A Failure to Communicate

 "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
            - George Bernard Shaw

Most religions presume that God wants something of humankind.  Religions demand certain behaviors, diet, grooming & dress, obedience to doctrine, prayer, praise and thanks, etc., without considering why God wants something from us.  (Asking why God wants anything from people is a topic for another post.)  Across 3000 known religions, the stipulations vary widely – to pray at certain times on these days, to forgo work on that day, to eat these things but not those things, for men to wear a hat here but not there, for women to wear a hat here or a burkha there, to kill these things to honor God, to engage in certain sexual behaviors but not others, etc.  Many religions, acting in the name of God, demand to control most aspects of human life. 

Taken together, there’s little rhyme or reason to any of it.  We should ask why God’s instructions are so vague.  God is presumed to be all-powerful.  Why didn’t he communicate his existence and his rulebook clearly and consistently to all people through all times?  We should expect better communication from an all-powerful god who wants to communicate his message.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are left only apocryphal, unsubstantiated stories of significant communications from God, mostly thousands of years old.  Thinking about the  most significant direct communications from God, we might think of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Joan of Arc.  According to religious tradition, Abraham lived about 4000 years ago, Moses lived about 3500 years ago, Jesus 2000 years ago, and Joan of Arc about 600 years ago.  Archeologists have given up on finding historical evidence that Abraham and Moses existed.  The only contemporary evidence of Jesus is in two passing references by the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, writing about sixty years after Jesus’ death.  How do we judge the authenticity of Jesus’ works and teachings from such fragmentary evidence?  Did Joan of Arc actually experience holy visions, or hallucinations?  We don’t know.  

There is no evidence of direct communication from God.  Nothing in religious tradition passes even rudimentary standards of evidence.  

The Gospel of John says that Jesus is God’s only begotten son.  The direct communication from God was given only to the Israelites under Roman occupation.   Why was that?  If God is all-powerful and caring, wouldn’t he have sent his emissaries fairly, to every culture on earth?  Why did God wait for 1500 years after Jesus’ death to bring the good news of the savior to the native peoples of the Americas (while bringing genocide, smallpox and tuberculosis, too)?   Why is God restricted to only one begotten son?  Why didn’t God issue 10,000 sons to communicate clearly to all people?  Why did God communicate so directly to one group 2000 years ago, and only erratically since then? 

If God exists, and if he were interested in human recognition and compliance with his rules, you’d think he would communicate better to people in modern times.  If God can move heaven and earth, why doesn’t he move the stars to write “I am the Lord your God” in every language on earth?  Why doesn’t God send a tablet carved in unearthly materials, subject to validation through scientific measurement?  Perhaps God could send a single electromagnetic message from the sky to every mobile phone on the planet, saying “I am”.   But none of those things happen.   We’re left with the stuff of myths from the late Bronze Age.  

And as an aside, if God exists, why doesn’t God make life better for all of humankind?

Most religious people believe in the power of prayer to communicate with God.  When a disciple asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded with the Lord’s Prayer.  In it we find the basic attributes of prayer to God – praise, a wish for divine rule, a request for daily needs and preservation from harm, a request for forgiveness of sins.  An expression of gratitude is not in the Lord’s Prayer, but is present in other prayers of the New Testament.  But what evidence is there that prayer from worshiper to God is real communication, and not illusion?  Please see my earlier post, “Regarding The Power of Prayer, or, Did the People on the Titanic Forget to Pray?” 
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/07/regarding-power-of-prayer-or-did-people.html

    Poem by Laurie Anderson, displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

We have two alternative explanations.  First, we could conclude that God is mysterious, erratic, unclear and unfair in revealing his existence and salvation to the various peoples of earth.  Alternatively, we can conclude that God doesn’t exist.  

I began this essay with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."  For all of recorded history, across cultures and across time, people have succumbed to the illusion that communication has taken place with God.  The path toward truth is to ask for evidence that communication with God ever occurred.

