By Mano Singham
Religious people love Hitler because they think he is a winning argument for them. They argue that he was an unbeliever and he did evil things hence unbelief leads to evil. Even if the two premises are true, the conclusion does not logically follow. But even the first premise is false since Hitler was born a Catholic, never renounced it, and even spoke many times in favor of god. In a speech delivered just a year before his death, Hitler says, "I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence."
Some Catholic apologists like Dinesh D'Souza argue that Hitler was secretly an unbeliever who was cynically using religion just to gain support for his appalling policies. But all that shows is that believing Catholics and Lutherans were the ones who supported the Nazi program, hardly a recommendation for religion. Also, when you start appealing to secret motives, you are heading into dangerous ground. After all, using that kind of reasoning, I could argue that D'Souza is secretly an atheist who is deliberately using idiotic arguments as a subtle way of discrediting religion.
Anyway, back to my encounter with the Jesus woman, I was surprised by this development because Hitler, although he almost inevitably makes a cameo appearance in these discussions, is usually religious people's Hail Mary, the big gun, brought out at the very end when all else has failed. This seemed a little early in the game for him to make his dramatic entry. Also, haven’t these people heard of the decision rule arising from Godwin's Law?
So I asked, what about Hitler? She said that if there were no afterlife, then he would not get the punishment he deserved and surely that was wrong. I said that she was not making a case for the afterlife but was merely indulging in wishful thinking, hoping that there is an afterlife so that scores could be settled. But her introducing Hitler enabled me to ask her some questions.
Isn't a god who would condemn people to eternal torment doing something that was even worse than what Hitler did? God wasn't sending people to hell, they were going there because they had been given the gift of free will and they were choosing to reject god.
But doesn't god have the power to not send people to hell? Yes.
Then if they end up in hell, that must be because he wants them to go to hell, right? No.
How come? It is Satan who puts them there.
So is Satan more powerful than god? No.
Then why can't god overrule him? Because he is just. People go to hell because they have abused the gift of free will and rejected god.
But if he has given us the 'gift' of free will, why is he punishing us for using that gift in a way that he disapproves? Because he is just.
Doesn't seem like much of a 'gift', does it? What's the point in giving people free will and then threatening them with eternal damnation if they use that will to make decisions he doesn't like? Doesn't that destroy the purpose of giving free will? If we choose to do wrong, it is our own fault if we go to hell.
I decided to move on.
I asked the Jesus woman whether she believed that Noah's flood occurred. Yes.
In that flood, god deliberately murdered all but the eight people in Noah's family, including tiny infants. Wasn't that worse than anything Hitler had done? Didn't that make god the worst genocidal maniac in history? No.
Why not? Because all those people died because of their sins.
What about the infants? Doesn't it bother you that god murdered vast numbers of tiny newborn infants by drowning them? What had they done to deserve that awful fate?
At this point, she started making stuff up, the way that religious people do when they have no answer. They think they can get away with this because they assume that the person they are talking to does not know the Bible. The doctrine of original sin that says that even newborn babies are also sinners has always been a tough sell, even for the most ardent believers, and she did not even try to pull that one on me. She instead said that god had immediately gathered up in his arms all the babies who had died in the flood. It is a nice cozy image but irrelevant. A murderer who cuddles his victim immediately afterward is still a murderer, and even creepy to boot. It is also totally fictitious. I told her that the Bible said no such thing. As far as the Bible was concerned, in drowning babies god was carrying out his plan exactly as envisaged and I challenged her to show me where in the Bible it said that god had scooped up the drowned babies.
She was stumped and asked me to wait and went off to get reinforcements from the rest of her group and came back with a middle-aged guy and a younger man. But not only could they not back up her assertion of god's act by providing me with biblical verses (which I knew they couldn't) they had no better responses to the questions.
Is murdering a baby an evil act? Yes.
Is drowning huge numbers of babies evil? Yes.
Wouldn't a huge number of babies have drowned in the flood? Yes.
So why were they worshipping an evil, infant-murdering god? No, because if god does something, it cannot be evil.
This answer was so laughable that I let it go and decided to move on to another topic, which I will describe tomorrow.
POST SCRIPT: Some Grey Bloke tries to understand god's love and hell
There are moral systems
There are moral systems where one could consider rape, murder, torture, etc not to be evil. I tend to take it that such things are evil, but that in order to ascertain whether existence(everything that exists, including possibly other alternate universes, if evidence comes in favor of such.) itself is just or an abomination, one may need to look at such alternate systems and find a way to evaluate and compare such.
