Morality and Free Will
Although I tend to stick to the scientific reasons for why Christianity and religion in general is invalid, there is quite a bit to be said about the philosophy of Christianity. The ten commandments are held to be the ultimate authority by Christians, and for the most part, they are morally sound. The stone tablet prohibits killing, theft, jealousy, and other acts that most people would agree to be negative. To keep people from sinning and disobeying the commandments, there is the concept of hell. Those who do not believe in God, Jesus, the ten commandments, etc., are sent to an inferno for all eternity. I think it would be a good idea to discuss the morality behind the "lake of fire".
Hell seems like a good idea at first glance -- it punishes those who are evil, and those who are good, go straight to heaven, an eternal state of bliss. However, when hell is examined closely, it's immoral principles are exposed. To begin with, when you go to hell, you go there for all eternity -- forever. Once you're sent there, you can't come back under any circumstances. This is truly capital punishment, and it is utterly pointless and hypocritic. One must ask what the point of punishment is. Most would agree that the point of punishment is to teach a person a lesson. Punishment is usually a good thing because the person who is being punished realizes that he or she does not like this punishment, and to avoid it, he or she shouldn't do whatever immoral deed they committed in the first place. In the case of hell, on the other hand, the souls of the damned, regardless of how many lessons they have learned or how repentent they are, are never given a chance to better themselves. A sinner could turn into the next Jesus Christ in hell, but it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever because that person would be imprisoned there for all eternity. So what is the point of this eternal punishment? What gain can be made? How is anyone actually helped? The only positive effect that hell could ever have would be to reform criminals. If hell does have that effect, however, then why is the former criminal required to stay in his little pit of fire? After a person in hell is repentent, wouldn't keeping him or her there be punishing a now innocent, well meaning person?
We who live in the United States all go by the constitution, which clearly prohibits the use of cruel and unfair punishment. Let's create a hypothetical situation. A man who has done nothing wrong his entire life steals a loaf of bread from the supermarket and is caught by the police. As punishment, the police give the criminal drugs that let him live forever, but don't let him out of jail. Instead, they simply torture him to the extent of their physical capabilities, which are very large seeing as the man cannot die. The man lives for thousands of years only to feel infinite pain. Day in, day out, the police cut the man open and shove red hot needles through his internal organs. The man is not aloud to sleep, eat, or talk to anyone for millions and millions of years. Is this fair? Would this classify as cruel or unfair punishment? Even if the man is deeply sorry for what he did, he is still tortured. That's exactly what hell is like. If you don't become a Christian and ask for forgiveness by the time you die, that's what happens to you, even if it's something as insignificant as stealing one loaf of bread on only one occasion. I suppose that many would say, "yes, but in Christianity, you have a chance to repent to Jesus". Why is it necessary to repent to Jesus specifically? Why is asking for forgiveness from Jesus any better than just repenting to no one in particular? Is God really that picky? Why would he even care, as long as the person has learned his or her lesson? It's like punishing your child because he apologized to his father rather than his mother for something he did.
There is more to it than that. What if the man who stole a loaf of bread had never even heard of Jesus or the Christian God? That's definitely possible, seeing as there are many places in Africa which are only occupied by tribes, who have never even seen a missionary. How do they repent for doing something wrong? Some say that everyone get's a chance to ask for salvation and to learn about God. That is completely ridiculous, and I can prove it wrong right here. If everyone on the planet since Jesus was supposedly alive knew about God and Christianity, then how exactly did missionaries teach people about Christianity? Perhaps now, in the year 2000, 90% of the world's population has heard of Jesus, but what about in the year six hundred? If everyone knew about Jesus, then why were missionaries necessary? Why is "spreading the word" necessary? How is it even possible?
A common response is that not everyone is given the chance in the same way. Perhaps those who have never heard about Jesus don't need to ask for forgiveness from him. Of course, they need to repent somehow. After all, if they didn't need to repent to escape hell, then that brings up all sorts of equality issues. But why exactly should these people be able to avoid hell by simply being sorry, whereas the rest of us have to pray to some Christian deity? Because I know about Jesus, if I died, I would go to hell because I didn't repent to Jesus for swearing at my parents one time, but a Zulu wouldn't, even though we were both repentent. Isn't that unfair, unequal treatment? By those standards, less people would be going to hell without Jesus. The world would be better off without him.
