The Central Flaw of Christianity (another article)

THE CENTRAL FLAW OF CHRISTIANITY

By Yahya Sulaiman, a.k.a. Ziggy Zag


Let us say that you and I are friends and that you have done a lot of treacherous, disrespectful, and ungrateful things toward me. You come forward to me with them, confessing them all. You add, “Look, I know I’ve wronged you. A whole bunch of times. But I’ve come clean with it and I will try my dead level best never to do any of those things again. I know I deserve to get my butt kicked and to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t hold it against you if you started hitting me right now. I’ll gladly take a punch, ’cause I know I deserve it, but if you can find it in your heart to forgive me, I beg that you do so.”

I respond, “Of course I forgive you. I love you more than you could ever know, and I know you better than you know yourself, so I know your repentance to me is sincere. I forgive you for everything. Don’t worry about it.”

And then, just as you’re opening your mouth to thank me in tears, I punch myself dead in the face and knock myself out.

After I’ve come to you ask me what I’m on about. Have I lost my mind? I answer, “Well, someone had to get hit for what you did!”

What would your reaction be? Would you question my logic and possibly even my sanity? Or would you say, “Hey, man, I knew you cared but I never had any idea how much you cared!”

Well, I guess it is the thought that counts—for us fallible and imperfect mortals, who are capable of being so foolish. God, on the other hand, is the one Being from whom we know we definitely cannot expect such silliness. And yet if I were to believe in the substitution doctrine of Christianity, the core concept of the whole religion, established unequivocally all up and down the entire New Testament (Matthew 26:28, Galatians 1:4, 1 John 2:2, 1 John 4:10, Revelation 1:5, 1 Peter 2:24), then I would have to believe something extremely comparable to our bizarre little episode with the punching. God, according to Christian thought, cannot or will not simply let bygones be bygones when he forgives someone their sins. In other words, he has to forgive without forgiving. Someone still has to be punished for your sins when God pardons you of them, and who better to be punished for sinning than a man who’s never sinned before in his entire life?

This is the main problem I have with Christianity now and it was also one of the main problems I had when I was a Christian, because there was perhaps nothing about the religion’s many evident untruths about which I had to put more effort into deceiving myself. The behavior I see from other Christians now frequently suggests the same may be true of them. Henry Ward Beecher or someone once said, “‘I can forgive, but I cannot forget,’ is only another way of saying, ‘I will not forgive.’ Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.” Yet instead of perceiving forgiveness in this very accurate and rational way, Christian dogma—to use the cliché that Christians themselves are always using—instead misrepresents forgiveness as a note of debt transferred from one person who cannot pay it to a loving volunteer who can.

As I heard a brother in the faith put it once, “The Christian concept of entering Heaven is similar to going to the movie theater. To get in you need to pay the ticket price. If you can not [sic] afford the price you get rich uncle Charlie to cough up the money for you. I do not see this as forgiveness. forgiveness [sic] erases all debt and their [sic] is no longer a price to be paid. To be forgiven we need only to repent fully and strive to become loyal servants of Allaah(swt). When our repentance is accepted, there is no longer any bill to pay...There is no charge for Allaah(swt)'s mercy.”

Precisely. Forgiveness is the erasure of moral debt altogether, not a transfer of it from one party to another. Christianity is supposedly a religion centered entirely on grace yet the Christian definition of grace tries to have it both ways, and in doing so attributes both utmost injustice and gross, puzzling impracticality and unreasonability to the Almighty—a savage version of the Almighty who absolutely demands that blood be spilled, even if it is innocent blood.

When you explain all this to a Christian they will invariably, as sure as night follows day and water flows downhill, give one of two responses (often both). The first is an appeal to their bizarre misconception that the Old Testament animal sacrifices somehow presaged the crucifixion. Like the majority of the so-called Messianic prophecies this is just retroactive reinterpretation, completely unheard of before the advent of Christianity itself. Barring this, if the animal sacrifices sufficed for the people of the past, there’s no reason why they should not suffice for the people of the present. As such, even if you grant the animal sacrifice defense the crucifixion would still be pointless, as the only thing God would have to do is either continue having animals be sacrificed throughout history or make the incarnation and atonement happen within the first generation after the Fall. Otherwise you’re stuck with absurd cop-out that the crucifixion saved people before it ever took place, lest you think everyone in that part of history automatically condemned for happening to be born at a certain time.

