The 32,000 Virgins of God and Moses

"If there is a God, he is a malign thug." ~ Mark Twain

"The death of one is a tragedy / But death of a million is just a statistic." ~ Marilyn Manson

The Biblical story of the Israelites' massacre of the Midianites and their capture of 32,000 virgin girls in the Old Testament stands as one of the clearest demonstrations of the fact that the Bible promotes great evil. The forcefulness of this particular story is shown by the fact that no matter what form or version of Christianity or Judaism one chooses to embrace, there is no possibility of shying away from the truth that this story portrays a horrible evil as just and good.

The story is found in the Book of Numbers, chapter 31. The first aspect of this story that needs to be emphasized is expressed in the first two verses, which read, "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 'Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.'" From the very beginning of this chapter, it is clearly stated that Moses was not the only one who ordered the attack. The order originates from God, who uses Moses as his primary messenger and overseer of the orders. Thus, Jehovah cannot be let off the hook for what ensues in the remainder of this chapter. This war of vengeance against the Midianites was not the work of Moses, but was conceived and planned by God.

Moses dutifully sends out 12,000 of his men (one thousand from each tribe) to make war against the Midianites. The Israelite soldiers slay all the Midianite males, and take all of the women, children, goods, cattle and sheep captive before burning down all their cities and castles. The Israelite soldiers return to their camp at the plains of Moab, bringing the captives and spoils of war and presenting them to Moses and Eleazar the Priest. Moses is furious; he asks the soldiers, "Have ye saved all the women alive?" (v. 15). Moses proceeds to explain irately that "Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the Congregation of the Lord" (v. 16).

The Midianite men, of whom there were no survivors, had turned their backs on God and therefore deserved to die. But Moses is here telling his army that the women who had been taken captive were the ones responsible for leading them away from God in the first place, and that consequently they were deserving of death. And because the sins of the fathers are to be carried out upon the sons, Moses declares all of the little boys worthy of death. Thus, Moses commands, "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man, by lying with him. But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves" (vv. 17-18). Thus, after completely destroying the entire city of the Midianites, the Israelite army kills all the women and children they took captive, except for the virgin girls. After this massacre is carried out, the Israelite army undergoes a process of ritual purification outside the camp for seven days as prescribed by Eleazar, then return to divide the spoils. Moses has another conversation with God in which God instructs him on exactly how to divide up the spoil. Verses 25-47 describe in detail the process by which a thorough inventory of the spoils is made and divided up among the warriors who took part in the battle and the rest of the tribes making up the Congregation of Israel, which portion was given to the priests, and the amount that God demanded as a tax to himself. It turns out that there are 32,000 virgin girls in total (v. 35). Of those, a total of thirty-two are turned over to the temple as God's tribute portion (v. 40).

I have read through this chapter in the Book of Numbers several times. I know the story very well, to the point where I can readily imagine a number of different ways a fundamentalist preacher might deliver a sermon on this particular passage. The most common rationalization employed by a fundamentalist preacher is likely the one that declares how unfortunate it is that God had to kill the Midianite men for turning their backs on him, that the men, women and little boys deserved death because of this, and yet proceeds to assert how wonderful it is that God spared all those young Midianite girls in his infinite love and mercy so that they could grow up in the service of the one true religion, knowing Jehovah and knowing his love! This is one of the most transparently ridiculous as well as despicable rationalizations one can concoct in an attempt to defend the story's immoral theme of young girls being raped after just witnessing all the people they love get killed by the people who are raping them. The Christian attempts at rationalizing the actions of God, Moses and the Israelite army in this story completely ignore this obvious implication. Rather, they prefer to focus their apologetic energies on pointing out the wickedness of the Midianites, much as they do with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis.

Of course, it is also true that there are not many sermons being preached on this particular passage. While one could come up with ways to rationalize the story, it is not a particularly pleasant or relevant sermon to prepare, considering the vast array of other Bible passages to choose from. Indeed, I consulted SermonAudio.com, the Internet's largest library of audio sermons from conservative Christian churches, to get a sense of how often this passage is preached on. Out of over 335,000 sermons collected on the site, a mere 13 sermons based on Numbers 31 is to be found [1].

In addition to standing as an example of extreme immorality portrayed as heroic justice, this story contains logical absurdities that become apparent when one does the math. Consider: how many people would the Israelites have to kill in order to end up with 32,000 virgins? On average, based on the population of girls age 0-17 in most U.S. cities of comparable size, a total population of about 300,000 is required to come up with a figure of 32,000 for girls in that age range. It should be duly noted that this figure is generous; it is likely that in the time period in which the Book of Numbers is set, girls were probably engaging in intercourse as early as age fourteen. We do not know for sure, of course. But in any case, a required total population of 300,000 to account for thirty-two thousand virgin girls is a good and generous estimate. Now, according to population figures from 2008, there are only 60 cities in the U.S. that have more than 300,000 in total population. Pittsburgh is at the bottom of that list at 60, with a population of 310,037 [2]. Thus, the Israelite army in our story would have had to wipe out the equivalent of Pittsburgh ca. 2008 in order to end up with 32,000 virgin girls.

Let us place the numbers in perspective: 300,000 casualties of attack is one hundred 9/11s. It is seventy times the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in the Iraq War to date. But it is only half the number of Iraqis who have been killed to date. Exactly where did all of this take place? What huge city did the Midianites have? How were all of the women and children, 32,000 of which are young virgin girls to be spared, corralled to a location where the rest are killed en masse?

There are many numbers in the Bible that are demonstrably and completely wrong. This is one particularly implausible example. There has been an enormous population explosion in just the last century. It is doubtful that there even existed cities the size of Pittsburgh at that time in ancient history. While it is true that the Roman Empire was comprised of five million people by about 14 A.D., the Roman Empire was atypically enormous for one city. In fact, it constituted the entire known world and was spread out in many wide-ranging locations. But historical/archaeological evidence for the existence or plausibility of one city with 300,000 people in circa 1400s B.C. is lacking. Rather, we are presented with the picture of a roving band of murderous barbarians wandering in a desert, juxtaposed against very specific details concerning the Midianites. Throughout the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, there are numerous stories of the Israelites utterly destroying tribes left and right, stories that do not provide any specifics but only lengthy lists of destroyed and defeated tribes. The sheer number of people that were killed at the direct instructions of God add up quickly to a formidable figure in this manner.

One of the most important considerations to come away with upon reading and contemplating this story is that no matter how Christians attempt to rationalize the details away, this story would be incredibly appalling even if it happened to concern a single family. Imagine this scenario: a loyal servant of Jehovah heads to the house next door and murders the father, the mother and the little boy because they were deserving. He spares the twelve year-old daughter of the murdered parents, keeping her to himself. One instance, applied to one family makes the scenario described in Numbers 31 one of the most immoral and appalling events that could possibly happen, as is readily recognized and acknowledged as such by all people. Yet it is presented as a moral requirement when this same act is carried out on a mass scale! Controversial rock musician Marilyn Manson had the right idea when he observed human nature to be such that too often we tend to perceive that "The death of one is a tragedy / But death of a million is just a statistic."

The alternative to believing that this horrible slaughter of a city with a population size equivalent to Pittsburgh actually occurred is to concede that the Bible is wrong about the number. We certainly should hope that the numbers are very wrong! However, the important point to bear in mind is that it does not matter if the story is true or not. For the record, I do not think this story ever actually occurred; I contend that it is far-fetched and that the numbers are indeed all wrong. But this pales in importance, because the massacre and plunder is portrayed as something that was just and good. It is an act that God is described as having executed and placed his seal of approval on. If the events described in this story ever really happened, it would be an example of horrible evil. This is precisely why I agree with Mark Twain when he said, "If there is a God, he is a malign thug." In my estimation, Mark Twain was being particularly generous in his description of the God of the Bible, and "malign thug" is possibly the most pleasant description one could give to this fictional character. As some of my readers may remember, I have in past writings described the God of the Bible (specifically as depicted in Genesis) as an immature teenager who experiments carelessly with humankind. However, a more fitting parallel is to be made between God and Al Capone the farther one reads through the Old Testament. The God character certainly does develop into a malign thug, and today we are confronted with thugs for God, also known as radical evangelists.

As always, I look forward to feedback from my Christian friends who may wish to exercise their apologetic skills. I can be convinced.

Notes

1. http://www.sermonaudio.com/search.asp?chapter=31&keyword=Numbers&BibleOnly=true&currSection=sermonsbible.

2. "Table 1: Annual Estimates of the Population for Incorporated Places Over 100,000, Ranked by July 1, 2008 Population: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2008" (CSV). 2008 Population Estimates. United States Census Bureau, Population Division.

Why Does God Not Stop Satan? A Response to Lavern

“There could, he reasoned, be only one Creator, God, who was or had been primarily benignant. Yet all the evidence pointed to the co-existence of an evil creative principle, a Satan. God, then, must be a split or dual personality, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, manifesting sometimes as the Devil. This duality . . . must be a form of what is commonly called schizophrenia.”

~ Clark Ashton Smith [1]

Some months ago, I wrote a lengthy essay critiquing the ideas put forth by the infamous creationist Kent Hovind, specifically focusing on his “doctoral dissertation” that he wrote in the early 1990s and which has just recently surfaced. At one point in that essay, I brought into the discussion a point relating to the relationship between God and Satan as depicted in the Bible. I raised the question of why God did not simply destroy Satan in the past or destroy him now, especially given God’s alleged omnipotence. For according to a literal reading of the Biblical story, Satan is a thorn in the side of both God and humans, being as he is the driving influence behind evil and suffering in the world. I posed the question as follows:

The bewildering question is this: Why is God content to treat the disease and not cure it? Why does God not kill Satan, who is allegedly the thorn in the side of humanity who inspires [humanity’s] shortcomings? The biblical story in its literal form makes no sense.

Biblical literalists are often heard offering the explanation that God cannot destroy Satan now, because he's bound by the Bible to destroy Satan at the end of time. But then, the question that naturally comes next is who wrote the Bible? What they are essentially saying is that God bound himself to not incapacitate Satan, because God himself wrote the Bible which records Satan’s demise at the conclusion of all things, rather than early on [2].

The present essay is inspired by a video I recently came across, made by a freelance Christian theologian by the name of Lavern, which attempts to address this very question. This Christian commentator runs a YouTube channel whose handle is “TrustInJC” (which I can only assume stands for Johnny Cash), a channel devoted to short video messages discussing a number of different topics and issues relating to Christianity and the Bible. After having viewed the video, entitled “Why Does God Not Stop Satan,” I thought it worthwhile to review and analyze its message point-by-point, for the message given in it is directly relevant to the question I posed in that earlier essay [3].

