The Problem of Evil Christians
A Dialogue
(A=Atheist, C=Christian)
A: I know of Christians who have done the most horrible acts imaginable. That proves that what you’re saying can’t be true.
C: So if Hitler said that 2+2=4, would that prove that 2+2 isn’t 4? The truth of a claim may have nothing to do with how good or bad the person is who said it.
A: My early years were spent in a fundamentalist school taught by bigots and hypocrites. They made up rules and laws and said I’d burn in hell forever if I didn’t keep them. That’s what you think I should become?
C: No, that’s exactly what I’m asking you not to become. That’s what Jesus condemned.
A: But at least these evil Christians prove that Christianity, and probably any religion, produce greater evil than we would have if there were no religions.
C: No, the fact that there are evil people like that just proves that some who want to see themselves as Christians will go to any extant to avoid and distort what they do not want to see in the Bible.
Any political power structure will attract evil people; but it will also corrupt many good people, because power does corrupt. It shouldn’t be thought strange to find evil people in every conceivable system that wields power, even religious ones that purportedly hold to high moral standards. But at the very least, leaders in such systems have to contradict the teachings of their system. To rationalize such contradictions can never be easy. It took centuries before such people could so take control of the organized church to distort its original teachings and justify inquisitions and pograms and witch hunts. Yet even when the official church was most corrupt, pockets of resistance flourished and advanced the basic teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. This will always happen so long as people have access to those original teachings.
When one can do evil and not contradict the ethical teachings of one’s system, it is much easier for evil people and policies to be found in that system. So under Hitler’s “Reich Church” and his almost neopagan worship of the state and “Volk” it was much easier for him to justify his atrocities to his followers. It wasn’t at all easy for him to try to do so to those who held an ethic based on Jesus’ teachings. Those who have lived consistently with the New Testament teachings have produced the greatest good imaginable for a world like ours.
A: Atheism has never had a chance to prove itself. Get rid of religion and give us a chance and we will show you the kind of good we can produce for the world.
C: It has had its chance. Look at the millions of innocent people slaughtered and tortured under Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceaușescu, Hoxha, and the Kims (N. Korea). What “Christian” Inquisitions or Crusades have ever amassed numbers even close to these?”
Secularism just doesn’t have any reason to advocate a good ethic rather than a bad one. You’re free to choose any kind you want. Even if people were to choose Hitler’s ethic and even if you could persuade them it’s wrong to do so, you wouldn’t be able to give them any good reason to change their minds. Unless there are outside forces compelling them one way or the other, it’s all a matter of arbitrary choice. Even worse, there are many who will not even recognize that there is any objective good or evil whatsoever. If we start with people and nothing else, why say that they have any worth or value such that they should have any rights at all? What are we anyway? Nothing more than complicated machines, protoplasm produced by chance. Can protoplasm have rights? These are just the logical conclusions of atheism.
Dennis Jensen 2000, revised October 2019
For more discussion and arguments see D. Jensen, Human Suffering and the Evil of Religion, part 2. This book is discussed elsewhere on this website. The meme on that page reflects and discusses some of the problems covered above.
If this image is not available on your display, it may be described as follows: We see the back of a nude woman being tortured by the Inquisition. Her arms are behind her back with her wrists bound together to a rope pulling the wrists upward until she is suspended in the air. A weight is holding down one of her ankles. Men sitting at two tables are evidently questioning her and one is recording the events. The left side of the meme says, “If you think Christianity was never like radical Islam, you haven’t studied Christian history.” On the right the reply says, “If you think this is Christianity, you don’t know what Jesus taught. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. . . . Love your enemies. . . . Do good to those who persecute you.’ If people’s actions are in complete contradiction to Jesus’ teachings and they can call themselves Christians, the word becomes meaningless.”
