by Eric Lormand

"Why do you call me good?" (Mark 10:18)
"And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?" (Luke 12:57)

Suppose you were in the market for a new house, and the real estate agent told you, in all seriousness, that a particular house was absolutely perfect in every way, not a single defect. You’d scour the place before signing the dotted line. Or similarly, suppose a friend offered to set you up with a completely ideal blind date. It’d be ridiculous for the agent or your friend to complain later that your inspection was "one-sided" or that you were "only emphasizing the negative".

That’s how we ought to think about Jesus. It’s usually agreed by both Christians and non Christians, even by vehement anti-Christians, that Jesus as presented in the four gospels is perfectly ideal, morally. Many of his most simple teachings (e.g., the "Golden Rule") seem brilliant, and many of the actions that seem most natural to him (e.g., seeking to forgive those who crucify him because "they know not what they do") are, at times, amazing. But we should scour the record before signing on the dotted line. (Box 1 and Box 2 give other reasons it’s important to think this through.)

So let’s turn to the biblical stories without prejudice—without prejudging the issue of Jesus’s moral status. This procedure should be welcome to any Christian who believes that a fair reading of the texts will bear out their claims. I think otherwise. What are the facts?

Before we can address this, we need to settle on some moral principles. I’ll try not to depend upon any but the least controversial ones:

(1) There’s a difference between morality and power. (This assumption is implicit in Box 2’s claim that an omnipotent being could well be a "meanie".) Hitler was powerful, but he wasn’t (correspondingly) good—and not simply because he didn’t win! Similarly, I assume it’s more respectable in general to engage in "rational" moral discussion than to wield power as a substitute for rational persuasion.

(2) Considered all by itself, suffering is a bad thing, and so to the extent one predictably causes suffering, one should have an overriding justification or excuse. There are serious constraints on the suffering one is permitted to cause. For instance, there’s such a thing as "cruel and unusual punishment"—if a kid pokes fun at your beer-belly, you aren’t justified in shooting him. Inflicting great pain should be treated as a last resort.

Though I think (1) and (2) could be defended "from scratch" rather than assumed, that would take a while and I won’t try to do so here. At any rate, they would be hard for a Christian to deny. Other points may surface here and there, but I believe they will be as unobjectionable as these.

I first draw attention to a few of the actions of God in the Old Testament which seem very wrong. If Jesus is God, he’s responsible for these actions every bit as much as "Jehovah" is. The Old Testament is pretty gory, and we could multiply examples indefinitely. I list only a couple that are lesser known, that are attributed to God directly rather than to a human representative (Moses’s biological weapons, Samson’s suicide bombing, etc.), and that seem to be completely pointless. Third, I’ll point out certain features of the famous story of Job, since Job asks the same question I do, namely, "Is God (completely) good?" Then we’ll turn to the New Testament documents.

II Kings 2:23-25 reads:

While of course I don’t want to encourage youngsters to jeer at baldheaded men, the punishment in this case is cruel and unusual if anytthing is. And the implication is clear that it’s God who’s inflicting the punishment—why else would the bear come out just when Elisha curses the children? While it’s possible that the boys are doing more than "just teasing"—maybe they are trying to kill Elisha, or steal his lunch—there’s no textual reason to believe this. No reason, that is, unless you already believe that God must have a good reason for killing the boys—a belief which, as I have argued, is nothing more than a prejudice.

Even more of the "mercy of the Lord" is displayed at I Chronicles 13:9-10, where David, an unfortunate named Uzzah, and a couple of others are transporting the ark of the covenant:

As you may have guessed, there is a prohibition against touching the ark. But it seems that Uzzah has good intentions (to prevent the ark from crashing to the ground), and surely this fact calls for leniency. (If his intentions were to cop a feel of the ark, why would he wait until the oxen stumble? In hopes that he can trick God?) Even if his primary intention is (heaven forfend!) to touch the ark, this punishment is excessive.