“TrustInJC” (or Lavern) begins:

Hello; Lavern here, and thank you for joining me. In this video, I’m going to attempt to answer a question that was put to me. The question was “Why does God not stop Satan?” Now, before I get into my answer, I’d like to make it clear that I’d really like to know what other people think on this matter, because I believe there’s a lot of atheists who ask this question and even Christians who are unsure why it is that Satan is allowed to roam so freely in the world today.

Now, as far as my answer: The short answer is that God does in fact stop Satan. We have his promise in the prophecy that Satan will be thrown into the Lake of Fire. So we do know that God eventually does stop him, and stops him cold and for all eternity. The question is, then, why does he not do it sooner? Why is he not already stopping Satan? Why does he allow Satan to continue with what many people would consider to be madness? Well, there are actually a number of reasons for this. I’m probably not going to be able to answer them all in this video.

One of the more common answers (and something I believe to be true) is that it’s not so much that God allows it, but rather that people allow it. And not just allow it; there are many people who embrace Satan. They reject God and embrace Satan. Scripture tells us that if we are not for Jesus, then we are against him. So consider all the people who are rejecting Christ. These people, then, are against him. So it can be no wonder then that Satan is so well accepted. People are actually embracing Satan; we see this in the media, we see this in government, we see it in the laws that are being passed, we see it in the movies, we see it in our music. People are embracing Satan. Now again, this doesn’t answer the question: “Well, why does God allow this?” So, I would say that it’s not so much that God allows it, but people are asking for it. And as long as people are asking for Satan, God’s going to allow it because they have the free will.

As we can see, the first explanation Lavern offers as to why God does not stop the efforts of Satan comes in the form of placing the blame on humanity’s alleged preference for Satan over God. Free will is then invoked to account for why this preference is upheld by the omnipotent deity. The first problem with this rationalization is that it is presented in the context of a gross oversimplification in the form of a black-and-white dichotomy that simply does not exist in the real world. Lavern subscribes to the transparently false notion that anybody who is not a Christian is against Jesus and is by default an ally of Satan. This idea, which displays an appalling level of understanding of diversity, is so obviously fallacious that it hardly warrants thorough debunking. By Lavern’s criterion, those who worship Satan would include Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintos, Scientologists, atheists/agnostics, and every single other belief system or viewpoint that does not fall within the category of orthodox Christianity. His claim that anyone who rejects Christ automatically embraces Satan is false primarily for the simple reason that Satan is a part of Christianity, while most other faiths and viewpoints listed are completely separate. It is also interesting to note close counterparts to the notion of evil in other religions. Muslims reject Christ, yet their doctrine also declares belief in and opposition to Shaitan, the Islamic equivalent of Satan and a comparable enemy of their God.

Lavern also specifically refers to those who generally “reject God and embrace Satan.” No atheist believes that Satan exists, just as no atheist believes that God exists. As I pointed out above, belief in Satan presupposes belief in Christianity or Islam, which of course presupposes distinct forms of theism. Even the very small minority of atheists who identify as Satanists do not actually believe in Satan as an actual literal being, but rather revere Satan as a symbol of freedom. There is a vast spectrum of belief in between atheism and theism, of course, for which Lavern’s black-and-white false dichotomy simply does not fit. Many people are not “for” Jesus in a religiously devout sense, but see no particular reason to be against his teachings and philosophy. In fact, a great many people hold great respect and admiration for the alleged life and teachings of Jesus, including some atheists, without taking the unnecessary step of accepting the religiously-inspired, unreachable pedestal constructed for Jesus by adherents of orthodox Christianity. It is also important to point out that the percentage of people in the United States who actually believe in Satan as a literal being and worship him is extremely small.

In view of this last point, one will notice the sheer ridiculousness of the level of paranoia Lavern harbors toward the world. He apparently sees Satan around every corner. He claims he can recognize the influence of the prince of darkness in the media, in government, in laws that are passed, in films and in music. Is this paranoia in the least bit warranted? I think not; such illusions of sensing evil everywhere often comes from an over-inflated sense of one’s own righteousness that is projected on everything contained in one's day-to-day purview to maintain and increase that delusional sense of ego-reinforcing self-righteousness. But perhaps this notion that a malevolent evil is around every corner provides a hint as to how Lavern might respond to the counter-arguments I raised above. I suspect he would respond by asserting that the majority of those who are not followers of Christ embrace Satan without knowing it consciously. But this amounts to a conspiracy theory run amok, and as with virtually every other conspiracy theory, this idea is unfounded and non-falsifiable. Unless Lavern can provide positive and convincing evidence that a being called Satan as understood by the Christian religion actually exists, and furthermore that Satan’s influence is everywhere exerted in society, we are justified in safely dismissing his conspiratorial claim that Satan’s machinations are everywhere around us whether consciously recognized or not. This means that in the context of the specific claims Lavern has made, one needs to ask him to identify specific examples of media outlets, government actions, laws, film and media that are the products of Satan’s inspiration, and specific reasons as to why these are legitimate examples. Otherwise, to simply assert that “Whatever is not of God is of Satan” is a meaningless statement. God has never been satisfactorily defined in such a way that all can agree what God is through independent verification.

All these considerations aside, placing the blame for Satan’s continued dabbling with the creation of a supposedly all-powerful God on the free will of people who prefer Satan over God is singularly unsatisfactory as an explanation, at least in view of what Christianity actually teaches. The Bible contains numerous accounts of God intervening in human affairs in such a way that the volition of humans is placed on a back burner. God is apparently willing to intervene and directly violate the intentions of people at some times, and not at other times. The God of the Bible is a very arbitrary character in many ways. Why should the continued existence of his number-one antagonist and the source of humanity's problems be an exception? Why is God obliged to grant humanity their alleged preference of lord and master, but not obliged to grant humanity their other desires and choices? Many Christians are fond of describing God as a caring parent-figure who is only looking out for his creations’ best interests. This portrayal is often put forth as their explanation for why God does not always allow people to experience what their free will choice would result in. If Christians such as Lavern are correct in arguing that it is not God so much as it is people that allow Satan his continued existence through their free will preference, then Christians who adhere to the “caring parent figure” picture of God are obviously not taking this into account or their conception of God is simply wrong. If Lavern’s deity and devil really do exist, then perhaps we should all be desperately wishing, in the interest of humanity, that Garth Brooks was speaking of real possibilities in his song “Unanswered Prayers,” in which he sings,

Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers / Remember when you're talkin’ to the man upstairs / That just because he doesn’t answer doesn’t mean he don’t care / Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

Moreover, if God is so very constrained by the free will of his creations that he is bound to refrain from decisively curing humanity's disease, why speak of him as all-powerful?

Lavern continues:

But there is more to it. There is another answer as well. And for that we have to go right back to Genesis where it all began, where Satan had the first contact with humans, that being Adam and Eve. Scripture tells us, through the writings of Enoch, that God planted the Tree for the purpose of revealing to Adam his sinful nature. For God knew the sinful and the carnal nature that was within Adam. But Adam didn’t. And so God planted the Tree for the purpose of revealing to Adam his sinful nature. And Satan was also part of this plan. Satan was allowed to tempt Adam and Eve. He was allowed to place into their minds these thoughts, these ideas that they could be like God if they ate of this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And so then, through this temptation from Satan, their lustful desires (that to be like God) and their prideful heart all came to the surface and was revealed through their actions when they finally gave in and ate of that fruit. And so we see that Satan and this Tree both actually had a purpose into revealing the true nature of Adam and Eve, their true sinful, evil, rebellious nature.

This is all very interesting in its wild speculation, as well as quite bewildering. Lavern is raising far more questions and quandaries than he is answering. My first point in response is a minor one, but one I consider worth raising awareness about. Almost all modern Christian creationists believe that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was the devil in disguise. But nowhere in the Bible is this either stated or implied, neither in the third chapter of Genesis nor in the Book of Revelation and in no passage in between. There is no unambiguous internal biblical support for thinking that the ancient authors of Genesis had what modern theologians think of as Satan in mind at all when describing the serpent in the garden. But I digress . . .

Lavern cites the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings of Enoch in his analysis of the Adam and Eve story, specifically for the purpose of supporting his interpretation that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was planted by God in proximity to Adam’s and Eve’s habitation as a means of intentionally tempting them into sin. This is interesting in a number of respects. First, Lavern’s interpretation implies that God created Adam and Eve with a built-in sinful nature that they were not aware of. Second, this interpretation likens the Tree of Knowledge to the Pauline interpretation of the Law of Moses. Lavern states that God planted the Tree of Knowledge for the sole purpose of intentionally provoking Adam’s dormant sinful nature into the open [4]. But the analogy to the Pauline doctrine concerning the Mosaic Law is unwarranted. God would have no need to reveal humans’ fallen nature as a means to demonstrate to them their need for his salvation if God had not created humans with an inner evil nature to begin with. Such an “installation” makes no sense whatsoever. Most interesting of all, Lavern states that Satan was a central part of God’s purposes. What he suggests is that God allows Satan to continue wreaking havoc in the lives of people because Satan is conveniently conducive to “revealing our true nature.”

If what Lavern is suggesting is true, the implication is that God created the first humans with a “sinful, evil, rebellious nature” at the outset and that God’s first occupying interest in humans was to tease their evil natures out of their dormant state and into a manifestation that would reveal to Adam and Eve this nature they did not know they possessed. Does this understanding strike anybody else as very odd? What possible reason would God have to create the first humans with a built-in evil nature lying just under the surface? And what is God’s motive for wanting to reveal this dark side of their nature to them as his very first exercise in interacting with them? Perhaps a motive to compel his creations by guilt to be subservient to him is what is at work here.

In my aforementioned essay critiquing Kent Hovind and creationism, I write, “God’s first mistake was to facilitate the first two humans’ fatal screw-up by placing the Tree of Knowledge in the middle of the Garden of Eden, not to mention arbitrarily declaring it forbidden.” Apparently, Lavern would agree that the fall of the first humans was, in fact, facilitated by God (with the help of Satan no less), but that it was no mistake and was intentional. In that same essay, I also posed this question and comment: “What is the divine reasoning behind staging and choreographing situations and conditions in just such a way that disaster is predictable, including the placing of these people in a specific locale in close proximity to a constant temptation? This is rarely addressed by the biblical literalists and never given an explanation that preserves God’s powers of reasoning.” Lavern has actually addressed this question. He has also furnished an explanation, derived from a pseudepigraphical text, that does in fact preserve God’s powers of reasoning (although very loosely). But this is done at the undeniable expense of a picture of the God of the Bible that is omnibenevolent or one whose intrinsic nature is goodness and love. The God that Lavern describes is strikingly malevolent and capricious. Lavern’s interpretation of the biblical God does rationalize what otherwise appears to be fatal errors of judgment, but the rationalization is immediately recognized as irreconcilable with his alleged nature of perfect goodness and love. Then again, my statement in the same essay referred to above may also apply: “If the fundamentalist version of Christianity were actually true, God is perhaps best conceptualized as a teenager who is experimenting on a cosmic scale, not fully understanding exactly what he is doing with our race.”

