Thomas Paine was correct when he wrote, “Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.”52 The eternal torture created by Jesus, and its unmitigated application for any and every crime, is cruel and unusual.
10
Redemption and Original Sin or Personal Responsibility and the Presumption of Innocence?
“I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life…. In order to gain the benefit of this wondrous offer, I have to accept that I am responsible for the flogging and mocking and crucifixion, in which I had no say and no part…. Furthermore, I am required to believe that the agony was necessary in order to compensate for an earlier crime in which I also had no part, the sin of Adam.”
— Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, 20071
The American justice system and government, and perhaps our entire society, rest on the principle that people are personally responsible for their actions. We depend on the ability to hold people accountable. The founders were explicit about the need for personal responsibility in the new constitutional system they had created.2 In criminal law, banking and lending, voting, paying taxes, civil law, insurance, and more, personal responsibility is a prerequisite.
Religion tends to lessen one’s sense of personal responsibility and, in some instances, can even be an indicator that a person intends to avoid all such responsibility. Data backs this up. In one study, researchers looked at keywords people used when applying for loans. An applicant who mentioned their god—as in, “I swear to God I’ll pay you back”—was 2.2 times more likely to default on the loan, making it “among the single highest indicators that someone would not pay back.”3
The entire Christian religion is based on a singular claim that violates the principle of personal responsibility so critical to our systems: that Jesus died for your sins. Christianity’s rejection of personal responsibility is actually twofold. First, a person is guilty of original sin simply because they were born. To believe this, you must accept not only that all humans descended from two originals that a god created for his garden, but also that all human beings are culpable for the actions of those two forebears, whose disobedience was prompted by a talking snake and was committed millennia ago. Guilt without action is rare under our law, but it is the law in much of Christianity. Second, the sacrifice of Jesus means that one’s sins are forgiven. This is vicarious redemption through human sacrifice—Jesus as a sacrificial scapegoat. Each idea is repugnant to American principles in its own way. Original sin confers guilt without regard for personal actions, while vicarious redemption absolves that guilt through the torture and murder of another human.
Although vicarious redemption through Jesus’s sacrifice is central only to Christianity, vicarious redemption is common within Judeo-Christianity. The sacrifice of Jesus culminates a long tradition of human sacrifice. The Israelite general Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to the biblical god for granting him victory in battle,4 and that same god tells Moses to “take all the chiefs of the people, and impale them in the sun before the LORD, in order that the fierce anger of the LORD may turn away from Israel.”5
Biblical animal sacrifice is even more common than human sacrifice. The Hebrew bible has an astonishing variety of commands for animal sacrifice, detailed down to the minutiae. Animals that are to be slaughtered and burned to appease the vengeful god are often required to be unblemished.6 Everyone remembers that Noah brought two of each animal on his ark, but the bible also says that he brought an additional seven pairs of each animal that were “clean.” He brought these animals successfully through the yearlong flood and then, when the waters subsided, built an altar and killed the clean animals as a sacrifice to his god.7 Jesus, himself a sacrificial offering, was called “the lamb of god” and was depicted in art as “a lamb without defect or blemish” for centuries.8 His supposedly sinless nature was equivalent to the unblemished animals.
The modern reader may think such sacrifices are limited to primitive times and places, but they are still practiced today, including by members of some Ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects who, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, practice kapparot.9 Participants grab a chicken by the wings and swing it around their heads three times to transfer their sins to the bird while chanting, “This be my substitute, my vicarious offering, my atonement.”10 The chickens are then slaughtered (an estimated 50,000 chickens are killed annually for kapparot in Brooklyn alone).11 Muslims undertaking the Hajj during Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, sacrifice lambs, goats, or cows as a symbolic reenactment of Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram in place of Isaac.
Vicarious redemption supposedly expunges some cosmic criminal record, but is the very definition of two wrongs not making a right. The biblical ambition to abolish personal responsibility is not limited to vicarious redemption through human and animal sacrifice, though. The biblical god regularly punishes innocent people, including children who are penalized for their parent’s mistakes (we’ll see this in the Second Commandment too, in chapter 15), as well as entire groups of people who are punished for the minor infractions of one person in the group:
The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio, 1603.
Genesis 6:7, 6:13, 6:17; 7:4, 7:21–23—God kills everything and everyone except Noah, Noah’s family, and a pair of each animal because he regrets making humans.
Genesis 22:2–12—God commands a father to kill his son as a test. Neither has done anything wrong; god just wants to make sure Abraham is so scared of him that he will kill Isaac, his child.
