By Diana Holbourn
During Becky's Last Term at University, she Takes Interest in Controversial Debates Between an Atheist and a Christian she Knows
Book five of the online Becky Bexley series. Chapter 3 continued.
This series accompanies the books about what Becky does at university and afterwards, which you can find out more about on my author website. (The online series is in draft form.)
One of the girls said, "Hang on Judith; before you carry on, I could do with a bit of light relief; I'm going to have to go and get another drink!"
Most of the girls decided to do the same.
When they sat down again, One of them said, "The other day, I was feeling really stressed in the morning. It's not usual for me to do this at all, but I thought I could really do with some alcohol! So I chugged down a couple of pints of beer. Anyway, one of my friends saw me drinking, and said disapprovingly, 'What are you doing drinking this early in the morning?' I absent-mindedly said, 'I don't know. Ask the booze; after all, that's what I'm drinking.'
"My friend giggled and said, 'Oh really! It's not as if the booze told you to drink it! If everyone followed your logic, just imagine what you'd hear people say! Someone might accidentally drop a cup on someone's foot, and say, 'Sorry; but you can't blame me for that; ask the cup why it decided to jump out of my hand!' Or someone might steal some printer paper from an office they worked in, and if the boss found out and asked them why they'd done it, they might say, 'I don't know! Ask the printer paper! After all, it let me take it and came home with me.'"
The girls laughed.
Just after that, a student called Tony started playing the guitar and singing songs in the garden outside. It was a warm evening, and the door to the priest's garden was open, and lots of people had gone outside to sit down and chat there.
The girls listened to the music in silence for a minute or so, enjoying it. ... At least most of them were.
But then one of them said, "What a soppy song! Pass the sick bucket! ... No actually, I like hearing Tony playing the guitar and singing. It's just that some of the lyrics to this song remind me of some of the mushy poetry we were made to study at school. I hate poetry! Maybe it's because of that.
"Mind you, I've had some fun with some sometimes. I was on a forum not long ago, and someone started a thread where they posted this weird-sounding poem that used flowery language and had some kind of obscure-sounding meaning, and asked people to critique it. That was asking for trouble, considering that a lot of things people say get made fun of there.
"The poem seemed a bit strange. Part of it was something to do with swooning at the sound of classical music or something.
"Someone said he thought the wording of it was overdone. I joked, 'But I thought poetry was supposed to be wordy, full of flowery language. And isn't it supposed to contain a high percentage of rambling woolly-minded-sounding ideas, lots of bizarre imagery, and things that are just plain impossible for anyone else to understand? In fact, I thought there was a strict rule among poets that says, "If any poet dares to write a poem which is not ponderous and fanciful, but which explains itself in a succinct no-nonsense manner that can be easily understood with the logical mind, he is to be shunned by all other poets, as an alien with the Plague would be! We must Not associate with people who violate the poetic ethos in such a flagrant manner!"'"
One of the others grinned and said, "You nutter!"
The girl who'd been telling the story smiled and said, "It didn't end there. After that, I said, 'No? There isn't a rule like that? Oh sorry, I must have just made it up then. Actually, the poem under discussion seems to be about how classical music can sometimes be so terrible it can give you fainting fits. So it certainly isn't all bad. It could easily grow on me.'
"Then the person who started the thread, who must have been a glutton for punishment, posted another poem he'd made up, this time about how storms could be scary, but how people should try to see the beauty in them, just as he did himself.
"I said, 'That's nice. ... Well, apart from when the wind threatens to blow your roof off and the lightning threatens to hit your nearest power line and cut off all your electricity. You've got to admit that it would be hard for you to see the beauty in them then, as they were stopping your freezer and computer and all your other electrical things from working, or doing worse things.
"'Actually though, I've noticed that people can have completely different attitudes and emotional responses to exactly the same event, like they might to storms that haven't provided any evidence that they're about to do any damage yet, where some people find them exciting, and some people think they're scary. To give a trivial example, once in our student kitchen, the fridge freezer broke and had to be replaced. We had to go without one for a few weeks, which made things a bit awkward! The delivery man who brought a new one said we needed to wait 24 hours to use it. Something to do with the chemicals settling down or something - I don't know what. But after he'd gone, one of the people sharing the kitchen said depressively, "Oh no, we've got to wait 24 hours to use the fridge!" But at the same time, I was thinking merrily, "Oh good! We can start using it in 24 hours!"'
"I teased the man who'd written the poem, saying, 'Maybe you can use that as inspiration to alter your poem to fit the world of mod cons. So your modified "Beautiful Storm" poem could instead be called, "Beautiful Computer". And it could go:
"'"Always crashing, losing my work; emails come from all kinds of twerps. Idiots swarm me on Internet forums; pages load slowly; the technical support team are morons. ... But wait! Computers are wondrous things really!" And then you can go into a great litany of praise for them.'
"Then I said, 'No OK, that wouldn't have the pretty poetic touch really, would it. Forget that idea.'"
The girls grinned.
One of them said, "I wrote a poem once. Someone on a forum objected to the amount of exclamation marks I was using in an argument with her, for some reason. When I started a conversation with someone else, she gave him what sounded like a dire warning, saying, 'Hey, you'd better watch out - you're well on your way to being attacked by exclamation marks. You'd better use an umbrella.'
"Then she said some horrible things to him about me. I replied with a joke, saying, 'It seems from what you've said that the exclamation mark must be a truly fearsome thing to behold!'
"Then I wrote this little joke poem, that went:
"'Oh the Dreaded exclamation mark
It stalks you in the darkness waiting to strike
It hides under the bed and growls and shrieks
It'll tear your clothes and steal your bike
"'It'll scare your grandmother out of the house
She'll languish in the cold cold night
It'll turn your freezer off so your food goes bad
and then chillingly laugh while you try to put things right!'"
The girls giggled.
Then one said, "I was teasing a man on a forum not long ago, whose username was Village Colonel, for some reason. The signature he had appearing at the bottom of all his posts was a quote from the chorus of an old Chris de Burgh song that goes:
"'Don't pay the ferryman
Don't even fix a price
Don't pay the ferryman
Until he gets you to the other side.'
