Part III: Investigating "Deuteronomy 22:22-28 – Does this passage condone rape?"

It's taken me a while to get around to this. Mostly because I am busy, but a small part, perhaps, because rape apologists make me sick. The concept that anyone can make excuses for such a horrifying act is inhuman to me; the victim-blaming and -shaming in our society is something I find particularly repugnant.

While they are certainly not the only contributors to this problem, sadly, the religious do tend to speak with the loudest voices when the chorus of "she had it coming" is cued up for another verse. The duplicity of it, though, is such that when they say it, they speak with the fervor of the gospels, and yet, when I or anyone else points out that they are speaking in complete agreement with at least the christian bible, they deny it.

This is what is summed up in the rape passages described on www.resplect.com -- that we don't understand what "rape" means, it was a different time, those women were ASKING for it.

I suppose one of the things that I consider most offensive about these passages (we're talking specifically about Deuteronomy 22:22-28) is the criterion that they have used to determine which people deserve to die after the crime of rape has been committed, how to determine if it is a rape or not, and, if not death, what punishment should be wrought against victim and aggressor alike.

The passages in Deuteronomy discuss the laws surrounding rape, and those laws are as follows:

1. If a woman who is pledged to be married or is married is raped in town, and she is discovered being raped, then both she and her rapist must be taken outside of town and stoned to death. The woman, because she was in town and people were around and she didn't scream for help, and the man, because he violated another man's property (wife or fiancee.)

2. If a woman who is pledged to be married or who is married is raped outside of town, only the man is to be murdered. This is because she could have screamed as loud as you please, and nobody was around to rescue her.

3. If a woman who is not afianced or married is raped, nobody has to die. The rapist has to pay the victim's father 50 shekels of silver (roughly $264.10 USD) and then he and his victim are forced to marry. They can never be divorced as long as the rapist lives.

There are a few things that the apologist (who really should apologise for his incredible lack of sensitivity surrounding the issue of rape, but that is another matter) over at Resplect has to say about this. One thing, in particular, jumps out.

Now, a casual reading may make this passage seem overly harsh, as though the woman is being stoned merely because she did not make enough noise. In reality, this is given for the purpose of a distinguishing criteria between a rape case and an adultery. The lack of a cry for help is simply a fairly objective indicator of consent.

Honestly, in my opinion, the best way to tell if a woman has been raped or not is to ask her. Studies have shown that in the US there are fewer instances of false rape reports than there are of false auto theft reports. According to a 1997 study done by the FBI, a mere 8% of all rapes reported in the US are "unfounded". That doesn't mean that they are all false, but the reports determined to be false would certainly fall into that category. The NSW Australia Attorney-General's Department Crime Prevention Division date-rape websites estimates the number of false reports somewhere between 2% and 7%. Because it's such a small number, we can reasonably say that a good way to determine if a woman (or man!) is raped is to ask.

Conversely, a terrible way to determine such a thing is to require screaming, crying out for help, or fighting back for it to be considered a "real" rape. Just browsing the internet got me some very poignant examples of why anybody can see this would be a bad method, let alone the divine and infinitely wise, just and caring creator of the universe.

(Warning: some of the stories that I'm going to link to and reference are graphic in nature. Please avoid them if victims accounts of rape, news reports of rape or statistics surrounding rape are triggering for you.)


Why Didn't I Scream?:

Of course I won't scream, I didn't scream then, I won't scream now, certainly not out of fear or the thought of my own pain. I knew that if I were bad, if I revealed my terror, he would kill me.

Here is what shames me to the core: I thought he was going to kill me, but I did not fight him. Why did I not overpower the puny little man, smack that gun out of his paltry, worm-white fingers? I was strong then, probably stronger than he, certainly very strong now. But I was hypnotized into passivity. I had no strength to run, and anyway I did not like the idea of being shot from behind. It seemed easier just to wait until the murder was done with.

I Didn't Have Time To Scream:

Four people raped me.

I didn't have the chance to scream. They covered my mouth.

She Didn't Say Anything At All:

It couldn’t be rape, because it didn’t last very long.

It couldn’t be rape, because no one noticed any visible trauma.

It couldn’t be rape, because she didn’t scream.

It couldn’t be rape, because there were no witnesses.

It couldn’t be rape, because it’s only rape when a victim physically struggles.

I couldn’t possibly be a rapist, because my alleged victim didn’t act how I expect rape victims to act.

It couldn’t be rape, because a rape victim must say “no,” or otherwise consent is present.

And she didn’t say anything at all.

She Didn't Scream or Fight Back, So It Wasn't Rape:

Women may be paralysed with fear - rape is rape, regardless of whether there's a struggle.

Many victims are scared of losing their lives and being hurt even when no weapon or obvious physical force is used.

And oh, so many more. Heartbreaking stories of the savagery with which these victims lost their dignity, their privacy, their self-respect, their sense of safety and fairness in the world. Not every victim screams, but every victim suffers, and it is a cold, uncaring individual who uses that parameter as a "fairly objective indicator of consent". It is not. It is a fairly objective indicator of how numb with pain, paralysed with fear, struck mute with terror or frightened for their lives that victims of rape can be. You would think that the being who created intimately each and every woman in the world would care a little more about them than to use a ridiculous rule like that to weed out the fornicators from the raped.

