The GOD Delusion (37 page)

In
so far as modern religious writers attach any kind of symbolic or
allegorical meaning to the massacre of the Midianites, the symbolism is
aimed in precisely the wrong direction. The unfortunate Midianites, so
far as one can tell from the biblical account, were the victims of
genocide in their own country. Yet their name lives on in Christian
lore only in that favourite hymn (which I can still sing from memory
after fifty years, to two different tunes, both in grim minor keys):

Christian,
dost thou see them 

On the holy
ground? 

How the troops of
Midian 

Prowl
and prowl around? 

Christian, up and
smite them, 

Counting gain but
loss; 

Smite them by the
merit 

Of the holy cross.

Alas,
poor slandered, slaughtered Midianites, to be remembered only as poetic
symbols of universal evil in a Victorian hymn.

The
rival god Baal seems to have been a perennially seductive tempter to
wayward worship. In Numbers, chapter 25, many of the Israelites
were lured by Moabite women to sacrifice to Baal. God reacted with
characteristic fury. He ordered Moses to 'Take all the heads of the
people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the
fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.' One cannot
help, yet again, marvelling at the extraordinarily draconian view taken
of the sin of flirting with rival gods. To our modern sense of values
and justice it seems a trifling sin compared to, say, offering your
daughter for a gang rape. It is yet another example of the disconnect
between scriptural and modern (one is tempted to say civilized) morals.
Of course, it is easily enough understood in terms of the theory of
memes, and the qualities that a deity needs in order to survive in the
meme pool.

The
tragi-farce of God's maniacal jealousy against alternative gods recurs
continually throughout the Old Testament. It motivates the first of the
Ten Commandments (the ones 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). Having promised to drive out of their
homelands the unfortunate Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites,
Hivites and Jebusites, God gets down to what really matters: rival
gods\

...
ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their
groves. For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name
is Jealous, is a jealous God. Lest thou make a covenant with the
inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do
sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his
sacrifice; And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their
daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring
after their gods. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods (Exodus 34: 13-17)

I
know, yes, of course, of course, times have changed, and no religious
leader today (apart from the likes of the Taliban or the American
Christian equivalent) thinks like Moses. But that is my whole point.
All I am establishing is that modern morality, wherever else it comes
from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot
get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of
inside track to defining what is good and what is bad - a privileged
source unavailable to atheists. They cannot get away with it, not even
if they employ that favourite trick of interpreting selected scriptures
as 'symbolic' rather than literal. By what criterion do you
decide
which passages are symbolic, which literal?

The
ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody
fruition in the book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty
massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so.
As the charming old song exultantly has it, 'Joshua fit the battle of
Jericho, and the walls came a-tumbling down . . . There's none like
good old Joshuay, at the battle of Jericho.' Good old Joshua didn't
rest until 'they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man
and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of
the sword' (Joshua 6: 21).

Yet
again, theologians will protest, it didn't happen. Well, no -the story
has it that the walls came tumbling down at the mere sound of men
shouting and blowing horns, so indeed it didn't happen - but that is
not the point. The point is that, whether true or not, the Bible is
held up to us as the source of our morality. And the Bible story of
Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land
in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of
Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.
The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not
the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals. As
it happens, the story of Joshua in Jericho is the subject of an
interesting experiment in child morality, to be discussed later in this
chapter.

Do
not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any
doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied
the seizing of the Promised Land. On the contrary, his orders, for
example in Deuteronomy 20, were ruthlessly explicit. He made a clear
distinction between the people who lived in the land that was needed,
and those who lived a long way away. The latter should be invited to
surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed
and the women carried off for breeding. In contrast to this relatively
humane treatment, see what was in store for those tribes unfortunate
enough to be already in residence
in the promised
Lebensraum:
'But of the cities of
these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance,
thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly
destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites,
and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God
hath commanded thee.'

Do
those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude
have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The
following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20:
cursing your parents; committing adultery; making love to your
stepmother or your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and
her daughter; bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate
beast is to be killed too). You also get executed, of course, for
working on the sabbath: the point is made again and again throughout
the Old Testament. In Numbers 15, the children of Israel found a man in
the wilderness gathering sticks on the forbidden day. They arrested him
and then asked God what to do with him. As it turned out, God was in no
mood for half-measures that day. 'And the Lord said unto Moses, The man
shall surely be put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with
stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without
the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died.' Did this harmless
gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him? Did he
whimper with fear as the first stones flew, and scream with pain as the
fusillade crashed into his head? What shocks me today about such
stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn't. What
makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such
an appalling role model as Yahweh - and, even worse, that they should
bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on
the rest of us.