"That signature appeared so often because he posted quite a bit in some threads that I started having fun imagining that it was meant to be some kind of urgent warning that he was trying to give people. I teased him, 'You seem to be a colonel with a shrinking fear of ferrymen. That wouldn't go down well on the battlefield, would it, if all the enemy had to do was send a ferryman over the lines to make you run away. Or do they not bother you quite that much? If they don't, then I'm curious: Why do you so continually want to insist that it's so important for everyone not to pay ferrymen till they get you to the other side that you have the warning as your signature? It's not good enough to say you just have that signature because you like the song. There has to be a more important reason for signatures than that! And after all, you must like other songs, so why single out that one? So come on! Tell us about your experiences with corrupt ferrymen!'
"Village Colonel joked, 'I used to be a ferryman. I would never take your money, but I would take your psyche.'
"Then he said the quote from the song only appeared 'continually' because it was his signature, so it would automatically appear at the bottom of the messages he posted. I joked, 'Excuses, excuses! I know the truth! It appears continually because you feel that ferrymen are a constant threat!'
"He said that soon he'd probably change his signature back to one he'd had before, that said, 'Adjust, migrate, or die'.
"I don't know why he wanted that as his signature; but I joked, 'That'll sound like an order, far more like what a colonel's supposed to sound like!'
"Another forum member joked that Village Colonel's username didn't mean he was a literal colonel, but that it was just an honorary title given out by the governor of Kentucky, like the one given to Colonel Sanders, the man who started Kentucky Fried Chicken.
"I joked, 'Oh I see. Colonel Sanders wasn't called colonel because of his great battle against chickens in his bid to turn so many into Kentucky Fried Chicken then?'
"A bit later, Village Colonel said something in French, for some reason. I joked, 'What's with the French? Do you have French ancestry? Is there a French language gene that programs everyone with it to know French? So people with it are born knowing French? What a clever gene! Could you speak French before you could talk then?'
"Village Colonel didn't post for a little while, and I said, 'I wonder where the quaking-in-his-boots-for-fear-of-ferrymen Colonel's gone. I hope we didn't scare him away! Some colonels are such cowards. ... Sorry Colonel; only joking. If he does change his signature, this thread isn't going to make sense to anyone who reads it in the future. They'll all wonder why I'm saying his signature's about ferrymen when it isn't, and why I keep asking him about them when he never mentioned them!'
"Then Village Colonel came back and said, 'Did the thread make any sense before?'
"I suppose it didn't."
The girls grinned.
But then Judith turned the conversation serious again, saying, "Anyway, I didn't finish my explanation about these stages of morality, and why God comes across as a lot harsher in the Old Testament than he does in the New Testament.
"It seems Old Testament societies might have been functioning at a low stage of morality. Old Testament prophets said Israel was full of crime. One called Jerusalem the city of Murderers! And they said murder was common throughout the land. And not only did criminals murder grown people, but it was very common for people to worship idols, and some killed their children by sacrificing them to them, burning them alive in fires! The prophets said some places were full of the blood of innocent children. I think there was a hope that child sacrifice could stave off hard times or increase good fortune. In some countries, there are people who do that kind of thing even today! Perhaps it was also a substitute for abortion, in the days before that could be done safely. It seems that one reason there was a need for that might have been because a lot of people worshipped the gods of fertility cults, I think; the prophets condemned them for having sex with prostitutes as a part of the worship of those gods.
"The prophets said the country was full of violence, and that even the priests robbed people and were murderers. And they said it was common for people who didn't want to join in with other people's evil schemes to be attacked. And they said there was fighting and arguing everywhere.
"And the prophets often condemned cruelty to the poor, saying there was a whole lot of exploitation around, partly because some leaders made unjust laws that caused a lot of poor people to suffer, like by imposing really heavy taxes on them when they were already finding it hard to make a living, making them even give their wheat in taxes if they couldn't pay money - wheat they might have needed for food or to sell to get money to buy other food. And the prophets said the courts were totally corrupt, so the people who won cases were the people who could pay the biggest bribes, no matter how good a case people who were trying to bring criminals who'd harmed them to court had, such as where people were finding it hard to even survive because everything they had had been stolen.
"And from what the prophets said, it seems it was common for people to falsely accuse others of crimes that would be punished by the death penalty.
"They said a lot of people thought God's protection over Israel could be taken for granted, or thought it would please him if they fasted on holy days, only to go back to mistreating their workers and other poor people in various ways afterwards.
"The prophets said a whole lot of stealing went on, with people breaking into houses and robbing people on the streets, as well as defrauding them by doing things like taking needed possessions of theirs as security for loans, with the agreement being that they would keep them if a loan wasn't repaid, but then not giving them back even if it was, it seems. And they would make big profits by charging unfairly high interest rates to people they lent money to.
"And the prophets said there was a whole lot of drunkenness and prostitution, and that even Israel's leaders and priests were drunkards, too stupefied with drink to govern the people without making stupid mistakes.
"And one prophet said a lot of sexual abuse went on in families, where some sisters and daughters were raped, and that kind of thing. And they condemned the amount of affairs married partners would have, and other things like men having sex with their fathers' wives.
"They said that everywhere there were fraudsters, and people who ran protection rackets where they'd make people pay for the so-called privilege of not being harmed by them. Some would hire themselves out as hitmen. And some people would make people work for them as slaves if they couldn't pay even tiny debts, supposedly so they could recoup the money they owed them; or they'd take even clothes they needed. They'd force people to give up their land and houses by fraud and violence. And they'd evict people from their homes even when it meant they'd end up on the streets with their children. Some of them had expensive houses full of things they'd taken from people in grinding poverty.
"And one prophet said it wasn't just men who mistreated the poor and the weak, but women too.
"They condemned the people for mistreating foreigners and disadvantaged people like orphans and widows.
"One condemned women who pretended to be psychic, charging people for their services and deceiving them into believing they could predict the future, even misleading them into believing they knew through their psychic powers who was guilty of various crimes that would get the death penalty, which allowed the people who were really guilty to go free, while innocent people were charged for the crimes. and another thing the fake psychics were condemned for was encouraging people to do some bad things. And the prophets said there were prophets of other gods who encouraged people to do evil things too, instead of trying to persuade them to give up harmful ways.
"And a lot of people would sell food that wasn't fit to eat, and over-charge for it, and use false weights and measures, telling people they were selling them a certain amount of food, when really they were getting less than that.
"But the prophets said everyone from the rich to the poor was dishonest and greedy for gain.
"One prophet said that even friends and relatives had to be on guard against each other, since so many of them would lie and deceive and slander each other and break promises, and cause each other harm.