Our rape apologist at Resplect is willing to compromise, however. He says:

If it could be shown that the woman, despite being desperate to avoid the encounter, would not have been helped in her struggle, then this case would fall under the next scenario in verse 25-26.

Oh, well, doesn't that make it all better? In the world of Bronze-Age desert sheep-herders, for whom women were no more than baby-making factories and rather attractive, breathing possessions, "if it could be shown" indeed. Women were, though this might shock you, not considered equal in this community. If a man says he did not rape her, and the woman says he did, guess who wins? The man. Of course. He has a helpful penis to make him right all the time.

Not only that, but, as was helpfully pointed out to me by a friend, how does Mr. Resplect even KNOW this? My friend said, to quote her directly,

"I assert he just made this up--pulled is right out of his apologist ass. Where in the Bible does it assert that if she can demonstrate it was rape, but did not scream, we go to the next regulation? I don't see the flow chart arrow indicating that--so how does this guy know this?"

Let's just say, however, just for the sake of argument, that indeed a woman could have come up with the kind of penis -- I mean, evidence, that would have convinced a group of elder, authoritarian, puritanical and chauvanistic men that she indeed tried her hardest not to get raped, but just wasn't able to do it to the extent that she was rescued.

That is STILL morally repugnant. You can shine and shine and shine and polish and polish and polish and twist and turn all you like, but you still end up with a woman in the position where she must fight back, cry out, do SOMETHING to attempt to stop the scenario for it to "count" as rape. Well, guess what? Rape is determined by CONSENT, not by ANY OTHER FACTOR. She could have been doing a naked can-can, and if she did not give consent, it was rape. Whether she laid silently and submissively and cried and waited for it to be over so that she could crawl into her bed and wish she was dead, or whether she fought with the strength of 10 people and screamed like a banshee changes absolutely nothing, and is not, in fact, something that she should be required to die for.

If this is the perfect and divine law of the being who created morality, why don't we have such a law now, which determines what is rape and what is fornication based on how much you fight back? I submit that we do not have such a law because it is stupid, savage and cruel -- exactly what one would expect from ancient Palestinian desert nomads, but far from what we would get from the loving spiritual father of us all. How is it possible for we lowly humans to be more sympathetic and reasonable than God Himself?

It does actually get worse. Really. It must take some kind of subhuman mind to be able to come up with a "good" reason to force a rape victim to marry her rapist. It obviously can't just be a horrible and disgusting law designed by men who didn't respect or value women as people, because it MUST be the good and just holy laws of an omnibenevolent god for the concept that the entire bible was written (or inspired) by that god and is inerrently true. Ockam's Razor is completely lost on fundamentalist apologists, because in order for their whole world-view to work, they must jam the existing writings into a new-age world. But that's not easy.

And so this prize-winning example of apologist flim-flam goes thus:

Many will stumble at verse 28-29, this seems absolutely horrifying in our society, that a rape victim be forced to marry their assailant.  What needs to be firmly grasped is that there is a distinct lack of welfare system in the society of the time.  This is actually not a case of the victim being forced to marry the assailant, but the assailant being forced to marry the victim.  Virginity being a much bigger deal in that culture, the woman will have been made essentially unmarriageable by the attack.  This means that she is in a situation of tremendous adversity, to be without the material support of a husband her whole life.  The assailant is forced to marry her (and told that he may never divorce her), to ensure that she is looked after, and not condemned to poverty because of his crime.  Again, this is not condoning rape, rather, the penalties for such actions are quite severe.

With fury raging inside of me, I will attempt to answer this as clearly as possible.

THIS IS NOT A SEVERE PUNISHMENT FOR A RAPIST.

A "severe" punishment for a rapist might be, oh, having his penis ripped off. Or being torn to pieces by wild boars. Or being thrown, fully conscious, into a vat of acid. Or, without anaesthesia, having each of his organs removed painfully in such a way that he lives as long as possible.

Those are "severe" punishments. Overly severe, actually. Cruel and unusual punishments.

Being forced to marry a woman that you have sexually violated, so that you can do so again and again and again and nobody can say anything about it because she is your wife and therefore your property to do with as you wish, is not even a punishment at all. At that time and place, marital rape was not even considered a possibility. You couldn't "rape" your own wife, it was impossible -- any sex that you had was ordained by God, whether or not she consented to it.

Why am I even saying "at that time and place"? Hell, TODAY in some parts of the world, debate rages on as to whether or not a man can rape his wife. In fact, according to www.survive.co.uk, a British not-for-profit rape survivors resource, up until 1991, there was no such legal thing as marital rape. You honestly think that the primitive peoples that existed during the time of the Old Testament believed in such a thing? The UK Islamic Council only recently made the statement that you can't rape your wife. Austin Cline wrote about it in his atheism blog on About.com:

Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed is the president of the Islamic Sharia Council, Britain's most important Islamic law court. Sayeed has declared that men can't rape their wives -- not that they shouldn't rape their wives, but rather that it's simply not possible for a man to rape his wife. You see, Sayeed believes that once a woman marries, she turns over control of her body to her husband and gives up any right to say "no" to sex. Ever.

