The Absurdity Of Vicarious Salvation

The Romans wasted some perfectly good lumber on an eccentric Judean preacher.

Fox News propagandist Brit Hume made waves this week when he said on air that Tiger Woods should convert to Christianity in light of his many extramarital affairs. In case you missed it, here’s what Brit (who will never be confused with David) Hume said:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person, I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. He’s lost his family, it’s not clear to me whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children, but the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal, the extent to which he can recover, it seems to me, depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist, I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith, so my message to Tiger would be “Tiger, turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

It is not possible for me to care any less about what Brit Hume thinks, but I am using his pretentiousness as a point of departure to highlight the breathtaking absurdity of the central dogma of his faith. You see, when I was a wee lad and church authorities attempted to inculcate me with batshit tales about child sacrifice in ancient Palestine, I was understandably suspicious about the veracity of such anecdotes. Teachers kept telling me that I had to be “forgiven” by Jesus Christ in order to be “saved.”

Forgiven for what? Saved from what? Sin and damnation, respectively. This never sat well with me. I remember being ten years old and wondering what possible sins I could have committed that would warrant an eternity of suffering. “Trust in Jesus,” they would say. “You can only be forgiven through him.” (I refuse to capitalize pronouns referring to so-called divinities.) That’s all I could think about when I heard pompous ass Brit Hume talk about how Christianity “offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption” necessary for Woods to “recover as a person.” Talk about holier-than-thou.

Forgiveness through Christ is of course the sine qua non of institutionalized Christianity, and it is required in two respects. The first, says the Christian narrative, is to be forgiven as an everyday person, a flawed human who will inevitably commit acts of wrongdoing throughout life. The second is to be forgiven as a metaphysical entity, a being who is simply guilty by default because his species is guilty, thus requiring forgiveness. The only way to be forgiven in either sense is to ask Jesus for forgiveness, and this will make it so. Failure to comply results in an ugly life and an even uglier afterlife.

Brit Hume was referring to the first application, so let’s start with that. According to him, the central lesson in the Tiger Woods sex saga is that Woods should convert to Christianity because he is in need of some kind of abstract forgiveness. Notice the conspicuous absence of any reference to Woods’ wife in Hume’s remarks. He mentions Woods’ family in passing, but that’s just a warm-up for the most critical part of this portentous pontification. For Hume and all other Christians, the most important person to receive forgiveness from is Jesus. While it is preferable to secure also the forgiveness of the victims of the transgression, it is not necessary for salvation. Indeed, it is not even necessary to ask forgiveness or even apologize to those who have been wronged. All that matters in the Christian faith is that one asks Jesus for absolution. On this score, Christ’s silence is taken as a tacit show of forgiveness. It has to be. What’s Jesus going to do? Say, “Ok, you’re forgiven”? He’s been dead for 2,000 years, if he lived at all.

The second sense in which humans need to be forgiven according to the narrative is that we are all inherently wicked. Thanks to the curiosity of Adam and Eve, god doomed humans forever. Instead of living for eternity in paradise, humans were condemned to live in places like Calcutta, Mogadishu, and Cleveland. Men would have to labor for a living, while women would have to squeeze children out of their vaginas causing them great pain. They would be forced interact with other humans in awkward social and professional situations, and god punished the intelligent by creating innumerable amounts of idiots in an attempt to drive them mad. Fear, lunacy, stupidity, incompetence, and bellicosity were to characterize the human race. And, to take a line from Hobbes, “the life of man, solitary poor nasty, brutish, and short.” And after death…nothing. Perhaps sheol, but that’s another story.

Enter Jesus. God finally decided that he had had enough, and sent his only son earthward to be brutally killed to “save” humankind. Jesus got nailed to some two-by-fours, thereby opening the door to heaven for mankind. But, with heaven comes hell. And because humans are by nature bad, hell is the default destination of all souls unless one gives Jesus the necessary props for taking those nails and saving everyone.

I don’t know about you, but I never asked Jesus to die for me. In fact, if I were there at the time of the crucifixion—if it in fact happened—I would’ve tried to stop it, or at the very least, suggested that it would be a bad idea. And yet, doing the moral thing in that instance would undermine the entire premise of Christianity. Thus, if we could travel back in time to Judea during the moments leading up to the crucifixion, we would be faced with a catch-22: do nothing (or even cheer on the execution), thus demonstrating our ignobility and immorality by allowing Christ to be crucified in order to save us; or, defy the notion that humans are inherently wicked by stopping the Romans from carrying out the death sentence against the son of god, but thereby preventing the redemption of all humankind. Or how about this scenario: what if we traveled back in time to find that the Jewish leaders had changed their minds for some reason? What if they really didn’t want Jesus crucified after all, and Pilate was willing to oblige their change of heart? According to Christian doctrine, somebody had to kill Jesus. Thus, in that situation it would be incumbent upon us to save humanity by murdering him.

These conclusions would be laughable were they not so unpleasant. And yet we are forced to draw them because of the ridiculousness of Christian doctrine, which is at bottom, disgraceful and lazy. Rather than attempt to live as Christ did, today’s Christians are redeemed by simply believing that he died for them.

All this is nonsense, of course. At the end of the day, we are responsible to ourselves and those around us, and perhaps by extension, the living members of society and humanity as a whole. Our behavior directly and indirectly affects more people than we could possibly imagine. However, one person we do not affect is Jesus Christ, because he’s dead. And he’s not coming back. But if by off chance he does, he’s going to be very pissed off at a lot of so-called Christians.

- Max