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From: tim@k.cs.cmu.edu.ARPA (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Even If I Did Believe...
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Date: Sat, 14-Sep-85 07:30:26 EDT
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Posted: Sat Sep 14 07:30:26 1985
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	"Even If I Did Believe ..."
	by Tim Maroney
	November 5,1984
	Copyright 1984 by the author

Introduction
============

I am not a Christian.  In my discussions of this fact with
Christians, I have repeatedly run into a major misunderstanding.
The Christians assume that if I believed the Bible were true, I
would become a Christian; that is, they believe that my reason for
not being a Christian is that I don't believe in their god.  This
is not the case.  In this essay, I will explain more clearly why
I am not a Christian.  The essay is not meant as an attack on
Christianity, just as a statement of personal belief.

One disclaimer:  The thesis of this essay is that even if a God as
described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship.
Consequently, I speak sometimes as if I did believe the Bible,
when in fact I do not.

If I had undeniable proof of the existence of Yahweh, aka Jehovah,
aka Adonai, aka El Shaddai, aka Yahweh Elohim, the father of Jesus
and the ancient leader of the Semitic peoples, I still would not
worship the monster.  If an angel appeared to me and removed my
appendectomy scar so I could never deny the reality of divine
power, I still would not be a Christian.  My primary reason for
not being a Christian has nothing to do with my lack of
belief in their god.  My primary reason is that the Bible is a
disgusting book describing the behavior of a god without the
morality of the average high school student.

That God does what he wants, when he wants, without even an
attempt at self-justification, and all for what reason?  According
to Paul, all for his own greater glory.  For his own glory he
condemns billions to eternal torment, drowns millions of innocent
beasts and thousands of children, orders the slaughter of entire
cities down to the last man, woman, and child, creates a race that
he knows is flawed and will hurt itself, refuses to deal with any
other god on a friendly basis, rains doom on those who dare to
try to be as knowledgable as he is, and so on.

Hell
====

Jesus preaching love in no way atones for Yahweh's many hideous
crimes; lest we forget, it was at the time of Jesus that he
created Hell.  This cruellest of all concentration camps
(certainly far worse than the ones created by the Nazis) was at no
time mentioned in the Old Testament, and the wrathful and
threatening god of the Old Testament would hardly have omitted any
chance to terrify his worshippers.

(Incidentally, the "Sheol" of the Old Testament is simply a generic
term for the afterlife; neither modern scholarship nor Judaic
tradition equates it with Hell.)

I have heard some Christians who believe that there is no
everburning Hell in their religion, that the "lake of fire" is
purely destructive, that sinners will be annihilated rather than
tortured after the Last Judgment.  Sometimes, they claim that
medieval Catholics created that "myth", and that they would revile
any god who made this concentration camp.

Well, get ready to start reviling then.  The myth of Hell was not
created in the Middle Ages.  It is explicitly stated in a set of
books called the Synoptic Gospels, you know, the ones by Matthew,
Mark, and Luke.  Since some people don't seem to be very familiar
with these books, usually considered the cornerstone of
Christianity, I'll fill them in.

In Matt. 18:34-35, Jesus finishes up a parable about an
unforgiving debtor with: "And in his anger the master handed him
over to the torturers till he should pay all his debt.  And that
is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you each
forgive your brother from your heart."  Not clean killing -- you
will be handed over to the torturers.  In the parable of the
wedding feast, Matthew 22:1-14, Jesus concludes with "Then the
king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot and throw him
out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of
teeth.'"  The king didn't say, "Execute him", but bind him and
throw him into a painful place.  This is echoed in Mat. 24:51, in
almost the same words, and again in Mat. 25:30, again with similar
words.  Finally (for Matthew), we have Mat. 25:41-46, on the Last
Judgment.  "Next he will say to those on his left hand, 'Go away
from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared
for the devil and his angels...  And they will go away to eternal
punishment, and the virtuous to eternal life.'"

My point is proven, so I won't bore you with the quotes from Mark
and Luke; however, check out Mark 9:43, Mark 9:48-49, Luke 13:27-
28, and Luke 16:23-26 if you still doubt.  Why would Jesus have so
frequently mentioned the existence of an afterlife of torment if that
was misleading his followers?  And why did he never imply the existence
of a forthcoming destruction of the unfaithful?

