Essays - Morality Comes From Humans, Not God!

Religious bigots have always claimed that morality must come from a higher power. According to them, humans cannot be left to invent our own rules of social conduct and ethics because we simply aren't capable of doing so. We lack the wisdom and intelligence necessary to decide what's right and what's wrong, so we need the Biblical God to dictate the rules for us, much as children need direction from their parents. Of course, this argument assumes that:

This "higher power" exists and is the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God, rather than the "Great Spirit" of aboriginal cultures, the heavenly pantheons of Hinduism or other polytheistic religions, or something else entirely.
The Bible, despite being assembled and written by humans, is the absolutely "inerrant" testimony of his wishes despite its countless self-contradictions.

Even if we blindly accept those two whoppers, should we accept this argument? If God is our "heavenly father", does he really have the exclusive right to decide what is right and what is wrong? I have found it an interesting (and yes, I'll admit it: amusing) diversion to temporarily suspend disbelief and ask what we could glean from God's behaviour if we assume that the specific actions taken by God in the Bible really happened as witnessed by its authors (note that suspension of disbelief does not necessarily entail the acceptance of Biblical narrative bias or interpretations).

The analogy of God as father ("Heavenly" or not) is one that we would do well to analyze in depth. Children do receive direction from their parents, but they must eventually graduate to an understanding of ethics rather than mindless obedience to arbitrary rules which are justified only by the power of their enforcers. Moreover, a father's power over his children does not necessarily translate to moral authority. Even superior knowledge doesn't necessarily translate to moral authority. An abusive father may have more power and knowledge than his weak, ignorant children, but does this mean he also has superior morality?

Confucius said that a father's authority over the household was predicated on his "moral mandate"; if he was unworthy of obedience, then he hadn't the right to demand it. Modern society shares that view: abusive fathers quite literally lose the right to be fathers. Their children are taken away from them, and they may even be imprisoned. Of course, you can probably imagine where this is leading. If God is indeed the father, then does he have the right to make claims of moral authority? Has he been a good father, or an abusive father?

That question is quite easy to answer, because his abusive nature is clearly and repeatedly demonstrated all throughout the Old Testament. He is incredibly vindictive, as he demonstrated by punishing all of Adam and Eve's descendants for their "inherited sin." He is mercilessly harsh, violent, and cruel, as he demonstrated countless times, most shockingly when he obliterated virtually all of the entire human race in the Great Flood. He expects them to "do as I say, not as I do", as he demonstrated by killing millions even though he had once said "Thou Shalt Not Kill". He is hopelessly vain; he supposedly created the entire human race only to bask in their worship and adulation, and he apparently becomes furious whenever they try to live for their own fulfillment and happiness (thus distracting them from their primary task of continuously worshipping and adoring him). And finally, his rules are inconsistent; he orders his "children" not to kill on one hand, and then he orders them to mercilessly kill on the other (see the Book of Joshua).

His only consistent rule is that we must worship him or suffer the consequences, and that rule has been carried into the New Testament. We are still supposedly going to suffer eternal damnation if we fail to worship him, regardless of how we live our lives. His own aggrandizement is the only thing that matters to him, and any degree of cruelty on his part, no matter how harsh or unjustified, is acceptable if it will motivate us to glorify his "holy" name. These are all classic examples of abusive (indeed, exceptionally abusive) behaviour, so it's quite clear that if we are to believe that God is the "parent" of humanity, then he's been a pretty damned lousy parent!

Have we outgrown our bonds?

God's moral mandate is clearly nonexistent, as he is a classic example of an abusive father. But are humans any better qualified to decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong? Humanists would say yes, and believe it or not, the Bible provides support for their position.

It is common knowledge among Christians that in Genesis, Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit of knowledge. The result of this act was made clear in Genesis 3:22, when God said "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil". In other words, God himself acknowledges that good and evil exist separately from him, and that he and the angels "know" of good and evil without necessarily being able to dictate what they are. Furthermore, he acknowledges that with that bite from the apple, we humans gained just as much knowledge of good and evil as any angel.

But that's only the beginning. As a child grows, his knowledge and wisdom grow with him (or her). If humanity in its infancy had just as much knowledge of good and evil as God himself, then how much more knowledge would we have after breaking our bonds and growing up? God supposedly has great power, but power is hardly equivalent to morality! In fact, it is often said that "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and if that's true, then by virtue of his power, God cannot comprehend human morality.

