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The
Atheist Devotional: Timeless Meditations for
the Godless by M. Moore
Copyright ă 2008 M. Next: Reading Number 19: Quentin Smith Proves Something or Other
-Reading Number Eighteen -
Dawkins: Faking the Facts
Excerpted from: Dawkins, The God Delusion*
Why is it that whenever you go to an atheist Web site or read a book defending atheism, like Dawkins’ book, you always seem to find that you’re reading some of the most factually inaccurate stuff around? Simple. We atheists are “freethinkers,” which means we’re free from petty concerns like factual truth...just like Nietzsche called himself a “free spirit” and cared nothing for truth. Let’s look at some of the factual errors in Dawkins’ attack on the Bible.
Factual error #1:
In Judges 11, Jephthah makes a vow that the next thing to walk out the door of his house he would sacrifice to God (expecting an animal to walk out). But who should come traipsing out but his daughter! Oh no! Jephthah has to sacrifice his own daughter. So “Jephthah cooked her.”
Except the Bible doesn’t say that he cooked her. It says he “did to her according to the vow which he had made; and she had no relations with a man.” A son or daughter who was “sacrificed” to God was not killed, but redeemed (Ex. 13:11-15). Being dedicated to the service of God was one way of redeeming (Num. 3:12-13, 45). So the story is saying that Jephthah’s daughter would have been dedicated to the service of God as a result of her father’s vow. That’s why in the story she was mourning her virginity, and not her imminent death! The result of Jephthah’s fulfilling “the vow which he had made” (Judges 11:39a) was that “she had no relations with a man” (Judges 11:39b), not that she was killed. For further explanation, see for example http://www.tektonics.org/gk/jepthah.html
Factual error #2:
“God’s maniacal jealousy...motivates the first of the Ten Commandments (the one on the tablets that Moses broke: Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5), and it is even more prominent in the (otherwise rather different) substitute commandments that God provided to replace the broken tablets (Exodus 34).
“Maniacal”—don’t you love it? If strong adjectives could substitute for logic and truth, Dawkins would be a philosophical genius! Anyway, Dawkins seems to assume that God’s words in Exodus 34:10-26 are the words that God gave as the “substitute” Ten Commandments, written on the second set of stone tablets. The only problem is, the passage doesn’t say that. It says that God spoke these words to Moses and then “he” (meaning God in verse 28—Hebrew sometimes switched without warning from one antecedent to another—see for example Psalm 25:12-13) wrote down the words of the Ten Commandments. It doesn’t say that the words written on the tablets were the words God had just spoken.
Factual error #3:
“’Love thy neighbor’...meant only ‘Love another Jew.’ ...’Neighbor’ means ‘fellow-Jew’...The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality.”
A brilliant point. That is, if you ignore passages like Deut. 10:19, where the Israelites were commanded to
“show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
In Deut. 25:7 God says:
“You shall not detest an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not detest an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land.”
Or how about the command to love foreigners in Lev. 19:34:
“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.”
Factual error #4:
“Jesus limited his in-group of the ‘saved’ strictly to Jews.”
Um...so what about Jesus’ command in Matt. 28:19?
“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit...”
Not exactly limiting salvation to Jews, is it? And right toward the beginning of the book of John, Jesus preaches salvation to the Samaritan woman at the well and her whole town. Samaritans were regarded as particularly detestable by Jews. But the gospels affirm their worth (see Luke 10:25-37, where a Samaritan is the hero of the story and is called the “neighbor” we are supposed to love).
Factual error #5:
“Hartung draws attention to the two verses in Revelation where the number of those ‘sealed’ (which some sects, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, interpret to mean ‘saved’) is limited to 144,000. Hartung’s point is that they all had to be Jews...”
Yes, the 144,000 are depicted as being Jews, but that doesn’t mean that Revelation is telling us that only Jews are saved. After all, who were the seven churches to whom Revelation was addressed (Rev. 1:4, chapters 2-4)? Gentiles. And check out these verses:
And they sang a new song, saying, "Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. [Rev. 5:9]
And I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to preach to those who live on the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people... [Rev. 14:6]
After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands... [Rev. 7:9]
Factual error #6 (?):
Dawkins at least hints at another factual lie when he talks about Moses and the Midianites.
In the book of Numbers, Moses commands the Israelites to wipe out all the Midianites. But he makes an exception by commanding: “’But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep for yourselves’ (Numbers 31:18). No, Moses was not a great role model for modern moralists.”
Now why would Dawkins make a special point of quoting verbatim the command to spare the Midianite virgins? Does he now suddenly have a problem with people being spared instead of being killed? Well, if you’re new to atheism you need to understand what he’s probably hinting at here. It’s been a favorite ploy among atheists to claim that Moses was commanding the Israelite men to keep the virgins and rape them! That seems to be what Dawkins is trying to imply. So yeah, let’s just ignore a passage like Deut. 21:10-14 that shows women captives could be taken as wives, but were to be treated with kindness. It fits our agenda so much more nicely to imply the lie that God (and Moses) approved rape.
And factual error #7:
Dawkins doesn’t just promote untruths about the Bible; he also slanders modern Christians:
“If Jesus wanted to be betrayed and then murdered” to provide salvation for the world “isn’t it rather unfair of those who consider themselves redeemed to take it out on Judas and on Jews down the ages?” ...By saving us through Jesus’ crucifixion the way he did, God was “condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as ‘Christ-killers’: did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?”