Among the Christians who accept the reality of Hell, another
rationalization is quite popular.  This holds that Hell is in some
sense voluntary, and chosen by its inmates.  It's an interesting
idea, and certainly one of the more interesting aspects of Dante's
"Inferno" is the way the conditions of the damned reflect conditions
created in life by their sins.  I agree completely that the man
who commits murder must live ever in fear of attack, that the thief
will never feel secure in his property, that the liar can trust no
one, and so on.  By their offenses they create an unpleasant life
for themselves.

However, you don't have to hurt anyone to get into Hell.  All it
takes, according to Scripture, is knowing about Jesus and not
accepting him as Savior.  It doesn't matter how virtuous you
are, how much good you do, how happy an environment you create for
yourself and others.  Given this, the voluntary entry argument doesn't
make sense.  The same argument could be used to justify the sending
of Aryan opponents of Nazism to concentration camps:  they voluntarily
chose not to give homage to Hitler, so they chose to be interred.  Why
should we blame the Nazis for the inmates' choice?  Why should we
blame Yahweh for the choice of the damned?

Genocide
========

You hear a lot from Christians about Yahweh's "infinite compassion
and mercy".  Tell it to the Midianites.  Numbers 31 is a classic
example of wholesale slaughter and rape under the direction of
Yahweh.  A sample of this tale: "They waged the campaign against
Midian, as Yahweh had ordered Moses, and they put every male to
death....  The sons of Israel took the Midianite women captive with
their young children, and plundered all their cattle, all their
flocks and all their goods.  They set fire to the towns where
they lived and all their encampments....  Moses was enraged
with the commanders of the army ...  who had come back from
this military expedition.  He said, 'Why have you spared the
life of all the women? ...  So kill all the male children.  Kill
also all the women who have slept with a man.  Spare the lives
only of the young girls who have not slept with a man, and take
them for yourselves.'"  Yes, friends, this is infinite mercy and
compassion for you.  I particularly like the way that Moses got
upset with them for sparing women and male children, but allowed
the young girls to be kept for later raping.  If only humans could
keep to such lofty standards without the necessity of divine
revelation.

This wasn't the first time the Hebrews harassed the Midianites
(although it was obviously the last...)  Earlier, in Chapter 25 to
be precise, Israel settled in Midian.  Rather than toss the Hebrews
out on their ear from this land of limited resources, the Midianites
-- well, I'll let the author of Numbers tell it:  "The [Hebrews] gave
themselves over to debauchery with the daughters of Moab.  These
invited them to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and
bowed down before their gods.  With Israel thus committed to the Baal
of Peor, the anger of Yahweh blazed out against them.  Yahweh said to
Moses: 'Take all the leaders of the people.  Impale them for Yahweh,
here in the sun; then the burning anger of Yahweh will turn away from
Israel.'  Moses said to the judges in Israel, 'Every one of you must
put to death those of his people who have committed themselves to the
Baal of Peor.'"

Now that is written in a rather negatively-connoted fashion.  Look at
what actually happened:  Israel arrived in Midian.  The Midianites
welcomed them like kinfolk.  They let them date their daughters; they
invited them to come to Church.  Right neighborly reception, if you
ask me.  Some of the Hebrews, no doubt impressed by the friendly ways
of these people, took up the local customs of their own free will.  So
what does Moses do?  He puts spears through them and lets them rot in
the sun.  Who's the bad guy here?  I'd say it's pretty obvious.
Neither apostacy nor fornication deserve the death penalty -- or do you
think we should start frying unwed mothers and those who leave their
religion, by Federal law?

Right on the heels of this comes a plague.  This is blamed by the
Hebrews on one Zimri, who had the incredible gall to actually marry
a Midianite woman!  Fortunately, a zealous son of Israel speared them
both right through the genitals, and the plague went away.  Now we
moderns know that disease just doesn't work that way, but a more
important objection concerns a point of Biblical trivia.  Of what
nationality was Zipporah, the wife of Moses?  You have five seconds ...
That's right, she was a Midianite!  But for some reason Moses'
genitals were allowed to remain intact.  This makes marriage
to a Midianite seem like less than a capital offense.

I don't think the firstborn in Egypt during the captivity would
have agreed with the verdict of compassion and mercy (Ex. 11:5,12:29).
Yahweh could have teleported the Jews out of captivity without
bloodshed, or put the Egyptians to sleep while they left, but no.
That wouldn't be gory and exciting enough for him.  Now rivers
of blood, killing innocent children: there's something you can
really sink your teeth into.