This exact premise was more than likely believed to the letter by the men who wrote the bible. There was no punishment in the forced marriage -- it was merely a bandaid solution to the problem of what to do with the sullied woman once she had been used and wasn't good to anybody anymore. Her father has the right to be paid for her, since nobody else would ever marry her now that her precious hymen had been broken. It was akin to damaging property -- you break it, you buy it, and it's no good trying to return it later; we all saw you break it.

Mr. Resplect makes the comment that "virginity was much more important in those days". Why isn't virginity still as important to his god that a woman who has "known" a man is virtually unmarriageable trash? Because in our secular society, women are not objects, they are humans, equally as deserving of human experience and love as men are. Because sex, in and of itself, does not make a woman less of herself, less worthy, less intelligent, less happy, less of a potential good wife or partner.

Again, I will make an amateurishly philosophical suggestion: instead of that horrifying "welfare system" to "protect victims" that god devised, why didn't he do this:

 And the LORD spoke, saying, "Verily, I say unto you, my beloved people: if one among you should lie with a virgin forcibly, and take her virginity without her consent, then that man is to be exiled. You must cast out the evil among you. The maiden will be treated no differently than any other young virgin among you, for she has my blessing, and her virginity will be returned symbolically by my love, for she did not agree. Any man or woman who shuns this maid is to be punished, for she is a virgin in My Eyes."

 How fucking hard was that? God says she's still a virgin because she didn't agree to have sex. If she's good enough for God, she's good enough for you. She can still get married, even in a fucked up society which prides virginity over a woman's actual right to choose whether or not to have sex, and nobody has to marry the person who put them through one of the more terrifying and horrible experiences a woman can suffer.

Trying to masquerade these laws as divinely inspired and truly moral is nothing more than misogynistic, ignorant and disgusting. If there was a god, and he designed this system, then, as I feel I have demonstrated, there is not a possible way that he could be considered moral to the millions of women who have been raped, to the millions of men who empathise and suffer with them, hell, to any sane, caring and loving human being. There are many words to describe a god like that, and let me tell you, "Supremely Moral" is not a phrase that comes to mind.

Repugnant, immoral, shameful, disgusting and imaginary...those ones work just fine.

Stay tuned for next time, when we tackle Part IV: Investigating "Numbers 31:15-18 -- Does this passage condone rape?"

Part II: Investigating "1 Samuel 15:2-3 – Does this passage condone genocide?"

It's been sort of almost impossible for me to come up with a very lengthy or well-written retort to the next portion of foolishness that is written over at resplect.com. You can find the segment I'm talking about here: http://resplect.com/mainsite/?q=node/22. As my title indicates, this is our friend's idea of clarifying his god's morality when faced with a passage that clearly condones genocide.

The reason I find this so difficult to write about is not because it is a skillful refutation, but rather because it is ludicrous, and it's based on faulty reasoning from the beginning. The writer helpfully points out that God doesn't approve of murder in passages Exodus 20:13 and Matthew 5:21-22, nor racial partiality as mentioned in Romans 2:10-11, but, apprently his displeasure in these two things does not extend to himself.

It's yet another round of "God can do whatever he wants, no matter how immoral it is to us humans, because he is God, so nyah." It's just as silly as I've made it sound. He seems to believe that he has thoroughly made the case that his all-loving, all-forgiving god is totally for us humans being peaceful and loving, but he just doesn't have to behave the same way. Unfortunately for him, he has not made this case at all. An omnibenevolent being should be held to JUST as high as standard as humankind, if not moreso.

Wouldn't the idea that God himself is sinning by perpetrating genocide completely fly in the face of the idea that God is perfect and never sins? The author of this nonsense has carefully crafted a reason why his god would NEVER condone humans committing genocide -- and yet, when the god itself does it, he is merely acting out his righteous judgement.

What we see at the beginning of 1 Samuel 15 is the long awaited fulfillment of the judgment that God pronounced on Amalek a long time before (way back in Exodus 17).  Now, God is not doing this on a whim, God has essentially just been patient with Amalek all this time, and has finally decided to act upon the judgment He pronounced initially.  We see from Exodus 17 that this is definitely God's act.  As we saw previously, in the moral frame of reference of God relating to man, God taking the lives of the people of Amalek is not immoral at all.

Um, excuse me? It absolutely IS immoral. In fact, it is later described to be immoral later on in this very same article!

God is clearly against His worshipers committing murder (Exodus 20:13, Matthew 5:21-22) and also against racial partiality (Romans 2:10-11), so we can obviously infer that He is against their combined evil in the act of genocide.

