Answer 1

 

Before Before starting, I want to emphasize that I am giving you the Christian view. So I’m not saying you have to believe that, and I’m not (entirely) trying to convince you of it. I’m not saying it will make sense to a person who doesn’t believe Christ. Rather, I’m asking you to suppose the Christian world-view is true, and then think about the answers that then result from it. Feel free to reject the world-view- what I’m describing is the answer you would get if you were to accept it. So think about it as a hypothetical.

 

Before starting, I want to hope something. Clearly, you are a person who notices and appreciates sunsets, and presumably the way trees are green, and giraffes are yellow, and the way women are beautiful. So I hope that at some subliminal level you have a feeling that an arithmetic argument such as you advanced is a little wanting in some sense.

 

Suppose you propose to a woman by showing her a spreadsheet that proves it would be a good deal. Suppose you spurn the woman you love because you have a spreadsheet proving that it would save money to do so. Suppose, as you suggested, we were all the same color, and there was only one language, and maybe only one gender, and one kind of food and one song, just because it would minimize strife. We’d all rightly object that something went wrong in these equations, and they aren’t worth it. We’d take the strife or expense for the sake of the joy, wouldn’t we?

 

So, arguments about head counts and gallons of blood cry for an answer, but I do hope that at some level you feel that, somehow, such arguments don’t seem to encompass enough of the picture.

 

          I trust I have not wasted breath

          I think we are not wholly brain

          Magnetic mockeries, not in vain

          Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death.

 

          Not only cunning casts in clay-

Let science prove we are, and then

What matters science unto men?

At least to me… I would not stay.

 

Let him, the wiser man who springs

Hereafter, up from childhood shape

His nature like the greater ape.

But I was born to other things.

 

          - Tennyson, that radical dude

 

But on to the arithmetic! I’ll grant to you that religious wars have caused more death and strife than any other cause. Even though the two most deadly wars were not religious, I’ll grant that for discussion. And I’m not really aware of Christians slaughtering “countless millions” of people who would not convert to Christianity by the sword, and I had to smile at your account of ruthless Christians brutalizing those poor, innocent Vikings. But let me just grant all that.

 

First point: who needs the name of God before doing awful things? Ask Pol Pot. Ask Joe Stalin. Ask Himmler. If religious pretexts are not available, people act like monsters on other pretexts. You are suggesting that if a religion that teaches peace did not exist, there would be less violence! I would expect a world devoid of, at least, Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism, to have MORE violence. It would be hard to establish that the things done “in God’s name” wouldn’t have been done anyway. If I want your farmland, appealing to God is a good reason to kill you and take it. But if I couldn’t appeal to God, I’d kill you and take it anyway. Welcome to humankind. So fairness would dictate that you separate out things not done for religious reasons, as well as things done on religious pretexts that were really for other reasons.

 

Second point: But haven’t professing Christians done awful things for truly religious reasons? Sure they have. What’s up with that?

 

The most casual observer can tell that there is, in the world, a war between good and evil. The front lines are hard to see but the war is terribly, horribly evident. Isn’t impersonating your enemy a good tactic? The Bible said evil will purposely masquerade as good, and that we should not be surprised. The Christian view is that it is therefore simplistic to blame everything done in the name of good, on Good. Biblically, it lacks perceptivity. People doing evil in the name of religion sure had a field day at Golgotha. It didn’t take Jesus by surprise. They claimed they were doing God a favor by murdering Him, but He didn’t seem to feel that made it God’s fault. So fairness would dictate that you separate out the actions of evil people masquerading as holy ones.

 

Third point: You didn’t actually grant that any good at all has come from religion, but I think you would be willing to grant SOME good. I mean, there isn’t any unvarnished bad. So you are looking at a terrible cost in lives and strife, in exchange for, in your view, precious little gain. Right?

 

But what kind of calculus are you going to use to measure Christianity’s good versus its bad? If you got a doctorate in Statistics, and another in History, you’d only realize that you don’t have enough data. And if somehow you had enough data, how would you assign weights to the data? How many dead Saracens does it take to outweigh a leper hospital? How many slaughtered Bavarian Protestants does it take to outweigh the pacification of Scandinavia and the end of the Viking threat? How many crusades does it take to overbalance Byzantium protecting Europe for all those centuries? And most unquantifiable of all, what is the value to God of hosts of grateful Christians praising Him down through the ages? The Christian answer is that we cannot see the whole picture, and we cannot know how God prices and values these things, so we cannot do the math.

 

Fourth point: I know that when you compare all the bad you attribute to Christianity to the good you see in it, you think it is a very threadbare, pathetic comparison. But my surprising point is that Christians think it is worse than you do. Much, much worse. Christians believe in an infinite man-god, of infinite worth, who came and spilled His blood and was groundlessly murdered by evil men. The creator of everything is worth more than everything He created, obviously. And so He is worth more than the damage or loss of part of that creation. But He himself was lost! All the things you mention, ghastly as they are, are just chump-change to a Christian. The Christian insists that the loss and waste is hugely, vastly more appalling than you realize.

 

So in short, although I think your arithmetic is faulty, I agree with your premise, and the Biblical position is even more extreme than yours: the picture is even worse than you say!

 

So why would God do that? If it doesn’t make sense to you, you have a lot of company (starting with Job). And you can see that it will never make arithmetic sense. What was He doing? It was no surprise to Him- He did it on purpose.  So it seems like He valued SOMETHING enough to lose all that and pay all that. And all those dead people you’re talking about- those were His. He created them. They mattered more to Him than to you or me. So He’s been tolerating all this, and continues to do so…. For the sake of WHAT?

 

You’ve probably had to suffer through a standard love song or two- you know, the “I’d climb the highest mountain and swim the deepest ocean for you, baby baby” type. But suppose a man really did that. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, really. Think of all the babes he probably went past on his trip. He could have had 10 of them for the trouble he’s taking for the one woman. Doesn’t add up. But if you look at it as an aesthetic statement rather than an economic one, it’s beautiful. And if you happened to be that woman, it is indescribably beautiful, and life-altering.

 

In somewhat the same sense, the Bible describes all the bad stuff you see as God being extravagantly prolific, passionately wasteful, for something. This ought to get our attention! This is God’s signal flare, and it’s a hella big one. He’s saying it’s about something so big that it dwarfs the arithmetic. He’s saying, go find out what the deal is.