"The prophets said God really wanted people to turn away from their criminal ways and be kind to each other, such as by sharing their food with hungry people, and giving clothes to people who needed them, and being willing to help people in other ways. It seems there were a lot of people in dire need in that society!
"They said God would much rather that people turned away from wickedness than that he had to punish them. And in quite a few places in the Old Testament, the prophets said God would change his mind and not punish the people after all if they would only change their ways. And they said he was longing to show them mercy and kindness if they would only change, and that he wouldn't punish the people as much as they deserved as it was; instead of causing an army to wipe everyone out, some would be spared, especially since some people were actually decent. And in the Book of Jeremiah, it says an earlier prophet prophesied that an army would come up and destroy part of Israel if they didn't change their ways, and the people listened and started behaving better, so it didn't happen.
"But it seems they soon went back to criminal ways, so eventually it did happen.
"When you read all that, where the prophets condemned cruelty over and over again, and kept saying God wanted people to change, and that he'd change his mind about punishing them if they did, you get the impression that God really cared, despite what he threatened them with. I know that's a bit controversial, given the severity of what he said would happen to them if they didn't change.
"But anyway, the argument about applying those stages of morality the professor wrote about to the Bible goes that since it seems that a lot of the people of Israel were functioning at a low moral stage in those days, just taking what they could get, as well as a lot of them doing a lot of cruel things, they would probably only be deterred, if at all, by threats of severe punishment, and then the punishment itself if that didn't work, so that's what God had to use. It wouldn't have made sense for Old Testament prophets to have tried to appeal to the good natures of people who enjoyed being lawless and were very unlikely to change unless they were punished. Punishment was the only thing that would have been able to give them an incentive to change, since appealing to their consciences would have been appealing to something it seems a lot of them didn't have.
"But like I said, the Old Testament prophets did often say that if the people would only turn away from their evil ways, God wouldn't bring on them the punishment he was threatening to bring on them. They told the people he said that he would instead do a lot of good for their country. And they said he was saying that the punishment in itself was designed to make them turn back to him and give up crime. Obviously it would have succeeded in making all the people who were killed give up their crimes! But I don't think that was quite the point of what the prophets were saying.
"And a later prophet said that the people who were taken as captives by the Babylonian army who conquered them did turn away from their evil ways and try to genuinely get God's favour ... at least for a while.
"But imagine how ineffective it would have been for the prophets to have just appealed to those people's good natures, telling them God loved them, and just telling them they shouldn't do bad things but should be kind and tender-hearted to each other instead, the way New Testament writers appealed to people who'd made a commitment to Christianity. Not only would a lot of them have probably laughed in the faces of the prophets or just ignored them, but at a low stage of morality, authority figures who can't control people with discipline and punishment are thought of as weak, I suppose the way school children think of their teachers as weak and will take advantage of it and mess around if they can't control the class. So it seems the people wouldn't have had any respect for a God who could only plead with them to live better, but didn't seem to have any power to punish them if they didn't.
"So if the theory's right, it means God had to deal with them at their level of understanding and use what had a chance of motivating them to do what he was asking them to. That could well have been the reason for other punishments in the Old Testament that seem really severe too, like acts of disobedience that seem minor being punished by death, which was probably meant to serve as a warning against disobedience to the community watching, and Old Testament Law containing death penalties for lots of things, which might have been partly designed to get through to the people how seriously commands not to do them needed to be taken.
"If they'd been functioning at a higher stage of morality, appealing to their sense of fairness might have been all that was necessary. But according to the argument, God had to behave in a way that had the best chance of getting his points home to them. And impressive and intimidating displays of anger and power and ability to punish wrongdoers were the only things that could persuade adults at a low stage of morality that God was actually worth listening to. Failure to punish would have just made them think they could get away with doing what they wanted, or that God couldn't be very powerful after all, so there was no point in following him.
"But it could be said that God was trying to gradually guide people into higher-stage thinking, with the prophets appealing to people to love justice and kindness as well as saying they deserved punishment, and then Jesus later coming along and teaching people they should do things like pray for people who persecuted and mistreated them, and do good to people who hated them. Those kinds of ideas would only ever have appealed to a minority of people though."
Deborah said, "Well, I suppose that could be a plausible explanation for the difference between the Old Testament and the newer one. Some groups of people in Old Testament times seem to have been punished horribly for silly reasons though, such as when God supposedly commanded the Israelites to go and kill all the Amalekites, including all the babies and children, because a few hundred years earlier, a group of Amalekites killed some Israelites in the desert. Isn't that what the Bible says happened? It would be like if in a few hundred years' time, some country's leaders said they'd received a message from God ordering their army to go and kill Germans because of what the Nazis did a few hundred years earlier! How could anyone justify that?"
Judith said, "I know that sounds unfair and horrible. But I read an article where the man who wrote it said he'd done some research into what the Amalekites were really like, and he said they weren't peaceful people just minding their own business and trying to live their lives. They were warlike, often raiding Israel.
"Even in modern times, civilians have been killed in wars because leaders thought it would work for the greater good; and on one or two occasions, they might actually have been right. I'm thinking of when America dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, which was a horrendous thing to do, with all the civilians that were killed, but the thinking was that the alternative would be worse, because it was thought that dropping the bomb would scare the Japanese into surrendering - which they actually did, - and that that would shorten the war, which it almost certainly did, as far as I'm aware. If it hadn't happened, America would have actually invaded Japan to try to win, and more people might have ended up dying!
"But the man who wrote this article said he'd found out that the Amalekites were desert people who couldn't farm their land to provide themselves with food, because it was so dry it was pretty infertile, so they made their living by raiding nearby countries again and again, stealing food that the people of those countries themselves needed to survive, and probably doing a lot of killing and other nasty things in the process, like taking people to sell as slaves, which apparently happened quite a lot in war in those days. So Israel was still being attacked by them when God ordered that they be destroyed.
"It still seems harsh that the Bible says God said their women and children should all be killed as well as the warriors; but the alternatives might have been worse. Without their men to provide food for them and violently defend their community, the women and children might have starved in the desert, or been made the prey of marauding tribes who might have taken them as slaves, or who knows what.
