Christians don’t agree on much, particularly about the bible. They agree on very little about what the bible actually says, what it really means, and what parts of it are true and applicable. In fact, the single thing on which Christians seem able to agree is that parts of the bible claiming to count don’t really count and that parts of the bible demanding obedience don’t really require obedience. Naturally, they don’t agree on what those parts are, only that those parts exist.
What Christians don’t understand or simply won’t admit (and why they’re so damned annoying) is that because Christianity professes to be a revealed religion, rejecting any part of the revelation requires rejecting the entire revelation, together with the god it purports to reveal. Of course, the bible claims to be that revelation and a unique source of truth—the inspired revelation of the singular God explaining both his exclusively salvific religion and the source, purpose, and end of the world.
So, let’s examine its reliability as the trustworthy self-disclosure of a condescending god.
The bible reports in Exodus 33:23 that Moses saw the “back parts,” apparently of god’s body, because according to god in verse 20, no man can see god’s face and live. So to protect Moses from such an unfortunate death, god covered Moses’ face with his own hand until his face was safely hidden from view and Moses was able to safely satiate the curiosity by looking at god’s ass. That was certainly thoughtful of god, but here’s the rub: John 1:18 declares that no person, save Jesus, has seen god at any time. That would make sense in light of 1 Timothy 1:17—which asserts that god is, among other things, invisible—but it certainly gives rise to the obvious question: What was Moses looking at when he saw god’s “back parts?” Meanwhile, according to Deuteronomy 34:10, Moses knew god face to face and according to the historical opinion of the church, god had no body at all, because considering Deuteronomy 4:15-16 with John 4:24 and Luke 24:39, we get the following:
“Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female. [Jesus said:] God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”1
These are the exact verses adduced by the 1646 version of the Westminster Confession of Faith to “prove” its declaration that the “one only, living, and true God” is “without body, parts, or passions.” Apparently, when declaring truth, church councils ignore contradictory proof texts.
The puzzles don’t end when trying to understand what, how, and who has seen god, either. For example, whether god changes his mind is also a puzzle. According to Genesis 6, observing the utter wickedness of humanity so repented god for having created at all and so grieved his heart that he destroyed his own creation (save the Noahs, of course). That’s powerful repentance and apparently god has a propensity for it, because in Exodus 32, we learn that Moses persuaded god to repent of the evil he intended doing to his people. Nor is Moses the only prophet aware of the divine propensity to repent. In Jonah 3:9, that prophet banks on the same penchant when encouraging Nineveh to repent, and sure enough, the next verse finds god repenting “of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”
This divine propensity to repent is an odd one, though, because James 1:17 tells us that with god there “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” and Numbers 23:19 assures us that, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent,” and mockingly asks us, “hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?” 2
Obviously, it’s impossible to reasonably believe all of those things and the honest answer to the bible’s sardonic question must be an equally sardonic, “I dunno.” When confronted with a formal contradiction in the bible, the rational mind concludes that the bible makes false statements and when the subject of those formal contradictions is god, the rational mind concludes that the bible makes false statements about god. The consistent rational mind then proceeds to reject the bible as a reliable revelation of god, to evaluate the bible both in terms of that fact and its internal testimony, and ultimately to reject the bible and the god it purports to reveal. That leaves the rational mind free from struggling with the archaic biblical ethic that approbates rape, slavery, and genocide, while promulgating the subjection of women to men.
Unfortunately, Christians, if not utterly irrational, are certainly not consistently rational individuals and—whether for want of thought, want of courage, or want of honesty—the Christian won’t say, “I dunno.” Therefore, the Christian never arrives at the point of rational activity, rejecting the bible, its ethic, and its god in toto. Instead, the Christian will admit the bible’s failures—explaining them as transcription error, allegory, or cultural limits3–but insist on the bible’s overall validity as a peculiar religious revelation, despite both its failure to cogently reveal anything and its primitive and abhorrent ethic.
Having embraced a self-refuting, ethically repugnant ersatz revelation, the Christian has forfeited any objective religious canon and must adopt a subjective religious standard. Not surprisingly, that canon becomes his or her own predilections, so that every Christian will describe and interpret the bible in a manner that matches his or her intellect (or lack of intellect) ethic, and personality, using the bible’s own objective unreliability and primitive content as reason to reject what doesn’t appeal. Rather than rationally rejecting the entire revelation, the Christian eclectically picks, chooses, dismisses, ignores, and rationalizes the bible’s various and conflicting commands, ethics, accounts, and contradictions to self-project her or himself into the bible.
Some Christians will dismiss more of the bible, others less, some in pious sounding ways, and others more flagrantly. The better educated, more articulate Christians might perform mental genuflections to explain biblical contradictions and write grand systematic theologies to describe the gods they project, while the uneducated ones might tell you only what they feel in their hearts and the religious yuppies will tell you what meaning they take from the bible. What each Christian is telling you, though, in her or his own way, is that he or she is god. The result is a rank and unique pride that claims a divine stamp of approval upon the Christian’s own life, while rejecting both all of the bible that doesn’t appeal to her or his liking and the gods constructed by other Christians, reflecting other parts of the bible.
