Knowing Good & Evil

I think I was halfway through a five-hour drive when my mind, keeping itself awake, took a strange train of thought. I’ve joked over the years (maybe not on this blog, but…) that if some consider themselves pro-life and others pro-choice, then Gxd might just be anti-life, in the sense of “fuck them kids”. Like yes, Gxd is said to know (certain) people before they are born and to even form them in the womb; but even besides (just like Adam) the point of personhood seeming to when his breath first enters them, and even besides the Torah considering the death of a fetus to be a crime of property destruction rather than murder, Gxd seems to be just fine killing people of any age cohort including adolescents, children, and infants. No judgment here. Walk with me.

I wondered, then, about the plague on the firstborn in Egypt. Now, I do disagree with how most media depict the myth as specifically targeting children—since a firstborn son here is either a present or future patriarch, someone who owned property such as land and cattle and slaves, and is thus someone with a vested interest in keeping the Hebrews in chains—but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t not include children, or even fetuses if Gxd (in this case) acknowledged their personhood. So I wondered: how does a typical Christian understand this event? I feel like I’ve always felt that the plague was justifiable in its own right, even if hypothetically it were carried out by the hands of the Hebrews themselves, but I realized recently that such an opinion would make most Christians (or at least evangelicals) shiver. Two reasons: first, in that expectations for behavior could be reflected up or down, rather than Gxd on his pedestal being excluded from typical consideration; and second, in that Gxd would operate not according to some inviolable mores (for example, being “pro-life”), but to an ethical calculus whose rationale is not beyond our understanding.

But that’s like the point of the New Testament, right? Or at least of the ‘radical’ tendency expressed in the gospels of Mark and Proto-Luke, as well as in Paul’s (authentic) epistles, as opposed to the reactionary tendency in Matthew (though, I argue, not in James’ epistle as is often supposed): it’s as if Gxd through Jesus says, “I gave you the Torah because you idiots couldn’t figure it out for yourselves, but you’re still getting it deeply wrong because you confuse following the Law for acting ethically.” But should we understand the ethics of Gxd in the Bible as being necessarily kind or passive or “good” in the traditional sense? In the Torah, Gxd doesn’t just eliminate the property-owning class of Egypt: he destroys Freaky Rapist City; he resets the entire world by drowning all humanity except a handful; and when creating the first humans, he seems to trick them into becoming self-conscious. That’s not to mention the persistent promise of future judgment in the New Testament—would you be surprised to know that whereas Paul talks about sin as a destructive force, Jesus himself is actually the one to suggest any degree of eternal torment in the afterlife? Counterintuitive though it seems, where liberal readers like to frame Jesus as a preacher of naïve kindness, and conservative readers as a restorer of traditional mores (following Matthew and to a lesser extent Canonical Luke): we can perhaps better understand Gxd as one who both “make[s] weal and create[s] woe” (Isaiah 45:7), who destroys and deceives in service of love and loyalty. I am reminded of one of Énziramire’s favorite quotes by a liberal Maoist named Thomas Jefferson:

In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands, the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.

Please forgive the thought scramble. Just wanted to expel all this. I think understanding what sin “is” will be helpful to better direct these thoughts, because especially in Paul we should drop the idea that sin has anything to do with (again) inviolable taboos, especially given his naturalist perspective on Gxd and ethics.