I do not understand how God in this instance can be seen as anything more than a ruthless dictator, completely abolishing an entire race of people simply because he felt like it. There are many ways to punish people, we as a society have figured that out. But God resorts to the same tactic every time -- murder. And not just murder of the person who did the wrong thing that so offended him; no, murder of every living being that possibly even reminds him of that evil.

We are lead to believe through manipulations that god was merely "carrying out judgment on a particular people group for particular atrocities". What WAS this atrocity that so offended Yahweh? Let's find out! (Because learning is POWER!)

Long story short, the Amalekites were a source of constant woe to the Israelites in bible times. According to the bible, when the Israelites were completing the exodus from Egypt, they waged war with them, picking off the weak, elderly and infirm. They were ALL up in the Jews grill, y'all. Why? Well, because the Amalekites (among others) owned the land that the Israelites were attempting to just rock up and steal from them.

A few other reasons that have been given for why God was so pissed off at the Amalekites include:

• Sacrificing their children to gods (Dt 12:29-31)
• Nobody actively demonstrated any righteousness (Ez 14:13-20)
• It was just because they were at war (Dt 20:10-15)
• Godsaidso (Jdg 7:2-3, Josh 5:13-14)
• They were invading the promised land (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 20:16-18)

All of those come from gotquestions.org and rationalchristianity.net, so certainly not secular sources. My personal favorite excuse for god killing a bunch of innocent babies is this quote from gotquestions.org:

Unlike us, God knows the future. God knew what the results would be if Israel did not completely eradicate the Amalekites. If Israel did not carry out God’s orders, the Amalekites would come back to “haunt” the Israelites again and again. ... After David and his men attacked the Amalekites and rescued their families, 400 Amalekites escaped. ... Several hundred years later, a descendant ... tried to have the entire Jewish people exterminated (see the book of Esther). So, ... incomplete obedience almost resulted in Israel’s destruction. God knew this would occur, so He ordered the extermination of the Amalekites ahead of time.

Brilliant! So instead of actually doing something to stop that from occuring, like, say, snapping his fingers and having both nations live at peace with one another, or visiting other groups of people with the frequency and miraculous nature that he appeared to the Israelites, to command them to live in harmony with the new tribes, he just decided to MASSACRE THEM ALL.

AND IT DIDN'T EVEN WORK.

That's right, kids, God knew that the Amalekites would cause trouble for his special babies in the future, and so he ordered them all killed. But, since God is so terrible at having any of his insane orders followed, it didn't work, and the event that he was trying to precipitate happened ANYWAY, making the entire event an exercise in total futility. Bloody, gorey, inhumane and terrible futility.

Not only does this fail on multiple levels, but all the other excuses are equally as lame. They sacrificed their children to gods? Well, God apparently did the same thing RE: Jesus, and he even ordered Abraham to do the same. Jepthah, as well, was ordered to sacrifice his daughter to God. They were at war? If we were at war with another country, and sliced open pregnant women's bellies to make sure that their fetus was dead, too, as well as murdered all of their livestock, burned all of the booty and basically made sure that any living breathing thing there was totally decimated, I think that would be considered a terrible atrocity. War is war, genocide is genocide, no matter who puts their happy stamp on it.

Over and over again, while reading multiple articles about the slaughter of the Amalekites, I've read the words "This is a difficult passage", "I don't understand why God did this 100% either", "I'm not so sure about this, but I trust God is Just", and many more like it. Even biblical scholars and Christian apologists are uncomfortable with the events described in 1 Samuel 15. Why? Because it shows off the ugly face of God to the extreme, the entirely self-contradictory nature of the creature.

The Bible also clearly teaches that one person is not held guilty for another's sin (Ezek 18). And yet, God was completely fine with murdering suckling infants and young children who didn't even know their own name yet, let alone their racial heritage, that, by a cruel twist of fate, was bestowed upon them by the very God that smited it. Yes, Yahweh deliberately allowed children to be born into a race that he particularly hated, merely so that he could have his minions slaughter them.

Trying to cover up rivers of blood with a doily won't work. God clearly agrees with the idea that group of people deserve to be bloodily murdered simply to wipe out their entire race. The bronze-age desert tribesmen who wrote these tales did not yet know that, to a civilised society, these actions are unacceptable even between warring nations. But we know, and no amount of special pleading will untangle God from that unholy act.

Stay tuned for Part III: Investigating "Deuteronomy 22:22-28 – Does this passage condone rape?"

Part I: Investigating "Is God in the Bible Immoral?"

In my last blog post, I gave a little background to this investigation. This will be part one of a multi-part series, dealing with a detailed argument an acquaintance of mine has given in defense of his god's morality.

This post will deal with the introduction to his argumentation, which, in and of itself, is frought with fallacies. The link to this segment is: http://resplect.com/mainsite/?q=node/20

He begins by giving a little context surrounding morality for us. He separates the commands of his god into three groupings: Descriptive, General Prescriptive and Special Prescriptive. While this segmentation is never addressed or indicated in the bible, this is how he will begin to justify the atrocities that his god has committed and condoned.