Ultimately, the god to which every particular Christian prays is identical to the god which every particular Christian shaves: The god in the mirror. It’s an arrogant syncretism of life and religion that we call Self-Projection as God (SPAG).
For a practical demonstration, just pick a pair of contrary or contradictory bible verses that are on either side of a sensitive issue and ask a Christian what she or he thinks about them. The better you know the bible and the Christian, the easier it will be to pick the appropriately contrary verses, but the result will always be the same: The Christian will start rationalizing and explaining the contradiction in a way that accommodates them to his or her own life.
Press the Christian on inconsistencies and you’ll find that she or he sit upon the horns of a dilemma: A revelation the Christian can neither dismiss nor embrace in whole. On the one hand, the bible contains many paradoxical statements, contrary accounts, and even a formal contradiction or two. Invariably, it also has commands that the Christian does not wish to obey, ethics of which the Christian does not approve, and revelations of a god that the Christian does not want to worship. On the other hand, the Christian needs the bible to believe certain things he or she does hold dear. Whether it’s the beliefs that his dear old grandma is “in a better place”, that there was once a very special baby in a feeding trough, and that no matter how bad life gets there is a god to love us and make it all better, or the beliefs that grandma “went to hell,” that there was once a very special baby in a feeding trough, and that no matter how bad life gets, there is a god to hate our enemies and send them to hell, the Christian needs the bible to hold onto those things. They don’t make sense without religion.
Understand that we’re not merely intending to demonstrate simply that the bible is an inconsistent hodgepodge of ancient mythology and antiquated ethics rife with error, a Godian Knot that cannot be unraveled. That’s an obvious prima facie case and it’s not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is that because it’s an obvious prima facie case, that SPAG is the necessary and universal form of Christianity in practice, an absolute identity: All Christianity is Self-Projection as God.
Of course, the good news here is that at some level, SPAG is the Christian’s tacit admission to what we rationalists understand clearly: Far from being an inspired text from an eternal and unchanging god that is truth itself, the bible is a primitive book written in primitive cultures by primitive men with agendas and intentions that are below the dignity of any decent thinking person today. The bad news is that by the Christian having made that tacit admission without arriving at the point of rational activity, the bible has become a book that no enlightened person would rationally embrace,4but simultaneously a book that otherwise enlightened men and women embrace and defend, while—for the most part—refusing to defend it.
The Christian has not finally embraced the bible, but projected his or her own values, ego, and opinions an external revelation of god, claiming it as the bible’s god. That is the god the Christian will defend, not any historic definition of god. Not a “more biblical” [sic] version of god, and certainly not another person’s Self-Projection as God. It changes the ground of debate with the Christian. The dispute is no longer over the veracity and value of the bible as words bound in leather covers. We decisively have won that battle, but the Christians have outflanked us.
Convincing the Christian to reject the bible is simple, but convincing her or him to cease Self-Projecting as God proves far more difficult. Rather than filtering the evidence for god against reality and determining what it means, the Christian filters everything through his or her SPAG, doing whatever it takes to make it fit. While we continue to fire bullets cast in a rational mold at the non-existent god that we have already convinced the Christian to reject, the living-breathing god the Christian worships stands before us, freshly shaved and impervious to our logical ammunition.
It’s an infuriating battle to fight. We demonstrate that the bible is a self-contradictory book replete with inconsistency and error that could not stand scrutiny in an American court of law. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true and good. We demonstrate that the bible is an appalling book replete with heinous accounts of atrocity that would have Yahweh tried as a war criminal under the Geneva Convention. The Christian will agree and insist that her god is true and good. We demonstrate that the bible is a primitive book replete with approbations of slavery and misogyny that would be rejected by any enlightened society. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true. We say that the bible is an antiquated book abounding in anti-scientific accounts of the natural world and fanciful mythological tales that belie an omnipotent creator as its author. The Christian will agree and insist that his god is true.
We marvel at the Christian’s imperviousness to our logical arsenal until we finally throw up hands in frustration and concede, not the content of the argument, but the wherewithal to continue in the quagmire of irrational guerilla warfare. Meanwhile, the Christians win the war of attrition and elect leaders that go to war based on discussions with god about faulty intelligence, which is why religion is not a harmless and private matter.
As long as men and women are claiming to be god, Christianity must be objected and defeated, but the battle is not waged over an objective religion with an objective revelation. The battle has shifted to the Christian’s mind and psychology and the point of contention has become his or her claim of jus divinum for personal predilections. Focusing on the new objective is a matter of shifting our focus from the ridiculous religion that is objective Christianity to the ridiculous incongruity of SPAG in an otherwise intelligent and enlightened person’s life.