Genesis 34:25—Jacob’s sons “took their swords and came against the city unawares, and killed all the males.” To avenge the rape of their sister they kill the rapists—and every other male.
Exodus 11:4–6; 11:29–30—God kills firstborn children unless there is lamb’s blood on the family’s doorframe. Morality, innocence, and age are irrelevant.
Exodus 20:5, 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy. 5:9—God promises to punish children for their parents’ crimes, to the third and fourth generation, in each verse.
Exodus 22:20—If you sacrifice to another god you shall be devoted to destruction. This entails eradicating the offender’s family, according to Levitcus 27:28–29.
Exodus 23:23—Six races of people are wiped out because they happen to live in Canaan, a land that god promised to the Israelites. “When my angel goes in front of you, and brings you to the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, and I blot them out.”
Levitcus 26:29—“You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters.” Making guilty parents cannibalize their innocent children and killing the innocent to punish the guilty in the process.
Numbers 9:13—Failing to keep Passover gets your family exterminated.
Numbers 14:33—“Your children…shall suffer for your faithlessness.”
Numbers 16:20–35—“Their wives, their children, and their little ones…the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, along with their households—everyone who belonged to Korah.”
Numbers 25:7–8, 25:16–18—After a Jewish man “brought a Midianite woman into his family,” Aaron’s grandson, Phinehas, took a spear “and pierced the two of them, the Israelite and the woman, through the belly.” For this murder, Phinehas is commended by his god, who then orders destruction of the Midianites for being Midianites.
Deuteronomy 28:41—“You shall have sons and daughters, but they shall not remain yours, for they shall go into captivity.”
Deuteronomy 28:53—“You will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your own sons
and daughters.”
Deuteronomy 28:59—“The LORD will overwhelm both you and your offspring with severe and lasting afflictions and grievous lasting maladies.”
And this list only includes examples from the Pentateuch, the first five biblical books.
Eighteenth-century English politician and philosopher Henry St. John, the Viscount Bolingbroke, heavily influenced the founders, including both Jefferson and Adams (who read his works through five times).12 Bolingbroke observed that if vicarious “redemption” is “the main and fundamental article of the Christian faith,” then the “fall of man is the foundation of this fundamental article.”13 The combination of these doctrines, he noted, “is, in all its circumstances, absolutely irreconcilable to every idea we can frame of wisdom, justness, and goodness, to say nothing of the dignity of the Supreme Being.”14 And it is irreconcilable to American principles.
The American justice system rejects a presumption of guilt in favor of its opposite, the presumption of innocence. Unlike the biblical god’s law, our laws protect the innocent.15 Discussing this principle in 1895, the Supreme Court related a tale from the annals of Roman law:
Numerius contented himself with denying his guilt, and there was not sufficient proof against him. His adversary, Delphidius, “a passionate man,” seeing that the failure of the accusation was inevitable, could not restrain himself, and exclaimed, “Oh, illustrious Caesar! if it is sufficient to deny, what hereafter will become of the guilty?” to which Julian replied, “If it suffices to accuse, what will become of the innocent?”16
Christians effectively answered Julian’s riposte several centuries later when Pope Innocent IV issued a bull in 1252, Ad extirpanda, allowing the Inquisition to torture to extract confessions from the accused.17 “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law,” said the Supreme Court more than one hundred years ago.18 Benjamin Franklin thought it “better for a hundred guilty persons to escape than for one innocent person to suffer.”19 Franklin may have discussed the principle with Voltaire when the two met in Paris in 1778. Years earlier, the French philosopher had written, “It is better to run the risk of sparing the guilty than to condemn the innocent.”20 America’s justice system demands proof of guilt to avoid punishing innocents; the Judeo-Christian god intentionally harms innocents to punish the guilty.
Some have tried to argue that presuming innocence is in fact biblical. The chain of logic21 is tenuous and difficult to trace, but if followed it leads to a single quote from Deuteronomy 17:2–5, which reads:
If there is found among you…a man or woman who…serve[s] other gods and worship[s] them…and if it is reported to you or you hear of it, and you make a thorough inquiry, and the charge is proved true…then you shall bring out to your gates that man or that woman who has committed this crime and you shall stone the man or woman to death.
