T here are, indeed, several ways in which religion is not just amoral, but positively immoral. And

these faults and crimes are not to be found in the behavior of its adherents (which can

sometimes be exemplary) but in its original precepts. These include:

• Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent and the credulous

• The doctrine of blood sacrifice

• The doctrine of atonement

• The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment

• The imposition of impossible tasks and rules

The first point has already been covered. All the creation myths of all peoples have long been

known to be false, and have fairly recently been replaced by infinitely superior and more

magnificent explanations. To its list of apologies, religion should simply add an apology for

foisting man-made parchments and folk myths upon the unsuspecting, and for taking so long to

concede that this had been done. One senses a reluctance to make this admission, since it might

tend to explode the whole religious worldview, but the longer it is delayed the more heinous the

denial will become.

BLOOD SACRIFICE

Before monotheism arose, the altars of primitive society reeked of blood, much of it human

and some of it infant. The thirst for this, at least in animal form, is still with us. Pious Jews are at

this moment trying to breed the spotlessly pure “red heifer” mentioned in the book of Numbers,

chapter 19, which if slaughtered again according to the exact and meticulous ritual will bring

about the return of animal sacrifices in the Third Temple, and hasten the end of time and the

coming of the Messiah. This may appear merely absurd, but a team of like-minded Christian

maniac farmers are attempting as I write to help their co-fundamentalists by employing special

breeding techniques (borrowed or stolen from modern science) to produce a perfect “Red

Angus” beast in Nebraska. Meanwhile in Israel, the Jewish biblical fanatics are also trying to

raise a human child, in a pure “bubble” free from contamination, who will at the attainment of

the right age be privileged to cut that heifer’s throat. Ideally, this should be done on the Temple

Mount, awkwardly the site of the Muslim holy places but nonetheless the very spot where

Abraham is alleged to have drawn the knife over the live body of his own child. Other

sacramental guttings and throat-cuttings, particularly of lambs, occur every year in the

Christian and Muslim world, either to celebrate Easter or the feast of Eid.

The latter, which honors Abraham’s willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is

common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors. There is no

softening the plain meaning of this frightful story. The prelude involves a series of vilenesses

and delusions, from the seduction of Lot by both his daughters to the marriage of Abraham to

his stepsister, the birth of Isaac to Sarah when Abraham was a hundred years old, and many

other credible and incredible rustic crimes and misdemeanors. Perhaps afflicted by a poorconscience, but at any rate believing himself commanded by god, Abraham agreed to murder

his son. He prepared the kindling, laid the tied-up boy upon it (thus showing that he knew the

procedure), and took up the knife in order to kill the child like an animal. At the last available

moment his hand was stayed, not by god as it happens, but by an angel, and he was praised

from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own

crimes. As a reward for his fealty, he was promised a long and large posterity.

Not long after this (though the Genesis narrative is not very well illustrated in point of time)

his wife Sarah expired at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven, and her dutiful husband

found her a place of burial in a cave in the town of Hebron. Having outlived her by attaining the

fine old age of one hundred and seventy-five, and having fathered six more children meanwhile,

Abraham was eventually buried in the same cave. To this day, religious people kill each other

and kill each other’s children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and

unlocatable hole in a hill.

There was a terrible massacre of Jewish residents of Hebron during the Arab revolt of 1929,

when sixty-seven Jews were slaughtered. Many of these were Lubavitchers, who regard all non

Jews as racially inferior and who had moved to Hebron because they believed the Genesis myth,

but this does not excuse the pogrom. Remaining outside the border of Israel until 1967, the town

was captured that year with much fanfare by Israeli forces and became part of the occupied

West Bank. Jewish settlers began to “return,” under the leadership of a particularly violent and

obnoxious rabbi named Moshe Levinger, and to build an armed settlement named Kiryat Arba

above the town, as well as some smaller settlements within it. The Muslims among the mainly

Arab inhabitants continued to claim that the praiseworthy Abraham indeed had been willing to

murder his son, but only for their religion and not for the Jews. This is what “submission” means.

When I visited the place I found that the supposed “Cave of the Patriarchs,” or “Cave of

Machpela,” had separate entrances and separate places of worship for the two warring

claimants to the right to celebrate this atrocity in their own names.

A short while before I arrived, another atrocity had occurred. An Israeli zealot named Dr.

Baruch Goldstein had come to the cave and, unslinging the automatic weapon that he was

allowed to carry, discharged it into the Muslim congregation. He killed twenty-seven

worshippers and injured countless others before being overwhelmed and beaten to death. It

turned out that many people already knew that Dr. Goldstein was dangerous. While serving as a

physician in the Israeli army he had announced that he would not treat non-Jewish patients,

such as Israeli Arabs, especially on the Sabbath. As it happens, he was obeying rabbinic law in

declining to do this, as many Jewish fundamentalist authorities have confirmed, so an easy way

to spot an inhumane killer was to notice that he was guided by a sincere and literal observance

of the divine instruction. Shrines in his name have been set up by the more doggedly observant

Jews ever since, and of those rabbis who condemned his action, not all did so in unequivocal

terms. The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood

sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.

