Excerpt from the Journal of Eve
When I was four years old, my father shot me.
I know that it was not his fault. He asked me not to play on the new slide, but I disobeyed him. I didn’t listen to his warning about what would happen if I did. When he found me sitting on the patch of dirt at its foot, he sighed, but without hesitation pulled out his revolver and shot me in the stomach.
Three weeks later, I came back home from the hospital. The incident was covered up. My father was a very influential man. Rumours floated around town, but they were not enough to puncture my father’s charitable image. Even I didn’t hold anything against him. But from then on I was always the girl with the scar.
For my father’s birthday the following year, I painted my love for him a rock, even though he had asked for a wall of paintings. He didn’t like my rock. He said I should be more thankful to him. I tried to tell him that I couldn’t paint a wall. He said I would have no dinner that night, and I would be locked in the basement furnace if next year’s gift wasn’t to his liking. I knew that he was allowed to, because he was my father and I owed everything to him.
When I started school, I had a nice teacher called Mr Lee. When he found out who my father was, he seemed sad and told me I could ask him for help if I was ever in trouble. So I told him that the previous month, my father had bought me a puppy, then told me to drown it. Crying and with trembling hands, I had lowered it into the bathtub, but as soon as it touched the water he had stopped me and said I could keep the puppy.
I think Mr Lee told the principal, because the next day my father was very angry. He had me transferred to another class and said not to talk to any teachers about personal things again. I asked where my puppy was. My father told me that he had put her in the furnace, for my own good. I didn’t believe him. But I never saw my puppy again.
For the ten years I was in school, my father gave me different lessons at home. He would give me rules that I hadn’t learned in school. The first thing he said was that I had to always love him, or he would punish me. He told me that I must spend one day each week at home with him to prove I loved him. He told me never to question him, and to hate anyone who did. He told me horrible things would happen to me if I ever disobeyed him. I was afraid.
When I was sixteen, I made friends with another girl. Then one time something happened between us. My father found out, and whipped me. Then we packed up and left town. I was too scared to go near a girl again for a long time.
My father owned a mansion in another town. There were a few families renting rooms in it. My father took their money and kicked them out, so we could live there. I saw a woman crying with her baby. There was nothing anyone could do. Except my father.
My father invited over some men he knew. They were all a lot older than me. He offered me to them as a wife. One of them accepted, and we became married. I had no choice. But I knew my father was doing what was best for me.
The following month, our country went to war. The army was not afraid of defeat. My father’s company made their weapons. Their weapons were the best in the world. All my father asked in exchange for the weapons was that he chose which country was attacked. I heard stories about rivers of blood left in the army’s path. I heard stories about children impaled against rocks, and thrown off cliffs. I didn’t believe my father would let that happen, just so he could get more land.
When I was twenty, I finally parted with my father. He was too old to run his company, so he chose someone in his place while he lived in another country. He chose a man named Chris. Everyone agreed Chris was nicer than my father. When he came for dinner with the other company members, he would tell stories. Everyone looked up to him. He put some of the company’s funds into a new medicine. He saved some lives, but eventually became too busy. Sometimes I wondered if he could save more if he wanted to.
Then the riots happened. There were riots against the company’s weapons, which had killed thousands of people. They attacked the main building. Chris was shot in the struggle. They attacked our mansion and I was forced by another man.
My father returned to deal with the disaster. He and my husband hated me. They said I had committed adultery. They didn’t care that it wasn’t my fault. That I had no choice. My father had finally had enough. He grabbed me and pushed me into the furnace. I was in there for half a minute before someone pulled me out.
I opened my blistered eyes, crying from the pain, and saw a squad of policemen. Two had my father handcuffed and pinned against the wall. One was calling for an ambulance. Another was telling my father that he had got away with crimes for too long, and would be tried for hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse, war crimes, and even more. My father received more than fifty life sentences in jail. He was only there for two years before he died.
I spent seven years receiving counselling for twenty years of what I learned had been terror on every level imaginable. I had bad scars all over my body from the burns, to join the one where my father had first shot me for being too curious. Despite that, I had opened my eyes to everything else. For the first time in almost thirty years, I tasted more freedom in the air than pain or fear. I knew that it wasn’t all lost.
A Word on Morality
A common question posed to non-theists is, of course, “Theists get their morality from God. Where do you get your morality from?” or alternatively the more blatant “Atheists are immoral because they don’t accept God’s written rules of morality.” Other humanistic writers have shattered this insulting assertion utterly and brilliantly, but I still wish to refute it for my own liberty.
The first and foremost response to this question is simply pointing out that theists, even under the same denomination, can hardly be said to be in agreement on exactly what God’s idea of morality is. There are literally hundreds of different “interpretations” of the Bible alone, the most extreme of which spit on the very idea of morality. And ironically, it is these fundamentalists who are following God’s written laws most precisely. I have no doubt that most theists who ask atheists about their “missing” morality have not read the Bible, which is of course one of the most effective methods of deconversion. A simple retort would be to ask the original questioner if they would consider the following things morally acceptable: bears mauling children as punishment for teasing; the genocide of seven civilisations for being in the wrong place; the slaying of innocent children and “ripping open” of pregnant women; and of course throwing ten thousand unarmed captives off a cliff. That’s God’s written idea of morality.
