Received 3.10.2000

Some of what you understand about Christianity is faulty.

I have a question for you. If there is no God out there to be the one who ultimately judges right from wrong, what basis do you have for determining what is right and wrong? If there is no basis for right and wrong, then you can do whatever you please and there would be no fear of punishment, yet we have some sense of right and wrong, and a sense of a need for punishment for those who transgress right and wrong.

Without God and His standard there is no enforceable standard and we can never hope for the wrongs done against us to be righted, because it all becomes relative and chaotic.

We need God, even if we deny Him.

Plato's Mom

My Reply:

You open your letter by saying that some of my understanding of Christianity is faulty, but offer no details. I have had 13 years of Christian education so I feel reasonably well qualified. I do, however, brush across many topics on this web site and there are many varieties of Christianity for me to potentially misrepresent, so I won't deny that this is a possibility.

I disagree, of course, that God is necessary to maintain the standard of right and wrong. If you saw a baby wandering onto a busy street wouldn't a gut reaction send you rushing to save it, or would you stop to consider if saving the baby would help you gain entry into Heaven? If you were unable to save the baby, wouldn't the tragedy be emotionally devastating for you, even if the child was a stranger? These are instinctive reactions that take place apart from higher mental functions such as reflecting on our fears or hopes for the afterlife. Atheists have these instincts just like Christian's do. Humans are sympathetic creatures who naturally tend to care about what happens to their fellow man. We often focus on the exceptions, but people generally treat each other very positively. Most Christians don't give humanity the credit it deserves.

If God was necessary to help us distinguish between right and wrong, we would expect to see exponentially higher crime rates in predominately non-Christian countries, such as China or Japan. The United States, however, is arguably the most violent country in the world. We would expect our prisons to be packed with atheists, but I suspect the percentage of inmates who believe in God reflects pretty accurately on the general population.

People will sometimes say that if there is no God, the world would be a cold place, but I think the opposite is true. A world where people only act out of fear of punishment or hope of reward is a place where everyone is ingenuine. I'd much rather live in a world where people make moral decisions based on another's inherent worth rather than out of fear.

I wrote about this topic earlier in an essay that is posted at this site. Click here to view that essay.

Thanks for visiting the Closet Atheist site and thanks for writing.

C.A.

Reply from Plato's Mom - Received 3.11.2000

Your response is what I meant by your understanding of Christianity being faulty.   There is no man who can get into heaven by being good enough. Saving a baby has nothing to do with it. Christianity shows us that there is good and evil in each one of us, but that we all have done too many wrong things to ever get into heaven under God's criteria. (God requires perfection, but clearly none of us can live up to His standards--how many can obey all the rules in the Bible for example all their life?) But see, God loved us too much to give up on us, and that is why He sent Christ His Son, to die on the cross for our sins.  Here Christ served as our surrogate, standing in the place of our punishment because once God decreed that the penalty of sin is death, death was required for all those who sin.  When Jesus stood in our place and took the penalty for us, the justice of God was satisfied, and Christ then gained us back the right to live in God's presence if we believe in His Son.  We can now  know Him again as Father and lover of our soul. It has nothing to do with being good enough to get into heaven, you see. Perhaps instead of relying on elementary school concepts which are geared for children, you should try reading the Bible starting at Matthew to grasp the grownup concepts that make Christianity greater than just being good enough for God.

[You assume] that  America is a Christian nation. Actually we have fewer Christians than say South Korea does percentagewise. The other thing you lack understanding of is that a belief in God does not necessarily mean that you believe in His Son.  It also does not mean that if you do believe in Christ you are automatically a perfect person, on the contrary we still have a basic sinful nature to contend with, we still are imperfect and do wrong things.  It is the nature of the fallen world that we all still sin, this is why we need Christ (see above) But about needing God, we do need God to know that someone out there is going to hold us accountable otherwise who makes the standards of right and wrong. In fact the more our nation moves away from God, the more our standards become arbitrary chaotic and up to whatever we feel like at the moment as being good or bad.  You live on shifting sands if there is no absolute God to make the rules stick absolutely.

Perhaps [your last point is] correct and that is why God set it up so that only if you love Him and His Son enough to try to live the way He says is better do you receive His blessings in life, and eternal life with Him.  God accepts all who accept His Son.   All others who are too interested in living as they please without God in their lives He promises to give them a life without Him in it--they call this place Hell.  It's what they wanted, so He will give them what they want.

Plato's Mom

My Reply:

In your original note you ask, "If there is no God out there to be the one who ultimately judges right from wrong, what basis do you have for determining what is right and wrong? If there is no basis for right and wrong, then you can do whatever you please and there would be no fear of punishment."

My reply addressed the fear of punishment you write about and how it doesn't play a real part in how we make moral decisions, which prompted you to say my notions of Christianity are childlike.  You may be referring to the mention of "burning in Hell" in my Clean your room, or I'll light you on fire essay.  Whether you believe in the classic vision of Hell popularized by John Milton in Paradise Lost, or the softer idea that Hell is knowing we will never be in God's presence, an infinity of any punishment for our finite time on Earth is still cruel and unusual.  In your reply you write, "It has nothing to do with being good enough to get into Heaven, you see."  But you also write "...we do need God to know that someone out there is going to hold us accountable otherwise who makes the standards of right and wrong."  If being good has nothing to do with it, how does God hold us accountable?

Original Sin and how God absolves us from it must be the most nonsequitur string of cause and effect imaginable.  I challenge anyone to think of anything more unlikely.  6,000 years ago a woman eats fruit from a forbidden tree and as a result all of humanity cannot enter Heaven.  God is forgiving, however, so 4,000 years later He decides to give us a second chance.  (If God is infallible, how can He have a change of heart?)  God, being all powerful, decides the best way to remedy the problem is by having his son publicly executed (he can always create more).  There is a catch, though, because the fix only works if you truly believe that God had his son killed to resolve the fruit problem.  If you, like some Christians, don't believe in Original Sin, but do believe that God truly wants us to share in eternal life with him, our sinful nature (without Eve as a scapegoat) still illustrates a disturbingly faulty design for an omnipotent creator.

It is refreshing to hear a Christian assert that the U.S. is not a Christian country.  The separation of church and state seems more and more tenuous with the current legislative pushes to post the Ten Commandments in schools and teach creationism.   You, however, missed my point.  If, as you say, "...the more our nation moves away from God, the more our standards become arbitrary chaotic..." we would expect nations which are less Christian than the U.S. to have more crime regardless of how fallible man is, which isn't the case.

Thanks again for writing.

C.A.