"One theory goes that Israel could have taken them in and tried to find families willing to shelter them. But it's doubtful that that would have been possible, partly because there likely wouldn't have been a lot of resources available to pay for the housing and needs of such a lot of people, especially since governments didn't tend to have sophisticated welfare services in those days, and the country was spending a lot of its resources fighting other wars. And it's likely there wouldn't have been enough food in the country to have been able to feed that many more people.
"That's besides the fact that a lot of the children might have grown up full of thoughts of revenge against Israel, that they would then go on to inflict on people in the country.
"But the Bible says the Amalekites did have warning that Israel intended to attack them. A king of Israel announced their intention, so a tribe that lived alongside them, considered innocent, could move away before the attack happened, so they didn't kill them along with the Amalekites. And that tribe did move away. So Amalekites had the chance to get out too. Maybe a lot of them did.
"But anyway, the Bible says the Amalekites weren't all killed; and a Bible passage later in the same book of it where it tells the story of the Israelites being ordered to kill them says the Amalekites raided part of Israel again, while the men weren't there to defend it, because they were off fighting some other war; and they carried all the women and children away, including two of the king's wives, and stole a whole load of booty, and burned a town to the ground. So that's the kind of people they were. It does say the men of Israel who'd been out fighting discovered what had happened when they got back, and Travelled to Amalekite territory, and did manage to get everyone and all their things back again; so that's one thing."
One of the group said, "That's gross! But thank you for explaining this stuff, Judith. It might help me when I have debates with atheists on Internet forums. Some of them can get really insulting! I mean, I don't mind the way you've been criticising the Bible, Deborah, - or at least not much. But some of the atheists I've had debates with have said the Bible's just a book of savage superstition, and even that Christianity can damage the brain!"
The girl saying that grinned as she said, "I hope that isn't the next thing you're planning to say!
"But anyway, they wouldn't change their opinions no matter what, so I started making fun of what a couple of them said. One put a message on a forum that said things like, "'The brains of people who believe in God have failed to develop to the level evolution has made it possible for human brains to develop to. The Christians on this forum are brain-damaged people. The damage results in weak logical abilities and increased gullibility, due to their rational networks not developing. That makes them defenceless against believing insane superstitious stories, like you find in the Bible, which is like a dangerous virus that's infected the world for centuries. To preach Christianity to these people is like exposing non-immunised children to large doses of smallpox pathogens and refusing to even consider anti-viral treatment agents when they succumb to the disease.
"'All babies are born without a belief in God. But many have weak skeptical brain wiring, so when they're exposed to the Brain Virus called Christian Superstition, some regions of their brains are damaged and shrink, because their capacity for sceptical enquiry diminishes. Little children will believe anything adults tell them, so they're vulnerable to being infected with the harmful religious mind virus. The repetition of Christian beliefs over time will deactivate their rational brain networks, and cause them to believe in them without ever questioning them, as well as making them gullible to belief in Big Foot, ghosts, poltergeists, psychic magic, and all kinds of batty nonsense like that.
"In the worst cases, the hatred they're indoctrinated with as a natural part of Christianity expands into biblical violence, leading them to murder those who aren't infected, like atheists, or those infected with a different strain of the religious virus, like Muslims. The real Apocalypse is being caused by increasing numbers of religious people in the world as the population rises.
"'I know this post is a real bummer. I wish it was untrue.'
"The man who said those things would go on and on like that. One day I made fun of a post he wrote where he said things like that, by just cutting out the odd word here and there, to make it say the opposite of what he would want to say, or else to just say things he would never say. My revised version of his message went:
"'Matter and Energy are in fact totally unsupported by evidence. It seems naive for modern humans to believe in atheism. Atheism is a code of required beliefs, behaviours, and submission to authority, a system of mind control largely exploited by men seeking power. Usually adopting a god is atheistic.
"'Atheists are Christians. The atheist must forever block out awareness of the Muslims who are rivals. All babies have weak skeptical brain wiring, so regions of their brains are damaged and shrink, leading them to murder those who are uninfected. The real Apocalypse is a real bummer.'
"Some of the atheists on that forum said such insulting things about Christians, like calling us bigots and brain-damaged people, that I joked about them some more, partly to let off steam, and partly to tease them for fun, to see what they'd say. I started a thread that said, 'There are Atheists in the world who are strange beings. They're not the friendly Atheists you meet around the place sometimes, who are happy to chat and be nice. No, these ones are wild, savage creatures. They constantly bite the bars of their cages trying to get out. When passers-by come along, they'll growl angrily at them, bare their teeth, and throw themselves against the front of their cages in a desperate attempt to get out so they can maul them. They spend all night and most of the day shouting angrily about how Christianity is the pinnacle of evil. They don't need much sleep. As soon as they wake up, they can be heard shrieking curses against Christianity. It's how they psyche themselves up for another day.'
"And I quoted a joke I came across on a web page that said something like, 'We think atheists live in high-rise caves. Or they could be cliff-dwellers. We know they eat grass, leaves, insects, rodents, lizards, snakes, rocks and the occasional bag of dirt. Not to mention the various strange wild flowers observed growing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Zenobia Red Tulip, for example, has the scent of scrambled eggs, and if you're not careful, it'll provoke passers-by to spin in circles while reciting scripture.
"'atheists are four-legged creatures, with big rabbit ears and a bushy tail like a kangaroo. They live in the trees and come out at night to prey upon Christians. They don't eat us. But they use us to argue against religion. They bark all night, bay at the moon and chase trucks. Don't get near an atheist. They all want to argue theology.
"'You can hear the atheists caged in American zoos pontificate on the terrible lies they believe can be found in the Bible. Atheists don't believe in heaven or angels. The truths they spout are bitter and cannot be swallowed without being candy-coated.'
"One of the atheists on the forum I said that on said he'd just put me on his ignore list for saying that. I replied, 'The wild Atheists have ignore lists too. Their owners have arranged a set-up with them where if anyone comes along who makes them particularly angry or restless, they'll receive notification to always go into the back of their cages and avoid them, to save themselves from antagonising themselves by meeting them. The list of people they're notified about is called an ignore list. But in practice, the wild Atheists have a tendency to ignore their ignore lists, and go to the front of their cages and begin to dialogue with the people they get angry with anyway. Their owners have never found a way around this problem to this day.'