Indeed, when you examine God's dictums of "morality", you will see that they revolve around obedience rather than anything we would regard as ethics. Those who obey him and worship him are regarded as "righteous" even if they are unrepentant murderers of women and children (see the Book of Joshua), and those who disobey him or worship other gods are described as "evil" and worthy of destruction even if they have committed no other crime (see Deuteronomy 20:16-18). But God is a pure hypocrite, because he knows that good and evil transcend his own authority. After he dictated the Ten Commandments to the Israelites, he became angry that some of them were worshipping an idol (the infamous golden calf). What was his response? He decided to kill them all, apart from Moses himself! Moses successfully argued that he should be merciful instead, and in Exodus 32:14, "the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people". Did you notice that? God repented of the "evil" which he thought to do! In other words, God is admittedly capable of evil! The relatively merciful Moses then went down and killed "only" 3000 of them (apparently, to send a message), thus pleasing God. In this incident, we learned that:

God can be wrong.
Even a mass-murdering hate monger like Moses can have superior morality to God.
A human can argue with God and win.

Therefore, the first book of the Old Testament openly acknowledges that humans know right from wrong even without God's guidance, and the second book acknowledges that a human's morality had already exceeded God's morality even during the savage time of Exodus!

What about Jesus?

Christians might accept that the Old Testament God was evil (although fundamentalists actually defend his actions, thus demonstrating their own immorality), but what of Jesus? Did he not "raise the bar", beyond anything a "mere" human could have done? Well, Jesus invoked the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) and contradicted the legalistic Pharisees of his day, but the Golden Rule came from humans. It is found in countless writings throughout countless societies around the world that predate Jesus (Confucius invoked it five hundred years before Jesus was born). Obviously, none of his teachings exceeded the limits of human understanding, if they were all found in pre-existing writings of other cultures. Furthermore, Jesus himself was human. Fundamentalists tend to assume that Jesus' good traits must have come from God and that any flaws must have come from humanity, but could it not be the other way around?

When you consider the Old and New Testaments together, you might realize that it is possible to interpret Jesus in an entirely different light, as long as you're willing to open your mind to alternate possibilities. I've been chastised by some Christians for attempting to interpret Scripture "incorrectly", but a literary or even historical document is testimony rather than observation, and it is therefore never limited to just one "correct" interpretation. The problem is that most Christians learn about Jesus in Sunday school as children, before they learn to analyze and criticize. Of course, this is deliberate, hence the importance Christians place on "raising children in the church". Such young children lack the skills to interpret or analyze on their own, so they are simultaneously taught not only the words, but also the "correct" interpretations for them. Many will grow up with these interpretations so thoroughly impressed onto their minds that they refuse to even consider any alternate interpretations. This is where fundamentalism comes from, since such people will instinctively prefer easy answers to hard questions (never mind the strict regimes of the scientific method). But what if we imagine that Paul was wrong? What if we suppose that God had finally recognized that he knew nothing of the human experience, so he sent his son not to show us the way, but to show him the way?

God cannot possibly know Right from Wrong

It is usually assumed that God must know right from wrong, because he is immortal and omnipotent. However, I would argue that such power and immortality mean that God cannot possibly know right from wrong.

God would have no concept of dealing with equals, since he is unique, omnipotent, and unchallenged. Human morality, on the other hand, is entirely about dealing with others as equals. It's about concepts such as mercy and reciprocity and fairness, the need for which an omnipotent God would not understand because he has no direct knowledge of weakness or suffering or fear. If we were to return to the "heavenly father" analogy, ask yourself what kind of father a man would be if he had never gone through childhood himself.

Such a father would be incapable of understanding his children, and he would be a terrible father (perhaps even as bad as the Old Testament God). If you were to continue with this heretical line of thought, then the only way for the father to understand his children would be to experience childhood. It would therefore follow that Jesus was the agent through which God sought to experience humanity. Jesus was born and raised as a human being. He absorbed the moral teachings of neighbouring human societies of the time, and then incorporated them into a new understanding of humanity and morality that God could never have discerned on his own. Jesus understood what God could not, because he knew what it meant to be weak, and mortal. In other words, he knew what it meant to walk a mile in another man's shoes.

But that wasn't enough; he also had to know the depths of evil. He had to find out first-hand about the pain of torture so that he could comprehend suffering, which an unfeeling God had mercilessly inflicted upon countless previous generations. And on the cross, he finally understood fear of death, which was yet another concept that would have been utterly alien to an immortal God. It would have been the ultimate test, and the ultimate learning experience. And when Jesus cried out on the cross that God had "forsaken" him, he would have been hoping that perhaps he wouldn't have to see this through to its bitter end. But that wasn't to be the case. He had to understand mortality and death, so he could understand first-hand what God had inflicted upon humanity. And when he finally died, he became a proxy agent for God's repentance, in atonement not for humanity's sins against God, but for God's sins against humanity. If you interpret his story this way, then it becomes obvious that we didn't have to learn morality from God; God had to learn morality from us!

Of course, that is only an alternate possible interpretation of the Jesus myth, and your mileage may vary. However, the alternative is simply not reconcilable with the historical facts. Every single one of Jesus' teachings was echoed in other cultures around the world at the time (or long before). If he had to bring this knowledge to us, then how can this be explained? Moreover, how can the improved morality of the New Testament be explained if it had no source other than the exact same God who was supposedly all-knowing and morally perfect since the dawn of time?