This is a command to kill everyone of another religion. The “thorough inquiry” requirement is not a presumption of innocence, nor is it all that original. The deficit in this passage is especially obvious when weighed against every biblical example of punishing innocent people. The children killed for and by god—Egypt’s firstborn, Jephthah’s unnamed daughter, Eli’s descendants, Achon’s family, the thousands of babies and children who died in Noah’s flood—were all innocent; they did “not yet know right from wrong,” as the bible says.22 But the biblical god slaughtered them just the same. The bible kills too many innocents to be the wellspring of this important concept; it shuns the axiom on nearly every page.
SEPARATION OF POWERS CAME FROM MONTESQUIEU, not Isaiah. The bible venerates principles such as obedience and fear, not freedom, as the Constitution does. Biblical justice is so severe and vicious that it would, if implemented, violate the Constitution. Hell, a central tenet of Christianity, conflicts with the Constitution on at least two major counts: both as a place of torture and as an eternal punishment. Original sin, another essential Christian principle, transgresses the core presumption of American justice. And vicarious redemption, the defining Christian principle, repudiates personal responsibility, upon which all American law, society, and government rest. It doesn’t look as if the bible positively influenced the American founding. But perhaps the Christian nationalist means to argue that it was actually religious faith and not biblical or religious principles per se that were influential?
11
The American Experiment: Religious Faith or Reason?
“We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
— 1 Thessalonians 1:3 NIV
“It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandize or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”
— John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,”17871
What about faith? Was America founded on the Christian faith? The bible says that faith can move mountains. Jesus tells his disciples, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”2 He repeats this a few chapters later, with an additional benefit: not only can faith move mountains, it can also kill a harmless shrub. Jesus smites a fig tree for not producing fruit, though he knew figs were not in season, and then tells his followers, “If you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.”3
Notice the dodge: the impossible becomes possible if you have enough faith. Since the impossible is, by definition, impossible, the believer’s faith is always wanting. If the stubborn mountain refuses to move, it is because the follower had doubts, a weak faith. The quantity or strength of one’s faith is irrelevant because one can never have enough. Faith enough to fill a mountain would not move a mustard seed. The impossibility binds the believer to the religion, forcing them to seek ever greater faith.
If the Christian nationalists are to be believed, America was founded on faith. Though some, such as Michael Novak, at least admit that a government cannot be built on faith alone, “Reason and faith are the two wings by which the American eagle took flight.”4 On the contrary, faith, at least when mixed with government, is antithetical to American principles.
But first, let’s get our vocabulary straight. The word “faith” is used here as it is by modern Christians, to signify religious faith. It is not used as a synonym for trust, confidence, a wish, a deeply held nonreligious belief, or hope. Nor is it used to signify an evidence-based belief such as “having faith” that flipping a switch will turn on a light or “having faith” that a spouse will not stray. Both of those beliefs are based on evidence. The light goes on 99.9 percent of the time; your spouse loves you and shows it. We don’t have religious faith that the light will turn on—we have a reasonable expectation based on evidence, a mouthful that often gets shortened to “having faith.” The bible conflates religious faith with hope in a favorite passage of many believers: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”5 This is right in one sense: religious faith is not an evidence-based belief. It is a belief in spite of the evidence. Religious faith is, as Professor Peter Boghossian observes, “pretending to know things you don’t know.”6
Religious faith is useless and even harmful when one is trying to build a country and government. Imagine a delegate at the Constitutional Convention arguing for five branches of government instead of three. To support the claim, he cites his personal religious fai
th: “because my God said so.” He would have been laughed out of Independence Hall. Cornell historian and political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed that “science and its philosophical corollaries were perhaps the most important intellectual force shaping the destiny of eighteenth-century America.”7
It is hardly credible to argue that Judeo-Christianity, and especially Protestantism, is responsible for the founders’ use of reason when Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, called reason “the Devil’s greatest whore.”8 Many Christian beliefs, including the resurrection and the virgin birth, require the believer to suspend, not apply, reason. Hence, Martin Luther’s argument that “reason in no way contributes to faith…reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”9
American law and our Constitution were not passed down from on high. Some of the greatest minds of the day reasoned, debated, and compromised for months, years even, to agree on the laws that would guide the new nation. Our Constitution is the product of human thought and perseverance, not faith.
Jefferson rejected a faith-based government and any government attempt to declare articles of faith: “The Newtonian principles of gravitation is now more firmly established, on the basis of reason, than it would be were the government to step in, and to make it an article of necessary faith. Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”10 Reason and experiment dispel error; faith propagates it. The founders relied on the former. John Adams said of the “formation of the American governments” that it should “never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods”; rather, those governments “were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”11
The Founding Myth Page 17