It was due to Yahweh's hardening of Pharoah's heart in the
first place that made the later cruelties necessary.  And why?
Yahweh explains to Moses in Ex. 11:9, "Pharoah will not listen to
you; so that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt."
Wonderful.  All those children and adults tortured and killed, for
the same reason that would lead one of us today to set off fireworks.
This is immorality, pure and simple.

The entire book of Joshua is a long sequence of atrocities.  I
have not given all these quotes for space reasons -- I urge you to
look them up for yourself.  If you are not shocked, then your
moral standards must be low indeed.

Of course, you will sometimes hear rationalizations of this
slaughter.  There are three major forms: the corruption argument,
the universal criminalization argument, and the mercy argument.
The first and second say that those slaughtered were evil and
deserving of their fate; the third says that since they
were religiously incorrect, it was a mercy to terminate their
existence.

The corruption argument simply does not hold up.  The people
slaughtered in the Old Testament were almost uniformly blameless
(with a few exceptions, of course -- for instance, the Sodomites
violated the conventions of hospitality.)  Usually, no
justification is offered beyond the fact that since they were of
another tribe, it was OK to kill them.  And it goes without
saying that the hordes of slaughtered children were innocent.
Does the fact that you think God has told you that some country is
corrupt give you the right to slaughter every inhabitant of the
country?  If so, then let's start sending arms to Iran for use against
Iraq right away!

The universal criminalization argument is very silly.  It goes like
this.  All men are disgusting sinners who deserve to be killed.  When
Yahweh kills some of them, he has every right to, because they are
vile sinners.  Hmm.  In that case, if I decide that someone is a vile
sinner and deserves to die, then that is a correct perception.
Therefore, if I cash in their chips myself, it's OK, they got what
they deserved, no more and no less.  How many of us would object if
someone had knocked off Hitler?  He deserved it, so why should we
object?  Now what about knocking off Mother Theresa?  She deserves it;
she's a human after all.

By making all men deserving of death, universal criminalization
makes murder less than a sin.  (The people who put it forth should be
glad I don't buy it, or they would probably be first on my list!)

What's that you say?  Only Yahweh has the right to kill those who
deserve it?  I see.  We should have stayed home during World War II.
In any case, this is yet another moral double standard, and those are
clearly unacceptable.  Stay tuned if you can't see why.

As to the mercy argument:  They shoot horses, don't they?
However, people are not animals to be destroyed against their will
in the name of mercy.  If I don't claim to be suffering, and don't
ask to die, neither you nor any god has the right to decide that
you know better.

Neglect
=======

Most of us, given omnipotence, would be able to do a far better
job than Yahweh.  What would you do if given omnipotence?  If your
answer is anything other than "abolish world hunger", there's
something more than a little skewed in your perception of mankind.
There is no question that this is the greatest evil in the world
today.  The second thing would be to abolish disease, right?  This
doesn't take "infinite mercy", just normal compassion and a bit of
common sense.  God's supposedly infinite mercy is apparently the
same thing as no mercy at all.

What makes this particularly unforgivable is that even Jesus's own
standards demand feeding of the poor.  See Matthew 25:35, in which
it is stated that the blessed feed the hungry, and that the damned
do not.  Yahweh is held blameless, though, for not feeding them.
Does the old saw about "practicing what you preach" not apply
to Yahweh?  Is his hypocrisy not a sin?

Usually, when I bring this up in a discussion, someone says, "No; it
is the evil of men that is to blame; they have lots of money and keep
it to themselves rather than feeding the poor."  This argument uses
a double standard.  Men are held guilty for not feeding the poor,
while Yahweh is held innocent for doing exactly the same.  In fact,
it would be far easier for Yahweh to feed all the poor than for any
man to feed even one!  Men are certainly not blameless here, but it
is Yahweh who is the true villain.

One popular rationalization of this is that for Yahweh to feed all
the hungry would somehow (and it is never explained how) make it
more difficult for people to get into Heaven.  Sure, and another
reason is that it would make the quality of newspapers worse,
right?  You can't just say that two things are connected when
there is no apparent or explained link between them!  (Well, you
can, but you're making a fool of yourself.)