"One of the atheists there responded to what I said by sarcastically asking me if the place was an atheist-bashing forum. He said atheists don't eat flowers. I joked, "'Yep, this is an Atheist-bashing forum. Every thread has its Atheist-bash hidden somewhere in it. And the rules are that if you don't find it by the time you finish reading it, you have to do one yourself. If a moderator discovers you've been reading a thread without an Atheist-bash on it and you haven't put one on there yourself, you'll get a stern private message from them asking you why, and telling you that if you don't amend your ways and put Atheist-bashes on the threads you find without them in in future, you will be banned from the forum. That'll serve you right. We can't have iconoclasts flouting our grand old universal Atheist-bashing traditions!'
"The atheist I was replying to accused me of being a religious bigot, and said he assumed that in that case, I must be bigoted against all kinds of other people as well, like being racist, anti-gay, or a 'man-hating lesbo'.
"I joked, 'Yes, I'm all the things you say, and more. I'd like to put all gay men and people of different races from me in boxes, and then they could be shipped around the world for Olympic teams to use in their weight-lifting practice.'
"I hope you don't mind me saying this stuff, Deborah; but the atheists there did say some pretty offensive things about Christians and the Bible.
"I made fun of the insulting things they said in other ways too. One day, I said, 'OK, I'm finally going to have to admit that atheists are superior to Christians after all, like you keep saying they are. Actually, I've heard about the superior skills of atheists before. I hope it's not more evidence of my inferior thinking skills that I believed every word of what I heard, but I do! Here's what I now believe about atheists:
"'While the average life expectancy of a theist is around 70 years, atheists normally live for over 200 years. In fact, it's been known for atheists to live to nearly 300. And when they're nearly 200 years old, they're just as good-looking as they ever were.
"'Atheists have incredible memories. If you ask an atheist what someone in the family said on a date in the past you choose, like the 1st of August ten years ago, they'll be able to tell you exactly what was said.
"'And atheists have specially enhanced vision, so if you ask an atheist what's going on in a specific house a few blocks away, they'll be able to tell you.
"'Atheists typically have amazing hearing. They can hear planes landing and taking off right across the other side of the world. And they can hear the conversations people are having in the planes.
"'And I've learned that atheists don't need any sleep. Sometimes, atheists can be up for several years in one go, suffering no ill effects whatsoever, and not even feeling tired.
"'The bodies of atheists have evolved so ingeniously that if they know they're going to have to do without water for days or weeks, it won't bother them. They can drink a whole pondful of water in one go, and then their body stores it and uses bits of it over the next few weeks when it needs it.
"'Atheist babies can talk from the very first day they're born. They've been known to strike up conversations with their parents the minute they're delivered, commenting on the birth experience and the hospital, and starting debates with their parents about things they heard them talking about while they were still in the womb.
"'Atheists are genetically programmed to already have a stack of scientific knowledge in their minds when they're born. They've been known to become top scientists even while they're still toddlers.
"'Atheists can run at 150 miles an hour. They've been known to out-run cars and trains easily.
"'While most people have to rely on plants and animals for food, atheists have more choice, and could survive even where there's no outside source of food at all. That's because atheists have the ability to make fruit grow all over their arms, as if they're tree branches. You can sometimes see atheists with clusters of grapes or apples hanging from twigs on their arms. Atheists will often sit in special greenhouses for half an hour where they can cultivate the fruit especially quickly. You can see apples and grapes and other fruit growing from nothing to great juicy appetising things on their arms before your eyes.
"'Those are just a few of the many amazing facts about atheists I've come to believe!'
"The atheists I was talking to said they thought I was nuts, and gave up arguing with me for a while after that."
Becky said with a chuckle, "I suppose that's one way of stopping people arguing with you, - make them think you're nuts!"
Deborah grinned and joked, "Wow, how can you possibly not want to be an atheist when you know we've got talents like that! Why don't you become an atheist, and then you'd have them too! If you don't, it'll have to mean the atheists on that forum are right and you really have got brain damage; I mean, why else would anyone pass up an opportunity like that?"
The girls giggled.
But then Deborah said, "Seriously though, I can understand atheists wanting to say insulting things about the Bible. I mean, some of it's downright offensive to a lot of people. I mean, for one thing, what about when God supposedly ordered the Israelites to conquer the land of Canaan so they could live there instead of the Canaanites, and he ordered them to kill all the Canaanites? You know, there are some horrible Bible verses, where God supposedly ordered them to kill them just for not believing in him! At least, that's what I've heard.
"And it's even worse, because there are Bible verses that commanded that if a community in Israel turned to worshipping other gods, the other people had to kill them all too! What kind of a psycho God would order that kind of thing? Was he so egotistical and jealous, he just couldn't tolerate rivals? Or what?"
Judith said, "It was more complicated than that. For one thing, about the Canaanites, the Bible says they had some nasty harmful cultural practices that could do with being eliminated. It wasn't just that they didn't believe in God.
"And as well as that, there might have been reasons why things could have been worse than they were. The Bible's account of the conquest of Jericho, the first town it says Israel conquered in Canaan, says that a woman who lived in a house built into the wall said the people had heard about the reputation of the Israelites in battle and knew they were coming, and were scared. According to an article I read, the Canaanites were semi-nomadic, so they'd have been accustomed to migrating, so it wouldn't have been as big a deal for them to leave as it would be for us. So a lot of them might have moved away before the Israelites arrived. Possibly.
"But according to the Bible, the overthrow of their cities was actually a judgment of God on the Canaanites for doing all kinds of evil things, including sacrificing children to their gods, possibly murdering them by burning them alive, and also having sex with all kinds of relatives it's actually illegal in this country to marry, because they're so genetically close that their offspring are more likely to have defects, because if one or two of the same genes in both of them has a defect, their children will inherit two copies of it, one from each parent, and that makes the genes more likely to cause problems than if a person just gets one copy of the faulty gene, because only one of their parents has it. ... Well, I obviously don't need to explain this to you, since you study biology, so you'll know about this kind of thing already. You probably know a lot more than I do about it.
"I've actually got a relative who's the daughter of cousins who married, and she's allright, but her mum had two babies before her whose brains didn't develop, so they died soon after they were born. Her mum actually thought the same thing might happen to her when she was pregnant with her, so she made a little funeral shroud for her.
"Mind you, I think the risk of cousins who marry having babies with defects is still pretty low.
"But according to the Bible, the Canaanites were in the habit of having sex with sisters, their mothers, grandchildren, aunts, children's and other relatives' wives, and other relatives and other people's wives, as well as animals.
