you’ve picked a bad God. Even if you could conclusively prove that your God is real and that the Bible is His word, He doesn’t deserve to be worshipped.

The record of reckless cruelty exhibited by God in the Bible is way too long to get into here, but even Senator Erwin’s own statement shows a God unworthy of adoration. Go back up a bit and reread what Erwin said. I particularly want this line to sink in: “Sadly, innocents suffered along with the guilty. Sin always brings suffering to good people as well as the bad.”

Now, our entire criminal justice system was built on the idea that it was better to let ten guilty men go free than to punish one innocent man. It was an article of faith with the Founders, and is one of the bedrocks of our Constitution, which is why we have the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. We can’t always manage it, because we’re human beings and therefore fallible; and sometimes we have corrupt people in power who disregard or subvert this idea. Nevertheless, it is the high ideal of our concept of justice, and for the most part we do our best to live up to it.

God, on the other hand, could easily punish the guilty while protecting the innocent. That is part of being omnipotent. He could, for example, just hit all the bad people in New Orleans with heart attacks, or He could miraculously pluck the innocent from the water and divert destruction from their homes. And yet, He doesn’t. It’s not that He’s willing to let the innocent suffer; he is, by Senator Erwin’s own estimation, willfully causing the innocent to suffer. Why should we worship a God that has a less-developed sense of justice and morality than we have?

A God that would destroy an entire city to punish a mere portion of that city’s inhabitants is not worthy of praise. A God that would destroy an entire city to punish a mere portion of that city’s inhabitants deserves condemnation. It’s as simple as that.

The Born-Agains say that the goodness of God is beyond all understanding; that’s because there’s so little of it that it’s hard to draw a representative sample. The wickedness of God, though, is easy to see. In fact, the wickedness of God is pretty much exactly the wickedness of man, only on a grander scale. The God of the Bible is petty, unjust, vengeful, jealous, vicious, cruel, selfish, and murderous. The God of the Bible exhibits behavior we would find unacceptable (if unsurprising) in a small child. He isn’t worthy of worship; He’s a monster. The original monster.

So, the point isn’t whether or not Erwin and others like him are right. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Prove to me that this ugly, unjust God exists. Bring Him here, right now, and my knee will not bow. If my manners prevent me from spitting in His face, it will be better than He deserves.

If I'm going to worship a God, it will be a kind and just God. I can live with one that allows bad things to happen, but not one that intentionally causes pain and suffering and death out of spite. That, frankly, is beneath me, and if He's beneath me, how worthy a God can He be?