ATONEMENT

Previous sacrifices of humans, such as the Aztec and other ceremonies from which we recoil,

were common in the ancient world and took the form of propitiatory murder. An offering of a

virgin or an infant or a prisoner was assumed to appease the gods: once again, not a very good

advertisement for the moral properties of religion. “Martyrdom,” or a deliberate sacrifice of

oneself, can be viewed in a slightly different light, though when practiced by the Hindus in the

form of suttee, or the strongly suggested “suicide” of widows, it was put down by the British in

India for imperial as much as for Christian reasons. Those “martyrs” who wish to kill others aswell as themselves, in an act of religious exaltation, are viewed more differently still: Islam is

ostensibly opposed to suicide per se but cannot seem to decide whether to condemn or

recommend the act of such a bold shahid.

However, the idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C. S.

Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition. Once again we have a father

demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying

to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how

moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago,

without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession

of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this

murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life.

Let us just for now overlook all the contradictions between the tellers of the original story

and assume that it is basically true. What are the further implications? They are not as

reassuring as they look at first sight. For a start, and in order to gain the benefit of this

wondrous offer, I have to accept that I am responsible for the flogging and mocking and

crucifixion, in which I had no say and no part, and agree that every time I decline this

responsibility, or that I sin in word or deed, I am intensifying the agony of it. Furthermore, I am

required to believe that the agony was necessary in order to compensate for an earlier crime in

which I also had no part, the sin of Adam. It is useless to object that Adam seems to have been

created with insatiable discontent and curiosity and then forbidden to slake it: all this was

settled long before even Jesus himself was born. Thus my own guilt in the matter is deemed

“original” and inescapable. However, I am still granted free will with which to reject the offer of

vicarious redemption. Should I exercise this choice, however, I face an eternity of torture much

more awful than anything endured at Calvary, or anything threatened to those who first heard

the Ten Commandments.

The tale is made no easier to follow by the necessary realization that Jesus both wished and

needed to die and came to Jerusalem at Passover in order to do so, and that all who took part

in his murder were unknowingly doing god’s will, and fulfilling ancient prophecies. (Absent the

gnostic version, this makes it hopelessly odd that Judas, who allegedly performed the strangely

redundant act of identifying a very well-known preacher to those who had been hunting for him,

should suffer such opprobrium. Without him, there could have been no “Good Friday,” as the

Christians naively call it even when they are not in a vengeful mood.)

There is a charge (found in only one of the four Gospels) that the Jews who condemned

Jesus asked for his blood to be “on their heads” for future generations. This is not a problem

that concerns only the Jews, or those Catholics who are worried by the history of Christian anti

Semitism. Suppose that the Jewish Sanhedrin had in fact made such a call, as Maimonides

thought they had, and should have. How could that call possibly be binding upon successor

generations? Remember that the Vatican did not assert that it was some Jews who had killed

Christ. It asserted that it was the Jews who had ordered his death, and that the Jewish people as

a whole were the bearers of a collective responsibility. It seems bizarre that the church could not

bring itself to drop the charge of generalized Jewish “deicide” until very recently. But the key to

its reluctance is easy to find. If you once admit that the descendants of Jews are not implicated,

it becomes very hard to argue that anyone else not there present was implicated, either. One

rent in the fabric, as usual, threatens to tear the whole thing apart (or to make it into something

simply man-made and woven, like the discredited Shroud of Turin). The collectivization of guilt,

in short, is immoral in itself, as religion has been occasionally compelled to admit.

ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND IMPOSSIBLE TASKSThe Gospel story of the Garden of Gethsemane used to absorb me very much as a child,

because its “break” in the action and its human whimper made me wonder if some of the

fantastic scenario might after all be true. Jesus asks, in effect, “Do I have to go through with

this?” It is an impressive and unforgettable question, and I long ago decided that I would

cheerfully wager my own soul on the belief that the only right answer to it is “no.” 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. Our everyday idiom is quite sound in regarding “scapegoating”

with contempt. And religion is scapegoating writ large. I can pay your debt, my love, if you have

been imprudent, and if I were a hero like Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities I could even serve

your term in prison or take your place on the scaffold. Greater love hath no man. But I cannot

absolve you of your responsibilities. It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to

accept. And if the same offer is made from another time and another world, through the

mediation of middlemen and accompanied by inducements, it loses all its grandeur and

becomes debased into wish-thinking or, worse, a combination of blackmailing with bribery.

The ultimate degeneration of all this into a mere bargain was made unpleasantly obvious by

Blaise Pascal, whose theology is not far short of sordid. His celebrated “wager” puts it in

hucksterish form: what have you got to lose? If you believe in god and there is a god, you win. If

you believe in him and you are wrong—so what? I once wrote a response to this cunning piece

of bet-covering, which took two forms. The first was a version of Bertrand Russell’s hypothetical

reply to the hypothetical question: what will you say if you die and are confronted with your

Maker? His response? “I should say, Oh God, you did not give us enough evidence.” My own

reply: Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might

prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith

or the smoking tributes of bloody altars. But I would not count on it.