                            “THE MANY KINDS OF SILENCE

            THE SILENCE AFTER YOU’VE SAID SOMETHING REALLY STUPID 
            THE SILENCE IN THE MIDDLE OF A DESERTED STREET AT MIDNIGHT
            THE SILENCE AFTER YOU’VE PRAYED”
    Poem by Laurie Anderson, displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
This poem and image are presented without permission and not for profit.  They will be removed upon request, if desired by the artist.    

The Transactional Primate and Transactional God

This post examines the transactional nature of people, and our presumption of transactions with unseen gods and spirits.  One of the presumed transactions is the biblical sacrifice of Jesus Christ in exchange for the forgiveness of human sins.  The post asks why a loving god would require a transaction involving a blood sacrifice rather than granting unconditional forgiveness to humanity.

This image of the crucifixion site was generated by AI.

Some animals understand transactional relationships.  Crows are well-known for transactional behaviors, bringing shiny objects in response to being fed.  There’s a delightful, documented story of a squirrel which spontaneously began stealing cookies and bringing them to someone who had been feeding the squirrel.  Animals can have a sense of gratitude and empathy, presume that something is valuable and giving it in trade for benefits received.  But an animal’s sense of what is valuable may differ from what humans appreciate, as cat owners who find a dead mouse on their pillow can attest.

Humans are among those animals with a natural capacity to understand trade.  Humans have the most complex social lives in the animal kingdom.  We have the ability to communicate, understand, and participate in exchanges.   Transactions are a necessary part of human social behavior, well illustrated in pop-psychology books Games People Play and I’m Okay, You’re Okay.  The books are correct that transactions are among our core social behaviors, and are necessary in society.  We are transactional creatures by default.  

Transactional Programming
Our faith in transactional fairness is borne out our daily experiences.  Over-indulgence often carries negative consequences, and self-denial often conveys benefits.  Sweets and fatty foods cause tooth decay and unwanted weight gain, and perhaps more serious consequences of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.  Exercise requires a cost of time and effort but produces health benefits.  Working hard may result in a promotion or more pay; saving money usually results in more money later.  Going out of our way to help someone may result in a new friendship, a reciprocated favor, or simply the pleasure of doing a good deed.  Time spent in picking up, cleaning, personal hygiene, seeing the doctor and dentist all have an immediate personal cost, but we expect a better quality of life in those transactions.

We are so programmed to expect fair transactions that we often fail to verify that a transaction yields a benefit.  We expect that a large package will be a bargain without checking the unit price.  Or we choose an expensive product, presuming that the cheaper option is of lower quality.  We usually assume that what is easily obtained is less valuable than something that requires more effort and personal cost, without requiring proof.

Religious Transactions
Humans apparently conducted transactions with spirits for as long as we’ve had the unique quality of being human.  All cultures offered prayers, worship and sacrifices to invisible, unresponsive spirits in exchange for presumed material benefits, either in this life or the next.  Sacrifices included food and drink, coins and jewelry, animals and human lives.  James Michener writes that as Polynesian cultures struggled with priests representing competing gods, it was presumed that the gods which demanded the most extreme sacrifices must be the strongest gods.  So the culture adopted more extreme practices of human sacrifice to appeal to the strongest god.  It is incredible that cultures throughout history participated in sacrificial transactions without ever requiring an audit to verify that promised material benefits were actually delivered.

The Judeo-Christian religion anthropomorphizes God and presumes that God wants things that humans want – praise, faithfulness, obedience, trust, conversation, connection and love.  But our religious leaders never ponder the question of why God would want those things.  Does God really want our worship and offerings, any more than we want the dead mouse generously given to us by the cat?  Why would God care about praise from humans any more than the praise from flatworms?  What good is human worship to the creator of two trillion galaxies?

In the movie “Men in Black”, miniature aliens living in a locker in Grand Central Station worship Agent Jay in a transaction for his gift of a wristwatch, to Agent Jay’s annoyance.