The major point to take home from this is that, in the process of attempting to answer the question of why God does not stop Satan, Lavern has stated unambiguously that God and Satan are allied together for a common purpose. God is using the skills of Satan to throw guilt in the faces of his new creations for some twisted reason, which is presumably what Satan is also interested in doing. They both glean something out of this tempting game, and so they work together. The implications of Lavern’s statements appear to have escaped his own attention. If God and Satan are working together for a common purpose, then the reason God does not stop Satan is obvious! In Lavern’s scenario, stopping Satan would be against God’s interest! Not only does this mean that Lavern cannot say God is omnibenevolent and remain consistent, but his scenario also means that God is not all-powerful on his own to accomplish his twisted purposes. In view of the first reason Lavern offered above, perhaps it is little wonder that God is willing to grant humanity their alleged preference of Satan. If Satan works for God, perhaps he finds this indulgence convenient to his designs and plans!

Lavern continues:

We also see in Scripture that there are other things that God uses to reveal our nature. The Apostle Paul tells us that the Law of Moses was given to us so that we would see our sinful nature, so that that part of us would be revealed. Scriptures themselves are given to us to reveal ourselves. Scripture is like a two-edged sword. It reveals not only who God is to us, but it also reveals who we are. The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sins, so the Holy Spirit reveals to us our true nature. So, so much about our life is done in order to reveal our nature. Even suffering has this purpose, and we see this in the Book of Job. In the story of Job, we see that Satan comes to God and he asks for permission to test Job. And God allows, he gives permission for Job to be tested. So we see here that Satan is actually a test for us, that he is allowed to test us to reveal our nature. And it was Satan’s purpose to try and reveal that Job is not as righteous as what Job would like to believe or what God is claiming. And what we see is that after the second phase, Job actually does falter. He begins to question God. And what this reveals to us is that, like Jesus tells us, the rich man has a very difficult time in entering heaven, and the reason is because of the pride and the lust and everything that they have for the things that they have, their health and so on.

Now, in the story of Job, from the story of Job, I just want to read a couple passages. Because what we see in Job is that it does reveal Job’s nature. And a young man by the name of Elihu is the one who really reveals this. And he asked Job, in chapter 33, beginning verse 19: “So why are you bringing a charge against him [meaning God]? Why say he does not respond to people's complaints? For God speaks again and again.”

And then going on to chapter 34, beginning verse 7: “Tell me, has there ever been a man like Job, with his thirst for irreverent talk? He chooses evil people as companions, he spends his time with wicked men. He has even said, ‘Why waste time trying to please God?’”

So we see here that through Job’s suffering, he finally breaks, and his true nature is revealed. The suffering breaks him down to his core self. It’s like peeling an onion, and it just breaks him down. And from that place, his true nature is revealed. But then from that place, Job ends up repenting. And from this place he actually becomes closer to God, and he actually knows God a whole lot better. We see this in the end of Job. But before I get to there, just one more verse I’d like to read: Chapter 36, verse 21 (this is still Elihu talking): “Be on guard, turn back from evil. For God sent this suffering to keep you from a life of evil.” So through this suffering, it’s actually saving Job, preventing him from a life of evil.

Now, it ends in chapter 42. And reading from verse 5 (this is now Job talking): “I had only heard about you before. But now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” And this is Job talking about God. Just to repeat this, I had only heard about you before. But now I have seen you with my own eyes. So we see that through his suffering, Job was brought closer to God, and he was able to hear his voice and he was able to see him. And none of this would have been possible if he had not first lost everything that he’d had.

Here Lavern expands on his argument that God allows Satan to continue to thrive for purposes of self-revelation by arguing that Satan is a tool by which the faith of humans is tested. According to him, the influences at work in peoples’ lives to reveal our nature includes the workings of Satan, hence the mention of human suffering as a consequence of Satan’s actions. Not surprisingly, Lavern uses the most clear and thus most forthcoming example in Scripture, that of the story of Job in the Old Testament. In his discussion of Satan asking permission of God to torment Job, Lavern makes a very interesting series of statements. For instance, his comments concerning the rich having a difficult time entering heaven because of their possessions and pride leads me to doubt just how carefully Lavern has read his Bible. The Book of Job indicates fairly clearly that Job was at his most pious and righteous at the height of his prosperity and wealth. Before going into an inventory of his wealth, the opening verses of Job tell us that he was “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1-5).

But again, this is a minor point in the context of the overall question we are asking. Lavern’s overarching point is that Satan’s harmful workings and the suffering he inflicts on the world serve the purpose of testing the strength of the faith of the righteous. This occasions an important question: If the God of the Bible is omniscient or all-knowing, why is the testing of his followers’ faith required? Of course, if Lavern stands by the statements he has made so far concerning God’s nature, perhaps the God he has in mind is not all-knowing, all-powerful, or possessed of an impeccable morality. If we take Lavern’s previous statements seriously, we are presented with a God who employs Satan to help him accomplish his capriciously meaningless purposes because he is apparently not all-powerful and thus cannot achieve his purposes without inflicting suffering. Thus, perhaps this God may not be all-knowing or possessed of clear judgment either. But even given a God who is not all-knowing, one wonders why the “God” conceived by Lavern’s theological imagination would even care to be convinced of the strength of his subjects’ faith in the first place. After all, Lavern has stated that God knowingly created humankind with a built-in evil nature that he took pleasure in throwing in their face via the temptation of the Tree of Knowledge that he dangled in front of their faces, so to speak. If God created human beings for the purpose of gleaning a twisted sense of pleasure from watching them wallow in guilt, one would tend towards the conclusion that he is not very interested in seeing them rise above that guilt, which by the accounts of most Christians and Jews is achieved through piety and devotion to God.

If this kind of God actually exists and the accompanying scenarios really did occur, and if Job was aware of this state of affairs in the agenda of this deity, then Job is perfectly justified, as is all humanity, in levying the kind of charges against this deity that the character of Elihu disapproves of in the quote given above (which is actually found in Job 33:13, not verse 19). In light of Lavern’s conception of God, the contemptuously rhetorical question Elihu poses in Job 34:7-9 is grossly misplaced. Because Elihu is speaking in pious defense of God, we can wonder just how “evil” and “wicked” the men he disapproves of really are. A “thirst for irreverent talk” would in this case seem to amount to an authentic morality that opposes the juvenile capriciousness exhibited in the particular portrait of God we are examining. Why waste time trying to please this kind of God indeed?

Some of my readers may at this point charge that I am focusing too heavily on this one individual’s idiosyncratic conception of God and interpretation of Scripture. While this may be the case – since this is a response to his personal attempt to explain a question I have raised in past writings – I should also point out that similar criticisms apply to the more mainstream Christian and Jewish apologetics surrounding the philosophy contained in the Book of Job. According to mainstream interpretation, the moral of the story is that if we unquestioningly trust in God, he will provide for us even if we do not understand his motives in allowing hardship and suffering in our lives. But in the story of Job, God does more than just withhold from Job an explanation of his reasons for allowing Job to suffer tremendously. Job makes several inquiries as to God’s reasoning, with no initial response forthcoming. Finally, God responds indignantly by saying, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much” (38:4). God then proceeds to embark on an obnoxious tirade, repeatedly making statements such as, “Do you realize the extent of the earth? Tell me about it if you know!” (38:18), “Do you know the laws of the universe? Can you use them to regulate the earth?” (38:33), and so on and so forth. In essence, God’s response can be paraphrased as “Were you present when I created the universe and can you grasp all of its intricacies? No, so how dare you inquire!”

However, God’s motive in allowing Job to experience such suffering is made known to the reader of the text at the outset. The settling of a bet was his motive. This should strike all readers as extremely petty. One can also apprehend more than pettiness on a cosmic scale when one considers that all of Job’s children and servants were unwittingly involved, with the result that they all perish at the beginning of the story. They had no direct relation to the petty bet between God and Satan, and no explanation is offered as to how they could possibly be deserving of death. If such senselessness is required in “preventing Job from a life of evil” and in bringing him “closer to God” as Lavern says, one can only wonder how perfectly good, loving and all-powerful this God really is.

Lavern continues and concludes as follows:

Now, jumping to the Gospel of John, chapter 9: This is the story of the disciples coming to Jesus and asking him about this blind man. They ask him “Why is it that he is blind? Is it because of the sins that he committed or the sins of his father?” And this is how Jesus responds: “’It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,’ Jesus answered. ‘This happened so the power of God could be seen in him.’” So it had nothing to do with sins, it had nothing to do with anything that this person had done wrong, but rather was to glorify God and his Kingdom, and at the right time in God's timing, this is what happened. And Jesus ends up healing this man, and the glory of God is shown.

So, there are so many different reasons. It’s not just one or two as to why Satan is allowed to continue to have his way in this world. Some of it is people actually want him. People are drawn to Satan because of their own evil natures. Some of it is because we are being tested. Some of it is to reveal our own nature, so that we can come closer to God.

Alright, I really look forward to comments. Till next time, peace and blessings.

The third and final story Lavern cites as illustration of his reasons for why God does not stop Satan is thematically reminiscent of the preceding two. In all three stories, God is far more culpable than Satan for the sufferings of the characters described in the stories. Let’s review: • In the first story, God creates the first humans with a dual nature already in place in their spiritual constitution for the sole purpose of facilitating their downfall through deliberate temptation, such that the two created people will feel compelled by guilt to be subservient to him. Our bold theologian implies that God enlisted the services of Satan to aid him in bringing about the desired result and essentially wrote the script for the serpent’s dialogue found in Genesis 3.

• In the story of the sufferings of God’s servant Job, God dabbles in a petty wager with Satan to test the strength of Job’s loyalty in the midst of pain, a wager that costs the lives of Job’s entire family with the exception of his wife.