Another popular rationalization is that life without "challenges"
would be boring and dehumanizing, so Yahweh does not remove them.
The fallacy here is grouping all challenges together.  I personally
lead a very challenging and satisfying life, but I have not lately
had to flee any volcanos or earthquakes, go without food for a week,
or suffer the ravages of some disease.  I would be quite happy, in
fact, if I never did have to face such challenges as those.  There is
plenty of room for amelioration of the human condition without making
it dull.  Another objection here is that the same people who like this
rationalization usually believe that they will enter a world that is
perfect and without challenge after death, but they don't seem
particularly put off by the "dullness" of Heaven ....

Other Gods
==========

Suppose you were a god and there were other gods.  What would you
do?  What I would try to do is the same thing I do as a person
among other people -- try to make friends or at least truce with
as many of them as possible.  The jealous Judeo-Christian god does
the opposite.

(Some people feel that Yahweh is the only god, and therefore cannot
be faulted for not having friendly relations with other gods.
This idea is a fairly modern invention: that not only is he the
best god, but the only one.  Yahweh is repeatedly referred to as
"our God" in the Pentateuch, and there is no implication until
Isaiah that he is the only real one.  Also, try Deut. 5:7-9.  It
is psychotic to be jealous of nonexistent beings.  The statement
"You shall have no gods except me" clearly implies that the contrary
is possible.  However, I am willing to grant that there are no
other gods for the sake of argument.)

Suppose you were an omnipotent god and there were no other gods.
What would you do?  Perform a continual sequence of verifiable
miracles; after all, this doesn't require any effort, and keeps
people from delusion.  No such luck in the case of Jehovah.  He
demands absolute fidelity without any demonstration of his
existence, beyond some visionary manifestations of the sort that
you can get from any religion.

Christians commonly rationalize this in one of two ways.  First,
they claim that there is a virtue in believing something without
proof; that is, faith in itself is held to be a virtue, and Yahweh
doesn't want to remove our opportunity to indulge in it.  All I
can say to this is that I do not consider faith to be a virtue --
I consider it to be a sign of intellectual weakness, and a
significant barrier to scientific and other progress.

There is no virtue in accepting a thing on faith, since it may well
be false, and it is clearly not virtuous to believe the false.
Given that one has faith, how does one decide whether to put it
in Christianity instead of Hinduism?  There is no way; you just
have to cross your fingers and take the plunge.  Whichever choice
you take, you will hear voices in your head, see divine
manifestations, and so on, so even once the plunge is taken there
is no way to know you are correct.

Further on this topic, according to the Bible Yahweh repeatedly
deprived people of their opportunity for faith by manifesting himself
in undeniable ways.  It is hard to place much stock in a virtue for
which Yahweh removes the opportunity among his most favored, such as
Moses and other prophets.

It has also not escaped my attention that many of the same people who
prattle about the virtues of faith like to talk about "proofs" of
various things in their religion, such as the resurrection of Jesus.
Which is it?  Do you have faith, or do you have proof?

Second, there is the rationalization that scientific discovery
would become impossible if a continual stream of verifiable
miracles were performed.  This argument denies the omnipotence of
Yahweh.  If he can do anything, he can perform a sequence of
miracles in such a way as to convince everyone of his existence
and not interfere with scientific discovery at all.  The only
things he can't do are logical absurdities such as making 2+2=5.

The point to remember here is that if we don't believe in him, we
go to Hell, and this is a greater evil than a lack of the "virtue"
of faith or a stunting of science, or anything else conceivable.
If Yahweh is concerned about the good, he will do what he can to
keep us from Hell, and withholding vital information from us is the
exact opposite of this.

Other Charges
=============

The charge against Yahweh of infecting us with disease is
particularly strong.  God made these micro-organisms, and made us
subject to them.  If I made a bunch of plague germs and set them
loose, you would rightly hold me accountable.  Since (according to
Genesis) all life and thus all disease comes from Yahweh, I hold
him similarly accountable.

A similar consideration arises with respect to the common Christian
conception of Satan.  This being was created and unleashed by God, who
knew exactly what he would do: that is, spend his entire existence
wreaking havoc and leading people into criminal activities.  Suppose
I were to build an evil robot that I knew would go around killing
people.  Whose fault would it be if I let it loose, mine or the
robot's?  Whose fault is deviltry in the world, the puppet Satan
or the being that deliberately created Satan's evil?