It is likely such events have happened, happen and will continue to happen somewhere probably eternally. It is also likely that in many such cases the perpetrators will remain unpunished.( also if we assume alternate laws of physics are possible in other universes, there may be places where true immortality along with eternal power concentration is possible and eternal genocidal tyrants may in fact exist forever untouched.).
The case could be that without a moral system that sees such events, if ever occurring, as acceptable then existence may not be considered just.
alternate realities
élan vital wrote: "There are moral systems where one could consider rape, murder, torture, etc not to be evil. I tend to take it that such things are evil, but ... one may need to look at such alternate systems and find a way to evaluate and compare such."
The problem is, of course, that the tools we use for that evaluation are, themselves, shaped by the ethical structure in which we operate. In other words, determining whether rape or murder is evil depends on the value one places on the lives of other human beings.
I've chosen an ethic that is based on religious teachings. Specifically, that mankind is one family, that to be just we should treat others as we would be treated and to be merciful, we should put their welfare before our own. Because of this, I would also say that rape and murder are evil. But élan is right in pointing out that there are value systems (those that devalue women, for example) in which rape is simply accepted (boys will be boys).
Before Muhammad arrived on the scene in Arabia, it was debatable as to whether women were as valuable as camels. A woman who had an unwelcome girl child could find her daughter buried alive and herself "divorced" or dead. A man could have as many wives and concubines as he wanted. Divorce was as easy as disposing of the the offending female. This was the accepted ethic. Muhammad introduced the idea that women were people, were equal in the eyes of God and had rights (including inheritance). He limited the number of wives to 4 (IF the man could treat them with absolute equality, which Muhammad says later in the same surih is impossible), and got rid of concubinage. He also made divorce far more difficult, and made the husband responsible for supplying the ex-wife with support.
Had Muhammad framed himself as a philosopher with no consequence attached to whether His followers took His suggestions, it's doubtful much would have changed. But because He framed His teachings as being from a Source elevated above the politics and petty selfishness of human beings, change happened.
This is common when people accept a religion--they modify their behavior, not because they are naturally inclined to do so (at least not consciously), but because they have accepted to be part of a community that requires said change and/or because they love, respect or fear God and wish to be acceptable to Him. The process goes something like this: The individual believes in a God; someone (such as Muhammad, for example) convinces the individual that they are a Messenger of that God; the Messenger introduces new teachings or renews old ones and the believer complies because he believes the Messenger has the right to require compliance. After some time of adhering to the new way of thought and behavior, the thought becomes natural—the believer may even reverse-engineer the new ideals and discover rational imperatives for them (i.e., if we really believe we are members of one family and behave that way, conflict and bigotry will decrease). The behavior, likewise, becomes natural. (Lifelong atheists who acquire a belief in God becoming comfortable with meditation and prayer, for example.)
The point behind the point is this: If no value is placed on the distress of certain individuals in a society (women, children, blacks, "others" of whatever type) by the folks making the rules for that society, then there is no reason to change those rules. "Change the rules because you're hurting me," doesn't cut it when no one feels they need care about the parties being harmed. Religion says there is a higher level authority that can make those rules because He can see the "big picture."
I've had a number atheists tell me that they are moral without God and know that the Golden Rule ethic is good. But, this misses two points:
1) Even people who lack belief in God are shaped by the societies around them. And many of those societies function with at least avowed compliance with ethics inspired by religion. That is, a large segment of the population are teaching their children religious ethics, whether they attach a religious identity to them or not. A poll recently conducted by Pew Research has it that in the US 92% of the respondents said they believe in some sort of God or Universal spirit. In such an environment, dissociating oneself from the ethics one is embedded in is difficult, if not impossible.
2) It's fine to say, "see we accept these obviously good ethics", but without recourse to an absolute arbiter of those ethics, they amount to no better than shared opinions. Opinions can change. Even within religious communities, politics and avarice have caused folks to abandon the absolutes for a shared opinion that, for example, adhering to a certain dogma trumps or modifies the teachings of the Prophet.
As a person of faith, I would say opinions are changing in the right direction. It warms the cockles of my heart whenever an atheist promotes the Golden Rule as being rational and good, or talks about the essential oneness of humanity, but that's only because I see those unifying ethics as bringing us closer to a universal truth. Without that Source, the judgment of whether hurting our fellow beings is right or wrong would seem to be a matter of opinion based upon what one holds to be true. And not that long ago, this idea of human oneness did not have a broad acceptance.
Perhaps it's simply an idea whose time has come.