If I set your house on fire, then rescue you from it—am I a hero or a monster?

That answer comes quickly, doesn’t it? 

Sure, I may have saved you, but I saved you from an unnecessary dilemma, a lethal crisis I created.

This, I would argue, is the essential moral conundrum we have with Christianity’s God as the church on the corner generally presents him.

The pastor/teacher will carefully wrap the gospel message in the language of love and forgiveness. They’ll use comforting words like grace, redemption, deliverance, and salvation. What they will very rarely do is remind us that the reason we’re in need of these things is that, by God’s will, we are born in sin and bound for the unquenchable fires of hell unless we believe the right things.

Ah, you say, but it was Adam and Eve who chose to disobey God. They had free will. So, it’s mankind who’s to blame for our sinful nature.

Let’s consider those two post-Big-Bang rascals for a minute.

A man and woman dropped into paradise directly from the hands of a perfect, holy, loving creator. Impossible for them to be corrupted by bad parents—they didn’t have any. Impossible for them to be led astray by a wicked society—there wasn’t a society. Could there have ever been a more perfect, pure couple of humans? 

And yet, these previously unsullied humans rebelled against God—fooled by the serpent he allowed into the garden to tempt them.

God literally spoke to them. So, no room to doubt his existence.

They knew he was real; they knew the rules.

Still, those two wrecked all of humanity with one act of defiance. Furthermore, one of their sons killed the other. Of the first two children born to humans, one is a murderer. Helluva start.

What a weird story.

Who gave Adam and Eve their natures? Who determined their moral fortitude?

That is self-evident.

Now God might have allowed Adam and Eve free will, yet made their “newborn” natures deeply wise and steadfastly moral, “bulletproof” to the temptations of talking snakes. But he didn’t.

He creates people “out of the box” who appear recklessly inclined to moral failure, then condemns them for the sin he knew in advance they would commit.

What a strange God.

We are offered a double bind when God says, “I command that you love me.” 

Surely, real love is earned, not demanded.

Is God, as presented in the Bible, a being of good character? Is he a nice guy? Is he worthy of our love?

Author David Bentley Hart puts it like this:

“Can we truly love any person (let alone love that person as ourselves) if we are obliged, as the price and proof of our faith, to contemplate that person consigned (countless souls) to eternal suffering while we ourselves possess imperturbable, unclouded, unconditional, and everlasting happiness? Only a fool would believe it. But what has become the dominant picture of Christian faith tells us we must believe it, and must therefore become fools. It is a picture that demands of us that we ignore the contradiction altogether. It also demands that we become—at a deep and enduring level—resolutely and complacently cruel.”

(Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition. Words in italics, inside the quotes, are my insertion for clarification.)

Who comes up with eternal hell as a “just” punishment?

The American justice system (as full of hypocrisy as it is, as flawed as it is, as often as it gets things wrong), at least in principle, seeks both to arrive at the truth and to dispense punishment that fits the crime.

How could the inescapable, unending torment of countless men and women be a satisfying state of affairs for a sane deity? Much less one who “is light, and in him there is no darkness?” (1 John 1:5)

This is an incoherent and, frankly, wicked arrangement.

A God whose wrath is never quelled, who requires endless, hopeless suffering without reprieve to achieve his justice?

If this is light, I’d hate to see darkness.

The Bible gives us a peculiarly contradictory vision of God.

He is all-loving and merciful.

And yet.

In his paradigm, people (even profoundly moral people) who don’t believe the right things about the right god are consigned to everlasting suffering (at worst) or obliteration (at best). The sacrificial death of Christ for our sins has only bought salvation for those who believe one specific religious story (even though the greatest predictor of religious affiliation is not our moral values but where on planet Earth we’re born). No second chances after death. No angels dispatched to hell to preach God’s saving message to set the condemned free.

Back to our opening analogy: God sets our house on fire, then offers to rescue us—IF we love, worship, and obey him.

I don’t get it.

At this point, you may suppose I hate Christianity, or religion in general.

You’d be wrong on both counts. I have a deep fondness for Christianity; I was raised in it and formed by it. I love, admire, and respect many people who call themselves Christians. And I’m a big fan of most other religions.

These days, I appreciate religion “as a disposition,” not so much as a “proposition” (To borrow an idea from Iain McGilchrist). Religion as a framework, not as dogma, can be useful, even beautiful—for individuals and societies. I still use Christian language in my faith practice.

Christians, overall, aren’t evil. The sincere ones “want to be good.” They’re trying to live out Christ’s teachings: love your neighbor as yourself, be a servant to others, tell the truth, don’t harm others with your words or actions. Good stuff. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where everyone acted according to these principles?

But the God most Christians worship seems to be perpetrating more catastrophic harm than any human that ever lived, given his cosmic “setup” and foreknowledge of all its outcomes.

I don’t think this IS any God that actually exists anywhere.

Rather, this is a God drawn by people who were ruled by kings and lords who seemed high and lofty and all-powerful. They punished and rewarded according to their whims—laws unto themselves. They were not to be questioned. Their might made right.

Is it surprising that they made God the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

The Bible isn’t really the problem. The problem is taking it to be a literal presentation of irrefutable facts, a story right out of the mouth of the One True God. Rather than taking it as a set of stories that belong to ancient oral traditions. Stories that aren’t necessarily being perfectly represented by those who wrote them, rewrote them, interpreted them, reinterpreted them, and turned them into ten thousand versions that can be traced back before the Bible. Stories that point us toward alternate ways of considering life and death and what matters. If we saw the Bible and other religious texts that way, there’d be less murder for religious reasons going on.

I realize I’m unlikely to argue anyone out of their faith. That’s not something I actually have any interest in doing. I’m a fan of faith. I intend to keep mine. And I want you to keep yours.

I would encourage you, however, to carefully examine the God you’ve been handed by your religion.

Is your God truly loving and moral? Or is he a merciless Dictator in the Sky?