Chapter 34 — The God I Was Told About

The punitive and interventionist God of my childhood: obedience, sacrifice, punishment, fear and the religious meanings imposed upon suffering.

The God I Was Told About

By the time I began seriously examining religion as an adult, I was no longer asking only whether I believed in God.

I was asking a more basic question.

What would deserve to be called God?

That was not the same question.

The God presented to me as a child came with a long list of claimed attributes.

All-powerful.

All-knowing.

All-seeing.

Perfect.

Just.

Loving.

Merciful.

The creator of everything.

The final authority on good and evil.

Those claims create expectations.

If a being really possessed all of those characteristics, I would expect its behaviour to be extraordinary.

Not merely more powerful than human behaviour.

Better.

What Would Qualify as a God?

If there were such a being as God — genuinely all-powerful and all-knowing — I would expect consistency.

I would expect intelligence beyond anything available to human beings.

I would expect a capacity to solve conflict without reproducing the worst methods humans have invented.

I would expect justice without rage.

I would expect peace without slaughter.

I would expect equality without domination.

I would expect persuasion without terror.

I would expect a being with unlimited power not to need the methods of a warlord.

That became the problem.

The Stories I Had Been Given

The religious stories I had been taught included floods, destroyed cities, wars, collective punishment, death imposed upon whole populations and violence carried out in the name of divine judgement.

People were killed because they belonged to the wrong people.

Cities were destroyed.

Whole groups were condemned.

Disobedience could bring catastrophe.

Human beings were told that these acts belonged within a divine plan.

As a child, I had little ability to examine any of that.

As an adult, I did.

And I increasingly found myself asking:

Why would an all-powerful being need any of it?

Power That Needs Violence

Human beings resort to violence partly because our power and knowledge are limited.

We cannot always persuade.

We cannot always control outcomes.

We become frightened.

We become angry.

We make mistakes.

We lose control.

We do not know everything.

Those limitations may help explain human violence.

They do not explain divine violence if the being involved is supposed to be unlimited in power, knowledge and intelligence.

An all-powerful God would have alternatives.

Unlimited alternatives.

If violence remains necessary despite unlimited power, then I am left wondering what the word unlimited means.

An All-Knowing God Who Tests

The idea of divine testing also became difficult for me.

Human beings conduct tests because we do not know the answer.

A doctor orders a test because something is uncertain.

A scientist conducts an experiment because the result is not already known.

A teacher sets an examination because the teacher does not know exactly what each student has learned.

But an all-knowing God is supposed to know the result before the test begins.

He would know what the person will choose.

He would know what suffering will occur.

He would know who will break.

He would know who will survive.

He would know the outcome before creating the circumstances.

That made the idea of divine testing increasingly difficult for me to understand as testing at all.

Forgiveness and Destruction

Christianity placed enormous emphasis upon forgiveness.

Human beings were told to forgive.

We were told not to hold anger.

We were told to turn the other cheek.

We were taught mercy.

Yet the same religious tradition presented stories in which God could respond to disobedience with destruction.

That contradiction troubled me.

Why was forgiveness demanded from people with almost no power while the being with unlimited power could be portrayed as inflicting extraordinary punishment?

If forgiveness was a moral ideal, I expected the highest moral authority to demonstrate it more completely than the people being commanded to practise it.

Practice What You Teach

That became a simple standard for me.

Practice what you teach.

If peace is good, practise peace.

If forgiveness is good, practise forgiveness.

If mercy is good, practise mercy.

If equality is good, practise equality.

If children matter, protect children.

I would expect more consistency from a God than from an ordinary person, not less.

Peace Through War

Another contradiction became increasingly obvious to me.

Peace cannot be established through an endless commitment to violence.

War may stop another war.

It may defeat an aggressor.

It may change political control.

But killing is not peace.

Destruction is not reconciliation.

Fear is not harmony.

If a God possessed unlimited power, I could not understand why that God would require the same primitive instruments which humans repeatedly use against one another.

A truly divine intelligence should have better tools.

Equality Through Inequality

The same problem appeared in the social structure of the religion I had known.

Equality cannot logically be produced by making inequality sacred.

A system cannot claim universal human worth while permanently assigning greater authority to one class of human beings.

The church of my childhood placed enormous authority in the hands of men.

Priests were men.

Bishops were men.

Popes were men.

Women occupied different positions.

Children occupied lower positions again.

Obedience flowed upward.

Authority flowed downward.

That looked less and less like evidence of a perfect divine order.

It looked increasingly like a human social structure.

Women and Children

That question became particularly important to me because so much of my own childhood involved adults exercising authority over children.

A child had almost no standing.

