I awoke this morning thinking about God’s unaccountability for the behavior of his creation and how it parallels the politics of Western nations. It became apparent to me that it’s no wonder Western leaders in countries whose citizens are predominantly monotheistic in matters of religion are so unaccountable and always have been. After all, the Abrahamic God is their model, which, upon honest analysis, is a model of unaccountability.
An honest reading of the book of Genesis shows that man was set up for failure from the start. If Adam had been created a ‘perfect’ human, as Christian theology asserts, he wouldn’t have chosen the forbidden fruit; he and Eve would have obeyed God’s command. That they chose to disobey shows their imperfection. Yet God punishes them and their descendants instead of acknowledging his own role in having created fallible humans. The only time in the Bible where God took any accountability for his own creation was when he decided to destroy mankind with a flood. In Genesis 6:5, KJV, it says, “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” and the following verse states that “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” Nowhere else in the entire Bible does God ever take any accountability for the gross imperfection of his creation.
On the desk of President Harry Truman was a placard that famously read: “The buck stops here”. Following the long trail of tears leading to God’s desk, one finds no such placard; one only finds a finger wagging down at them in judgement and condemnation. At the Judgement Day when the vast majority of humans who’ve ever lived are thrown into the Lake of Fire, an honest and accountable “loving” God would leap into the flames with his victims or cancel the whole insanely punitive project altogether.
This, among other equally compelling reasons, is why I can’t believe in eternal punishment and a so-called ‘loving’ God who would implement it. To call the apocalyptic God of the book of Revelation “loving” is cognitive dissonance at its worst. And it’s why I think the Biblical model of leadership is tragically flawed, in that it’s based on the hypocrisy of an unaccountable God — and we’ve been seeing the results for millennia. My disdain for this model extends to any system where power is exempt from accountability, religious or otherwise.
For an eloquent, excellently reasoned statement on the improbability of eternal torment, David Bentley Hart said it better than I ever could here:
The obscenity of belief in an eternal hell – ABC Religion & Ethics