Finally, in the story of the healing of the blind man by Jesus in John 9:1-3, we are given yet another insight into how God is aided in elevating his show of power by teaming up with the helpful scapegoat who is Satan. As Jesus states in the passage, the lifelong blindness experienced by the man was inflicted upon him from birth for the sole purpose of providing a public show of God’s power and “glory” later in life through being healed. The blind man in this story was robbed of a lifetime of sight for no other reason than to allow God (in the person of Jesus) an outlet for glorifying himself by stooping to heal him. If Satan is understood to be a major source of pain and misery in the lives of God’s special creation, we see another example of God enlisting the services of his supposed arch-enemy to attain a self-glorifying end.

Conclusion

Taking Lavern’s mini-sermon as a whole, to what conclusion can we arrive as to how he answers the question he sets out to address? According to his analysis, it would seem God does not stop Satan because God and Satan routinely work together and cooperate with one another to achieve ends that are desirable to both. In concluding this response and further establishing why Lavern’s explanations actually does damage to the character of the God he claims to serve, a discussion of other Biblical passages that refer to the relationship between God and Satan is in order. For consistency of form, the passages I cite are from the New Living Translation of the Bible, the version which Lavern uses in his quotations.

The Bible’s treatment of this relationship appears to justify Lavern’s morally-damaging statements. For example, in the Hebrew Bible, one translation of the term applied to Satan bespeaks a divine messenger sent by God to be an adversary on his behalf. In the story of Balaam as recounted in Numbers 22, for instance, Balaam is visited by God in a dream and instructed to meet Balak, accompanied by the princes of Moab. The next morning, Balaam attempts to evade God’s instructions. In his anger, God sends a messenger (or angel) to kill Balaam as he travels on a donkey across the country. The messenger is invisible to Balaam but is seen by the donkey, who takes immediate action to avoid the danger, bolting off the road and into a field. In his frustration, not knowing that the animal was acting in the interest of his life, Balaam physically beats the donkey. The donkey then speaks to Balaam, asking him why he was beating her. Balaam (who apparently is unfazed by being confronted with a talking donkey), replies, “You have made me look like a fool!” At this point, the messenger appears to Balaam visibly and informs him in verse 32 that he has been sent by God as a satan (satan being a commonly-used Hebrew verb which translates to mean “one who opposes” or “adversary”).

Another use of the Hebrew term describing the adversary’s actions translates as a “divine counselor” of sorts. One example of this is found in a comparison of I Chronicles 21:1 and II Samuel 24:1. In the former, we read that “Satan rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel.” In this account, the census is said to have been encouraged by Satan, for which David is severely punished by God with a plague that kills seventy thousand Israelites. In the latter account, the identical event is described, with the one difference being that here it is God who influences the census rather than Satan: “Once again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he caused David to harm them by taking a census. ‘Go and count the people of Israel and Judah,’ the Lord told him.” Despite this, God still becomes infuriated and punishes the Israelites with the aforementioned plague.

Most scholars of the Hebrew Bible consider the writings in II Samuel to be the original account from which the editor of the I Chronicles text received his information. It is widely believed by scholars that, at the time the text of II Samuel was compiled and edited around 560 BCE, the editors subscribed to the belief common among that religious community at the time that God was the ultimate source of all supernatural actions, whether good or evil. This perspective had changed slightly by 400 BCE, at which time I Chronicles is believed to have been written. The author of the account in I Chronicles views God as one who works indirectly through helping agents. Thus, when we read in I Chronicles 21:1 that Satan rose up and inspired David to take a census of his kingdom, we are likely not reading an account of an adversary working against God, as evidenced by what we are told in II Samuel 24:1.

In Zechariah 3:1-2, Satan is portrayed as a member of God’s council in the court of heaven, in much the same way as he is portrayed in the first two chapters of the Book of Job. In his role on God's council in this passage, Satan objects to the selection of Jeshua as the high priest: “Then the angel showed me Jeshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. The Accuser, Satan, was there at the angel’s right hand, making accusations against Jeshua. And the Lord said to Satan, ‘I, the Lord, reject your accusations, Satan. Yes, the Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebukes you. This man is like a burning stick that has been snatched from the fire.’”

New Testament theology paints a picture of Satan and his role in the world that is dramatically different than his portrayal in the Hebrew Scriptures. The evolution of the figure of Satan from a loyal servant and ally of God to the arch-enemy of God and of all mankind has been traced by many scholars as a transformation that developed during what is called the “intertestamental period” between the close of the Protestant Old Testament and the start of what eventually became the New Testament canon.

The shift in Jewish conceptions of Satan during the transitional intertestamental period was largely occasioned by the influence of the Babylonian religion of Zoroastrianism. In particular, the concepts of angels, of the immortality of the soul, and of Angra Manyu, the God of Evil, were incorporated by Jewish thinkers into their theological system of belief [5]. The Zoroastrian concept of dualism began to surface in a number of Jewish writings, especially those of the Essenes, and eventually became fully integrated into Jewish thought. Shahriar Shahriari quotes J. Duchesne-Guillemin as saying that the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism and Christianity was such that “First, the figure of Satan, originally a servant of God, appointed by Him as His prosecutor, came more and more to resemble Ahriman, the enemy of God” [6]. John Gray remarks that “The development of the concept of Satan as the personal power of evil, who had his counterpart in the archangel Michael, the champion of cause of man in God’s purpose of creation, was probably developed under the influence of Persian Zoroastrian belief in the two conflicting spirits of good and evil” [7].

Thus, the strongly-held Protestant conception of an all-evil opponent of an all-good God who falls from heavenly service and resides over fallen man and hell is taken directly from late period Jewish writings such as the Book of Tobias, Ecclesiasticus, and the Book of Enoch, which were heavily influenced by the Zoroastrian religion of Persia. The irony of this fact is that one of the major reasons Protestants give for their rejection of texts such as these is that, in their understanding, neither Jesus nor his followers refer directly to them. Of course, our friend Lavern takes a different approach and strongly admonishes other Christians to consider the Book of Enoch to be inspired by God. But Lavern’s views represent another irony; he accepts the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal and non-canonical text, as an inspired writing from God in order to emphasize the conflict between God and Satan from a source that describes this conflict in greater depth than any canonical book of the Hebrew Scriptures or New Testament. At the same time, he inconsistently adopts a view of the relationship between God and Satan that writings such as the Book of Enoch largely served to dispel, namely that God and Satan hold common interests and cooperate to realize these interests.

As a result of this integration from influential pagan sources, God came to be understood as wholly good, rather than the source of both good and evil. Satan was conversely characterized as profoundly evil, wholly opposed to God. History was suddenly viewed as a cosmic battle between God and Satan, and the originally-held concept of Satan as God’s helper or lackey disappeared from orthodox systems of theology. Satan and his demons were then believed to be humanity’s greatest and most threatening enemies, and Christians and skeptical nonbelievers alike began to ask the question that is pondered to this day: Why does our all-powerful and perfectly good God not put an end to Satan’s ministry?

NOTES

1. Clark Ashton Smith, “Schizoid Creator,” in Tales of Science and Sorcery (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964).

2. Nathan Dickey, “Inside the Mind of a Creationist: A Critical Analysis of Kent Hovind’s ‘Doctoral Dissertation,’” Nathan Dickey’s Blog, 23 February 2010, http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2010/02/inside-mind-of-creationist-critical_23.html (accessed 6 June 2010).

3. TrustInJC, “Why Does God Not Stop Satan,” YouTube, 31 December 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrNX5RFBC0o (accessed 6 June 2010).

4. On his channel, Lavern has also produced a thirteen-part series of very interesting messages, entitled The Book of Enoch is God Inspired, in which he discusses why he believes the pseudepigraphical and apocryphal Book of Enoch is inspired by God. This series is available at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFD7A02C95EA58BB0&feature=plcp (accessed 6 June 2010). In Part 2 of this series, Lavern goes into fuller detail concerning the conception he has been given from this apocryphal text that humanity was created with two conflicting natures at the outset and that the Tree of Knowledge was a device deliberately used by God to draw out Adam’s and Eve’s dark side of their nature.

For example, he states in this second installment,

“Enoch explains that God understood and knew of Adam and Eve’s evil heart. He understood that they had a rebellious, evil, sinful nature. But they did not understand this, they didn’t know this, and so God used this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to reveal this to them. And so when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened. But it wasn’t because there was something in the fruit that opened their eyes, but rather the act itself. For when they ate of the Tree, their eyes were opened to the fact that they had this evil, sinful, rebellious nature and that they had rebelled against God, and that that sin distanced them from God. Paul understood this, and he had a revelation and understanding of this. And that is why Paul was able to write about the reason and the purpose of the Law of God. God’s Law, Paul explains, was created for the purpose of revealing to us our sinful nature, in the very same way that the Tree of Knowledge was put in the Garden of Eden to reveal Adam and Eve their sinful nature. So this was not some kind of new revelation that Paul received, but rather it was a revelation and an understanding of the writings of Enoch” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lu1Qkl6yLI).

The question Lavern fails to address is why God found it necessary to create humans with an evil nature to begin with. Does this not render God, not Satan, responsible for human rebellion and resultant human suffering, especially given his idea that it was God who orchestrated the temptation in Eden?

5. These concepts are developed in Zoroastrian Scriptures such as the Zend Avesta, the Pahlavi Texts and others. These texts are available online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/ (accessed 6 June 2010).

6. Shahriar Shahriari (July 1997), “Influence of Zoroastrianism on Other Religions,” http://www.sullivan-county.com/z/zor7.htm (accessed 6 June 2010).

7. John Gray, Near Eastern Mythology (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1985), p. 127.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

Avram Noam Chomsky is a world-famous linguist and intellectual political dissident who has written eloquently on many aspects of the world's social and political spectrum. In his many writings on politics, Chomsky places extensive emphasis on American foreign policy and the ways in which it influences events in the world at large [1]. This focus is not surprising, given the fact that America is the world's strongest superpower, with our economy totaling 30% of the total world economy while our population totals only about 5% of the world population. The actions taken by America holds global ramifications across the board, and few intellectuals are possessed of as firm and incisive an understanding of this than Noam Chomsky.

The 1992 documentary film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media is a film adaptation of a 1988 book Chomsky authored with economist and media analyst Edward S. Herman. The book, entitled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, is concerned primarily with the concentration of media ownership [2]. As the wording of the title clearly implies, the book's thesis is that there exists some degree of manipulation that takes place in terms of which viewpoints and political ideas are allowed to be voiced in the media, and which are constructed to appear as though they stand within mainstream acceptance. The documentary film, created by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, expands upon the book's subject of concentration of ownership in news media and how that concentration impacts the range of political discourse in society. Interspersed throughout this exploration are in-depth elucidations of the life and work of Noam Chomsky, including his lifelong research in linguistics and his views on other political matters, as well as biographical details of his personal life.