Yahweh deliberately acts to restrict man's capability for
understanding.  I have heard the claim that Yahweh does not restrict
us from learning, that he encourages us to learn all we can.  Tell
it to the workers at the Tower of Babel.  In case your memory fails
you here, Gen. 11:6-7 says, "'So they are all a single people with a
single language!' said Yahweh. 'This is but the start of their
undertakings!  There will be nothing too hard for them to do.
[Horrors! -- tim]  Come, let us go down and confuse their language
on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another.'"
Incidentally, don't confuse what you were taught in Sunday school with
Scripture; the reason the tower was being built had nothing to do with
men wanting to be like God; Gen. 11:4 contains the real reason:  "Let
us make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about
the whole earth."  We Americans do things like that all the time.

Human Judgment
==============

One of the criticisms most frequently levelled at me when presenting
these arguments has been that I have no right to judge God.  In the
universe model of many Christians, God is the definition of good.
All morality proceeds downwards from him, so it makes no sense to
apply moral standards to him.  From the perspective of man, trying
to determine which of the various conflicting belief systems he should
abide by, this argument makes no sense.

Assume that there is some religion of an evil god; we'll call this god
Satan for convenience.  It is clear that adherents of the religion of
Satan would see him not as evil, but as good.  Someone who is not a
member of the religion of Satan might say, "But your god has ordered
the slaughter of innocents!  How, then, can you say that he is good?"
The reply of one of the Satanists is likely to be, "Satan is the source
of good; he is good by definition; he is far above us humans; it is
thus nonsensical for us to judge him."  That's the only way to wriggle
off the hook.  Slaughtering innocents is obviously evil, so to save
Satan he has to be taken outside the normal standards of good and evil.

Now suppose that the questioner of the previous paragraph is trying to
decide which religion to join.  He must try to evaluate the various
religions available to him; in particular, he will try to avoid
falling into the clutches of some religion that worships an evil god
or evil spirit.  However, no religion says "We are evil; shun us like
the plague."  All religions claim to be good.  So he will have to use
some standard to compare the various religions, and this standard has
to be independent of any one religion.  Otherwise, he couldn't even
get started.  All religions are best by their own standard.

What standard is available for this necessary comparison?  None is
really ideal.  The best we can do is say that religion is best
which causes evil acts in its worshippers least and in which
apparently evil acts are not performed by the worshipped being(s).
Here he uses the common standard for "evil": theft, murder, rape,
terrorism, and so on are held to be evil.  He uses this standard
because there is none better, and because it is necessary to use
some such standard to avoid becoming ensnared by a cult of evil.

If we allow exemptions to any religion, there is no reason not to
allow the same exemption to all the others.  If we let Yahweh get away
with murder, we must let Quetzlcoatl kill as well.  This leaves us
right back where we started, so we can't make exemptions in any case.

The fact of the matter is that Yahweh and Jesus do not pass this test.
There are murder, theft, rape, and terrorism all through their books.
Sometimes Yahweh does it; sometimes people do it on Yahweh's orders;
sometimes Jesus just sits around gloating on the fate of sinners in
the afterlife.  It's simply not an acceptable religion when you hold it
to a moral standard.  Furthermore, this unacceptability is manifest
in the history of the religion, which is one of holy wars, intolerance,
purges, vicious infighting, and general immorality.

Feedback
========

Some of the responses I have heard to this essay in the
past are shown below, with my answers.  (Actually, most of the
responses I've gotten have been personal attacks and sheer,
unadorned sophistry; these are the cream.)

			---

"You can't judge God by the same standards as man." In that case,
why is it that I keep getting told that God is good?  Are there
two meanings of the word "good", one of which forbids murder,
deliberate starvation, infecting people with disease, and so on,
and another which allows these things?  I suggest that there is
already a word for the second meaning.  That word is "evil".

One particularly curious rationalization here is that "starvation
and disease and all the other evils of the world come from
breaking God's laws." Starvation comes from not having enough
food.  Disease comes from exposure to various nasty micro-
organisms, and from genetic infirmities.  If you can show me how
these two things come from breaking God's laws, I will be greatly
surprised.  Perhaps at the root they are caused by Adam and Eve
falling from grace, but you can't hold some starving infant in
Namibia responsible for the actions of two long-dead people, any
more than you can hold me responsible for the acts of Jack the
Ripper.  There just isn't sufficient connection to establish
guilt.

