The morality of God

Recently, a social media friend who is either an atheist or theistic evolutionist asked whether I believed Donald Trump was a Christian or not. He proceeded to offer his own opinion that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are sincere Christians, but Donald Trump is only a pretender.

Because I prefer to give honest and direct answers rather than evasive or vague ones when someone asks my opinion, I told him the truth: I don’t know if Donald Trump is a Christian or not. In my opinion, yes, Donald Trump is Christian. But I’ve never met the man in person. Judging what is in the heart and mind of another human being is a job only fit for a God, and that’s WAY above my pay grade. I don’t even see myself as some minor deity, unlike some people with pretentious (and contrived) last names, and an ego to rival my own. It is almost as big as Trump’s ego.

At best, I can sit on a jury and judge the actions of another person, but I cannot read their minds to better understand their motives. If someone wants to understand my motives, they only need to ask. Or, I might just come out and tell you, anyway.

Why am I writing this short essay on morality and God? The short answer is, I feel compelled, which I shall explain momentarily. I won’t earn a penny from writing it, unless one day down the road some magical little money tree sprouts from the fruits of my labor today, because to be brutally honest, ten years after beginning my career as a writing, I’m still trying to figure out the mystery of how to get paid consistently. I sell a few books and novels from time to time, especially when I make an effort to promote them, but two bucks for an ebook is never going to make me wealthy.

Fortunately, wealth isn’t the only goal of a writer. Writers need an audience as much as we want money. Practically any creature with digital appendages can tap keys on a keyboard and produce utter nonsense. It takes skill and concentration to produce material worth reading.

Back to judging the morality of Donald Trump–as I said earlier, I cannot know what is in Trump’s heart, but I can judge his actions. Donald Trump was the first American president in U. S. history to attend the March for Life rally to peacefully protest against abortion. Conversely, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden are closely aligned with the radically pro-abortion stance of the Democratic Party, due to the special interests of Planned Parenthood.

It could be argued that the position of Planned Parenthood on the abortion issue is the position of the Democratic Party, and thus the positions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And what is the position of Planned Parenthood on abortion? Do they support late-term abortion? Partial-birth abortion?

Post-birth abortion? (Also known as “infanticide.”)

Yes.

In case there is any doubt whatsoever what these people are saying, they are talking about neglecting and allowing a newborn citizen to die, a future voter, because the person who gave birth has demanded death. You certainly should not simply take my word for it–listen with your own ears.

These liberal ghouls pretend they only care about the health of the mother, but once the baby is breathing independently outside her body, how could her health be adversely affected by the baby’s life? The impression is being created that there are numerous infants destined to be born with terminal genetic defects, and killing them is an act of kindness. We live in a society where murderers and convicted criminals are shown compassion and mercy, but healthy unborn children may be dismembered and ripped from the womb. We live in a society where expectant mothers may not identify as biological females, and ask to be listed as the baby’s father on its birth certificate.

Which makes it pretty amazing and almost hilarious to think that as screwed up as we can be as human beings, there are some of us who feel qualified to judge God. In his infamous book The God Delusion, atheist Richard Dawkins offered what he called his “God hypothesis”:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character of all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard dawkins, the god delusion

What’s most amazing is the people clamoring for the deaths of unborn children are some of the same people condemning God for what they are doing themselves. Abortion is only wrong when God does it?

Please explain. How does that work, exactly?

I really don’t have a problem with individual atheists as much as atheism itself. Atheism is so illogical it is stupefying. Yes, I’ll explain. If theism is a claim that God exists, atheism is a claim that no God exists. No matter how you slice it, if you’re expressing an opinion on the existence of God, you’re making a claim. The safest and best solution is simply to qualify one’s personal position as theist-agnostic, atheist-agnostic, or apathetic-agnostic. Then the claim has been properly qualified as being belief-based, not knowledge-based. Claims do require evidence to support them.

As a theist-agnostic, I am qualifying my argument as belief-based, but as a creationist also, I would humbly submit creation as evidence for God.

Life cannot evolve until it exists. Life could not come into existence without a series of rare, miraculous events (the Big Bang, inflation, abiogenesis). I would further argue that atheism’s “no God” simply cannot compete with the creator God of the universe. The pantheistic gods of secular science (Time, Science and Extraordinary Luck) lack the key missing ingredient of intelligence, or more specifically, supernatural intelligence, to explain the unbelievably precise coordination and overwhelming appearance of designed patterns that are repeated throughout nature.