There are many aspects of the life and work of Noam Chomsky that make for interesting (not to mention heated) discussion. Among these various aspects, and one which the freethinking community may find worth emphasizing, is that Chomsky is a convinced atheist whose earliest cultural experience was in the secular Judaism of his parents, who were both teachers of the Hebrew language. From an early age, he identified and strongly connected with the secular and socialist aspects of the Jewish community in which he was raised. He was born in December of 1928, and was especially influenced between the formative ages of seven and ten by the events that unfolded in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The libertarian socialism driving those fighting for democracy in Spain at the time greatly contributed to the early development of Chomsky's political philosophy.

By this point in his career, Chomsky joins the ranks of intellectuals who have shown the academic community that atheists tend to be provocative thinkers. Of course, the very nature of atheism is provocative in a culture that is dominated by religion, rendering a provocative stance unavoidable for an open atheist. But one fact that is often grossly under-acknowledged is that the one and only thing that unites atheists is our lack of a belief in any god. There is literally no official atheist position on anything else. After all, any community that has produced such figures as Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand, Camilla Paglia, Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is obviously politically diverse and divergent. Emma Goldman (1869-1940) played a pivotal role in shaping the same anarchist tradition that Chomsky now embraces and contributes to with his work. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was an Objectivist who rejected all forms of supernaturalism as being antithetical to reason. These figures questioned the prevailing ideologies of their day, and those who follow in their footsteps maintain that questioning tendency. Noam Chomsky himself is heavily immersed in skeptical inquiry and universal ethics, and he has been and continues to be a tireless critic of the centralization of authority that benefits the few at the expense of very many. The major emphases of the documentary Manufacturing Consent are Chomsky's views and application of ethics and egalitarianism. At one point in the documentary, he recounts an early childhood experience he had in which another child was being bullied at his school. He relates that he remembers wanting to stand up for this bullied child, but became too afraid of being beaten up himself to step in and intervene. Ever since that incident, Chomsky says, he has always felt attracted to standing up for the underdog.

The "Liberal" Media and the Role of Faith in the Manufacture of Consent

The manipulation of political discourse executed by our current system of corporate media, as explored in the film, can be very clearly observed and confirmed by anybody. The most obvious culprit, of course, is Fox News. But interestingly enough, less obvious culprits have included CBS, which has been attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. In 2001, a book by Bernard Goldberg entitled Bias was released [3]. In this book, former CBS news reporter and producer Goldberg charges CBS with being the greatest bastion of liberal lunacy and bias in all media. Then, only three years later, CBS found itself charged with harboring a strong conservative bias in January of 2004, when the progressive advocacy group MoveOn.org attempted to place their anti-Bush ad "Child's Pay" as a broadcast during the Super Bowl [4]. CBS rejected the ad on grounds that it was "controversial," leading MoveOn.org to accuse CBS of being disproportionately conservative and of censoring from that position. These situations serve to illustrate the fact that while political favoritism is clear and unmistakable in some cases (such as Fox News), the direction of favoritism is often somewhat hazier in most other cases.

The grey areas encountered in trying to discern the direction of favoritism is especially the case with so-called "liberal" media. Outlets such as National Public Radio (NPR) is generally considered to be very liberal in the estimation of most critics and the general public. But Chomsky argues that media tends to be very "liberal" only by an almost begrudging necessity, in order to establish the agenda for what mainstream discourse is to consist of. Anything that ventures beyond those established parameters is marginalized and stigmatized. The public is thus encouraged to think of such ideas as being on the fringe and discouraged from looking deeper into what prevailing assumptions create the status quo in the first place. Chomsky's position is that the media does indeed tend to be more liberal, but only to the extent that the powers that be are not questioned. And therein lies the contradiction of the "liberal media." Choosing not to question the powers that be which control the concentration of media ownership is a strikingly conservative outlook. The media is artificially "liberal" in the context of television shows such as CNN's Crossfire (which aired from 1982 to 2005), in which representatives from both the Left and the Right engaged in on-air debate. Because both sides are being presented in this kind of format, this means that for all intents and purposes the network is being "liberal" in allowing both sides to air their say. Yet the "both sides" format implies that the two viewpoints being presented are all we have at our disposal, and this sets the parameter for what kinds of dissenting political discourse are tolerated. Coming out of the anarchist tradition, Chomsky seeks to question the forms of authority that dominate the mainstream media in the form of such parameter-setting, in order to realize the egalitarian vision he champions.

The following quote from the film encapsulates in a nutshell the overriding theme that is fleshed out in the course of the documentary:

Elizabeth Sikorovsky ("American Focus" Student Radio): From Washington, D.C., he's intellectual, author and linguist Professor Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: what is that title meant to describe?

Chomsky: Well, the title is actually borrowed from a book by Walter Lippmann written back around 1921, in which he described what he called the "manufacture of consent" as a "revolution" in "the practice of democracy." What it amounts to is a technique of control, and he said this was useful and necessary because the common interest, the general concerns of all people, elude the public. The public just isn't up to dealing with them. And they have to be the domain of what he called a "specialized class."

[Cut to footage of a lecture delivered by Chomsky]: Notice that that's the opposite of the standard view about democracy. There's a version of this expressed by the highly respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was very influential on contemporary policy makers. His view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason but faith. And this naive faith requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth-maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

This is a worthwhile point to make in discussions concerning why Chomsky's ideas are relevant to skepticism and atheism. Only through rational discourse and critical thinking can we discuss what impacts us as a culture and as a country with immense political influence in a way that examines all sides of any given issue in order to discern which is best supported by available evidence. The promotion of faith in religion and supernaturalism and the promotion of the acceptance of authoritarianism that comes through faith can be extremely destructive. The promotion of faith and authoritarianism leads inevitably to complacent believers blindly accepting what they are told without further inquiry or examination. Such promotion can also lead to religiously-motivated terrorist movements. A striking example of this is seen in the case of Chuck Spingola, a proudly self-described Christian terrorist, who in 2004 called upon his fellow Christian extremists on his "Army of God" website to carry out their religious duty by waging a wave of violence against abortion clinics and doctors [5]. Spingola has faith that his god decrees higher laws, and therefore his faith tells him that he has no need to be a contributing member of society. The notion he holds that says he can pass judgment on his fellow citizens comes about because his is a faith-based position, not a rational one. This faith-based position tells people like Spingola that the commands of his invisible friend is the sufficient legitimizing factor for his personal murderous prejudices. The "naive faith that requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications" that Chomsky brings up is an important and worthwhile concept to consider when examining the contrasts between faith and reason. What we discover is that the "myth-maker" can often inspire dangerous actions that go beyond mere harmless belief in irrationalities.

Football, Fundamentalism and Alternative Media

The most negative feedback to this documentary that Noam Chomsky received was in response to his statements concerning sports coverage in news media. Chomsky's view is that sports coverage is used to dumb down people and make them largely uncritical, to divert the public's analytical thinking skills towards matters that are not important in terms of current events. There is some validity in this argument; if everyone in America is occupied with worrying about trivial issues, such as another breakup between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, then perhaps they are not remaining as astutely aware as they should be of issues such as expansions to the Patriot Act that were snuck under the door by the Bush administration. While it is my contention that Ben Affleck and J.Lo can be the basis of worthwhile ideological and cultural analysis, as can football, the points raised by Chomsky deserve to be seriously taken into account. He says,

It's not the case, as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, it's the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what you would nowadays call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think; because you've got a bludgeon over their head and you can control what they do. But when the State loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem: It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule. And therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called "propaganda," the manufacture of consent, the creation of necessary illusions, various ways of either marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.

Now there are other media too, whose basic social role is quite different. It's a diversion. There's the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at, you know, the guys who - Joe Six-Pack, that kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people's brains. This is an oversimplification, but for the eighty percent (or whatever they are), the main thing for them is to divert them, to get them to watch National Football League and to worry about, you know, a mother with child with six heads, or whatever you pick up . . . on the supermarket stands and so on. Or, you know, look at astrology or get involved in, you know, fundamentalist stuff or something or other. Just get them away. You know, get them away from things that matter. And for that, it's important to reduce their capacity to think.

Sports . . . another crucial example of the indoctrination system idea. For one thing, because it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. It keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in sports. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in. They have the most exotic information and understanding about, you know, all kind of arcane issues. And the press undoubtedly does a lot with this. I remember in high school . . . I suddenly asked myself at one point, Why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don't know anybody on the team, you know. It's got nothing to do with me. I mean, why am I cheering for my team? It doesn't make any sense, you know. But the point is it does make sense. It's a way of building up irrational attitudes and submission to authority and, you know, group cohesion behind the . . . leadership elements. In fact, it's training in irrational jingoism.

Those are indeed fighting words, and I will here contribute only a slight disagreement to the fray. I can readily understand and agree that trivial media such as celebrity worship, football, etc. could very well serve as a diversion. But I do not see the fundamentalist thinking that he mentions as being a tool used for drawing people away from involvement in society. I would argue that fundamentalist movements are a tool used to draw people into being more involved, albeit from the basis of a particular ideological agenda that does not contribute to the healthy involvement Chomsky is referring to. Again, one need look no further than Chuck Spingola and his "Army of God" movement for confirmation of this fact. Religious fundamentalism, especially as it has been developing in this country, has been an extremely useful tool in the hands of the Religious Right, which is very politically motivated. The manipulation of fundamentalism has been a great asset for the likes of John Ashcroft and the late Jerry Falwell. To a considerably large extent, Americans have even substituted fundamentalism for politics. One can also argue that fundamentalism is dumbing down the masses while simultaneously mobilizing them. But the crucial difference is that fundamentalism is dumbing people down and force-feeding dogma in a way that is useful to groups with political agendas, whereas the kind of diversion characterized by things like astrology, football or Trading Spaces is not particularly pursuant to encouraging participation in movements that have important effects on the political or social landscape. Even if sports as covered by the media is a "training in irrational jingoism" (which I think is a valid observation), getting people to zone out on football cannot be said to satisfy or aid groups with a political agenda to attain power. On the other hand, religious fundamentalism, supernaturalism and conspiracy theories are far more useful forces. Those are means of manufacturing consent that are actually useful politically to groups such as the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority and other organizations under the umbrella of the Religious Right. These forces are also useful in the service of an elite who have a unity of interests. One need look no further than the Bush White House of the last decade, during which our country was subjected to Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Mr. Halliburton himself, Dick Cheney.

