Although SDR is dedicated to reporting on prejudice and discrimination against atheists, it also has a second purpose, to promote understanding about our reasoning to those who do believe. This is why I shy away from confrontation or criticism of believers as a whole. I will happily and brutally criticize those who attack, insult, and discriminate again us simply for daring to express our theological disagreements. Good atheists, just like any good people, will not demonize you personally simply for believing, and we expect the same. I understand, though, that these people are not all or even the majority of religious people.
This post is for you, the religious who although we disagree, do no demonize us. Hopefully, this post can be useful to show a small sliver of our reasoning when we reject religious dogma, and therefore help religious readers understand us a bit better. This is not meant to be a complete refutation of the bible, but simply an expression of why we reject the Bible’s authority with direct examples from it.
The Questions
P.Z. Myers brought to my intention an interesting and humorous quiz, “Do You Have Biblical Morals?“ Looking at the type of questions that are asked, I suggest that practically any modern American, religious or not, would score 0% on this quiz. It’s clearly not written from the pro-religious viewpoint. There is admittedly bias in the questions, but they are consistent with the evidence from the Bible itself. It shows parts of the Bible that it would be very difficult for anyone nowadays to accept. These questions show good examples that probably won’t in themselves make someone reject the religion they hold, but can show the religious some examples of why we reject the authority of the Bible.
For example, here are the first two questions (emphasis added):
1. Two strangers visit your home, and you are kind enough to provide them with accommodations for the night. They tell you they are angels appearing on behalf of the Lord. However, later in the evening, an angry mob turns up seeking to sodomize your guests. Do you: Protect your guests and call the police. Expel your guests and call the police.
Turn your preteen daughters over to the crowd to be raped.
2. Your elementary school child discovers that she can get your attention by using profanity. In a fit of rage, she directs a stream of profanity at you that would make a sailor blush. Do you: Send her to her room to cool down, take a deep breath and carefully assess the situation, and work out your differences when cooler heads prevail. Explain to her that profanity is never appropriate, and take away television for a week.
Put her to death.
In both of these questions, the biblical answer is the last. As a scholar of religion I can assure you that, putting aside my biases as an atheist, these are not taken out of context. I will go as far as to specify exactly what translation of the text I am using so that you can check this yourself, although the general gist of the stories should be the same no matter the translation. If one were to literally interpret the bible as a strict guidebook for morality, as some (but not all) do, these are the answers that would be found. Since these two examples come from what Christians refer to as the “Old Testament,” I will break out, from my days when I was a practicing Jew, my trusty personalized copy of the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible (it has my name in spiffy gold leaf!).
The translation I am using is Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text from The Jewish Publication Society (1985). This is a translation from the original Hebrew, attempting to create a translation accurate to the etymology of the original Hebrew words. The translation philosophy was, from the Preface, to “reproduce the Hebrew idiomatically and reflect contemporary scholarship, thus laying emphasis upon intelligibility and correctness”1. In practice, to increase intelligibility “[t]he translators avoided obsolete words and phrases and, whenever possible, rendered Hebrew idioms by means of their normal English equivalents. For the second person singular, the modern ‘you’ was used instead of the archaic ‘thou,’ even when referring to the Deity (’You’)”2. Now that we know the source, let’s get to the meat of things.
Question 1: Angels and Rape
The biblical answer to this question (”Turn your preteen daughters over to the crowd to be raped.”) comes from the book of Genesis (or in Hebrew, Beresheit).
The two angels arrived in Sodom in the evening, as Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to greet them and, bowing low with his face to the ground, he said, “Please, my lords, turn aside to your servant’s house to spend the night, and bathe your feet; then you may be on your way early.” But they said, “No, we will spend the night in the square.” But he urged them strongly, so they turned his way and entered his house. He prepared a feast for them and baked unleavened bread, and they ate.
They had not yet lain down, when the townspeople, the men of Sodom, young and old – all the people to the last man – gathered about the house. And they shouted to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may be intimate with them.” So Lot went out to them to the entrance, shut the door behind him, and said, “I beg you, my friends, do not commit such a wrong. Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you may do as you please; but do not do anything to these men, since they have come under the shelter of my roof.” But they said, “Stand back! The fellow,” they said, “came here as an alien, and already he acts the ruler! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” And they pressed hard against the person of Lot, and moved forward to break the door. But the men stretched out their hands and pulled Lot into the house with them, and shut the door. And the people who were at the entrance of the house, young and old, they struck with blinding light, so that they were helpless to find the entrance.
Then the men said to Lot, “Whom else have you here? Sons-in-law, your sons and daughters, or anyone else that you have in the city – bring them out of this place. For we are about to destroy this place; because the outcry against them before the LORD has become so great that the LORD has sent us to destroy it.” (Genesis 19.1-19.13)
The rest of the story is well known and internalized in American society to the extent that the name “Sodom” is innate in our culture as a representation of evil. In short, Lot and his family flee while Sodom is destroyed by God’s wrath: fire, brimstone – all the classic biblical angry God clichés. They are warned not to look back, but Lot’s wife just can’t help herself. For her curiosity, she is turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19.15-26). The degeneracy continues with Lot’s daughters getting him drunk so that they can have sex with him, producing their sons Moab (”from (my) father”) and Ben-ammi (”son of my (paternal) kindred”), but that’s an additional scandal unrelated to the current subject (Genesis 19.30-38).
Lot and his family, with the exception of his wife whose curiosity got the better of her, are saved from the destruction of Sodom because he saved the angels from the mob’s gang-rape. We can all agree that this is a good deed, right? Sure, if he didn’t save them by offering up his own daughters to be raped. Lot’s life after these events isn’t all roses, but that is more due to his old age, wife who just had to look back, and incestuous daughters who drug him with alcohol so that they can have his children. There is no evidence that he is ever punished by God for his willingness to sacrifice his daughters for two strangers (it isn’t clear that he is aware they are angels at the time). To the contrary, his life and his family are saved, and his incest-derived sons are fruitful as the progenitors of the Moabite and Ammonite people.
“But That’s Just Your Interpretation!”
Believers can find ways to interpret this and other questionable passages in ways that justify, but these rationalizations mean nothing to someone who does not already believe. As such, one cannot expect nonbelievers to find these explanations persuasive. For instance, one can argue the story is not meant to be taken literally. That’s a valid view, and something many atheists and biblical scholars agree with, but literally or not the story is meant to express something. It’s difficult to find any meaning or moral to this story other than that anything is acceptable as long as it’s for God, even incest, something normally unacceptable biblically, and certainly unacceptable to mainstream Christian and Jewish denominations. This is the kind of rationalization that we see in atrocities committed with religious justification, such as with religious terrorism. In should not be surprising why this bothers atheists.
This post ended up much longer than expected. I’ll write on the biblical basis of the second question next time.