Pascal reminds me of the hypocrites and frauds who abound in Talmudic Jewish

rationalization. Don’t do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You

obeyed the letter of the law: who’s counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a

prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer “temporary marriage,” selling

men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her

when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the

sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter’s itself was financed by a special one

time offer of that kind. The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted

Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain “remission of sin” to those who attended.

This pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that it

would be possible to obey. But to the totalitarian edicts that begin with revelation from absolute

authority, and that are enforced by fear, and based on a sin that had been committed long ago,

are added regulations that are often immoral and impossible at the same time. The essential

principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey. The resulting tyranny is

even more impressive if it can be enforced by a privileged caste or party which is highly zealous

in the detection of error. Most of humanity, throughout its history, has dwelt under a form of this

stupefying dictatorship, and a large portion of it still does. Allow me to give a few examples of

the rules that must, yet cannot, be followed.

The commandment at Sinai which forbade people even to think about coveting goods is the

first clue. It is echoed in the New Testament by the injunction which says that a man who looks

upon a woman in the wrong way has actually committed adultery already. And it is almost

equaled by the current Muslim and former Christian prohibition against lending out money at

interest. All of these, in their different fashion, attempt to place impossible restraints on human

initiative. They can only be met in one of two ways. The first is by a continual scourging and

mortification of the flesh, accompanied by incessant wrestling with “impure” thoughts whichbecome actual as soon as they are named, or even imagined. From this come hysterical

confessions of guilt, false promises of improvement, and loud, violent denunciations of other

backsliders and sinners: a spiritual police state. The second solution is organized hypocrisy,

where forbidden foods are rebaptized as something else, or where a donation to the religious

authorities will purchase some wiggle-room, or where ostentatious orthodoxy will buy some

time, or where money can be paid into one account and then paid back—with perhaps a slight

percentage added in a non-usurious manner—into another. This we might term the spiritual

banana republic. Many theocracies, from medieval Rome to modern Wahhabi Saudi Arabia,

have managed to be spiritual police states and spiritual banana republics at the same time.

This objection applies even to some of the noblest and some of the basest rules. The order to

“love thy neighbor” is mild and yet stern: a reminder of one’s duty to others. The order to “love

thy neighbor as thyself” is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed, as is the hard-to

interpret instruction to love others “as I have loved you.” Humans are not so constituted as to

care for others as much as themselves: the thing simply cannot be done (as any intelligent

“creator” would well understand from studying his own design). Urging humans to be

superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their

repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules. What a grin, meanwhile, on the face of those

who accept the cash donations that are made in lieu! The so-called Golden Rule, sometimes

needlessly identified with a folktale about the Babylonian Rabbi Hillel, simply enjoins us to treat

others as one would wish to be treated by them. This sober and rational precept, which one can

teach to any child with its innate sense of fairness (and which predates all Jesus’s “beatitudes”

and parables), is well within the compass of any atheist and does not require masochism and

hysteria, or sadism and hysteria, when it is breached. It is gradually learned, as part of the

painfully slow evolution of the species, and once grasped is never forgotten. Ordinary

conscience will do, without any heavenly wrath behind it.

As to the basest rules, one need only consult the argument from design once more. People

wish to enrich and better themselves, and though they may well lend or even give money to a

friend or relative in need and ask for nothing but its eventual return or its grateful

acknowledgment, they will not advance money to perfect strangers without expecting interest.

By a nice chance, cupidity and avarice are the spur to economic development. No student of the

subject from David Ricardo to Karl Marx to Adam Smith has been unaware of this fact. It is “not

from the benevolence” of the baker, observed Smith in his shrewd Scots manner, that we expect

our daily bread, but from his self-interest in baking and selling it. In any case, one may choose

to be altruistic, whatever that may mean, but by definition one may not be compelled into

altruism. Perhaps we would be better mammals if we were not “made” this way, but surely

nothing could be sillier than having a “maker” who then forbade the very same instinct he

instilled.

“Free will,” reply the casuists. You do not have to obey the laws against murder or theft

either. Well, one may be genetically programmed for a certain amount of aggression and

hatred and greed, and yet also evolved enough to beware of following every prompting. If we

gave in to our every base instinct every time, civilization would have been impossible and there

would be no writing in which to continue this argument. However, there can be no question that

a human being, whether standing up or lying down, finds his or her hand resting just next to the

genitalia. Useful no doubt in warding off primeval aggressors once our ancestors decided to

take the risk of going erect and exposing the viscera, this is both a privilege and a provocation

denied to most quadrupeds (some of whom can compensate by getting their mouths to the

same point that we can reach with our fingers and palms). Now: who devised the rule that this

easy apposition between the manual and the genital be forbidden, even as a thought? To put it

more plainly, who ordered that you must touch (for other reasons having nothing to do with sexor reproduction) but that you also must not? There does not even seem to be any true scriptural

authority here, yet almost all religions have made the prohibition a near-absolute one.

ONE COULD WRITE AN ENTIRE BOOK that was devoted only to the grotesque history of religion and

sex, and to holy dread of the procreative act and its associated impulses and necessities, from

the emission of semen to the effusion of menstrual blood. But a convenient way of condensing

the whole fascinating story may be to ask one single provocative question.