In regards to Chomsky's statements on sports being a tool that serves to keep people from worrying about issues of more considerable import to their lives, I wish to play the devil's advocate. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. There is nothing inherently wrong with sports. If people find football games entertaining, I see nothing draconian in indulging in that entertainment. There is no nefarious movement to dumb down the public with high school football games. Chomsky does have a valid point in the sense that media attention is often excessively geared toward trivial and downright stupid content. Chomsky also has a valid point in that corporate news networks such as Fox and (to some degree) MSNBC do engage in the manufacturing of pseudo-stories about an issue they allege is important. They will present such stories through talking heads that give their view about why a given issue is important, when in reality the story is bullshit and lacks substance. Oftentimes, the stories presented by these corporate news outlets contain nothing that holds any bearing to Joe Blow from Idaho sitting in his living room. Such stories are not specifically relevant to him, but the news media is very skilled in persuading him that he should be invested in an obscure social issue playing out among people across the country. This manufacturing of pseudo-stories in corporate news can be viewed as a good example of the kind of distraction Chomsky is referring to.

However, I argue that there can be political and social value in following sports, largely depending on who the participants in the sport are and the extent to which meaningful symbolism is involved. One figure that comes to mind is the heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali. As a black Muslim, Ali experienced a great deal of trouble in working to to maintain his boxing career because of his refusal to serve in the Vietnam war on religious grounds. Also, in the degrees to which women are allowed to participate in certain sports, there is opportunity to analyze the feminist significance of sports. There do exist aspects to sports whose larger implications can be meaningfully pondered. This is where I find Chomsky's assessment to be terribly simplistic.

However, buried within his remarks is the fact that Chomsky stands in awe of human creativity and is interested in encouraging as many people as possible to rise above being mere cogs in a machine by putting their intelligence to application. It is on this point that I could not agree more wholeheartedly with Chomsky. Of particular importance is his comment that, given the rather intricate analysis that ordinary people are able to deliver on call-in shows related to sports, it would be great if they were able to engage in comparable analysis with regard to political and social issues. There are media outlets that attempt to provide such opportunity for important political and social analysis, but their success is often limited by the barriers of big business demands and what kind of shows get the best ratings. This is why alternative media is crucial to the survival of democracy. I do not think it is any accident that most of the footage for the documentary Manufacturing Consent comes from a number of interviews of Noam Chomsky on public access television shows and community radio stations. The subliminal message of the documentary strongly praises and promotes the efforts of alternative media. Noam Chomsky gives considerable credit to the benefit to social and political critical analysis that alternative media provides, and for this reason alone this film is worth viewing and discussing.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media can be viewed online at http://www.hulu.com/watch/118171/manufacturing-consent or downloaded from http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufacturingConsent_0.

Notes

1. Noam Chomsky (2003). Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books. I recommend this macroscopic analysis of U.S. foreign policy from WWII to the Iraq War as the best place to start for anyone interested in getting a sense of Chomsky's views on foreign policy.

2. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.

3. Bernard Goldberg (2001). Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing.

4. This ad can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9WKimKIyUQ&feature=related

5. Dean Schabner. "A Call to Arms for 'Christian Terrorists'." ABC News 22 January 2004. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96790.

Songs of Human Sacrifice: An Exploration of the Theme of Redemption in Christian Hymns

Many people for whom the experience of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian atmosphere is completely foreign are liable to be quite surprised, even shocked, at some of the songs that are taught to children in fundamentalist Christian churches. Within the context of speaking to and comparing the experiences of other atheists who were raised religiously fundamentalist versus atheists who had a completely secular and non-religious upbringing, several interesting observations arise. On a very general and superficial level, one finds that there tends to be a wide understanding regarding the religious doctrine that inspires Christian hymns among those who were raised in that environment. On the other hand, those who are unfamiliar with religious culture sometimes lack a grasp of the total experience of the fundamentalist upbringing, including what it means to be entrenched in a church from an early age and to be surrounded by that distinctive kind of community. People who have deconverted from Christianity will often express that they completely understand the psychology of religious belief, and why it is that people can commit to and believe in a delusion.

Then there are other nonbelievers who have never had religious belief who are incredulous as to how anybody can believe in the basic tenets of Christianity and who do not understand how a reasonable person can possibly affirm it. These lifelong nonbelievers will often speak of friends they have whom they describe as very intelligent and who even understand particular aspects of the sciences, but whose usually-apparent reasoning skills seem to fly out the window the moment they begin speaking about their religion. And they do not understand how and why this occurs.

But for those of us nonbelievers who were raised fundamentalist, the answer to this phenomenon of human nature is not difficult to come by; we understand how and why this cognitive dissonance occurs, because we used to think the same way. Having made my company with several ex-Christians as well as current Christians of late, I do not think one has to be in any way unintelligent in order to believe in religion. Some atheists assert that there must be some kind of chemical imbalance at work on intelligent people who believe in religion. But this is not necessarily true, either. A chemical imbalance is not needed to explain the phenomenon of religious belief among the well-educated; all that is needed for fundamentalist religion to take hold is successful indoctrination.

But let us return to the subject of the shock lifelong nonbelievers are prone to express when learning of some of the lyrics contained in the songs taught to children in churches. I personally remember these songs, and my memory clearly recalls singing them when I was as young as four years old. I do not remember much else from the time I was four years old, but I remember these songs to this day. This serves to demonstrate that persistent dogmatic instruction works very well. Even more interesting, though, is another experience that nonbelievers who were raised fundamentalist have often expressed between themselves: when one progresses beyond and disposes of a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, he or she will sometimes go back to read a passage from the Bible and be surprised to find what they read is dramatically different from what they remember reading in their religious past. What they read will often not be the story they recall. At this point, one begins to realize just how much of what she read was impacted by what she was told she was reading in lieu of what she was actually reading. Organized religion has mastered the art of suppressing freedom of thought among its flock. The same experience holds true of traditional Christian hymns. For instance, songs such as "Are You Washed in the Blood?" seem normal to a great many people. Yet when I hear and consider that hymn today, I have a mental image of people bathing themselves in human blood, and the whole imagery strikes me as very off-putting.

Speaking as one who had attended Sunday School regularly as a child, from the time I was a toddler to the time I was in high school, I can make the observation that children raised in church environments for the most part get little more than the nice stories of the Bible, or Bible stories revised such that they are made more palatable for modern-day values. For example, I have seen children's books about Noah's Ark that depict fluffy little animals walking up into the ark, complete with a rainbow at the end of the tale. What is effectively glossed over is the part of the story that involves billions of people being drowned in a global genocide. It is not that this aspect of the story is completely glossed over; I can personally attest to the fact that children in fundamentalist churches are indeed taught that the world was destroyed, that people were wicked and killed as a result. Still, the overriding focus of the Sunday-School version of the story is that God loved Noah and his family and preserved them from the horrible flood. The nasty parts are slipped in and included, but they are minimized. The global genocide of billions via drowning is somewhat out-of-focus in the background of the proverbial camera, and it is presented as normalized. The rendition is essentially structured as "God needed to destroy the world because everyone was wicked. But Noah was good, and so God saved Noah and a selection of animals from the impending destruction." When a fundamentalist Christian defends the story of Genesis chapters 6-8, he is defending it as a righteous story. By defending this story, he is asserting that everybody, including children and animals, deserved to die, except Noah and his family. Such a defense is morally backward.

Another example of a Biblical story whose immoral elements very often become the subject of much minimization and normalization is seen in the story of Abraham's God-given orders to sacrifice his son, as related in Genesis 22. The message conveyed by this story is that if God tells a follower to kill his child, it is morally good and upstanding to intend to carry that command out, regardless of whether or not God stops the act from being completed. The story relates that Abraham was virtuous for being willing to fulfill God's murderous bidding, and for not questioning the command. This is why Abraham is later listed in the New Testament (Hebrews 11) as a man of great faith, for he was willing to do whatever he was asked by the deity without question, including killing his own child. The fact that the murderous act was halted by God is extremely significant to the Christian mindset, and this divine halting is consequently the most dwelled-upon aspect of the story. Yet in defending this story, many Christians do not seem to understand just what they are advocating. The part of the story in which the child sacrifice is stopped at the last minute is very minor in comparison to the core message that is advocated, namely that unquestioning faith is a good thing, including when it involves an intention to murder one's child as a sacrifice to God.

The Value of Love and the Christian Doctrine of Human Worthlessness in Context

In his 2008 album What If We, Brandon Heath beautifully delivers a modern hymn called "Love Never Fails" [1]. This song is a simple ode to the value of love, and it is the simplicity of the message that confers aesthetic quality to the song. If one was not aware that this particular song is actually rooted in Scripture, he or she might hear the song and not even realize that Brandon Heath is in fact singing a hymn. There is very little in the song to hint at any explicitly supernatural element beyond the message that love is valuable. One line in the song's lyrics reads, "Love will not cease / At the end of time." It is at this juncture that we perhaps find a hint that Heath is referring to a concept akin to God's love continuing for eternity after the world has ended. Even so, the listener would not likely read that much into the song if he or she was unfamiliar with the Biblical passage upon which it is based. When heard independently of a knowledge of its source material, "Love Never Fails" can be understood as simply a poetic statement about the endurance of love, and a person unfamiliar with the Bible is justified in understanding the song in that very general way.

The Biblical passage upon which Brandon Heath's song is based is found in the New Testament book of I Corinthians, a very eloquent passage commonly attributed to the Apostle Paul. This is a passage that is frequently and quite appropriately cited at weddings. The following is an abridged portion of this passage:

And now I will show you the most excellent way.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

(I Corinthians 12:31b, 13:2-8, 13, New International Version).

This is a beautiful passage; certainly it is one that I, even as an atheist, personally consider to be one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible. Most people recognize instinctively the beauty of these verses, and most people greatly value the kind of love expressed in them, regardless of personal belief concerning the Bible as a whole. As mentioned above, the fact that this passage is quoted frequently at weddings is quite apropos, being as it is a beautiful statement about the enduring nature of love, the forgiving nature of love, and what it means to look at a person in love that is unconditional. This passage conveys a sense that a life lived without love is less than it can be and should be. The Christian will also consider this to be a beautiful passage, but will unnecessarily qualify this with a belief that it is rendered beautiful by virtue of being inspired by God [2]. This Christian will assert that the passage in question was actually written by God, using Paul as merely a vessel. In other words, God used Paul as something of a scribe who was merely transcribing God's words, and what we have preserved is God's statement on love. This view has many problems attached to it. Perhaps most importantly, such a view is highly demeaning. I do not believe that God wrote this through Paul. I believe that Paul wrote this, and that he was expressing his own view on love. Furthermore, I contend that a human being is fully capable of expressing this view, that a human being is fully capable of appreciating love, and that a human being is fully capable of writing a beautiful passage regarding love. The valuable aspects of love can be understood and expressed by human beings in such a way that other human beings are touched so deeply that the writing endures for two thousand years. This is a testament to the insight of humanity; we do not need a God to give us this kind of enduring literature. In those who claim that we need God in order to gain any worthwhile insight, we see an example of the way in which religionists portray God as always receiving credit for what we call goodness, while people always receive the blame for the bad side of life.