A nun could speak with authority.

A priest could speak with authority.

A policeman could speak with authority.

A child could speak.

But speaking was not the same as being believed.

Any belief system which places obedience above scrutiny creates danger for people with less power.

Women can be affected by that.

Children can be affected even more.

The problem is not limited to religion.

Human institutions repeatedly create hierarchies.

Religion becomes especially powerful when the hierarchy is described as having divine approval.

God as the Ultimate Authority

There is a profound difference between saying:

“I want you to obey me,”

and saying:

“God wants you to obey me.”

The first claim exposes the adult.

The second recruits the universe.

The adult's instruction acquires infinite backing.

Disobedience is no longer merely disagreement with another person.

It becomes rebellion against the creator of everything.

For a child, that is an almost impossible imbalance of power.

The Human Fingerprint

As I read more widely, scripture began to look different to me.

I came to understand it as a collection of ancient writings produced in different periods, by different people, within different societies and political circumstances.

Those writings were preserved.

Copied.

Selected.

Translated.

Re-translated.

Interpreted.

Argued over.

And used differently by different communities.

That did not make the writings meaningless.

Ancient texts can tell us an enormous amount about humanity.

But it made it increasingly difficult for me to assume that every violence, hierarchy, contradiction or command within those writings came from a perfect intelligence outside humanity.

I began to see the human fingerprint everywhere.

Folklore, History and Sacred Story

Human societies have always created stories.

They explain beginnings.

They explain death.

They explain disasters.

They explain why one people defeated another.

They explain why rulers possess authority.

They explain why certain behaviours are permitted and others forbidden.

Some stories become folklore.

Some become national history.

Some become sacred.

The fact that a story is sacred to a community does not, by itself, demonstrate that every event within it occurred exactly as described or that every moral judgement within it came from a supernatural source.

For me, Christianity increasingly had to be examined in the same way I would examine any other inherited system of stories and claims.

Different Christians, Different Gods

There was another difficulty.

Christians themselves did not appear to agree about the God they were describing.

Some emphasised punishment.

Some emphasised love.

Some believed Hell involved literal eternal torment.

Others treated it differently.

Some read biblical violence literally.

Others treated parts of scripture as metaphor, history, poetry or products of their time.

The more I encountered those differences, the harder it became to accept the claim that one clear divine message had simply been delivered intact to humanity.

Human interpretation was everywhere.

If God Knows Everything

The problem became sharper whenever omniscience entered the discussion.

If God knows everything, then God knows every child being abused.

Not later.

Not after an investigation.

Not after a Royal Commission.

At the moment it happens.

God would know the child's name.

The room.

The person responsible.

The fear.

The injuries.

The lies told afterwards.

The records which disappear.

The adults who refuse to listen.

An all-seeing God would require no evidence map.

No witness statement.

No disclosure process.

No investigation.

He would already know.

If God Can Do Anything

Then comes the second claim.

God can do anything.

If that is true, intervention is not a question of ability.

That leaves a difficult question of choice.

A child can be abused while an all-powerful being is said to watch.

The child may pray.

The child may be told that God is present.

The abuse can continue.

I found it increasingly difficult to describe that arrangement as protection.

Ten Minutes

Eventually I found myself thinking about the problem in almost absurdly simple terms.

If an all-powerful God wanted humanity to know that he existed, the problem would be remarkably easy to solve.

Ten minutes would probably do it.

Appear.

Appear everywhere if necessary.

Speak clearly.

Do it in a way that cannot reasonably be confused with hallucination, fraud, politics, technology or somebody's private revelation.

Answer questions.

Resolve the ambiguity.

And, while here, stand beside the children being abused in his name.

That would settle rather a lot.

For me, the failure to do something so simple creates a much more serious moral problem than mere divine silence.

If a human being possessed decisive knowledge which could prevent abuse, identify offenders, establish the truth and deliver justice, but deliberately withheld that knowledge, we would not normally describe that person as morally exemplary.

We would ask whether evidence had been withheld.

We would ask whether justice had been obstructed.

We would ask whether victims had been denied natural justice and procedural fairness.

We would ask whether the person's inaction had allowed wrongdoing to continue.

Whether a particular criminal offence had been committed would depend upon the law and the facts.

But the conduct would be examined.

An all-seeing God, according to the claims made about him, possesses far more than a human witness ever could.

He supposedly knows exactly what happened.

He knows who did it.

He knows who lied.

He knows which records are wrong.

He knows which institutions concealed what happened.

And he supposedly possesses unlimited power to intervene.

If those claims are true, then non-intervention is no longer explained by lack of knowledge or lack of capacity.