The
political power of America's Ten Commandment tablet-toters is
especially regrettable in that great republic whose constitution, after
all, was drawn up by men of the Enlightenment in explicitly secular
terms. If we took the Ten Commandments seriously, we would rank the
worship of the wrong gods, and the making of graven images, as first
and second among sins. Rather than condemn the unspeakable vandalism of
the Taliban, who dynamited
the 150-foot-high Bamiyan Buddhas in the mountains of Afghanistan, we
would praise them for their righteous piety. What we think of as their
vandalism was certainly motivated by sincere religious zeal. This is
vividly attested by a truly bizarre story, which was the lead in the
(London)
Independent
of 6 August 2005. Under the
front-page headline, 'The destruction of Mecca', the
Independent
reported:

Historic
Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented
onslaught by religious zealots. Almost all of the rich and
multi-layered history of the holy city is gone . . . Now the actual
birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad is facing the bulldozers, with the
connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation
of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage . . . The
motive behind the destruction is the Wahhabists' fanatical fear that
places of historical and religious interest could give rise to idolatry
or polytheism, the worship of multiple and potentially equal gods. The
practice of idolatry in Saudi Arabia remains, in principle, punishable
by beheading.

I do
not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca -
or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of
Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. As the Nobel Prize-winning
American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to
human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good
things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do
evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said
something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from religious conviction.'

My
main purpose here has not been to show that we
shouldn't
get
our morals from scripture (although that is my opinion). My purpose has
been to demonstrate that we (and that includes most religious people)
as a matter of fact
don't
get our morals from
scripture. If we did, we would strictly observe the sabbath and think
it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to. We would
stone to death any new bride who couldn't prove she was a virgin, if
her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. We would execute
disobedient children. We would . . . but wait. Perhaps I have been
unfair. Nice Christians will have been protesting throughout this
section: everyone knows the Old Testament is pretty unpleasant. The New
Testament of Jesus undoes the damage and makes it all right. Doesn't it?

Well,
there's no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge
improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if
he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn't) was surely one of
the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way
ahead of its time. His 'turn the other cheek' anticipated Gandhi and
Martin Luther King by two thousand years. It was not for nothing that I
wrote an article called 'Atheists for Jesus' (and was later delighted
to be presented with a T-shirt bearing the legend).
⁹⁴

But
the moral superiority of Jesus precisely bears out my point. Jesus was
not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing.
He explicitly departed from them, for example when he deflated the dire
warnings about breaking the sabbath. 'The sabbath was made for man, not
man for the sabbath' has been generalized into a wise proverb. Since a
principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not,
derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model
for that very thesis.

Jesus'
family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish
to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own
mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to
follow him. 'If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother,
and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple.' The American comedian Julia Sweeney
expressed her bewilderment in her one-woman stage show,
Letting
Go of God:
⁹⁵
'Isn't that what cults
do? Get you to reject your family in order to inculcate you?
⁹⁶

Notwithstanding
his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus' ethical
teachings were - at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area
that is the Old Testament - admirable; but there are other teachings in
the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer
especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of 'atonement'
for 'original sin'. This teaching, which lies at the heart of New
Testament theology, is almost as morally obnoxious as the story of
Abraham setting out to barbecue Isaac, which it resembles - and that is
no accident, as Geza Vermes makes clear in
The Changing Faces
of Jesus.
Original sin itself comes straight from the Old
Testament myth of Adam and Eve. Their sin - eating the fruit of a
forbidden tree - seems mild enough to merit a mere reprimand. But the
symbolic nature of the fruit (knowledge of good and evil, which in
practice turned out to be knowledge that they were naked) was enough to
turn their scrumping escapade into the mother and father of all sins.*
They and all their descendants were banished forever from the Garden of
Eden, deprived of the gift of eternal life, and condemned to
generations of painful labour, in the field and in childbirth
respectively.

* I
am aware that 'scrumping' will not be familiar to American readers. But
I enjoy reading unfamiliar American words and looking them up to
broaden my vocabulary. I have deliberately used a few other
region-specific words for this reason. Scrumping itself is a
mot
juste
of unusual economy. It doesn't just mean stealing: it
specifically means stealing
apples
and
only
apples. It is hard for a
mot
to get more
juste
than that. Admittedly the Genesis story
doesn't specify that the fruit was an apple, but tradition has long
held it so.