A Hymn to Humanism

In 1855, American poet Walt Whitman produced what is to this day his best-known poem, "Song of Myself." This very lengthy poem is a humanistic hymn of sorts which carries overtones of Transcendentalist thought, a thematic current which Whitman (the subject and center of the poem) makes use of to develop an expansive persona for himself that shatters the conventional limits socially and traditionally imposed on the self. In one portion of the poem, Whitman writes,

Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other [3].

The "Song of Myself," in its entirety (which I strongly encourage all to read), is an ode to the human self and a celebration of the human self (something most Christians would presumably consider "evil," as the poet is worshiping himself instead of their God; this observation is peripheral to the point at hand, but will become important later). For the sake of the present argument, let us assume that when Whitman writes "I believe in you my soul," he is referring to a spiritual belief in a supernatural soul, and that such is what he is describing. Even while making a reference to such a belief, at least on the surface, Whitman nevertheless makes it unambiguously clear that even given his affirmation of whatever it is he is calling his "soul," he presents this affirmation in egalitarian proportion to his physical aspects. That is, he portrays his physical self as no less acceptable, no less celebratory, and no less a part of him than whatever else he is or may be. He is declaring that whatever aspects of him exist are all aspects that are worthy of celebration, not condemnation. In Whitman's mind, even if the soul exists, it is neither better nor worse than his physical existence, a sentiment expressed in the line "the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other."

This is the philosophical area in which redemptive religion utterly fails in terms of fulfilling human lives. Redemptive religion does insist on an abasement of the human condition, and even an abasement of mere human existence. Redemptive religion teaches that we as human beings cannot achieve, cannot be good, and cannot be worthwhile without first valuing the immaterial aspect of oneself that is alleged to be superior than the physical aspect. According to the doctrines of redemptive religion, the immaterial aspect of the person is so superior to the physical person that it is the only aspect worthy of enduring forever. And according to the religionists, it is in fact the physical nature of humans that condemns them on whatever level and to whatever degree is required for a redemptive religion to make sense.

The writings of William Shakespeare are, of course, not to be overlooked by those engaged in purveying themes of beauty in literature that have transcended the ages. There is such a large number of beautiful texts by Shakespeare that it is difficult to make a selection from them to share as examples in a single essay. However, the following quotation, which comes from an individual writing about Shakespeare, is a sufficient capsule summary of the power of Shakespeare. The article in which it appears is relevant to our discussion, for the author in the end appears to fall for the kind of dualistic dichotomy of human nature that Walt Whitman, for example, sought successfully to avoid:

In the class of literature we have here described, Shakespeare's dramas stand supreme. They are not religious works. They are not Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu Scriptures. They are what we call secular dramas, worldly plays if you like. But so transcendent is their beauty and so luminous is their internal content, that they have held countless millions enthralled during their uninterrupted performance on the world's stages ever since their first appearance over three hundred and fifty years ago [4].

Thus far, the author gives inspiring testament to the talent of an excellent human writer. Note, however, what this writer goes on to say:

People see and read the plays for pleasure and pastime. In doing so they expose themselves to a magic that, by its very nature, works upon their inner being, imparting to it basic patterns of the good and the true and the beautiful, charging it with impulses that propel it upward on its godward way. The magical influence which they so exercise derives from that element which flowed into them from super-human levels. These elements are purely spiritual. It is their presence in the dramas that truly makes of Shakespeare's plays humanity's Lay Bible.

This conclusion strikes me as a slap in the face to what the writer just credited Shakespeare with in the selfsame paragraph. To suggest that Shakespeare was only capable of writing what he did because of his spiritual aspect, or that we are only capable of appreciating his works because of his spiritual aspect, is utterly wrong and constitutes an affront to humanity's artistic achievements. Yet this is a common tactic; when all else fails in the attempt to demonstrate that something good has a religious origin, those who argue along these lines can always fall back on the notion that when something is ubiquitously recognized as good, whether it be the St. Paul's view on love, Walt Whitman or Shakespeare, it is proved that it is religious in nature. A similar tendency to axiomatically equate what is good with what is religious is seen in the religionists' common response to secularists who point out the exceedingly large number of atheists who have done good things for society that make lasting differences and impact peoples' lives for the better. Their response is almost always that this only shows that these atheists "have morality written on their hearts by God."

The Christian message of redemptive religion, in essence, is that as a human being, there is something so wrong with you that you require redemption. While the details differ across denominations, this redemption is generally redemption from a state of being that is in some way separated from God, whether that be eternal hellfire or total annihilation. According to orthodox Christianity, the way to be reconciled to God is through being redeemed, which is achieved by the death of Jesus Christ. This doctrine has its roots in rituals described in the Old Testament which involved sacrificing a spotless lamb to the deity Yahweh. In the Christian New Testament, the spotless lamb is represented by the character of Jesus Christ, who was literally executed as a human sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity. These sins apparently were - and continue to be - so heinous that they required execution as the price to be paid for their absolvement.

One of the most vivid descriptions of just how despicable humanity is in the eyes of the Christian God is seen in Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Edwards, an eighteenth-century American theologian, writes at considerable length in this sermon about how vile and contemptible all humans are in their sins, likening humanity to loathsome insects being held over a fire:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell [5].

For Christians who are orthodox in their theology, there is no way to argue that a death was required as the price of redemption for your failings, and then proceed to claim that your failings are minor. If one accepts the idea that Jesus died for our sins, and that the death represented perfect justice, one is compelled to also accept that the penalty prescribed for whatever is flawed and wrong with people is a murderous human sacrifice. Christianity demands an acceptance that human sacrifice is the just price to compensate for the worthlessness of humanity. The upshot of the whole grisly theological scenario is said to be that Jesus Christ came back from the dead after his execution, and that this was a demonstration that believers in Christ will also resurrect from their death and live again just as Christ did at his resurrection. But this has nothing to do with the fact that, according to Christianity, the payment price for the sins of humanity is a human sacrifice. Within Christianity, the idea that we can do anything to redeem ourselves is absolutely eviscerated. There is nothing we are capable of that can possibly redeem us. For if there was a way to redeem ourselves through our own efforts, Jesus would not have been demanded as sacrifice. The price of redemption is negated if it is possible for a person to ever be worthy of not being separated from God eternally. Whether the specific denominational doctrine dictates total annihilation or eternal life in torment, you are said to deserve whatever constitutes the bad side of entering the afterlife. Furthermore, you are powerless to effect anything that will change that undeserving condition. Only the execution that Jesus suffered satisfies the arbitrary price that Yahweh concocted to pay himself off. In essence, Yahweh is represented in Christianity as insisting that he will accept us with him in the heavenly abode for eternity only if somebody will kill somebody, a sacrifice that must be a perfect, sinless person.

Now, Beloved, Let Us Turn to Our Hymnals . . .

The foregoing discussion was pursuant to explaining the Christian doctrine of redemption, such that the hymns to be considered in the rest of this essay make sense. These hymns are in some ways symbolic, yet it should be understood that even in their symbolism, they are referring to an actual execution. The blood that is referenced in these hymns is literal blood according to the mindset of the Christian. What the faithful sing about every Sunday morning is not symbolic blood; it is the blood of an executed man killed as a human sacrifice to atone for how worthless and despicable people are.

1) "Are You Washed in the Blood?" ~ written and composed by Elisha A. Hoffman in 1878:

Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing pow'r?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

CHORUS
Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

This invitational song is one that is often sung at the end of the church service as a way of encouraging emotionally-charged conversion and baptism. The "Lamb" is a reference to the altar sacrifices described in the Old Testament. The song uses the imagery of a lamb sacrifice as a metaphor, but it is referring to a human sacrifice that they do believe literally occurred and was justified.

2) "There is Power in the Blood" ~ written and composed by Lewis E. Jones in 1899:

Would you be free from the burden of sin?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.
Would you o’er evil a victory win?
There’s wonderful power in the blood.

CHORUS
There is power, power, wonder working power
In the blood of the Lamb.
There is power, power, wonder working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb.

Would you be whiter, much whiter than snow?
There’s power in the blood, power in the blood.
Sin stains are lost in its life giving flow.
There’s wonderful power in the blood.

The first line asks the listener/reader if he or she wants to get rid of sin. The second line is a reflection of the Christian belief that Jesus' death redeems one from that sin. The third and fourth lines tell us that if you want to win over the evil forces plaguing your life, appealing to this human sacrifice is a good course to venture into. The "good" is the redemptive human sacrifice. And when the hymn states that "Sin stains are lost in its life giving flow," a flow of literal blood is being referred to. Coming just short of raising images of gushes of blood, the hymn is speaking of blood that was shed on a crucifix from a human sacrifice. I humbly suggest that this is insanity! I can even conceive of a comedy bit crassly satirizing the ideas presented in this and similar hymns, perhaps in the vein of Mitchell and Webb, in which a Christian arrives in heaven only to find himself being welcomed with huge buckets of blood and approached with invitations to dive in and bathe.

3) "Not All the Blood of Beasts" ~ written by Isaac Watts in 1709:

Not all the blood of beasts
On Jewish altars slain
Could give the guilty conscience peace
Or wash away the stain.

But Christ, the heav’nly Lamb,
Takes all our sins away;
A sacrifice of nobler name
And richer blood than they.

Believing, we rejoice
To see the curse remove;
We bless the Lamb with cheerful voice,
And sing His bleeding love.

If you are a Christian, you will immediately understand the meaning of this hymn's title, which makes reference to the belief that all the sacrifices of animals in the Old Testament system were not sufficient for absolvement of sins, which is why Jesus was required to be killed as a sacrifice instead. Notice that this hymn throws words and phrases such as "love" and "bless with cheerful voice" into the mix. This is to suggest that the human sacrifice that is required to make redemption possible is supposedly a gesture of love and a cause of rejoicing. This is what even young children are taught.