Descriptive is used to describe those events in the bible that are not commanded or condoned by god, but merely describe sinful acts that some people in biblical times participated in. He does not give examples of these things, but I suppose items that would fall under this category for him would be the actions of the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, or I guess possibly Lot and his daughters idea of how to repopulate their tribe. This is speculation, of course, but I assume this is what he meant.

This is already problematic, in that if his god is omniscient and omnipotent, and, as is frequenty attributed to him, "has a plan" for us all, these sinful behaviours would necessarily fall under his plan, be known to him, and be allowed by him (since he would be able to not plan it happening, or knowing about it, stop it from occuring with his power). I'm certain that the christian would point out that these actions are permitted by god under the "free will" clause of his contract with humanity, but allow me to elaborate.

"God allows this free will to happen, so that we are not all blind slaves to his will. He has angels for that! He wants people who freely choose him", the christians chorus. Fair enough, except that people do bad things. Things that we, as a society, find repugnent. Things that we find disgusting and wrong for societal and evolutionary reasons. Things like, oh, raping children, for example.

God must inherently know that people are raping children. He must also allow this kind of thing to occur, even though he knows about it. This is good? This is moral?

What if I did that? If I knew my next-door neighbour was abusing his or her child, and I did nothing to stop it? I would be the worst kind of person, to allow an innocent to suffer that kind of abuse, rather than take measures to end his or her suffering. God, apparently, does this daily. Hourly, actually, and doesn't bat an eyelash. Loving father, indeed. I could be imprisoned for such an act of willfully allowing a child to be in harm's way and not interceding. God intercedes to help people win ballgames and find their keys and get a job, but doesn't deign to provide a little assistance for a child being abused by their parents?

So, already, I have issues with "Descriptive" texts, because, inherently, they are bad things which god allows to happen when he could actually stop it, and we've barely gotten through three paragraphs.

Let's move on.

The next segment, "General Prescriptive", which are, to quote, "ways of life that God deems ought to be carried out by people in all circumstances." The example given is the commandment to not have or worship idols from the old testament, which is later reinforced by Paul in the new testament.

Interesting that he should point out one of the ten commandments. This would, to my mind, imply that ALL of the jewish law (the ten commandments are only the first ten, after all, out of over six-hundred) is General Prescriptive. Which means that god wants all people to follow those laws in all circumstances, simply to extrapolate on the example provided. Fantastic! A few of the laws that are now to be followed by all christians everywhere, in all circumstances, are as follows:

• Stone your unruly children! (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
• Murder everyone and destroy an entire town if they have different religious beliefs! (Deuteronomy 13:13-15)
• Murder all women who cannot prove their virginity after the wedding night! (Deuteronomy 22:20)
• Eat bugs! (Leviticus 11:21-22)
• Kill homosexuals! (Leviticus 18:22-20:13)

And so many more. These are all General Prescriptive, and need to be carried out by all people in all circumstances, by order, command, and indictment by god, according to this reasoning.

The third category mentioned is Special Prescriptive. These are commands that god issues for a CERTAIN person or group of people to do at a CERTAIN time. The example given is when Jonah of the bible is commanded to go to Ninevah and preach the good news at people. It is helpfully explained that god doesn't want ALL of us sillybears to go to Ninevah and preach at people. That would be silly.

The example I would have perhaps used would have been the example of Jepthah. Jepthah was a man with a plan. Part of that plan included winning a certain war. Jepthah bargained a bit with god to win the war. The deal was struck with god and went thusly: if Jepthah was victorious, he would slaughter -- I mean, sacrifice -- the first thing to walk through his door after the victory. The god in the story let Jepthah win, and then, in a turn of events worthy of a daytime TV drama, the first thing to walk through his door was his daughter. Jepthah murdered -- I mean, sacrificed -- his daughter to god.

Now, this would probably be something that my friend here would call Prescriptive. His god doesn't necessarily want us all to sacrifice our children, just in this situation, when the two characters had a bargain.

Either way, it's totally sick to do such a thing. God was probably laughing all the way to the blood bank after he orchestrated that little twist of fate. Couldn't he have made a ram stumble into his house first? Wouldn't god be upset by the idea of one of the people he created being sacrificed simply because she walked through a door, unbeknownst to herself that it was signing her death certificate? Didn't the girl have a say?

Wow, all of this nonsense, and we're just past the fifth paragraph.

Now that we know the categories that my friend has just made up and defined, we can go on to identify which of these segments each atrocity of god is filed under. Very handy! I'll have to use that for my filing system in the future. I was worried I was going to have to create a new alphabet to help me better organise the mass of horrors god has inflicted upon the world.

I'm not necessarily sure what good it does to have these categories, but it certainly made him feel important, so let's go on.

Next we deal with the concept of morality, and whether or not we can actually take god to task about his actions.

My buddy here begins with this statement:

"Many have made the claim that various actions and specific prescriptive commands of God in the Old Testament are simply cruel or otherwise immoral."