Following this, a common answer I’ve received is that these are all Old Testament shenanigans. Everything’s much better in the New Testament, they say. Jesus teaches love, compassion and ultimately all morality.
This is effectively an admission that the Old Testament is indeed brutally immoral much more often than not. To claim that God had a “change of heart” between Old and New, or that Jesus managed to convince his wrathful father that maybe humanity wasn’t so bad after all, is incompatible with the well-accepted notion of God’s infinite benevolence. It doesn’t work. To admit that God was, at some point, immoral, destroys this basic definition of the Judeo-Christian God.
This forces Christianity back onto perhaps the most frequently-heard lay apologetic: “The Bible is not meant to be taken completely literally.” The obvious problem with such a statement is thus: how are we to know which verses to take literally, and which not to take literally? As far as I know, God hasn’t left any hints. Using this ideology, I could also claim that the evil verses are the literal ones, and the verses of love “aren’t meant to be taken literally”. Taking into account that there are more of the former, this would actually be a more realistic claim. Yet I have (fortunately) heard of no one who would do such a thing. In any case, look at the above examples of outright immorality in the Bible. What on earth are we supposed to take from these verses? If not literal, are they metaphorical? Please, Christians, enlighten me on this. These are verses of injustice, bloodshed, and the slaughter of innocents. I’m not seeing a loving “message” behind it at all.
The question of which verses to shrug off as non-literal is of course synonymous with the question of which verses aren’t likely to be featured as “Bible Verse of the Day” at a church. It’s synonymous with the question of which verses are kept quiet and pushed behind the curtain by preachers and evangelizers. It’s synonymous with the question of which verses are left out of the (Christian-written) ”children’s Bible”. What does this mean? Christians are not just getting their morality from God. More accurately, they are flicking through God’s written word and pulling out the verses that they want to get their morality from. And on what basis do they decide which verses are good examples of morality? Why, the same basis as atheists, of course.
While I am thankful that Christians effectively decide their own morality rather than taking all of God’s (rather controversial) written advice, I also hope that the stereotype of the immoral non-theist will be replaced with the more accurate image of someone who intrinsically desires to minimize suffering and maximise happiness, and knows it.
Forever Will Ye Burn
It is a general consensus among atheists and critics of religion that the doctrine of Hell — an afterlife in which wrongdoers and/or opposition of a particular religion will suffer horrific, conscious pain for an infinite amount of time — is the lowest and most disgusting fabrication of religion.
While words cannot even begin to describe the horror and disturbed “purpose of justice” behind such a place, allow me to give you an example of exactly what Hell is supposed to be. Imagine, for a moment, that you were to commit adultery, and as punishment for this, you had to live the rest of your life with a machine attached to your arms that crushed your bones, healed them instantly, then crushed them again, and so on until you died. Well, that’s absolutely nothing compared to Hell. Hell is not a two-year prison sentence for minor assault. Hell is infinite. If one lifetime of constant pain sounds horrific, multiply that by a trillion, and…well, you’re still nowhere close: any finite amount of time is infinitely small compared to infinity.
Putting the actual characteristics of this gruesome realm aside, there’s no mystery as to its purpose. The threat of eternal punishment is the most obvious method of scaring people into following you. Putting the punishment in a place where no one can ever prove or disprove its existence is the next obvious step. Then label anyone you dislike as destined for this mythical torture chamber. “Join us, or forever will ye burn!”
However, Hell’s purpose (and similarly Heaven’s) is somewhat diluted by the fact that most religions claim to have their own version of such a place. Visual representations may change (ranging from the Bible’s lakes of fire to Dante’s artistic rendition of the “nine levels” of the inferno), but ultimately each religion gives Hell the same purpose. It is only the “List of the Condemned” that really changes — each group puts forward a different set of criteria that one must follow to avoid this undesirable fate.
This is the main reason why nonsense such as Pascal’s Wager (the ”better safe than sorry!” of religion) falls laughably short. Think about it: at this very moment, there are millions, likely hundreds of millions, of people who think you are going to some sort of Hell (or at least, their beliefs dictate it; it’s not something said in light conversation). It’s possible that several people in your life are among these people. And atheists? We’re basically only being condemned to one more version of Hell than anyone else. Amidst the thousands of versions of Hell in existence, that doesn’t make us much worse off than theists in terms of Pascal’s Wager. And I for one would gladly add one more Hell to the list of supernatural realms I’m “destined” for, if I receive in exchange the life of freedom, happiness and caring that accompanies atheism.
Hell is both a disturbing and problem-causing part of religion. It is not enough that followers believe they are destined for an eternity of happiness; they must also specifically believe that anyone who thinks otherwise is not only shunned from this paradise, but condemned to suffer forever. I don’t doubt there would be a fair bit less tension between religions if they could simply believe they were headed for eternal paradise, whilst others simply faced unconscious oblivion. Perhaps then, one human being would not look into the eyes of another, perhaps a life-long friend, and sincerely tell them that they deserve to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity.