"Of course, that isn't a good enough reason to order their destruction. But it seems they might have had a warrior culture too. So it's possible that the Canaanites didn't suffer more from Israel than a lot of them did from each other.
"In the Book of Judges in the Bible, which is about what happened after Israel invaded Canaan, it says the Israelites defeated the army of one of the regional kings, and captured him and cut off his thumbs and big toes. That sounds barbaric! But then the next verse says that the king was remarkably philosophical about it, and said it was as if he was being paid back for the wrong he'd done himself, since he'd been warlike and had captured seventy kings - which I think were leaders of city-states, - and had cut off their thumbs and big toes, and had made them pick up scraps of food under his table. Judging by that, it does seem that a whole lot of war was already going on in the area. It's impossible to be sure; but if the place really was in the grip of warring factions, maybe with some of them having a warrior culture, the destruction of the warrior culture could have been a force for ultimate good."
Deborah asked, "But what if things like those verses about the king who was cruel to lots of other kings he captured were just written into the Bible afterwards to try to justify what the Israelites had done?"
Judith became thoughtful, and said, "I suppose it's possible. But there's archaeological evidence that there was a lot of war in the area at around the time when Israel might have conquered Canaan, as various rulers tried to take control of trade routes and conquer territory. Apparently, according to historical evidence, Canaan had been prosperous before, with a lot of skilled workers and traders who sometimes travelled long distances to trade. But then warring factions grew up, for some reason, and a lot of the prosperity was destroyed. I don't know that much about it though.
"Anyway, about your other question: As for when the Bible says God commanded the Israelites to kill the people of even their own communities who started worshipping other gods instead of God, it wasn't just an ideological or ego thing, as if God was really offended that they were worshipping the wrong god; I think the worship of some of these gods involved sacrificing children by burning them alive, especially in times of crisis, to try to get the help of the gods of the area. And it involved other things like temple prostitution; and I don't know what would have happened to the babies that were produced because of that - whether they were all looked after, or whether some were abandoned and left to die, or sacrificed, or what, since in those days, there was no contraception or social services to take them on."
Deborah said, "That sounds horrible! But killing whole communities still sounds pretty savage and drastic! Why weren't there just laws for Israel that prescribed the death penalty for anyone who sacrificed their child by burning them alive, and forbade temple prostitution, and ordered the community to set up places where abandoned babies could be looked after, and commanded that everyone had to pay some kind of tax to support it?"
Judith said, "I'm not sure. But don't forget that the law said an entire community would have to turn to the worship of other gods before the other people were ordered to destroy it; and that would probably have meant the vast majority there would've had to be doing nasty things, or else supporting the ones there who did. And I think in those days, they had this concept of 'collective guilt', where even if a lot of people in communities where nasty things were going on didn't do harmful things themselves, they could be held culpable for harbouring the people who did, or not trying to stop them. That might be why the Bible says God inflicted plagues on the whole of Egypt when the Israelites were being held as slaves there, rather than just on the people who were mistreating them."
Deborah said, "That doesn't really seem fair, because some people would have been more guilty than others. And punishing sinful societies by inflicting war and plagues and famines on them still seems primitive! It's what you might expect the Old Testament to say God did if you believe it was just a set of morality tales written by primitive tribesmen who wanted to scare people into behaving well."
Judith said, "Think about the length of the Old Testament though! Morality tales would have been way way shorter!"
Deborah said, "Maybe. But then I reckon a lot of the Old Testament could have been just a primitive society's way of trying to make sense of the nasty things that happened. I mean, when it came to the wars against Israel that the Old Testament says prophets said were punishments for all their nasty behaviour, maybe the leaders were aware that there was a threat from other countries, and they actually commissioned the prophets to warn people that they might make war on them, and thought it would be a good opportunity to try to lower the crime rate at the same time, because they didn't have a more sophisticated way of doing that, like an effective police force that could actually catch criminals, so they hoped people would change if they were threatened with terrible consequences if they didn't.
"And then maybe after the wars actually happened, the stories of the prophets were written down by people trying to do the same things, - to lower the crime rate, by trying to convince the people that terrible consequences happen if they commit crimes. Or maybe a lot of people truly did believe that war was punishment for sin, and that's why they wanted to get the message across. The alternative explanation is that God's a barbarian."
Judith said, "Well I don't like that stuff in the Old Testament at all. It does seem harsh of God to have caused that kind of thing. But it's sad to think that all the people had to do to avoid the terrible consequences was to behave decently to each other - not perfectly, just decently, - you know, like not killing or defrauding or abusing each other.
"And as for the leaders actually commissioning the prophets to say what they said to try to make society less lawless, I don't think that can have happened. The Bible says that some kings actually opposed the prophets and even had one or two of them imprisoned and tried to kill them because of all the criticisms they made. They criticised the leaders as well as the ordinary people."
Deborah said, "It sounds as if the kings were barbarians as well as God then!
"But if we're to take the Old Testament as true, then surely, if God's genuinely good and all-powerful, he should have been able to think of more humane and less indiscriminate ways of dealing with the people than wiping out masses of entire families, including little children and babies. Surely he could have punished just the individuals responsible for crimes instead, as well as making each punishment fit the crime, instead of just thinking war should be the punishment for everyone! You know, like why didn't he inflict pain on individuals who were about to do something sinful till they stopped? Maybe anyone who wanted to use their hands to murder or commit violence or sexual abuse or defraud someone could have experienced intense pain in their hands every time they were about to do something like that, which went away when they changed their minds. Surely they'd soon get the message that it was an unacceptable thing to do, or they'd be put off doing it because of the pain."
Judith said, "I don't know. But sometimes things can have unforeseen consequences that God knows about but that we wouldn't find out about till later, such as if the pain drove some people so nuts they ended up doing worse things than they would have done before. And in those days, there was probably a lot more pain around because of all the disease, so a lot of innocent people might have been living in fear, wondering what on earth they could have done wrong every time they experienced some bad pain."
Deborah said, "Not if the pain God inflicted was very specific to the parts of the body people wanted to use to commit their sins, and it always went away again just as soon as they changed their minds."
Judith said, "I don't know how much better that would have been in the long term than the way the Bible says people were punished though, partly because I can imagine all kinds of harmful ideas developing if that kind of thing happened, like people thinking that if other people were in pain because of some kind of illness, they must be doing some kind of secret sin all the time, or thinking about doing it.
