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.