I previously wrote a brief post about the transactional nature of God in the Old Testament, here: https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-old-testament-rarely-heard-bible_29.html.

Sacrifice is featured prominently in Old and New Testament Judaism.  Second Chronicles 4-5 details the sacrifices to God offered by King Solomon for the dedication of Solomon’s temple, including 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep, plus offerings of grain mentioned a little later.  Nearly 1000 years later, sacrifices of animals was still a central part of Jewish religious observance, with the Gospels noting sacrifices of doves, pigeons, oxen, and sheep in ordinary worship. 

Some religions represent that the reward for transactions with spirits is not in this life but the next, removing the need to prove that benefits are received through the religious transaction.  This requires several levels of unfounded assumptions.  The first assumption is that unseen spirits exist.  The second assumption is that there is a life after death in some place, in some way that has meaning to a human individual.  The third is that unseen spirits desire what is sacrificed by humans, and fourth, that unseen spirits have agency over outcomes in the afterlife.  It’s hard for me to decide which of these is the most preposterous.  

Human Sacrifice
Judaism was one of the first religions to eschew human sacrifice.  Genesis 22 tells of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Abraham obediently prepares for the sacrifice, but before he can complete the act, God intervenes in the form of an angel, providing a ram to be killed in place of the son.  This sets a precedent for Judaism and later Christianity, that human sacrifice is not a transaction desired by God.  

Historian Thomas Cahill claims that every human culture practiced human sacrifice before the arrival of Christianity (Cahill ignores two millennia of Jewish precedent before Christianity in rejecting human sacrifice.)   It’s good that religions eventually recognized the immorality of such practices and brought them nearly to an end in the modern world.  Perhaps there is a slow improvement in human behavior, as Steven Pinker argued in “The Better Angels of Our Nature”.  The topic of human sacrifice is broad enough that it deserves a separate post.  

But in the general rejection of human sacrifice in Christianity, there is one striking exception.  It is the central tenet of Christianity - the transactional sacrifice of the life of Jesus Christ in payment for the sins of humanity.  

Sacrifice of Christ
It’s clear from scripture that the crucifixion of Christ is a transaction.  The death of Jesus is a payment demanded by God in exchange for the forgiveness of human sins.  This is the central tenet of Christianity.  The transaction is explained clearly in the prophecy of Isaiah, in the last supper in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, in the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, and in the Apostles’ Creed.   It somehow matters to God that blood must be shed to earn divine forgiveness for the sins of humanity.  For an ineffable reason, unconditional forgiveness of human sin is just not in God’s rule book.  Like the pagan gods of old, the Christian God demanded a blood sacrifice.

We’re told that Jesus is God’s only son.  Among two trillion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of planets, God chose to place his son here on Earth, with the expectation that Jesus would be tortured and killed to complete the necessary transaction for the eternal salvation of humanity.  God brought his mortal son Jesus to teach mercy and forgiveness to humanity, but the transaction here seems contradictory to the message.  

I think it’s important for us to ask why God would do any of that.  Why would God demand the life of Jesus in a transaction to forgive human sins, when God created humans to be inherently sinful?  Why does God not grant unconditional forgiveness to humanity, especially in the case of the teacher who taught forgiveness and to turn the other cheek?  Echoing Martin Luther, if God's grace is not freely given, is it really grace?  At what point do religious teachings strain our credulity to the breaking point?  When does a reasonable person say aloud “This doesn’t make any sense.  It cannot be true.”? 

Conclusion
Humans are transactional creatures by nature.  Our life experiences program us to expect transactional exchanges with nature and with other humans.  People project their transactional expectations onto the unseen spirit world, with no evidence that the spirit world exists or responds to the traces offered by people.  

In the Christian religion, doctrine teaches that the life of Jesus Christ was exchanged for the forgiveness of humanity’s sins.  This transaction is the central tenet of the religion.  Christians should question why God demanded this exchange, which runs counter to the idea of divine grace and unconditional forgiveness.  
It doesn’t make any sense.