4) "Nothing But the Blood" ~ written and composed by Robert Lowry in 1876:

Oh! precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Nothing can for sin atone,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
Naught of good that I have done,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This is all my hope and peace,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
This is all my righteousness,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

This hymn heavily alludes to the theological issues raised earlier in this essay concerning the doctrine that there is nothing any person can do on their own to effect salvation. As irredeemable creatures, there is nothing we can do to redeem ourself. As discussed above, this doctrine is one that strikes me as a singularly degrading vision of humanity and displays a contempt of human goodness. The last four lines in the hymn as quoted conveys the idea that all human righteousness, including anything good that you or I possibly can be, is relegated to the blood of a brutally-executed human sacrifice. One can hardly conceive of a more morally-bankrupt way of thinking.

5) "Just As I Am, Without One Plea" ~ written by Charlotte Elliott in 1834:

Just as I am, without one plea
But that thy blood was shed for me,
And that thou bidst me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

Just as I am, and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot,
To thee whose blood can cleanse each spot,
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!

It is interesting to note that the last quoted verse of this hymn acknowledges doubt, only to say that experiencing trouble in believing or being conflicted is a trivial matter. The doubter is encouraged to simply push the doubt aside, to disregard it and continue pushing toward simple acceptance. It seems there is no scarcity of Christian literature devoted to addressing doubts, and this is quite telling. The reason there is so much doubt among thinking Christians that occasions such literature is simple: Christianity is actually fairly hard to seriously believe.

6) "Whiter Than Snow" ~ written by James L. Nicholson in 1872:

Lord Jesus, let nothing unholy remain,
Apply Thine own blood and extract every stain;
To get this blest cleansing, I all things forego—
Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Lord Jesus, look down from Thy throne in the skies,
And help me to make a complete sacrifice;
I give up myself, and whatever I know—
Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Lord Jesus, for this I most humbly entreat,
I wait, blessed Lord, at Thy crucified feet,
By faith for my cleansing, I see thy blood flow—
Now wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

The middle verse of this hymn is included here as a fitting and direct response to people who invoke any form of Pascal's Wager as an argument for Christianity (a wager, by the way, that works for literally any religion or belief system that involves a threat of horrible proportions for unbelief). According to one facet of this wager, if you believe and you come to the end of life being wrong about that belief, you will not have given up or lost anything. Nicholson's hymn gives the lie to this notion, for as the hymn puts it, Christianity is "a complete sacrifice; I give up myself, and whatever I know—." According to this message, giving up one's entire life is integral and indispensable to believing in Christianity. One does not give up nothing if he or she ends up being wrong; everything is given up in the process of belief.

7) "Saved by the Blood" ~ written by Fanny Crosby in 1875 (not to be confused with S.J. Henderson's 1902 hymn of the same title):

We’re saved by the blood
That was drawn from the side
Of Jesus our Lord,
When He languished and died.

CHORUS
Hallelujah to God,
For redemption so free;
Hallelujah, hallelujah,
Dear Savior, to Thee.

That blood is a fount
Where the vilest may go
And wash till their souls
Shall be whiter than snow.

In this hymn, Crosby speaks of redemption as being "so free." The glaring problem with this is that someone died a brutal death, through blood "drawn from the side" like a "fount." That is anything but free.

8) "Amazing Grace" ~ written by John Newton in 1779:

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev'd;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ'd!

Thro' many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

"Amazing Grace" is a hymn that is of particular interest in our overview. Many people familiar with the cultural atmosphere a religious community tend not to recall any elements that are particularly degrading in the hymn. This is likely because "Amazing Grace" is perhaps the most famous Christian hymn of all time. Being performed tens of millions of times annually as it is, the philosophy embedded in the song can easily become obscured by its traditional familiarity. Another reason this hymn is important to consider is because many people are often under the impression that hymns replete with barbarism, blood and contempt for humanity are not popular or representatively selected among many religious communities. "Amazing Grace" is the counter-argument to this perception, for it is an extremely popular tune. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, religiously or secularly persuaded, who is not familiar with the song.

The history of modern interpretation surrounding this hymn is of particular interest, in that many modern groups who perform this song have struck out the word "wretch" and replaced it with a variety of other words that come off as less harsh in their estimation of humanity. Such replacement is completely contrary to the intention of the song, for the "wretch" is practically its entire focus. I have encountered several such versions of "Amazing Grace" that strike out the word "wretch," and can testify that while the striking out of the word diminishes its demeaning message, both the power and logic of the song as a whole is diminished as well. Catholic poet and essayist Kathleen Norris criticizes such revisions well by pointing out that "the bowdlerization of the text that results is thoroughly wretched English, and also laughably bland, which, taken together, is not an inconsiderable accomplishment" [6]. The bowdlerization of hymns turns up elsewhere as well. For instance, "Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861, contains a verse that reads "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." Some modern versions have modified that particular verse to read "As he died to make all holy, let us live to make all free." This modification effectively whitewashes the fact that "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is a war song whose contextual inspiration was the American Civil War.

These are good examples of people trying valiantly to pretend that these songs really do not say that which they really do say. More significantly, we also see in these modifications a pretense concerning doctrinal undertones. It is not as if using the word "wretch" distorts the doctrine that the hymn purports to represent and convey. On the contrary, the word "wretch" reflects the doctrine quite robustly. If an execution is required to compensate for what you committed and for your shortcomings, you must have extremely bad character traits. In this doctrinal scenario, you did not carry out something slightly wayward. You are manifestly evil to the core of your being. If one accepts the redemptive doctrine ascribed to the death and resurrection of Jesus, then a rejection of the word "wretch" is conspicuously inconsistent. The author of the hymn "Amazing Grace" is literally its defining context. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave trader who experienced a violent, life-threatening storm aboard one of his slave ships in 1748 at the age of twenty-two. This storm resulted in the ship filling with water and beginning to sink, and also resulted in Newton's conversion to Christianity. He then wrote "Amazing Grace" with this experience in mind, as a reflection on what a terrible person he was and his amazement at being spared death. The hymn emphasizes the wickedness of the poet in dramatic contrast to the undeserved grace he received, and it is this contrast that gives the hymn its powerful meaning. The reality is that in order to believe that a bloody human sacrifice is a justifiable divine response to your life, you must necessarily believe that you are a wretched being, a "loathsome insect" as Edwards would have it.

9) "Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?" ~ written by Isaac Watts in 1707:

Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For sinners such as I?
[originally, For such a worm as I?]

CHORUS
At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away,
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day!

Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, Thine—
And bathed in its own blood—
While the firm mark of wrath divine,
His Soul in anguish stood.

Was it for crimes that I had done
He groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut his glories in,
When Christ, the mighty Maker died,
For man the creature’s sin.

In the history of modern interpretations and version of this hymn, we find instances of lyrical bowdlerization similar to those seen in hymns such as "Amazing Grace" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Many people apparently do not appreciate the negative implications inherent in how the singer is asked to self-reference. This offending line originally came at the end of the first verse: "For such a worm as I." This phrase has been changed to "For sinners such as I," amd this revision now appears in most in-print hymnals and on most websites on which the lyrics are posted. On his website, Christian educator and columnist Keith Drury wrote an article not only seeking to explain and defend this revision, but also to condemn those few people in his congregation who prefer to keep the "worm" line as people with negative attitudes and poor self-esteem. He writes:

The rest of us just sing louder and drown out these sour notes. There are far more choir members singing songs of self-esteem than Reformers singing songs of total depravity. Since we’ve already rejected their “worm theology” we just ignore their warnings. We continue to preach a happy face doctrine of self esteem. People to like it. Which is why so many last Sunday changed the lyrics of Amazing Grace." We might think John Newton was a wretches [sic] and worm, but not us, thank you very much. We’re far better than that [7].

There is even a point early in his short article where Drury remarks "To be quite honest we don’t believe we were ever wretches—even before getting saved. Basically we think of ourselves as fairly nice people who became Christians and added meaning to our lives." But if Christian ministers such as Drury understand and accept what they are teaching as far as the Christian doctrine of redemption, they are in no position to deny that they and everyone else are worthy of execution. It is of course very amusing that some will sing about worms and some will sing about sinners (even in the same congregation), while both sides believe themselves to be better than the other. But what is truly amusing is that a congregation can reject a self-reference to "worm" or "wretch" and change it accordingly, but then continue to consider the redemptive meaning of the song to be intact.

"Was it for crimes that I had done / He groaned upon the tree?" This line is asking a powerful rhetorical question: Was it for me that he died, because of the crimes I committed? The answer to this is a resounding yes. According to Christian doctrine, an execution is required to pay for the acts of each and every person. The Christian cannot turn around and offer "But I was a good person." Good people do not need to be executed! Drury commits this error when he and his congregation sing of the blood of redemption and of Jesus' death freeing them from their sins, but then proceeds to state that "We might think John Newton was a [wretch] and worm, but not us, thank you very much. We’re far better than that." How can they claim that it would be justice for somebody to be brutally executed on their behalf, for their wrongdoings, and then turn around and state that they are primarily concerned with self-esteem above all? They are not crusaders of self-esteem, they are crusaders of total confusion. They do not make any sense.

The Sunday worshiper who self-references as a wretch and as a worm makes much more sense than people like Drury, for one who self-references as a wretch and a worm understands the doctrine. How much clearer do matters have to be laid out doctrinally than "When Christ, the might Maker died / For man the creature's sin"? Encapsulated in this hymn and the other hymns we have considered in this treatise is a twisted and demeaning philosophy that advocates scapegoating in lieu of personal responsibility for one's own actions. These hymns and the thousands of others that Christianity has inspired present us with a view of humanity that is utterly demeaning and degrading, a view designed to instill guilt and fear in people. And where guilt and fear are the tactics used to keep any system afloat, there is a sure indication that such a system should be discarded, and that a brighter vision of humanity's potential should be pursued.

NOTES

1. Brandon Heath, "Love Never Fails," from What If We (Reunion, 2008). This song can be heard online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2HMuADj5mA (accessed 14 May 2010).

2. Not everything I say throughout this treatise will be qualified fully. But here I should take the time to say at the outset the obvious fact that not all Christians believe the same way. I understand Christians hold different views concerning the inspiration of Scripture, and I am not describing all Christians when I speak of this belief or the others I discuss.

3. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Inclusive Edition, ed. Emory Holloway (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1926).

4. Rosicrucian Fellowship International Headquarters, "Shakespeare -- The Lay Bible," http://www.rosicrucian.com/zineen/pamen041.htm (accessed 14 May 2010).

5. Jonathan Edwards (1741), "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes Revised Edition, ed. Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 164-165.

6. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 166.

7. Keith Drury, "Saving Wretches Like You: Of Wretches and Worms," TuesdayColumn.com 30 Jan. 2007, http://www.drurywriting.com/keith/wretch.worm.htm (accessed 14 May 2010).