The Moral Compass is Broken

Without God, there can be no morality. Believers act as though this is as simple a law of the universe as gravity. I admit that for years, this was a challenging argument for me. Then I applied a few seconds of thought to it and found the claim to be inaccurate at best. At worst, the truth is the exact opposite.

If there is such a thing as universal truth in what is Good and Evil, the followers of any gods don't know what that universal truth is, nor do the gods themselves. Here I can list the crimes of tollowers of any belief structure. Murder, rape of adults and children, theft, and holy war top the list. Lesser crimes, such as intellectual dishonesty, are so commonplace that we hardly even notice.

Please understand that I don't hold these crimes to be the sole territory of theists. People of any belief structure can be motivated to do things that most of us would consider repulsive. However, that is the point. The Holy among us are not. Believers do not follow a moral compass that is unavailable to anybody else.

But, perhaps it is not fair to judge God based upon his followers. I certainly do think it is fair, but I am willing to make a concession in this case. So, let us judge God based on what he commands. Appropriately let us start in the book of Judges. In Judges 11, Jephthah sacrifices his daughter to the Lord because of a military victory that God delivered to him against the Ammonites. Perhaps one will blame Jephthah for this, but one might want to cast an eye skyward to wonder why God did not stop this case of human sacrifice like he did in the case of Abraham. At the minimum, this points to an inconsistant moral absolute.

God's commands for Joshua are undeniably more direct. The wholesale slaughter of thousands in military conquest didn't require a human sacrifice this time, unless you count the victims. God instructs his followers, in an absolutely direct way, to kill the people of lands given to his people and to take their posessions.

Alright, alright...these were still things done by his followers. Perhaps they totally misunderstood God. God might have been watching the destruction of Jericho and shouting angrily at Joshua to stop. Let us grant that as well. It does nothing to rescue the argument of moral absolutism.

Let us take acts of God himself. Specifically, Jesus. Jesus was a human sacrifice, to himself, in order to cleanse the sins of everybody else. If we allow that Christ was sinless, then this is a vicarious execution for crimes commited by others. This is not justice, morality or even mercy. Taken to another level, what gives Jesus the right to forgive offenses not commited against him? If a man wrongs me and is forgiven in God's view that does not make him innocent of his crime. But given what I have seen of God's view, the standards for innocence are suprisingly low.