It becomes a choice.

That choice becomes especially difficult to reconcile with the claim that the same God is entitled to judge human beings, demand obedience from them, insist upon forgiveness, condemn wrongdoing and punish people for failing to meet standards which he does not appear to practise himself.

For me, authority cannot demand from others a moral standard from which it exempts itself.

The greater the claimed authority, knowledge and power, the greater the responsibility should be.

An Argument I Had Made Before

Looking through my earlier writing, I realised that this was not an argument invented while writing this book.

Years earlier I had already found myself asking how human authorities could be criticised for possessing knowledge of abuse and failing to act, while believers simultaneously described an all-seeing and all-powerful God who knew vastly more and also remained silent.

My language then was deliberately provocative.

I spoke in terms of obstruction of justice and perverting the course of justice.

I would state the legal distinction more carefully now.

Those are human criminal offences with particular legal requirements.

My underlying question, however, remains.

What standard should apply to an authority which is claimed to possess complete knowledge and unlimited ability to prevent harm?

Which Law Exempts God?

There is a legal question hidden inside the argument.

Which law exempts God?

I have not identified one which simply says that God is exempt from the ordinary law.

The legal position appears to be different.

Human law operates upon human beings, corporations and other entities which the legal system recognises and over which courts can exercise jurisdiction.

The God described by Christianity is not ordinarily treated by a secular court as a legal person who can be located, served, questioned, prosecuted or compelled to give evidence.

That is different from Parliament having enacted a special exemption for God.

The legal system has no ordinary defendant before it.

But that procedural fact does not settle the moral argument created by the religion's own claims.

Religion describes God as an agent.

He sees.

He knows.

He commands.

He judges.

He punishes.

He is said to intervene.

Agency is asserted whenever divine authority is required.

For me, that agency cannot simply disappear when responsibility is examined.

Obey Civil Law

The distinction becomes clearer when we move from God to the human beings and institutions claiming to represent him.

During the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Justice Peter McClellan repeatedly pressed the question of the relationship between church rules and the civil law.

The essential proposition was strikingly simple.

Obey civil law.

That principle matters.

Whatever a church believes about divine authority, the human beings and institutions operating within a country remain subject to the law of that country.

Religious belief does not create a general licence to disregard ordinary law.

The invocation of God does not transform human conduct into something which cannot be examined.

The Responsibility Question Remains

That still leaves the theological problem untouched.

If believers describe God as possessing complete knowledge and unlimited capacity to act, then ignorance and inability cannot explain non-intervention.

A human court may have no practical defendant before it.

But I can still test the religious proposition against the moral standards which the same religion claims God imposes upon human beings.

If a human authority possessed decisive evidence of the abuse of children, had the capacity to prevent further harm and deliberately withheld both the evidence and assistance, we would examine that conduct very seriously.

Whether it constituted a particular criminal offence would depend upon the law and the facts.

But deliberate silence in those circumstances would not ordinarily be offered as an example of perfect justice.

That is the inconsistency I am examining.

The Man at the Centre of the Religion

There is another difficulty in simply removing Jesus from questions of human responsibility by placing him entirely in a supernatural category.

Christianity itself does not describe Jesus as merely appearing to be human.

It insists that he became human.

The Christian account presents him as a man who lived among other human beings.

He spoke.

He travelled.

He ate.

He suffered.

He was arrested.

He was killed.

Christianity then says that he rose again and continues to exist.

It also continues to attribute agency and authority to him.

He knows.

He judges.

He intercedes.

He commands.

He is said to possess authority over human beings now.

For me, that creates an accountability question which cannot simply be removed by saying that he is also divine.

He Cannot Have It Both Ways

The religion cannot rely upon Jesus' humanity and continuing personal existence when those claims establish his relationship with humanity and his authority over it, then make those characteristics disappear when questions of responsibility are asked.

He cannot have it both ways.

If the claim is that he no longer exists, that changes Christianity profoundly.

If the claim is that he exists but knows nothing of events on Earth, that changes claims of divine knowledge.

If the claim is that he knows but cannot act, that changes claims of divine power.

If the claim is that he knows, can act and chooses not to act, then the choice itself becomes open to moral examination.

Those are consequences of the claims themselves.

He Was Not Always Absent

There is another difficulty with explaining the silence by saying that Jesus is simply beyond human reach.

According to Christianity's own account, he was here.

He appeared publicly.

He spoke to crowds.

He argued with authorities.

He allowed people to approach him.

He accepted interaction with the human world around him.

He was not presented as hiding from the world.

Christianity then says that he died, rose again and continues to exist.

It also attributes continuing knowledge, authority and power to him.