Honestly motivated by his long suffering, it occurs to Job to wonder whether God is good, and he responsibly and respectfully takes his question straight to the source. We might reasonably demand that God engage in something like moral discussion. So how does God display his goodness? This is the irony, for his display is one of the most detestable of all his actions. Even the most careful reading of God’s speech from the whirlwind (chapters 38-42) reveals not a shred of evidence of his goodness, but only a "military parade" of his power and might. Thus sayeth the Lord to Job. for instance:

In the face of this onslaught Job whimpers:

The Lord continues:

Evaluate it without prejudice: isn’t this exactly what a powerful monster would say? You can easily imagine Hitler "justifying" himself, to someone who questions his goodness, by intimidating the questioner. And there are no morally relevant differences between this wrong and God’s intimidation of Job. Finally, Job succumbs to this battery:

If Job is ready to bow down before the first display of supernatural power he is faced with, is it not clear that he is equally ready to bow himself before an omnipotent fiend? And is it really so clear that he does not do so?

With this much said, I now consider some of the actions and attitudes of Jesus wearing his own hat (that is, the Jesus of the New Testament). Again I leave aside actions and teachings of others, such as the apostles, just as I leave aside the rampant crimes of later church institutions. I’ll list them in gradual and rough increasing order of importance, with the final two noticeably more persistent than the rest. The final six mainly concern problems with Jesus’s moral teachings, while the first two concern his (other) actions.

Start with the weird story of the Gadarene swine. Jesus casts out demons from a certain man, and, at the demons’ request, sends them into a nearby herd of swine, which are thereby driven into the sea. Now, if Jesus is God, he can presumably cast the demons into the abyss or wherever he pleases, so it is unjustifiably cruel to the swine to use them as a disposal site for the demons. Bad enough, but in case you’re not much moved by wanton cruelty to animals, consider that Jesus pointlessly disregards the rights of the herders who (quite understandably!) ask Jesus to leave their region. (Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-17, Luke 8:26-33)

And then there is the story of the chief priests who ask Jesus to tell them how he gets his authority. Maybe the evangelists are right to guess that the question is asked in order to trap Jesus in some legality, but Jesus’ behavior is still far from perfect. The question itself, regardless of the possible intentions of the questioners, is a perfectly fair one; it’s a question you could reasonably demand a straight answer to. Jesus, however, chooses to evade the question. While I doubt he should duck the question, I’m more concerned with how he manages this: he asks another question, which he knows (even if he isn’t omniscient) the chief priests will be afraid to answer in public. Then, since they don’t answer his question, he doesn’t answer theirs. That’s silly at best ("But I asked you first!" "No, I did!" "No, I did!") but the really crucial thing is this. The reason the priests cannot answer Jesus’s question is that they are physically afraid of the surrounding crowd, so that Jesus is using the threat of violence to duck the question. (Matthew 21:23-27, Mark 11:27-33, Luke 20:1-8)

Jesus is quick to assume that anyone who fails to "follow" him does so because of moral defects rather than (say) lack of evidence. While it’s not clear what weight should be given to the words of Jesus’ disciples, John states what seems to be an echo of Jesus’ view:

This famous story expresses one rather unwise aspect of Jesus’ moral teaching:

Really bad advice. Often you can’t see your own vices unless others point to them. If we were all to "mind our own business" until we were morally very clean, and only then criticize others, we attain very little moral improvement at all. If the most morally depraved person in the world tells me of some fault of mine (please assume, for the sake of the argument, that we aren’t one-and-the-same), the truth or falsity of what she says doesn’t depend upon her moral status.

There are other cases where implementing a policy of Jesus’s would lead to disastrous results. Jesus says:

This isn’t a sensible policy. Consider the following two cases:

Now, according to Jesus, a divorce is permissible (although not obligatory) in case (B), but is impermissible in case (A). This ought to strike you as simply perverse. What can be said in defense of this policy on divorce (a policy which unfortunately has been heeded, to the misery of many—at least with the gender roles reversed), and what can be said in defense of a God who arranges things such that the marriage in case (A) must not be dissolved? The only line I see is to try to make a case for denying that the cases are possible ones (God wouldn’t let that happen!), but, unfortunately they are (or he does).

Many of Jesus’ parables are stories of master-servant relationships. For example, he asks rhetorically:

Jesus is using this situation as an analogy for a relationship he considers good, namely, that between God and man. It seems he must condone (or advocate) such relationships, or else he wouldn’t use them as analogies for relationships he thinks right. But master-servant relationships of the sort Jesus exploits are among the worst relationships there are.

