#for context fifth grade was the first year i had to do human growth and development

[steviescrystals]

me in fifth grade when my own mother asked me if i was a lesbian (being bi wouldn’t even cross my mind until three years later) 👁️👄👁️

[deilands]

The Good Guys and The Bad Guys

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. - Martin Luther King Jr. 

Have you ever taken a moment and looked back on your life when you were much younger? Perhaps you look through the lens of memory to when you were a high-school student or when you were still running around your house wearing a superman cape or in my case Thunder-Cat Underwear (Don’t you dare judge me, He-Man supporters.)

I’ve always been fortunate to have a great long-term memory. I can remember playing with my best friend when I was three or sweeping the dirt-floor of my barn-like clubhouse when I was seven. I can remember being bullied in fifth grade and I can remember the struggle of wanting to hold hands with my sixth-grade girlfriend. One thing that I can’t do, though, is place myself in the head-space of that young child those many years ago. All my analysis comes from where I am currently residing.

I’ve mentioned already that during high-school I co-founded a club called the Christian Highschool Movement. We were what you would call militantly inspired Christians. We wore fatigues one day a week, did prayer walks around the school grounds to set up ‘hedges of protection’ around the school, we had morning prayer every morning and we even set up a ten to fifteen-page charter with such rules as no dating, or no chewing gum (because that would break the school rules and God wouldn’t agree with such things).

Here I am in our club attire with my sister who might just kill me when she realizes I used this picture. To her credit, she thought we were weird. 

One of the things that I can remember about my thoughts were this: Everyone that was not a Christian was, by their very nature, less than us. I don’t mean that I felt superior in an overall way but that they were still ‘in sin’ and therefore dead. They had no moral compass, were doomed to be slaves to their sin, and were, in general, going to find themselves lonely and lacking for the rest of their lives unless we managed – through the help of God – to save them from themselves.

We would put ourselves out there every day – we’d leave Chic Tracts on desks, harass the girl who wore the “Recovering Christian” shirt by telling her that she may be a recovering Christian but God still loved her, walked out of classrooms because they played a movie that had a curse word in it. . . all with the idea that our job was to reclaim territory from an enemy – Satan himself – who is, if most Christians are being honest, more successful at taking territory than they are at reclaiming it.

As I got older, I learned something pivotal that would later act to destroy another pillar of my Christian faith. I found that as I met more and more people that charity and compassion, love and forgiveness, peace and wholeness, and these other facets of life that are claimed by most religions to be found only in the purview of their faith are found everywhere in the world.

Many of you have seen the bumper sticker, “No God, No Peace, Know God, Know Peace”. It’s a trite but telling statement about what many believe about their faith. I can remember conversations with others through high-school and into college discussing how even though these people look ok on the outside, on the inside they are really sad, depressed, and without hope.

They have a “God-Shaped Hole” in their heart and they try to fill it with everything they can but nothing works.

Sound familiar?

Let me ask you though. Have you ever talked to an atheist or an agnostic or a Buddhist monk or a myriad of other people who have their life together WITHOUT your God in the middle of it? I promise you they exist.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, isn’t it?

Morality doesn’t need God. Someone asked a question anonymously earlier and I thought it fit in well with this post.

“Can justice exist in the absence of moral law?”

To answer this question, we should examine a few things. First – what is justice? I think, in the context of the question, that justice is best described as receiving appropriate punishment or reward based on your actions. Personified, justice is often shown as a blindfolded woman holding scales. She has no say in the matter, it’s about balance.

Perfect justice, then, doesn’t care about the why it cares about the what. It doesn’t see that you stole a loaf of bread to feed your family or you stole that loaf of bread to sell on the market to buy drugs. It just looks to balance scales.

Many people who engage in apologetics (reasoned arguments for belief in something) use this as a way of proving the existence of God. How would we know right and wrong if someone didn’t teach it to us first? There must have been some supreme ‘moral law’ established by someone. Otherwise, we’d all just run around committing genocide and murder and raping people all the time.  

Wait. . .

That is what God did.

1)     He did order more genocides for more reasons than one can count – often accompanying the rape of whatever virgins were left. I must wonder at times how that happened. Did the babies get killed first or did they let the kids watch their mom and dad get slaughtered? Maybe they killed them at the same time. Did they start the rape before or after the rest of them were killed? Sorry – I digress.

2)     He did establish the system of blood sacrifice and self-mutilation to appease himself when men did stuff that he considered wrong. Remember in all of this – if God is all-powerful, all creative, all knowing, all everything, then everything that is created (including moral law and the concepts of justice) is created by him. We talk about his great love in sending his only son. The problem is that he is the one who made that system up – remember?

I want to stop here because if I keep listing then it ends up being a rant.

The point is that for most of human history, morality and justice were based on the perceptions of what God wanted people to do. When the Catholics and the Protestants were at their worst, they maimed and killed all in the name of their God and before you rail that God never told them to do that – how do you know? At what point in the Scripture does God back away from his divine right of slaughter, torture, and rape? And if he does – what caused the never-changing God to change? You can claim it was the death of Jesus but that’s never posited within Scripture at all. Actually – if you read the Revelation of Jesus Christ – it looks like it is quite the opposite.

My point is, if you look through history, the one thing that I see overall is that it is the growth and evolution of humanity that has brought about the most peace, justice, and moral law. It wasn’t the Christian God who promoted equality. No – through most of the Scripture there is a severe lack of equality both between men and women and between races as well. It wasn’t God who promoted the cessation of horrible violence and war. He gave the ten commandments and then broke them as often as he wanted to. It wasn’t God who healed the masses and brought food to the starving. It was the innovations of men and women – many of which had moved away from belief in a deity. In contrast, the Church has consistently fought against the growth of scientific and medical knowledge – especially when that knowledge seems to go against some Scriptural precept.

So where then does our moral law come from? I believe – and yes this is a belief and I might be wrong – that it has come from the same evolutionary process that has brought us to where we are now. It’s no accident that countries who begin to educate women in equal measure as much as men see a significant drop in the death rate and the birth rate. It’s no accident that the countries who label themselves as the least religious see the most peace. It’s no accident that as education and equality rise so does the increase of what most of humanity would consider morality.

Does this make any sense? If knowing God is knowing peace; if knowing God is knowing love; if knowing God is knowing fulfillment, then why is it that underneath His morality we see the most destruction of these same tenants?

The world is much more complicated than Christians and Non-Christians. It is much more complicated than the good guys and the bad guys. Morality isn’t simply the purview of the Christian church and moral goodness and justice exist outside of the precepts established by any religion. When I realized this, I was able to take off my fatigues. I was able to realize that – at least as far as the visible evidence demonstrates – morality is as much an evolution as is skin-color and eye-color and how tall or how short people are. I don’t need a God to tell me what is right and wrong because I’m learning that by living and by attempting to act with as much empathy as I can, I am growing as a moral person.

And perhaps it is this change of morality that best demonstrates that humanity isn’t growing more evil. Yes, morality changes – like all things are changing. Let us not forget that it was moral – according to God – to have slaves. Until it wasn’t. It was moral to beat your wife for disobedience. It was moral to stone your children when they didn’t behave. It was moral to do a lot of things that now we look at in horror. Perhaps this is the biggest argument for why I walked away from the Christian faith. When mankind can operate with more compassion than God can – why should I follow?

And for those of you who would say that he’s God – he can do what he wants. . .

I don’t really have anything I can say to that.

Thank you for reading.