By now, you might be wondering if Richard Dawkins or Aron Ra said something new that annoyed me (I’m sure they have), but the inspiration for this post came from a really, really bad movie called Legion. In the spirit of full disclosure I only watched about the last forty-five minutes or so, but I am convinced that I saw more than enough to form a qualified opinion, and nothing that might have happened earlier in the movie could have improved the quality of the film as a whole.

Don’t get me wrong–the movie was intended to be received by audiences as a quality product. This wasn’t a “Sharknado” style B-movie. The stars were famous actors and the supporting cast easily recognizable. The special effects were well done, not cheesy. The only significant problem was the script itself, which was a mind-numbingly stupid mess that mashed together iconic characters from the Bible with a violent, nonsensical plot.

According to this movie, Archangels Michael and Gabriel duel in a gladiator-style war because God decided to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth with another extinction event “like the Flood.” There was an element in the story about if a certain baby was born humanity might be saved that seemed to be mocking the Christ message. Michael is sent down from heaven as an angelic assassin, presumably to perform a divine abortion or something, but apparently rebels when he meets the mother because he saw good in her (I missed the part). The baby’s mother was not a virgin, just a pregnant waitress working in a dump of a diner.

Did I already mention that the plot of this movie was incredibly stupid?

Michael is killed in brutally violent hand-to-wing combat with Gabriel, probably due to having lost his wings trying to help the humans he’d been sent to murder to escape from an archangel. As if that’s going to do any good–where can you hide from an angel? They were fleeing from a run-down diner in the middle of the desert that just so happened to be heavily fortified with military-grade weapons, and a band of lovable misfits ready to make noble but futile efforts to defeat a messenger sent from God.

Richard Dawkins didn’t write the script, but he could have.

Normally when I about about to reveal the twist in a movie’s climatic moment, I’ll warn readers with an advisory SPOILER ALERT, but in this instance, nothing could spoil or save this regrettable waste of celluloid. Just as Gabriel is about to murder the baby and his mother, Michael descends from heaven with his wings intact after God resurrected him, and wins their rematch while telling Gabriel that murdering mankind was what God wanted, but disobeying God to show love was what God needed.

Here’s the tricky part where atheists eager to judge God are concerned, so pay close attention and be prepared to think carefully about these next words: without objective morality, which only comes from God, how can we agree that murdering a baby is wrong? Late term and partial-birth abortion and even infanticide could be legalized, but that would not make them moral acts. Humans do these things to their own unborn children, and then we’re going to turn around and blame God for giving us the free will to choose evil over good?

What makes cannibalism wrong? Merely mention the name “Jeffrey Dahmer” and the tendency of most people is to recoil in horror, because he not only murdered his victims, he ate them. At the time of his arrest, it is difficult to say that Dahmer didn’t understand right from wrong, and good from evil. Dahmer didn’t murder people because he was gay or because he was an atheist, but he was an atheist at the time he committed the murders. He might have been mentally ill but he knew he needed to lie to the police because even he didn’t believe in God at the time, he feared being held accountable by some authority, eventually.

If no God exists, there can be no universal moral truths. Morality could only be defined by and would be relative to the individual. What is moral and just for me might not apply to you, and vice versa. Each person can make up his or her own rules as they go along. This supreme irony (or idiocy) occurs when humans who claim they don’t believe in God still try to hold this entity in whom they allegedly don’t believe to standards of morality that cannot exist without God.

How can I personally condemn Jeffrey Dahmer for killing and eating people, just because I prefer chicken? Just because I prefer adult women, how can I condemn other men who want to have sex with children? “Because I said so” doesn’t seem like a valid reason, but “because God said so” adds considerable gravitas to the prohibition. Atheists need the morality of God in order to be able to judge God’s morality.

Only an atheist could have written the plot to a stupid movie like Legion.

Ironically, the Bible tells a similar story about a leader among the angels who defies God, but unlike the movie, that angel’s motive was to deceive humanity, not save us from destruction. And we all know how that story from Genesis turns out.

His name was Lucifer. Today most people call him Satan.