We now come to the end of my critique of Dan Barker’s book, Mere Morality. In all honesty, it hasn’t been a fun series to write—it wasn’t because Barker’s arguments were challenging or even offensive. Rather, it was because his arguments were simply pedantic and rather childish. Simply put, after awhile, writing, “No, that is not what that even means” gets pretty old. Still, I’m rather hard-headed, and so if I start a blog series, I’m going to finish it.
And that is where we are today—my last post on Mere Morality. In this post, I will be looking at what Barker says in the last five chapters of his book. They are entitled, Terror, The New Testament, Judging God, Human Nature, and Moral Conflict.
Terror
The only noteworthy thing in this chapter is the odd comment Barker makes about Psalm 14. After listing Psalm 14:5, along with a host of other cherry-picked verses that supposedly prove what a horrible God the God of the Bible, Barker says the following: “That last verse comes from Psalm 14, which begins by calling atheists fools and ends by calling God a terrorist.”
Here is Psalm 14 in full:
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.
2The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good, not even one.
4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers who eat up my people
as they eat bread and do not call upon the LORD?
5 There they are in great terror, for God is with the generation of the righteous.
6 You would shame the plans of the poor, but the LORD is his refuge.
7 Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores the fortunes of his people,
let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad.
Three things need to be said: (1) No, Psalm 14 is not talking about modern atheists—Barker is trying to paint himself as some kind of victim by saying, “Look how mean the Bible is! It calls us atheists ‘fools’!” No, in the ancient world everyone worshipped some kind of god—in that sense, there were no “atheists” in the way Barker identifies himself. Rather, Psalm 14 is talking about corrupt evildoers who live their lives as if God doesn’t exist, and who therefore think they will never incur judgment for the evil they commit. (2) That leads to the obvious point to anyone who cares to actually read the Psalm: it is speaking against those who oppress the poor and needy and calls for justice. (3) And where does it call God a “terrorist”? That’s right—it doesn’t.
The New Testament
The one thing I found amusing in this chapter is Barker’s bizarre take on when Jesus was questioned about the greatest commandment. When asked, Jesus responds with, “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The entire Torah is summed up in these two commandments. Barker’s take? “Notice that even here—in the kinder, gentler Testament—the love of God comes first, just like it says in the jealous Ten Commandments. Jesus perpetuated the regal attitude that people come second. Looking at the source of the Old Testament verses Jesus was quoting (Deuteronomy 6:4-15 and Leviticus 19:17-18), we see that ‘love the Lord’ was a command to obedience based on fear and threats, and ‘love your neighbor’ meant only ‘love your Hebrew neighbor.’”
Do I need to even comment on how petty and silly that complaint is? Let’s look at the last part of that quote, though. The crazy thing is that when the scribe asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded by telling the parable of the…Good Samaritan! So let’s just be clear: first, the verses in Deuteronomy and Leviticus are not just about loving your Hebrew neighbor. And second, from Jesus’ own lips, he affirms that “neighbor” extends to anyone.
Judging God
In this section, Barker tells of a debate he had with William Lane Craig, in which the Canaanite Conquest came up in the debate. Apparently, Craig claimed that the Canaanite children were actually better off, because, “…if we believe children go to heaven, as I do, than they would be, allowing to live on in the circumstances in which they were.” Barker responded with a very valid critique of Lane’s questionable answer: “He actually shoots himself in the foot. Craig’s reasoning is a good argument for abortion: kill the fetus now so they can go to heaven without the risk of being raised in a godless family.”
Fair enough—it only took an entire book for me to find something I agree with Barker about. Of course, as I’ve written elsewhere, both Barker and Lane are misreading the text and assumption it is giving a blow by blow detailed description of some sort of blitzkrieg slaughter of the Canaanites. Yes, it is describing battles, and the Israelites eventual settlement in Canaan; but the language that reads to us as wholesale slaughter is a hyperbolic literary device that was common in the ancient world.
Human Nature
Barker writes: “Notice that Christianity has an obverse view of morality: in place of instinct, reason, and an evolving humanistic law, it has original sin, faith, and a divinely revealed absolute law” (135).
Well, just to be clear, as I learned during my debate with Barker, Barker doesn’t even believe “morality” really exists anyway—it is all just a matter of “whatever causes harm,” and that can vary from person to person, from perspective to perspective. Barker actually said in my debate with him that Hitler’s gassing of six million people wasn’t really immoral. The cold, hard fact is that a morality based on instinct and autonomous human reason will eventually give you the gas chambers, the gulag, and the killing fields. But Barker can’t see this. Of course, if someone can’t see Hitler’s genocide as immoral, it should come as no surprise to find that person not believing that sin exists.
The bizarre thing, though, is that Barker is quick to scream “Immorality!” and “Genocide!” when ripping Bible verses out of context. Funny how his sense of morality is entirely contingent on who he wants to attack.
Moral Conflict
Barker ends his book with the following statement: “There are no simplistic rules. Life is often messy, and to find the path that is the most moral we usually have to juggle our three moral minds, hoping to arrive at some clarity, or at least a justification for why we think a certain action results in less harm than another. If you recognize that instinct, reason, and humanistic law are useful guides, and then test the results against actual harm, then you are a good person.”
Part of that statement is correct: There are no simplistic rules; life is often messy; and figuring out what is moral often does take a lot of thought and struggle. But the problem is that Barker fails to practice what he preaches. Throughout his book (as well as his other books), what does Barker do on a constant basis? He sits in judgment with a black/while standard of morality rooted in modern American democratic law, and proceeds to issue moral verdicts on decontextualized, cherry-picked Bible verses without even attempting to understand the original historical context or the literary context in which a particular verse is found.
His book exudes all the self-righteous condemnation of the most rabid ultra-fundamentalist. To be fair, I am certain that in his daily, personal life, Barker is nice, polite, and moral person. And I hope my critique of his book isn’t taken as a personal attack on him. But I do think his arguments need to be countered with the same intensity with which he uses in his attacks on Christianity. At the core, the fundamental problem with his arguments is that in his thinking he proves himself to be content with ignorant rants and purposeful, inflammatory, agenda-driven mischaracterizations about, well…virtually everything.
And that, I find, is not only intellectually lazy, it a sin against reason.
Well done!