Even if you accept that the stories of the Bible actually happened, the doctrine of the heavenly origins of morality makes no sense whatsoever. God had no basis for morality other than his desire for self-aggrandizement, which is a truly horrendous basis for a system of morality. He lacked equals or weaknesses and he could not experience death, so he could not comprehend the human condition, nor could he determine what would lead to a truly just and humane society. He even demonstrated this lack of comprehension on numerous occasions, when the behaviour of humans so confused him that he flew into a homicidal or even genocidal rage out of sheer frustration at their failure to mindlessly obey him. Even if you accept the existence of God and the validity of Biblical stories regarding his actions, it is quite easy to see that far from giving us morality, God needed us to teach him morality.

Proudly Heretical

Of course, such alternate interpretations of the Jesus story are considered heretical, because they conflict with Paul's interpretation of the Jesus story. Since Paul's interpretation is enshrined in the Bible, it is supposedly "inerrant", so an alternate interpretation must be wrong. Paul's interpretation (and that of all Christians) is that Jesus "redeemed" us. Somehow, God could only forgive our "sins" against him by having his own son killed, and that simply doesn't work if one interprets the Jesus story as I've described above.

Of course, my reaction to the accusation of heresy is "so what?" Biblical inerrancy is a joke, and the fact that something is heretical is not, in and of itself, a valid criticism. Of course, one could also point out that since I don't really believe in the Jesus story, my proposed alternate interpretation is a mere thought exercise and does not carry the "weight" of sincere belief. But once again, the fact that something is proposed only for the purpose of a thought exercise does not, in and of itself, represent refutation.

The fact that my interpretation of Jesus differs from Paul's interpretation of Jesus is no more of a disproof than the accusation of heresy or the fact that I'm not a believer. Paul was an ignorant asshole who exhorted slaves to be happy with their lot in life, ordered women to be silent and subservient, and opposed family values by preaching that men should not marry. Appeals to authority are never valid, but appeals to Paul's authority are simply incomprehensible.

Paul's story itself is also incomprehensible. Instead of simply forgiving us, God had to send his own son to suffer and die so that humans could be forgiven by him? I have become convinced that Paul must have been on mind-altering drugs when he concocted this explanation, and frankly, I have never understood how anyone could make sense of it. If you were angry at people, would you be more inclined to forgive them after your son suffered and died at their hands? How would it "redeem" them if they chose to believe that he was your son or that he died for their "sins"?

Wouldn't it have been a lot easier for God to simply stop being so insanely vindictive for the "inherited" sin of Adam and Eve disobeying an arbitrary order thousands of years ago? "Inherited sin" is the hardest thing for Christians to sell to people who haven't been indoctrinated from childhood, hence the fact that Christian missionaries in Africa and China downplay that aspect of the belief system and play up the notion that every little self-indulgence is a sin, even if it hurts no one. Ask yourself how it makes any sense to punish someone's children for his sins; there's a reason we view inheritance of sin and debt as immoral (it's part of the mentality of "birthright" which underlies class snobbery, racism, and slavery), but when God does it, it's OK! Ask yourself how it makes any sense to condemn someone to eternal torture for even the smallest sins, or how it makes any sense to consider the serial murderer of children on equal moral footing with the most generous, caring, non-violent person as long as he believes in you.

Believers and non-believers alike have posed these questions many times over the past, only to be rewarded with the utterly useless answer that earthly notions of morality have no meaning to God. Could there be a more unequivocal admission that God is immoral or at the very least, amoral? Somehow, Christians fail to make this connection. Why? Because it's heresy. And apparently, that's supposed to mean something.

Conclusion

Does morality come from God, or humans? Arguably, it comes from both. God has his idea of morality, and we have ours. God's idea of morality revolves around his own aggrandizement: any crime we commit against one another is insignificant next to the huge burning issue of whether we sincerely worship him, and he demonstrated this scheme of "morality" by repeatedly ordering his "chosen people" to murder followers of other religions (even their women and children) all throughout the Old Testament. Even Jesus subscribed to that notion, by instructing his followers to "hate" those who belong to other religions. The human idea of morality, on the other hand, generally revolves around human happiness and suffering: most of us understand that it is immoral to take actions which will increase the amount of suffering and misery in this world or decrease the amount of pleasure and happiness. Your religious beliefs are your own business, but you can't use those beliefs to justify actions which cause pain and suffering to other human beings.

Which scheme of morality is superior? The former led to the Catholic crusades and inquisitions, the witch hunts, the original Israelite holy wars described in the Old Testament, the annihilation of natives and their culture in the Americas, the horrors of African subjugation and slavery, and Hitler's Holocaust. The latter has led to ... actually, I have yet to see anyone explain what harm has come from the latter. So if you subscribe to the former, you are not exactly in good company. If you subscribe to the latter, you have a fighting chance of understanding the difference between right and wrong. The choice is yours.