Now I turn to what I consider to be the most central issues.

Jesus makes many pronouncements about what’s good and what’s bad. One trouble is that he gives very little reason for accepting his pronouncements. But the real problem is that he "defends" his views (when he bothers to at all) by appealing to rewards and punishments. That is, he doesn’t urge people to act in certain ways or adopt certain attitudes because those actions or attitudes are good, but because they’re rewarded. And so with his negative injunctions, and punishment.

This comes out vividly in his Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the X-ers, for they shall get reward Y. Woe to the X-ers, for they shall get punishment Y." This isn’t only a poor sort of argument, but a dishonest one (coming from one who should know better). Confusion of questions of morality with questions of reward and punishment (i.e., of who wields power) is the surest sign of power-intoxication: from the heavy-handed parent, to the heavy-handed tyrant, to the heavy handed God. Granted, this sort of practice—"carrots and stcks"—is effective in causing (similarly confused) people to agree; but it isn’t right to use it in this manner (as a substitute for dialogue). Things aren’t made good by being rewarded, for bad actions could be rewarded. (Recall that we’re assuming there’s a difference between morality and power.)

It’s lamentable that people are often motivated by (no more than) fear of punishment and hope for reward. We acknowledge this when we admire the proverbial scout who walks the oldster across the street without asking for a reward. But Jesus is happy to prey upon the reward/punishment motivation. He’s often asked: "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" A really wise moral teacher would’ve responded (by saying something like), "You should do such-and-such a thing, but not ‘to inherit eternal life’. What virtue is there in doing your duty only in order to be rewarded? Do these things because they’re right. (And by the way, here’s why they’re right ….)" However, Jesus responds consistently in the opposite manner:

This sort of thinking permeates Jesus’ entire moral teaching. On plausible assumptions about his knowledge (and certainly on the assumption that he is omnipotent and omniscient!) his actions amount to threats on the same level as God’s intimidation of Job.

This last point is a common but nonetheless forceful one. It concerns Jesus’ belief that eternal punishment in a hell of fire is a good thing in some (one is inclined to say "many" or even "the great majority of") cases.

To make the objection it’s customary to appeal to a broad moral distinction between two sorts of punishment. On the one hand, there’s retributive punishment, and on the other there’s preventive punishment (there are borderline cases, of course, but they don’t blur the extremes). Retributive punishment is motivated by considerations of vengeance—"an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth"—and nothing deeper. Preventive punishment is motivated by considerations of usefulness (and desert)—for example, you may want to jail a criminal in order to prevent him from doing more wrong, but not simply in order to "get him back".

If you don’t like the distinction, or else don’t agree that retributive punishment is wrong, it’s enough if you agree to the following: it’s better in general to simply jail a criminal (or even execute her) than to jail her in order to torture her indefinitely. (Pain should be a last resort, and should be minimized.)

Now, it seems obvious that everlasting torment in hell is wrong for just these reasons. No matter what "trespasses" someone may commit, all that’s needed is for God to lock ’em up for eternity, or cause ’em to cease to exist. Even Jesus (who can strike many unprejudiced readers as simply bloodthirsty) seems to be conceding as much when he says, "It would have been better for that man [who betrays the Son of Man] if he had not been born". If so, what’s the point of the everlasting torment by fire? Jesus’s seeming admission makes his advocacy of hell even more detestable.

The typical response is that hell really is more like being locked up than like the eternal hellfire. It’s often claimed that the suffering amounts to being separated from God. But if sinners don’t suffer down here from being separated from God, why would it be so excruciating later on, unless there was more to hell than the apologists like to admit?

These are some of my reasons for thinking that Jesus is far from morally spotless, and isn’t worthy of worship and submission even if he is omnipotent, etc. (Box 3 assembles these points into a response to the "World’s Coolest" argument in Box 1.) I believe many of his moral teachings are on the right track, and I have great respect for many of his actions, but in moral virtue he sits far below others such as Buddha, Socrates, and Lao-tse. Divine or not, he has a whole side that’s seriously deranged.