			---

"Everything God does is really good, even though we can't always
see that it is."  There is no possible amount of good that can
counterbalance the deliberate, perpetual starvation of the human
race.  Maybe we Americans have it so good that we can't see this,
but most of the people in the world are undernourished.  Children
are dying by the truckload, not for any sin, but just because there
isn't enough food for them.  If you could see these children, and
you had food, you would give food to them.  (Either that, or you
are an unfeeling monster.)  Not so with the omniscient god you
worship.  He sees their bellies bloat, sees them run out of
nutrients and rot alive, sees their brains dying, and doesn't do a
damn thing, despite the fact that he has an unlimited supply of
food to give.  Another example of his mercy.

Christians have been claiming that there will be wonderful events,
that will more than make up for the abominable pain and suffering
on Earth, for about two thousand years now.  It is clear from the
gospels that Jesus thought that it was about to happen shortly
after his death.  Before the Christians, the Jews and Zoroastrians
were saying it.  Yet the world still turns as it has, and there is
still no reason to think of these claims as other than pipe-dreams
to mollify the masses.

			---

"You are fixating on evil and ignoring the good done by Yahweh."
A few years ago, there was a man named John Wayne Gacy.  He was a
good neighbor, a friendly man; he liked to dress up as a clown and
bring delight to children's faces.  He also abducted, raped, and
killed more than a dozen boys, and buried them in his basement.
When the jury convicted him, were they failing to take his good side
into account?  The fact is that murder and rape outweigh any other
good that can be done by a being, and proof of these acts is sufficient
for conviction of the being, for deciding it is evil.  Charles Manson
was good to his girls; but that made no difference at his trial for the
murder of Sharon Tate, nor should it have.

			---

"Don't ask such questions."  People who say this are cowering
slaves, beneath my notice.  They would as soon serve the devil as
god in their blindness and faith.  No amount of evidence could
convince them that the devil was bad once they had decided to
worship him; their basic assumption is that they are correct, so
they are untouchable by any rationality.

Conclusion
==========

In closing, let's see how Yahweh/Jesus stands up to his own
standards.  In Matthew 26:41-46, we hear the King, "Next he will
say to those on his left hand, 'Go away from me, with your curse
upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his
angels.  For I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was
thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; I was a stranger
and you never made me welcome, naked and you never clothed me,
sick and in prison and you never visited me.' ...  And they will
go away to eternal punishment, and the virtuous to eternal life."

Yahweh does not feed the hungry, he does not give drink to those who
thirst, he dispenses no clothes, and he lets the faithful sicken and
die.  In the light of this, Yahweh himself is the worst of sinners; if
there is no double standard, he will be at the head of that line
into eternal punishment.  He is guilty of almost every crime of
which he accuses the damned.

I do not believe in the reality of Jehovah, except as a
psychological phenomenon, but if I did believe I would not worship
that horror.  It could send me to the Hell it's made for those it
dislikes, and if there were no other choice but worshipping it,
I would walk in with the pride of the free man who chooses prison
rather than serve an evil leader.

Appendix: Non-literal Interpretations
=====================================

I have gone on at some length about why I consider fundamentalist
Christianity to be a morally unacceptable stance for me.  However,
there are also non-literal approaches to the Bible, such as those of
the Jews and most Catholics.  The Bible is held to be primarily a
symbolic book, in which any particular passage may not refer to
historical fact.

This is a position I accept with reservations.  For instance, it is
evident that Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon are inspired books
rich in symbolic meaning.  However, I see no value in trying to wring
symbolism from books such as Numbers and Joshua, since it is plain
that their original intent was to serve as historical accounts.  This
separates me from the Jews, whose opinions have been (for many
centuries) that these books have profound symbolic meaning.  You can
find symbolism in a random selection from a dictionary if you try hard
enough, but I don't consider it productive.  I will come to my
differences with non-literalist Christians shortly.