"Maybe if I was God, I'd try the pain thing to see how it went. But it might take a bit of trial and error before I got it right, unless I could be sure what would work before I started. I mean, for one thing, I wouldn't be sure when to start inflicting the pain, - when they first started thinking about committing a sinful act, or when they were just about to, or somewhere in between. You might have to do something different in each individual case, since, for instance, if a man wanted to sexually abuse his little daughter and picked her up to put her on his lap first, if I inflicted the pain when she was on his lap, or when he'd just picked her up, he'd probably drop her, or might throw her off his lap because he was only thinking about wanting to stop the pain, and she'd be hurt; but if I inflicted the pain on him before he picked her up, he might be yelling in agony, and she, not knowing he'd been about to abuse her, might be upset that her dad was in pain.
"Or a man who often wanted to punish his children by hitting them with a belt, and would sometimes slap his wife, might have pains in his hands so often he'd think he must have some disease, and give up work and start spending quite a bit of time in bed; and if the family were living in severe poverty anyway, that might tip the wife and kids into starvation. I wouldn't be sure I could avoid causing catastrophes by trying to prevent others.
"And there's also the question of where God should draw the line: For instance, would someone always get a pain in their hands when they tried to steal something, or just sometimes? I mean, what if they were stealing food from a shop to help their family survive, after they'd fallen on hard times? I mean, they could have tried begging or borrowing money to get some instead. But what if everyone in their community was very poor, so they didn't think they'd have much chance of success? And if they'd be allowed to steal to help their family to survive, what about stealing to give their child a birthday present if they couldn't afford one, when every other child in their village got one? You know, it might be a lot more complicated to draw the line than it seems. And if people only got the pain sometimes when they stole, they wouldn't be getting the message that stealing's bad, so they might not understand why they only got it sometimes; but if they got it all the time, some very poor families might be more likely to go hungry, and things like that.
"And some people's tongues would probably end up hurting a lot, since some people who couldn't steal because of the pains in their hands would probably try to force others to do it for them, making threats against them if they didn't, even if the others felt the pain too.
"And it wouldn't solve the problem of sins of omission - you know, when people should do something but they don't. So say if a good swimmer saw someone drowning but didn't try to help them, you couldn't inflict pain on them, or it would have the opposite effect of the one you wanted - making them think they couldn't possibly help anyone while they were in that condition. I suppose there would have to be several different ways of modifying people's behaviour.
"Some societies would have to be really heavily controlled by God, with lots of people in them suffering severe pain sometimes.
"But I think the main argument against the idea is that even in the Old Testament, the Bible says God wants people to love him, and change their ways out of the goodness of their hearts. If people were constantly being controlled by being given pain any time they went to do something sinful, the only relationship anyone could ever have with God would be one where they lived in fear of him."
Deborah said, "Well OK, but then, what if instead of that, God designed people to all have such well-developed consciences that they'd never commit crime, because they'd all feel too bad about the idea to ever do it?"
Judith said, "I'm not sure how possible that would have been. I think the main influence on how well most people's consciences develop is how good their parents and teachers and other people around them are at teaching them the difference between right and wrong, and how much they should care about it, as they're growing up. So that would probably always have to happen before people's consciences developed. I mean, I think most little children probably naturally don't have much of a conscience. I mean, you know, I can't imagine many toddlers thinking, 'I'd better not have a tantrum right now; my mum's already looking stressed; it'll just upset her even more.'"
Deborah said, "No, but if all parents had had well-developed consciences right from the beginning of humanity, because God had programmed the first humans to have them, and then they'd done their best to make sure their kids developed them, all parents would have wanted to teach their children the difference between right and wrong, and to care about the feelings of others and so on, because they'd want to teach them their ways. So all children would have developed consciences as they were growing up, unless they had psychopathic genes that made it harder for them to do that."
Judith said, "I don't know if it could ever have been as simple as that though, because a lot of people do sinful things because they can't think of better alternatives, like if someone's really poor and their family are starving, and then they go past a shop full of food. The temptation to steal some must be pretty high, - although they could stand at the door and beg people to get them some instead. But if they're really hungry, and their children are crying for food, the temptation to make sure they get some by stealing it might be way stronger than their conscience at the time, so they might go in and do it.
"And who's to say what would be right or wrong in that situation anyway, since if they stop their children feeling hungry, that would probably be a greater good than preventing the shop from losing money by not stealing from them, - although it might not be quite so clear-cut, since if lots of people in the area were starving, and if enough people stole from the shop that they couldn't make any profits, they wouldn't be able to afford to buy more food from suppliers, and would probably close down, and then there would be less food around for everyone, so more people might go hungry.
"And apart from that, strong feelings like self-interest can over-ride the conscience when they come on, such as when someone's angry, so they do things without a clear head.
"So even if we did all have really well-developed consciences, to prevent people sinning, God might also have to design us so our emotions were just quickly switched off beyond a certain point, so they didn't get strong enough to over-ride our consciences and tempt us to do things we shouldn't.
"And sins would also still be committed because a lot of people might do things they didn't see any harm in at the time, because they didn't think of the possible consequences, or they were over-optimistic and thought there wasn't much likelihood of them happening to them, like if teenagers had sex, and it resulted in unwanted pregnancies that led to some of them getting dangerous backstreet abortions, in places and times where abortion isn't or wasn't legal and safe."
Deborah said, "Well OK, so none of those systems would be ideal. But they might all have been better than people suffering in war; and I expect God could have done better if he'd wanted to, if he really does exist and he's all-powerful."
Judith replied, "Possibly. But actually, I don't really know if when the Bible suggests God's all-powerful, it means he's got the power to control each and every person's life so strictly that he could keep each and every person from committing sins all day every day if he wanted to. I think there are debates over what exactly the word 'omnipotent' really means - whether it means God's got the power to do anything and everything, or whether it means he's got all the power he possibly could have, given some limits."
Deborah said, "It couldn't be described as being 'all-powerful' if it had limits on it, surely. And if you believe the Old Testament, you believe God's powerful enough to kill everyone on earth by flooding the whole world! Unless he could do that but couldn't deal with lots of individuals differently at once."
One of the group said, "Yikes, I've got a feeling this conversation's about to get even more depressing! I mean, it's interesting; and I don't really mind you asking all these questions, Deborah; but it's beginning to remind me of conversations I've had with atheists on forums, where they've said Christians must be morally deficient if we accept things in the Bible like the Great Flood and hell, and the Israelite invasion of Canaan, saying we must somehow be completely oblivious to the fact that our God's a monster, since those stories don't make us object to believing in him.
