The Atheist's Fatal Flaw by Norman L. Geisler

Author:Norman L. Geisler [Geisler, Norman L. and Daniel J. McCoy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL067030, REL030000
ISBN: 9781441245915
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Unholy Cross: God as Pardoner

So the atheist asks God to lighten up, maybe enroll in anger management seminars. At the very least, he should stop killing people; perhaps he could soften the sentence or try to be more understanding. Maybe he could channel all that wrath into creative, rather than destructive, avenues. But God offers a better solution. What if God were to take all that wrath, every bit of it, and ingest it back into himself, so that it need never threaten us again? To be exact, it would not be ingested into but rather boomeranged back upon himself. Regardless, the wrath would no longer be ours to shoulder, but his. What would the atheist say to that? If it has anything to do with a cross, the atheist says, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There are six reasons the cross is unacceptable, even revolting, so that no real progress is made from the Old to New Testament.

First, Christ’s redemption is said to be barbaric. If we did not applaud the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament, what will make us applaud the human sacrifice of the New? Both should make us shudder at humanity’s primitive savagery. Harris explains, “The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a ‘loving’ God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the superstitious bloodletting that has plagued bewildered people throughout history.”15

Second, redemption is incoherent. In The End of Christianity, we discover that Bob Jones University–trained, Baptist-turned-atheist Ken Pulliam would have enjoyed time travel to further muddy up the christological heresy wars of the early Christian empire (as if that were even possible). For example, he asks why it is that only the Father needed to be propitiated when the three persons of the Godhead are allegedly equal. Moreover, did Jesus’s atonement temporarily sever the unity of the Godhead, which is impossible? If not, then Jesus did not really die spiritually, and thus could not offer complete atonement. In the end, Pulliam concludes that the redemption story is incoherent.

Third, redemption is impossible. How can someone else take your sins upon himself? Impossible, says Christopher Hitchens: “We cannot, like fear-ridden peasants of antiquity, hope to load all our crimes onto a goat and then drive the hapless animal into the desert.”16 Pulliam remarks that “it is logically impossible to punish an innocent person.”17 Our evolved sense of justice forbids such a notion. Says Pulliam, “Punishment, according to the retributive theory of justice, is an appropriate response for one who is guilty of breaking the law. . . . [T]he guilty party and only the guilty party should be punished.”18

Fourth, redemption is unnecessary. It sells a manufactured solution to a manufactured problem. On the one hand, if it can be assumed that original sin is a myth, then Dawkins is free to say, “So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.

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