I am an eclectic.  This means that I recognize that the basis of all
religions is mystical experience, which happens in all cultures.
Humans hang interpretations on these experiences dependent on their
individual and cultural prejudices and perspectives.  Often the
experience inspires the mystic to write stories, typically of a kind
compatible with, or expanding on, other stories in the culture.  I do
not treat any such story literally.  For example, in Homer we hear of
various gods and goddesses who walk, speak, and act in the same sense
that our mailman does.  I consider Aphrodite a goddess, but to me this
means only that she is a symbol of the abstract principle of sex.  It
does not mean that there is some ectoplasmic nymph who performed the
acts ascribed to Aphrodite in Greek myth.  Similarly with the "gods"
of the Hindus and Celts, of Shinto and of the Bible.  To me, they are
symbols of cosmic principles, not real beings at all.

Along with these stories we usually get laws we are supposed to follow
lest something awful happen.  A yogi, for example, is not supposed to
accept any gifts.  This is because in Indian culture, gift-giving is a
very big deal indeed, and very counterproductive as far as mental
equilibrium is concerned.  A middle-class Westerner such as myself has
received so many gifts by adulthood that it causes barely a ripple,
and so I see no need to follow that commandment.  However, the
rulebook never tells us that these rules are culturally specific; it
just says, don't do it.  Similarly, most of the Mosaic law is
meaningful only within its original cultural context.  We are not
supposed to be polytheistic, for example, because the laws were
written by refugees from a culture which had an extremely debased form
of polytheism in which the "gods" were mechanical statues with
speaking tubes through which the priests would ask for money.  All
commandments concerning worship, diet, sex, and so on must be
considered within their cultural context.  It must be recognized as
well that a good deal of them are simple superstition and "old wives'
tales".

There are also in every religion miracle stories.  Walls are supposed
to have fallen at the blast of a trumpet, worlds to have been formed
by a council of gods churning the primordial sea with a mountain, men
and gods to have arisen from the dead, flowers to have rained about
someone as he walked, illnesses to have been miraculously cured,
armies to have been vanquished by single heroes, virgins to have given
birth, and so on.  Few of us would believe our neighbor if he said
that these things had happened last week, but many people are far more
accepting when it comes to the distant past.  I think these accounts
of impossibilities, when they appear in historical accounts, are
caused by exaggeration, fabrication, and lacunae; when they appear in
symbolic stories, they represent cosmic principles and processes.
Many cultures have stories of gods who were slain and then returned to
life; I doubt this has ever happened, but it does conveniently
symbolize the yearly cycle of plant life.  It also provides a
convenient summary of the formula of improvement through
self-restriction.

Similarly, most religions have some description of continued existence
after death.  These involve various other worlds which are claimed to
be as real as this one.  In these worlds, various pleasures and
torments are more common than in the world we tie our shoes in.
Largely, these serve to bribe or threaten us into following the "laws"
of the religion.  They also symbolize various conditions which humans
create for themselves in life, and therein is the virtue of such
tales.  A person who allows himself to be driven, will he nil he, by
his or her crass desires (gluttony, sexual conquest, money, etc.) will
find himself, while still alive, in the Buddhist world of "hungry
ghosts", with a stomach like a mountain and a mouth like an insect's.
Dante told of a Hell in which the conditions of the damned were
straightforward metaphors of the conditions they created for
themselves in life.  As for the "existence" of these worlds in the
sense of the existence of Peoria, I have my doubts, but don't they
make great symbols?

I view the Bible in the same way I view the scriptures of most other
religions, as a mixture of inspired symbolism, garbled history, and
cultural prejudices.  I treat its tales of miracles (i.e.,
impossibilities) as symbolic representations or as falsehoods, its
strictures as culturally-bound laws of limited applicability, and its
God as a metaphor representing the underlying unity of the cosmos.  I
don't believe a virgin gave birth, I don't believe a man returned from
death, and I don't believe that the physical world was created by a
sentient being.  I don't believe in the reality of Heaven or Hell, and
I doubt very much that anyone has ever held tablets inscribed in human
tongues by a non-human hand.  Most of these are fine symbols, though
no better or worse than those in many other religions.

Since these are my beliefs, and they diverge so widely from both
Christian and Jewish thought, I do not call myself a Jew or Christian.
Nor do I call myself a Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, Zoroastrian, Satanist,
or Shintoist.  I do call myself a Thelemite and a Taoist, because
these religions have kept themselves free of doctrines needing to be
discarded or deliteralized.  You may call me a humanist, a polytheist,
an atheist, a monotheist, an agnostic:  I am all these and more, and
glad to be this way.
-=-
Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking
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