True, many have made this claim, myself included. I don't personally limit myself to the old testament, actually, I find major parts of the new testament destestable as well, particularly that little part about making an admittedly innocent man suffer and die to circumvent rules that could have easily been changed to forgo blood sacrifice. Or that one part where it's supposedly "justice" for someone to pay the penalty for someone elses crimes. Those parts bother me a bit. But, I digress.

The author makes the claim that since we are not just asking another human person to account for their actions, we have to take a different tack. We are asking GOD, after all, and he deserves a different playing field when we question his morality.

I couldn't possibly disagree more. If something is immoral, it is immoral for everyone, supernatural beings included. If someone does something wrong, it doesn't matter if they are a god or the president or a receptionist or a dole bludger or a fairy, I have every right to take them to task. I am a member of this society, and the actions of other people affect me. If someone is going to rape someone, for example, or order the rape of someone, or condone the rape of someone, it doesn't matter a whit if they are an authority. They're an asshole.

The question is asked, "...[W]hat is the standard that [I] hold God to?"

It is posed almost as if there has to be a different standard to hold this god to than anybody else. Incorrect. Especially given the descriptors of god as "infinitely just", we absolutely do have to judge him to the same standards. If he says something, and yet does not follow his commands, or he says or does something that we all know to be wrong, then we have to ask why.  Why do we know that slavery is wrong, for example, while we also know that god endorses it?

If someone in today's society were to say that slavery was okay, then we would consider them immoral. People in the past, judged from today's standards, who said slavery was great, are considered immoral. If a god says, in the past or today, that slavery is okay, we know that is wrong. We know it's wrong to own people. We know this, and whether or not you want to consider it to be a moral code granted to you by god, or whether you acknowledge that we have our morals thanks to our evolution as social animals, you know that this thing is wrong. It is wrong no matter who says it is right.

Including god.

This is certainly an argument that falls under The Euthyphro Dilemma. This is an argument against divine command theory, which was attributed to Socrates in Plato's dialogue "Euthyphro", in which Socrates asks, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Which is essentially asking, "Does god say it is good because it is good, or is it good because god says so?"

If god says something is good because it is good, then we don't need god to tell us so. We can cut out the middleman, so to speak, and go straight to the good stuff. This god isn't the author of morality, because it is moral with or without him, he's just saying it's good because it is. Now, if things are good because god says so, then god can literally describe morality however he wishes. Today, child rape is wrong. Tomorrow, child rape is totally okay and burn everyone who doesn't do it! The next day, child rape is back to being morally wrong. It's completely arbitrary.

The standard by which I judge the morality of god is the same standard by which I judge the morality of every single other person or entity on the planet: my own morality. It was developed by my social ancestors over millions of years of evolution. I know murder is wrong because I do not want to be murdered. If I murder people, other people are likely to murder me, and I don't want that to happen. I know slavery is wrong because I wouldn't want to be a slave. If I enslave people, I'm more likely to be enslaved by others, and I don't want that to happen. It's simple stuff really. If I am kind and generous, then people will trust me and help me out. If I am cruel and ruthless, then people will hate me and leave me to die.

Not complicated. No need to spin suffering off as morality. No need to try the convoluted path of explaining why rape is okay in certain situations at god's say-so. Just very, very simple social evolution. Google it. There are a billion articles on it.

This is the basic reason that I disregard the next premise that our friend comes up with, that we must need some sort of authority figure that we could never overthrow to define morality for us. We do not! It is innate, it is a part of our evolutionary make-up just as much as our DNA and our bone structure.

He builds a straw-man, saying, "For this accusation [that his housemate stealing rent money for beer and candy is immoral] to be coherent, it must be based on a standard which is set out by an entity in authority over my housemate.  Now, it could be argued that this standard could be imposed by a human government (these are, after all, in authority over us)."

Not at all. This is a posit which is completely undefended. It does not have to be set out by an entity in authority over us at all. It is set out INSIDE of us, in our development as social animals. The reason the government asserts authority over those who break our social mores is because we have social mores in place ALREADY and we need a system in place to deal with those aberrant creatures who do not abide by them. It is wrong to murder because we say so, and we say so because that is what we developed over time, living social lives.

No need for an authority to write the laws, we wrote them ourselves, over millions of years of trial and error. If a civilsation did not share, did not protect the young, did not help eachother, that civilisation would die out. We need eachother to live, and if someone is stealing, murdering and raping amongst us, they are hurting the society. We don't abide that, so we stop it. It's not a difficult concept.

So by the time we get to this bold assertion, "I suggest that the only candidate for such an authority figure is some sort of divine personality. Now, the Bible describes God as being that very authority figure." I am no longer a participant in this conversation, because it diverges so much from what is actually known about how the world works.

Not only is it wrong on that level, but it's wrong on several other levels as well. It's a false dichotomy, to begin with -- there could potentially be other candidates for that authority figure, even if he was necessary, which he isn't. For instance, the authority of our nature as social animals, which I have described already.

Secondly, a "divine personality" could, literally, mean anything. Flying Spaghetti Monster. Allah. Shiva. Thor. Zeus. Yahweh. Gazillions of others. Am I to take into account the (dubious) morality expressed by all of these gods simply because they could be this divine personality?