"I mean, I can understand why you're arguing the way you are, Deborah. But I got fed up of arguing with some malicious-sounding atheists about these kinds of things on forums, because they wouldn't change their minds no matter what; so I ended up resorting to making jokes. That was a whole lot more fun. I started making jokes with all the atheists there, not just the malicious ones.
"after someone said the early Old Testament books were like a storybook for psychos, I made a parody of a Bible story, joking, 'Yeah, they're all about the Israelite invasion of Canada. The Bible story goes:
"'And the Lord said to Israel, "Go forward and invade Canada. March on the land and drive out the Canadians and take over their land!"
"'The Israelites sent 12 spies into Canada to spy out the land. Ten came back saying it was a good land, and that the invasion of Canada would surely succeed. But two said the Canadians were like giants! They said Canada was a huge and terrifying land, so freezing in the winter that if their central heating broke down, only a great acceleration of global warming would help them!
"'The words of the two pessimistic spies threw the people of Israel into a panic, and no one wanted to invade Canada any more!'
"One day another fairly friendly atheist said something to me about how if atheists can't convert Christians to atheism, it'll be because they try to use logic, when the Christian belief isn't based on logic, but on things like hope for a reward in heaven. I made a couple of jokes in reply, where I started by saying,
"'Silly boy! ... Whoops, sorry about that. God has programmed me to say a set number of insults every day at set times, for some reason best known to himself, and the start of my response to your post just happened to coincide with one of the times when I have to say one each day. That's how it got there.'
"On another day, I was talking to a nice atheist about how I didn't understand how evolution could have happened, since it seemed to me that there would have to have been a fair number of happy coincidences for the world to have got the way it is, like males and females of millions of species evolving in tandem so they could breed, and bees and flowers both evolving together when they both need each other, - bees needing the flower pollen for food, and bees being very convenient for the flowers because they help them spread their seeds around. Or something. I'm not sure of the details of that, actually. I ended my post by saying, 'But what do I know?'
"Another atheist who was quite nice replied, 'If you'd started by saying that instead of ending with it, you might have learned something.'
"I joked, 'Why would it have made a difference? Or did you mean if I'd started my post by saying, "What do I know?" and then ended right there, I might have learned something, because atheists might have assumed I must know nothing and want to fill me in on the facts? But I've been on Internet forums with atheists for 250 years, and I only ever learned something in the first year. Since then, nearly every argument people have made against me has just been repetition.'
"This atheist's signature linked to a website called something like, 'God is Imaginary'. I joked, 'I'll go and look at that site if you like; but I expect the things on it will be repetition of the things Atheists have said for the past 7000 years on Internet forums as well.'
"Wow, I wonder what people would have been saying on forums if they really had been around that long ago! Wouldn't it be interesting to read some forum conversations from that far back in time!
"Anyway, during the conversation I had with this atheist, I said I'd read some articles on some websites that said there was a lot of scientific evidence that evolution can't have happened, and it was in line with the idea that God created the world instead. I don't know how valid their scientific evidence is; I haven't got a science qualification, so I can't really make a judgment. But I do think it's interesting.
"The atheist said all that kind of stuff's bunkum. I said, 'How could you be sure it all is? Even if some of it's about as scientific as an experiment to estimate how near the sun is to the earth by climbing a tree and seeing if it looks any nearer, that doesn't mean it all is.'
"He insisted he could be sure it's all rubbish. He said some people in America were trying to get that kind of thing taught in science lessons in schools, but that it should only ever be taught in religion classes.
"I felt a bit confused about why he'd say that, and joked, 'My head seems to have become full of sawdust all of a sudden, and I'm having to shake some of it out. I don't suppose it's real sawdust, although it might be, we never know. But if it isn't, perhaps some Atheist scientists could explain why people get the sensation sometimes. The trouble is that I find parts of your post confusing, since why should that stuff be taught in religion classes when it sounds scientific?'
"But he said it isn't real science, and is just motivated by people with a religious agenda wanting to manipulate the facts to fit it. He said he could tell because he'd read a lot of that stuff himself in the past.
"I joked, 'But how can I be sure you're not a few hundred years old? Maybe their science has improved a lot since you read it, which was maybe years and years ago.'
"He didn't say anything that convinced me that their science really is rubbish, and I'm not qualified to judge it myself, not having a science qualification. So I don't know what the truth of the matter is.
"I was arguing with that man on another day, about different things. He was saying it's illogical to believe God could be all-powerful and all-knowing and completely good at the same time, because of all the suffering he allows in the world. He said surely he wouldn't allow it if he was all three of those things, but he'd only do it if he was either all-good but not powerful enough to do anything about it, or else not knowing enough about it all, or else if he was all-powerful and all-knowing, but not completely good, so he didn't care about it. He insisted I answer the question of how it could make sense logically that God could be all three of those things - all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely good. I'm pretty sure he just wanted to bring it home to me that the idea of that's illogical, and that that must mean Christianity's illogical, because Christians believe God's all three of those things.
"I told him I don't know the truth of the matter. But he carried on asking questions. So I joked, 'You know, you really need to be putting these questions and accusations to God, not me. He hasn't made me privy to all the mysteries involved in his creation. May I suggest you take a hot air balloon and go up as far as you can into the sky, and then shout these things as loud as you can, in the hope he hears them?'
"He said, 'From my point of view, your suggestion is as constructive as writing angry letters to Santa Clause for not giving poor kids more presents.'
"I joked, 'Well, why don't you do that as well? In fact, you could do both at the same time: You could go up in a hot air balloon, shout your complaints to God, and then strategically fly the balloon over the North Pole, and drop the angry letters to Santa. OK?'
"Then I said something like what Judith said a little while ago, - that the Bible doesn't actually specifically say that God's 'all'-powerful and 'all'-knowing.
"The atheist said it was nice to come across a Christian who's actually read their Bible, and that maybe I'd want to call God 'ultra' powerful and so on, rather than 'all'-powerful and the other things. I said I didn't know enough about him to really know what the truth is."
The girls smiled.
Related to some of the themes in this book series: Self-Help Articles on Depression, Phobias, Improving Marriages, Addiction, Insomnia, Losing Weight, Saving Money and More