Unfortunately for Christianity, that's just the tip of the iceberg of moral problems with hell. We have the annoying problem with free will. Personally, I believe that the universe is very deterministic, and completely non random. That includes people's personalities. If any of those of you who are reading this article right now were born to my family in the same place and same time as I was, and were presented with a completely identical life in every aspect, you would turn out exactly the way that I am now. You would be the one writing this article. You would make the same decisions that I have made in my life, because your personality, which is based on experience, would be identical to mine. Jesus Christ himself, given the same situations that I have been given, would be writing an atheist article right now. Randomness does not exist. Even what we consider to be a "random" number generator in a computer would choose the same number over and over again, given the same situations. A complex algorithm which usually includes the time of day down to the millisecond is what determines random numbers which are generated by computers. Even the tempature of the outside world would change what number the computer would generate. A cold tempature, in which computers work faster in, would produce a different number than a warm tempature, in which computers work slower in, because the algorithm carried out by the computer would take longer in a warm enviornment, changing the time of the day at which the computer finishes the process, which is a variable in the algorithm itself. Every so called random number can be determined, given all the necessary factors. It's just that the algorithm is so complex and dependent on so many variables which are rarely ever the same that we can't ever predict the outcome. But, you must understand, the computer is incapable of generating a random number, nor is the universe.
So, then, how can I be blamed eternally for doing something that anyone else would have done in the same situations? (By the way, this further proves my point that the only point of punishment is to better the person being punished, but as I discussed earlier, a person in hell has no chance to show his better self.) The only response to this that I ever hear from Christians is that part of your personality is determined before your birth, inside your soul. For example, because Jesus has a naturally Christian soul, he would not be here writing this atheist article. Unfortunately, this point does not work out when one asks, "who gave you this personality in the first place?". Was it God? The Devil? Whichever it may be, it's not your fault that you have that personality. It's not my fault that I have a skeptic soul. God, or Satan, put this soul in me (also, let me remind you that if it was Satan who did it, it is God who we should blame for putting his evil soul in his body).
Even if there were an answer to this free will riddle, there is still another which doesn't seem solvable. This other riddle involves the fact that omniscience contradicts free will. The God defined by the Christians knows everything -- he is omniscience. That means that he knows what happened in the past, he knows about everything that is taking place now, and, most importantly, he knows what is going to take place in the future. If God knows what is going to take place in the future down to every little insignificant detail, and he can never be wrong, then how can you do anything besides what he thinks you're going to do? Think about it. Since the dawn of time, God has known what you are going to eat tomorrow morning for breakfast. If he has known what you're going to eat (or if you'll eat anything at all) since the creation of the universe, then how can you do anything besides what he thinks you are going to do? Suppose that you planned on eating waffles tomorrow morning, but after this article, you received a feeling of paranoia and as a result eat cereal instead. Do you think that God didn't know that you were going to read this article? Do you think that he didn't know that you were going to change from waffles to cereal? He knows what you're going to do from the beginning. How can you do anything else? God can't change his mind, because for him to change his mind, he would have to improve upon a previous conception about the world, and for him to be able to improve on his thought, his thought would have to be less than perfect, which is impossible because he is omniscient. This brings up all sorts of puzzling questions, such as "why did God create Adam and Eve in the first place, knowing all along that they would eat from the forbidden tree?", or "why did God repent for creating man after causing the world wide flood when he knew that everything that caused him to repent was going to happen in the first place?". There's also the riddle of why God asks people questions in Genesis. God, being omniscient, knew what Adam and Eve were thinking just before they ate from the forbidden tree. He knew they were thinking about doing it, but he just sat there up in his palace in the clouds.
God is omniscient. God knows the future. God cannot change his mind. Therefore, the future cannot be changed. In other words, everything that you do is predestined! How can you be blamed for something that you were destined to do ever since "the beginning"? One of the more mind blowing effects of omniscience is that God knows what he will do next. Doesn't that mean that God himself doesn't have free will? If he doesn't have free will, then how can we be sure that his laws are morally sound? After all, even if God disagreed with his own laws, he wouldn't be able to change what he told Moses because everything was predestined from the start.
Hell is an imaginary inferno created to keep the Christian sheep in line, and when taken as a fact, doesn't make one bit of sene. When omniscience is thrown into the picture, free will dies off and God becomes an incoherent subject. Christianity is making less and less sense.
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