Dawkins offers no qualification to his charge that “those who consider themselves redeemed” are persecutors and haters of Jews. Nice blanket condemnation, Richard. Way to lie about those nasty Christians.
So yes, Dawkins is very much a gloriously “free” thinker, in the sense of being free from the constraints of truth and factual accuracy. But speaking of Jesus’ crucifixion, let’s look at what Dawkins has to say about it, since for him it is the central absurdity and horror of the New Testament:
“But
now, the sado-masochism. God incarnated himself as
a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed
in atonement for the hereditary sin of “...who was God trying to impress? Presumably himself—judge and jury as well as execution victim. To cap it all off, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place: an awkward fact...”
Now why does he say that? Oh, I forgot—it’s because of evolution. We all evolved from apes, so of course there was no Adam. For Dawkins evolution is the self-evident truth by which all other truths are judged, the foundation and cornerstone of our faith as atheists.
“So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.”
Hmm...but even if Adam never existed, all of the other humans who have existed have committed plenty of sins—sins that Jesus would have been paying for on the cross. So Dawkins’ summary of the meaning of the cross—that Jesus was paying only for Adam’s sin—is just a tad distorted. Just a tad. But anyway. Is the crucifixion really vicious and “sado-masochistic,” as Dawkins claims? Well, obviously it’s not sadomasochistic. A sadomasochist is someone who gets pleasure from pain. And there’s no sign that Jesus or the Father derived any pleasure from it (yes, there was the “satisfaction” of God’s sense of justice, but that’s far removed from the kind of pleasure a sadomasochist feels). Okay, so Dawkins needs a dictionary. But the question remains whether the crucifixion is something totally outside the bounds of what we would ever consider moral and just. As we saw in discussing the Euthyphro Dilemma (Reading Number Ten; see also Reading Number Twenty-One), there are some things that it just wouldn’t make sense to say that God approves of morally, for example to suppose that God would say that torturing innocent people was a good thing.* On the other hand, we shouldn’t think that our own sense of right and wrong is so perfect that it might not need some correction... But still, if something is completely and diametrically opposed to any notion of morality that we have, we would have to admit that calling it moral is nonsensical. So what we need to find out is whether the crucifixion is that kind of idea. First let’s take the idea of punishment for sin. Obviously that’s not an idea that would strike us as morally nonsensical. We can move right along to the second component: the idea that one person can pay for someone else’s sins. Is that something that’s totally absurd and foreign to our moral sense? Well, certainly the idea of owing a debt because of wrongdoing is not unfamiliar to us. For example, we say that someone goes to prison to “pay his debt to society.” And a debt is something that someone else can pay for you. What then of the idea that God is paying the debt to himself? Is that nonsensical? No, although it might seem unnecessary—as Dawkins says, why couldn’t God just forgive the sins without requiring anyone to pay for them? Why does someone have to pay the penalty? Well, it could be simply a requirement of morality according to God’s nature, since (as we’ve seen) the foundation of all morality for the theist is God’s nature. (Why is God’s nature the way it is? It just is. You can’t ask for an explanation of that which is axiomatic. All reasoning, including moral reasoning, has to start somewhere, with axioms that require no further explanation.) Therefore, if payment is required by the morality that is grounded in God’s nature, we would have to say that there’s nothing morally or logically nonsensical about the crucifixion. Sad to say, Dawkins’ attack on the Bible fails, not least of all because he gets his facts all wrong. (But on the bright side, what he lacks in factual truth, he more than makes up for in the fury of his outrage and emotionalism.) Yes, it’s true that Christians today don’t live by the same standards as the Old Testament Israelites did. They follow the New Testament, which has superseded the Old, as part of God’s progressive revelation (see, for example, the book of Hebrews). That doesn’t mean that it was wrong for God to kill the people he did in the Old Testament. God has that right, and they were sinners, making their killing perfectly just. Even by atheist standards, the wiping out of the Midianites, for example, can easily be seen as a good thing. Darwin would have approved—recall how he believed that a species like humans only makes evolutionary progress when competition and the struggle for survival are “extremely severe.” Of course, Darwin (like Dawkins it seems) would have objected to the saving of the Midianite virgins, because it would preserve their inferior genes* (obviously Midianites were inferior if the Israelites prevailed in warfare against them). Interestingly, Dawkins in the present book quotes (though of course not with approval) H. G. Wells, the famous science fiction writer and fervent evolutionist from the turn of the 20th Century, to this same effect:
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black?...the yellow man?...the Jew?...well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go...and the ethical system of these men of the New Republic...which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds... And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness...is death... The men of the New Republic...will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
Just another example of someone who took Darwin literally but didn’t have his patience that the inferior would die off on their own. Yes, with atheism (unlike, for example, biblical Christianity) the possibilities for making up your own “ideals” are awesomely unlimited!
* “Excerpts” are paraphrased, except for “words in quotation marks and italics,” which are direct quotations from the excerpted work. * Jesus was an innocent person who was tortured, and he voluntarily allowed it (as did God the Father). But allowing someone else to commit evil is not always evil, for example if greater good comes from it. * Of course, Darwin would not have used the term “genes,” since the concept was unknown to him. He would have spoken of heredity using other terms. |