That makes his later absence much harder for me to understand.

If he could appear then, why can he not appear now?

If he can appear now but chooses not to, that is a different question.

And if his followers insist that he remains aware of what is happening, then absence does not remove responsibility from the argument.

Hiding From Responsibility

Put bluntly, Christianity's own claims leave me with an uncomfortable possibility.

He was once presented as a man who was willing to be seen.

Now, when abused children could benefit from the testimony of the supposedly perfect witness, he does not appear.

When institutions dispute what happened, he does not appear.

When records are incomplete, he does not appear.

When offenders deny responsibility, he does not appear.

When victims are required to prove events which an all-seeing God is said already to know, he does not appear.

From my perspective, that begins to look less like transcendence and more like avoidance of responsibility.

I cannot establish as a factual proposition that Jesus is literally hiding.

That is not evidence I possess.

It is the consequence I see when I test Christianity's own propositions against one another.

The religion says he remains alive.

It says he remains human as well as divine.

It says he knows.

It says he can act.

It says he judges the conduct of others.

Then it asks me to accept his absence when the same standards of responsibility are applied to him.

That is where the explanation stops working for me.

The Legal Question Is More Precise

That does not mean that a secular Australian court presently has an enforceable subpoena over Jesus merely because Christian doctrine says that he remains alive.

A court requires a valid proceeding and procedures by which an identified person can be brought within its authority.

A subpoena normally has to be issued and brought to the attention of the person required to comply with it according to the relevant court rules.

Failure to comply becomes a legal issue only once those procedural requirements have been satisfied.

So the practical difficulty of serving a subpoena is real.

But for me it does not answer the underlying question.

Saying that Jesus is in Heaven is itself a religious proposition.

If the same religion simultaneously maintains that he is alive, aware of events on Earth, capable of acting and entitled to judge human conduct, then it has created the very proposition which raises the accountability question.

Authority and Accountability

My larger point is simpler than whether a bailiff could presently find an address at which to serve him.

A claim of continuing authority should bring continuing responsibility with it.

If Jesus is said to know that children are being abused, to possess the capacity to intervene and to retain moral authority over the people involved, then I am entitled to ask why that authority is active when obedience is demanded but apparently inactive when protection is required.

If the answer is that he cannot act, the claim of unlimited power has to be reconsidered.

If the answer is that he does not know, omniscience has to be reconsidered.

If the answer is that he knows and can act but chooses not to, then the moral consequences of that choice can be examined.

None of those questions requires me to grant religious authority an exemption from scrutiny merely because the authority is described as divine.

The Silence

Humanity has spent thousands of years arguing about what God supposedly wants.

One person says God told him one thing.

Another says God requires the opposite.

Churches divide.

Religions divide.

People fight.

People kill.

Children are instructed to trust adults who claim to understand God's will.

And the claimed source of that authority remains unavailable for cross-examination.

For me, that silence became significant.

Natural Justice

The silence also produced another problem.

Natural justice requires that people affected by accusations and decisions have meaningful opportunities to know and answer the case against them.

Procedural fairness requires processes which can be examined.

Evidence can be challenged.

Decisions can be questioned.

Reasons can be requested.

But a child accused of offending God has no comparable opportunity.

God does not appear.

God does not give evidence.

God does not answer questions.

Human representatives speak instead.

The child is therefore required to answer an invisible authority through the visible adults claiming to represent it.

For me, that is profoundly inconsistent with the principles of fairness which human institutions themselves are increasingly expected to observe.

The Perfect Witness Who Never Appears

There is an irony in the idea of an all-seeing God.

Such a being would be the perfect witness.

Nothing could be hidden from him.

No abuse could occur unwitnessed.

No lie could deceive him.

No missing document would matter.

No failure of memory would prevent him knowing what happened.

For an abused child, that should be extraordinary protection.

Yet the child is still left trying to persuade human beings.

The perfect witness does not enter the witness box.

Justice in an Instant

That is where the concept of unlimited power became particularly difficult for me.

Human justice is slow because humans are limited.

We have to gather evidence.

We have to find witnesses.

We make mistakes.

Memories fail.

Records disappear.

People die.

An all-knowing God would have none of those limitations.

An all-powerful God would not have to wait for institutions to decide to act.

Natural justice could occur immediately.

Procedural fairness could be perfect.

An abused child could be protected instantly.

No perpetrator could hide behind authority.

No institution could conceal evidence.

That is the sort of capacity I associate with the word God.

If Hell Is a Place

There is also a less solemn question I sometimes ask.

If Hell exists as an actual place containing an inexhaustible source of heat, perhaps somebody could simply provide the location.

