How I Became An Atheist (Continued)
[ Continued From How I Became An Atheist ]
What dawned on me as soon as I read the story of God starting a town on fire because they rejected him was that what I had created and called “God” was not real. I had constructed it. It was a morality system built on my own sense of decency and framed in the beauty of the teachings given to me by my father (i.e. Christianity). And I would argue that’s the case for all kind, loving Christians who don’t live their life based on the literal teachings of the Bible.
Let me be clear: if you don’t believe and follow ALL of the teachings, in original form, that are to be found in the Bible, then you have your own religion. You have taken a framework and built your own system from it.
Unfortunately, the fundamentalists are right. With religion you don’t do things a little bit. You either believe and accept everything, or you don’t. Moderate churches may tell you otherwise, but if you read the Bible you’ll see there is no room for moderates. As an example, the Bible clearly says that if you work on the Sabbath you should be put to death.
Whosoever shall work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.— Numbers 15:32
But millions of Christians and Jews work on the Sabbath and think it’s just fine. Why? Because they’ve justified — using their own morality — that no just God would really condone killing people for such a thing, right? Well, here’s the simple question: what gives regular men the right to deny the parts of the Bible that they see fit? What tells them to pick and choose what to follow and what to discard?
The answer is nothing. Nothing tells them it’s permissible to ignore the exact words of the ten commandments if at some future time the laws don’t permit their enforcement. Let me state this again: God commanded Moses to kill a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. The man was killed. There is nothing about this that expired or became obsolete due to later law. If you are a Christian or a Jew, and you work on the Sabbath, you are breaking God’s law in a way that God himself says is punishable by death.
And that’s my point. You, my fellow humans out there who know this is a hideous idea but cling to a Christian identity are fooling yourselves. You are moral because YOU are a good person. You are moral because you don’t kill people who check their work email on Sunday. You decide how your family follows the Bible. You decide the moral way to raise your family.
You think your goodness comes from the Bible, but it doesn’t. It was inspired by the Bible, and you enjoy the idea of the Bible, but that idea is actually your own version of it — not the real thing. If it were the real thing you’d be in jail right now. The same goes for Muslims, as the Koran commands unspeakable evil as well of its followers. In short, if you’re open, thoughtful and moderate then you’ve perverted the original teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by being so.
Conclusion
So what’s my message? If you are moral and religious it’s because you are moral. Perhaps this came originally from some religious structure, but you’ve since taken that basic framework and customized it based on your own internal moral compass.
I don’t ask you to reject religion outright — only to realize that you are already disobeying the Bible in massive ways every single day. Your religion is not that of the Bible. It’s your own. And if you were able to break away to the degree that you have and reject the parts of the Bible that are clearly abominable — while still being a decent, moral person — then I ask you to consider why you need any of it.:
[June 2007]