Thirdly, the bible has not been demonstrated to be accurate, or divine, in any way. You cannot just say, "The bible says so, therefore it's true." That is not demonstrating its veracity at all, that is just spouting random claims. "The Koran says so, therefore it's true." is equally true by this logic.

So when you back up the claim that we must jump and do whatever god says, immediately, quick-smart, with a ridiculous comment like this: "The Bible speaks of this Person as the divine Creator and Sustainer of everything that exists apart from Himself.  For this reason, His ultimate power is completely unassailable to humans and His word must function, for them, as law." it is essentially meaningless.

I know that at this stage we are not questioning the existence of a god. We are talking about the specific character of a god. However, I do take issue with the argument that because god is god, we cannot question his character. Sure we can! I'm doing it right now. You can do it, too. My mom and dad made me, but that doesn't make them immune from my questioning them. For instance, if they beat me mercilessly everyday of my childhood*, then I could easily say that they had no right to do so, despite having made me, and having the power over my life to do it. Likewise, even if god made me, and has the power over me to do horrible things to me, that doesn't make it right for him to do so, and it in no way makes him unassailable to my questioning.

He goes on:

"If the person is to accuse God of being immoral for being changeable in His preferences, or otherwise call God to account on the basis of a standard set by an authority figure, they will find that they are thwarted from the outset.  For God by nature is the highest point of authority for both Himself and His accuser. "

All he is saying by making this argument is that might makes right, and whoever is the strongest and most authoritative gets to say what is morally correct. This is not true, in any context. If god is the supreme overlord of all creation, and he's a dickhead, he's still a dickhead, whether or not we're allowed by his laws to say so. So if god does something wrong, or arbitrarily changes his mind, then we can, and do, call him out on it. I do not recognise the authority of this god, nor do I agree that everything that comes out of his holy mouth is morally correct, just because he said so.

The final one-two punch of the introduction is to explain why, even though we are not allowed to question god, and god had written his morality on our hearts, we do question him anyway on the hideous things he does from time to time.

This is answered, as I forboded, in two parts. One being that we do not understand the parameters of the thing we are accusing god of being immoral about, i.e., we have taken the action out of context, and two being that we have a faulty understanding of morality, i.e., god gives lots of chances and only punishes those who don't respond to his mercy.

The first is ludicrous, as we have the entire context of the situation readily available to us in the bible. The fact that god ordered Abraham to slaughter his son as a sacrifice is no less disturbing when the hand holding the knife is stayed by an angel. He still ordered him to do it, and Abraham acknowledged that his god was the kind of god who would ask for a human sacrifice. The fact that god commands Jesus to actually go through with the sacrifice is no less disgusting and wrong when it is revealed that Jesus went through with it willingly, to serve his father, and to suffer for our sins. Actually, it may genuinely make it MORE offensive.

The second is pure baloney. If god murders a slew of people, then it doesn't matter how many warnings he gave them. That would be like if I had my 2 year old neice, Lily, over at my house, and I told her repeatedly not to pull my glasses off my face. Two year olds totally do this all the time. I may say no, sternly. I may put her down. I may push her little hand away when she reaches for them. I may put her in time-out. But I may not murder her.

Lastly, he gets to this:

"And finally, we discover that God taking the life of a human is not murder at all, in the sense of one human taking another human's life, because we are not related to Him as beings of equal value which He ought to respect.  Rather, our relationship to Him is like that of a lump of clay to the potter, in that the potter may do whatever he likes with the clay.   The clay is not something which the potter is obligated to treat with as much value as he has in himself (Romans 9:19-24).  So then, within the frame of reference of God relating to humans, the act of taking a human life is not murder..."

Guess what? Yes, it is. I really, genuinely feel bad for people who have such little self-respect, self-confidence and self-esteem. You ARE worth something, Nick. You're not some invisible man's plaything. You are a being in your own right. As I said before, the fact that my mother and father biologically made me, and the fact that, as a child, I was not equal to them, does not give them unlimited license to do whatever they want with me. The fact that I could not stop them, or the fact that I was not their intellectual, physical or social equal does not mean that they had the right.

Nobody has the right to arbitrarily do what they like with you, and call that love and mercy and morality. It is none of them.

So, we now wrap up the first part, the introduction, and wasn't it fun? It took me several days to read through this article that he wrote, simply because it was full of such hatred and willful ignorance that it made it really hard for me to read. That is why I am doing this, not only because it is cathartic, but because it is worthwhile.

See you all next time, when we tackle the much shorter part two, concerning god and genocide.

"Is God in the Bible Immoral?" An Investigation of Claims

Recently, I've been having a debate with a young-Earth Creationist and fundamentalist christian with whom I am acquainted. We've had a number of discussions over the brief time we've been aware of one another, primarily concerning my status as an atheist and his status as a christian, and what we believe and why. I admit, I am fairly ruthless in these conversations, mainly because it's important to me to discuss passionate topics with passion, but also because he is so, so damned frustrating.