But such an interpretation of animal sacrifice is completely nonsensical to begin with. Sin cannot be transferred from one creature to another like a transfusion of diseased blood. Sin is a kind of action, the result of personal choice. To transfer sin from one party to another (be the other party an animal or a God-man) would have to mean changing both party’s pasts by causing each party to have made the other's choices instead. Time travel into the past might allow one to do the trick: the only thing stabbing a cow would accomplish is having there being one fewer cow at present. When the Old Testament refers to the sacrificed animal as representing sin it doesn’t mean that literally. Watching the animal die was like watching your sin die, symbolic of God’s actual forgiveness, which came about because in performing the sacrifice you knew you were performing a ritual act of repentance. Otherwise why would the animal be quickly killed instead of being tortured to death for a whole day like Jesus (P) was supposed to have been? If it was just the death and not the pain that did the trick then no stations of the cross would have been necessary; Jesus (P) could’ve just offered himself to be swiftly decapitated by the guards who came to catch him and that’s that. The idea (as established in the biblical passages cited above) is that he was suffering instead of us, which is silly for more reasons than just the one I already explained about this substitution being a needless, graceless act of refusal to forgive. There is yet another problem still, one so obvious that I am puzzled it doesn’t get brought up more often.

Being flogged, crowned with thorns, whacked with a reed, marched across town, and crucified for nine hours is serious business indeed (if it did happen) but by no means is it the grand total of all the suffering that everyone who has ever lived or ever will live deserve for every single sin ever committed in past, present, and future. Even if sin could be transferred, there have been too many sins overall to squeeze them all into such a relatively meager amount of suffering. Heck, there’s probably been more than one individual person who has deserved those exact torments. To punish a single person for every wrongdoing in history would probably take longer than a single person could live. I know that there is no official objective means of measuring this but try to be honest with yourself: isn’t it supposed to be one eye for one eye? Wouldn’t a crucifixion be a fitting punishment only for one person’s unethically crucifying someone, and one bout of torture for one equivalent bout of torture? For heaven’s sake, people, even in the Gospels themselves the perpetrators marvel at what little time the whole thing took (Mark 15:44), and this is supposed to be punishment for every crucifixion, every murder, every rape, every hoarding of every miser, every act of perjury, every act of adultery, every swindling, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, obscene phone call, and Michael Bay movie from the dawn of man till Judgment Day?! Give me a crown of thorns, a beating, and a nine hour crucifixion over what happened to Rasputin any day.

Let us not lose focus here. The important thing is that God does not and should not need anyone to suffer and die so that anyone else can be forgiven. That’s not how forgiveness works. It’s a very simple thing that I can demonstrate for you right now: “I forgive you.” POOF! See how easy it is? And I’m not even omnipotent.

And that brings us to the next of the two inevitable pitiful defenses Christians make for this hole in their doctrinal logic. This defense is to make a quite vague and extremely circular appeal to “the law”—essentially telling us that the reason that we should believe that the law of a good and wise God would ever entail anything as morally monstrous and logically absurd as the atonement doctrine is that…well, it’s God’s law. Like I said, completely circular. Not to mention that neither of these defenses could change anything even if they were valid since the issue is whether or not any text (or at the very least, any interpretation of a text) which depicts God’s grace in such a terrible and impossible fashion can be believed in the first place. Even if “the law” and the old animal sacrifices did demand such a thing as the Christians suggest, that would not be reason to believe in Christianity: it would be reason to disbelieve in the law and sacrifices of the Old Testament (which to be fair has been corrupted, as we’ve discussed endlessly elsewhere), lest one instead have to disbelieve in the goodness and wisdom of God.

Perhaps another plug-in is needed. Let us say that I told you about a murder trial in which the automatic penalty in the case of a conviction is death, barring a pardon from the judge. (This judge, by the way, is someone that you respect and trust a great deal.) A pardon is exactly what the culprit gets. The judge grants him the pardon, bangs his gavel, and everyone starts to rise from their seats because they naturally think that the whole thing is over. But then, with the very next bang of his gavel, the judge pronounces a death sentence on himself. You ask me, in response to hearing this tale, why the judge would do such a thing, how he could do such a thing. I tell you that the law demands that someone has to be put to death when a capital crime is committed and since the judge pardoned the culprit he is naturally obligated to execute himself instead. You protest the logic to me (well, be honest with yourself: wouldn’t you?) and I say, “Look, they’ve been doing something like this since ancient times and this is just fulfilling the tradition. The law demands that this go on. The judge himself wrote that law. Who are you to argue with it?” What would your reaction be? To assume that I must be wrong about a judge as good and wise as you believe this one to be ever authoring such a law? Or would you think that that my story about the judge, and maybe also the very existence of the law I spoke of, isn’t true? Or that you have been gravely mistaken about this judge being good and wise in the first place? Or would you just shrug and go, “Oh well, I guess that’s good enough for me. Want to go out for pizza?”