Humanity has spent enormous effort looking for reliable sources of energy.

A permanently burning Hell would make a fairly impressive contribution.

I do not expect anybody to provide coordinates.

That is partly the point.

As a child I could be threatened with absolute certainty about a place which nobody could show me.

Nobody could locate it.

Nobody could measure it.

Nobody could take me there and bring me back.

Nobody could demonstrate the mechanism by which a person supposedly arrived there.

Yet I was expected to treat it as more certain than many things in the physical world around me.

The Burden Was Reversed

That pattern became familiar in other areas of my life.

An authority makes a claim.

I am expected to accept it.

If I question it, the burden somehow becomes mine.

Prove that Hell does not exist.

Prove that God did not command this.

Prove that the institution is wrong.

But that reverses the ordinary relationship between a claim and evidence.

The person making an extraordinary claim carries the responsibility for establishing it.

And where that claim is used to control, frighten, punish, exclude or otherwise affect the life of another person, I think that responsibility should be complete.

The greater the consequence imposed upon somebody else, the stronger the evidence required from the person making the claim.

A child should never carry the burden of disproving an adult's unverifiable supernatural accusation.

Fear Was Treated as Evidence

As a child, however, my fear could itself become part of the proof.

If I was frightened by Hell, that did not mean Hell existed.

It meant I was frightened.

If I was frightened by Satan, that did not demonstrate Satan.

It demonstrated that adults had successfully introduced the possibility into my mind.

The emotional effect of a claim is not evidence that the claim is true.

That distinction took me years to articulate.

A Moral Standard Above God?

There is another philosophical difficulty which interested me.

If killing innocent people is wrong because God says it is wrong, what happens when a religious story says God orders killing?

Does the act become good merely because the authority changes?

If so, morality becomes obedience.

Whatever God commands is good simply because God commands it.

But if we are capable of saying that cruelty, slaughter or the punishment of innocent people would remain wrong even if an authority ordered them, then we are already applying a moral standard independently of authority.

That distinction became important to me.

I did not want morality to mean obedience to power.

Power Is Not Goodness

A being can be powerful without being good.

Human history demonstrates that constantly.

Kings had power.

Emperors had power.

Armies had power.

Police have power.

Churches have power.

Parents have power over children.

Power tells us what somebody can do.

It does not tell us whether they should do it.

Infinite power, by itself, would not establish infinite goodness.

What I Could No Longer Call Divine

Eventually I reached a point where the word God itself seemed to require a higher standard.

If I were ever to use the word seriously, I would expect it to describe something far more coherent than the deity I had been taught to fear.

Such a being would not need violence to create peace.

It would not need inequality to create equality.

It would not demand unquestioning submission in order to establish freedom.

It would not require terror in order to inspire love.

It would not hide while adults harmed children in its name and then leave those children to prove what happened.

The Christian God and the Idea of God

That distinction became increasingly important.

Rejecting the God I had been taught about did not automatically settle every possible philosophical question about existence.

Perhaps the universe had an originating cause.

Perhaps there was some form of intelligence behind existence.

Perhaps there was not.

Those remained questions which could be considered separately.

What no longer made sense to me was the assumption that even if some creator existed, that creator must therefore be the particular personal God described to me by Christianity.

That was an additional claim.

It required additional evidence.

A Name Is Not Proof

Calling something God does not make it divine.

Calling an ancient command God's command does not establish that God gave it.

Calling violence holy does not change the violence.

Calling hierarchy God's order does not prove that the hierarchy came from God.

Calling fear faith does not make the fear voluntary.

The name cannot do the work of evidence.

The Question Became Larger

As a child, the question had been:

Will God punish me?

Later it became:

Does this God exist?

Eventually I found myself asking something larger.

Even if some form of creator existed, why should I assume that it was the God these particular ancient writings described?

Why should a creator of a universe containing an unimaginable number of stars require the political structures, punishments, loyalties and hierarchies of ancient human societies?

Why would infinite intelligence look so familiar?

The God I Was Told About

I was told about a God who saw everything.

I was told about a God who could do anything.

I was told about a God who loved children.

I was told about a God who demanded justice.

I was told about a God who required forgiveness.

Yet the stories, institutions and experiences surrounding that God often showed me violence, hierarchy, fear, punishment and silence.

Eventually I stopped treating those contradictions as a failure in me.

I allowed myself to examine the proposition instead.

Perhaps the question was not why I could not believe strongly enough.

Perhaps the God I had been told about simply did not meet the standard I would expect of a God.

That still left another question.

If the Christian God of my childhood was not the only possible meaning of the word, what else might the idea of God mean?

That question led somewhere quite different.