The debate we've been having most recently is one concerning the morality of his god. This came about after his accusation that my husband and I are only atheists to "indulge [our] hedonism", which, of course, in laymens terms, merely means that we are only atheists because we like to sin a lot. To quote Matt Dillahunty, president of the Atheist Community of Austin, "Yeah, you're right. I decided, this whole sinning thing? It's for me. So, pshaw." That argument didn't quite fly with my fundie friend.

I retorted, much less eloquently, that he couldn't accuse me of sinning, because, not only do I reject the idea of sin basically, but the god he chooses to worship has demonstrated nothing specifically moral worth following; in fact, I would (and do) go so far as to say this god is specifically immoral.

I just rattled off a few verses from the bible demonstrating yahweh's total lack of morality, specifically focussing on genocide, rape and torture as described in both the old and new testaments. My friend totally refused to answer me on most of my points, instead promising a "detailed dismantling" of what he called my "propaganda". I fail to see how quoting his own holy book counts as propaganda, but hey, far be it from me to try to extract logic or reason from a fundamentalist.

He flamed me up a wall for quoting these verses, accusing me of ripping off someone elses work (I did not), accusing me of taking everything out of context (I did not), and accusing me of taking only ten seconds to put together a pack of what was essentially lies (another wrong, it took me quite some time, actually.) To quote him directly,

"But this shows, 10 seconds to write propaganda. In this case, probably 2 hours of my time to dismantle and refute in detail."

Well, it was more like three weeks, but, to his credit, he did actually write a very long answer to my accusations (he proudly noted it's 5,300 word length) and directed me, and all those he imagined were following this exchange, to his website. I will post the link here.

http://resplect.com/mainsite/?q=node/20

Yes, children, this was the atrocity with which I was greeted after weeks of waiting. This clusterfuck of wrong. And now, as he so bemoaned before, I will have to spend much of my time correcting it, like a teacher with her angry red pen.

I will be going through this garbage one bit at a time, and I will separate it into different blog posts so that it will be easier to navigate, the same way he did on his website. It will take me quite a bit of time to do this, but thankfully, despite the fact that I, like my friend here, have limited spare time, I can squeeze in a bit here and there to deal with things that are important to me.

And doing my part to rid the world of more disinformation, twisting of facts and bending over backwards to smear "good" all over something which is demonstrably bad, is one of those things that is actually important to me.

The Tower of Never Speak to Me Again

The god of the Judeo-Christian Bible is a god who jealously imprisons knowledge. Curiously absent from the Bible in its entirety is any lordly command the likes of, "Thou shalt be curious" or "Thou shalt wonder about the world and learn as much as possible from it." In fact, at every turn, this malevolent God takes measures to prevent humans from learning and amassing knowledge. One of the more obvious myths concerning this is certainly The Fall, wherein Yahweh punishes his newly made man and woman with eternal damnation merely for curiously eating the fruit of knowledge. Another well known example is the story of Doubting Thomas, who, for simply investigating the veracity of the impossible specter appearing in front of him, is branded nearly heretical.

Similarly well known is the story of the Tower of Babel, although, this story is not commonly linked with the others. Why? Well, it's not really that important, in a sense. Even Christians regard the fable as a cute little story which describes why they are so many languages and why people are so spread out in the world. It could be argued that this story is widely regarded on par with the story of why the giraffe's neck is so long or why we have the Summer and Winter seasons. Certainly these stories, Babel included, are regarded as absolute truth by their devotees; but they are not necessarily stories that would find themselves at the center or core of very many dogmatic belief systems. They just are what they are: stories which describe why the world around us is the way it is.

The story of the Tower of Babel is found in Genesis 11:1-9 and appears in the King James Version as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children built. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Cute, right? I mean, the people obviously would have had one language after the Flood, so how come there are so many now? Easy, just invent a little myth that in a sort of adorable little way describes why that's the case. Simple, not too much fuss, nothing truly noteworthy.

Well, not really.

Even in this most simplistic of stories, we find so clearly set out that which Christians are so fond of terming "the character of God".

Here we have, plainly, a group of people who are all working together for a common goal: to create a tower that will go up to heaven, and that way their culture would never be divided. They would have the great piece of architecture that physically connected them, in their Earthliness, to their creator. The mysteries of the universe would be known to them, and they wouldn't have to be separated from God any longer.

Is this childlike bit of ingenuity welcomed and rewarded by their god, the way parents will smile and encourage children who are attempting to dig a hole to China or build a ladder to the moon? In a word, no. Not even bloody close.

No, the heavenly parent chooses to, instead, as is his nature, to instead punish curiosity. Not only does he "confound" their languages, so they can no longer speak to each other, but he scatters them "abroad upon the face of all the Earth". You know, just in case the fact that they could no longer understand one another wasn't impediment enough to them to stop their work, he physically separates them so far that they could never finish the job they set to complete. The task which, at it's heart, is so innocent: merely the desire to learn more and to never be separated.

One must ask oneself: Why does this god so hate the concept of his earthly creations working together to discover more about their surrounds?

Maybe they would have built their tower to heaven and found it totally vacant.