The Christian atonement is the reconciliation of humans to God through the death of Jesus. While it’s pitched as an incredible gift from a loving god, it doesn’t make sense when you stop to think about it.
- If we’ve done something worthy of punishment, then we should get that punishment. Anything else is unjust.
2. Whenever someone takes a punishment that should’ve been applied to someone else (like Jesus taking our punishment), that’s a miscarriage of justice.
3. If you give one guilty person a break, you must give the same break to everyone in the same situation, otherwise that’s an injustice as well.
And there are more issues. For example, why must we be reconciled in the first place? If we’re flawed, that’s because our Maker made us so. And why make a big deal about the sacrifice when Jesus popped back to life a couple of days later?
Worldviews: let the tap dancing commence!
Some say that we must first identify the worldview from which a statement is made. Sometimes people critique Worldview 1 from the standpoint of their worldview, Worldview 2. An atheist doesn’t accept miracles and so may scoff at a Christian talking about miracles. “It’s absurd from within their story because their story doesn’t allow for that kind of thing,” but within the Christian story, miracles are quite normal.
Our observations about justice come from a Western worldview and perhaps even a worldwide worldview. They are pretty much universally held within the modern world.
Christians imagine a symmetry that’s not there. Saying in effect, “We each have a worldview—I have my Christian worldview, and you have your atheist worldview, so let’s admit up front that we’re both biased.” Here again he’s wrong because there is a default position. We have a common idea of justice, and are speaking from that standpoint rather than an atheist standpoint. Christians are welcome to have a different point of view, but we will always see it in terms of its differences from the default.
Christians want to respond to us from within the Christian worldview, but is that available to anyone? Can I answer from within a Scientology worldview and expect that to be respected? Or Raelian? Or Pastafarian? Can I say that polygamy is okay from a Mormon standpoint? Can I say that ritual murder is okay as Kali worship? Or is Christianity privileged for some reason—and if so, why?
Christians say that God is the primary one offended by any sin or crime. “Even if I sinned against you, I am sinning first and foremost against your maker.” So if God is indeed the primary offended party and he’s satisfied with Jesus as a substitute (and the substitute is satisfied, and the guilty party is satisfied), then where’s the problem?
The problem, of course, is that this isn’t justice. Instead, it’s mythology and legend that over time became codified into religious dogma. Christians start with an assumption of God and then weave a story showing how it all makes sense from within a Christian worldview. It may make sense to them, but that’s not the point. We start, not with an assumption of the supernatural (the Hypothetical God fallacy), but with the idea of justice held pretty much universally in the West and compare the Christian version against that. It doesn’t compare well.
Christians say, “I don’t see the conflict within the context of the Christian worldview. Certainly I can see from a perspective of justice outside of the Christian worldview that there could be a conflict.” Exactly! Critiquing the position from outside the Christian worldview reveals a conflict. That’s all we have been saying. More importantly, this external, more universal view is the default. Christians can’t dismiss it by saying that they simply have a different worldview.
(Oddly, the
(Oddly, the Christian’s position sounds like the postmodern “We each have our own truths” attitude that conservatives claim to hate. Maybe they only hate it until it’s convenient.)
Mercy and debt and punishment, oh my!
Christians addresse the unfairness issue: “Mercy is an overflow of goodness that is not required of God.” God can grant mercy . . . or not. For example, we are within our rights to forgive one debt but not another. And if I am owed a debt but a third party wants to pay it, and everyone is happy with that, problem solved.
Yes, we can be arbitrary, but doesn’t God follow a higher standard? A judge certainly does. Fairness is the standard that society tries to achieve with our justice system. True, we don’t always meet that standard, because we are imperfect. A perfect, omnibenevolent being would be perfectly fair.
As for a third party paying a debt, that’s an option only for monetary payment, not for punishment for a crime. Imagine someone unfairly imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit. Once the error is discovered, no one says that the debt has been paid and there’s no need to find the actual perpetrator since someone has already served the time.
That’s what we see in the Innocence Project, which has used DNA evidence to overturn more than 300 criminal cases in the U.S., one quarter of which were for murder. Had justice nevertheless been satisfied in these cases because punishment was at least given to someone? Of course not—these were miscarriages of justice just like the Christian story of God’s righteous wrath being satisfied by the death of Jesus.
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