by Philip Yaffe

To open the discussion, let's deal with the point of view that God is the source of morality; therefore, morality is whatever He defines it to be. Agreed.

So let's change the premise. Can Man ever fully understand what is moral and what isn't?

Clearly, different religions and cultures have conflicting ideas on the subject. But most, if not all, would agree that gratuitously harming the innocent would be unjustified. Then how are we to interpret the stories of the Bible?

For instance, we are taught that God is the Father and we are all His children. Yet He designated the Israelites his "chosen people", putting this group of His children ahead of all others. If a human father were to do such a thing, he would certainly be reprimanded, if not imprisoned.

We are taught that due to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all mankind is condemned to suffer generation after generation. Isn't this gratuitously harming the innocent? Indeed, "the sins of the father shall be visited upon the sons". What our ancestors did necessarily affects us today. However, this is a human concept; God is not bound by such a stricture. For Him, eternal punishment is not a necessity, but a choice.

And how are we to interpret the story of the Israelites in Egypt? God, through Moses, tells Pharaoh to "let my people go". Pharaoh refuses. However, instead of punishing Pharaoh, He wreaks havoc on the entire nation, bringing unimaginable hardship and misery on people who had no say in the matter. Including the slaughter of thousands of newborn babies.

How are we to interpret the story of Noah and the Arc? Noah and his family couldn't have been the only righteous people on the planet, yet God swept away both the innocent (surely there were babies in the world) and the wicked alike.

The Bible is rife with such stories, not only in the Old Testament but also the New Testament, which proclaims the Apocalypse and the Final Judgment.

All of these horrors in one way or the other might be explained away by the "professionals", i.e. theologians. After all, theology in many universities is considered to be a legitimate and complex area of study. In other words, the intricacies of the Bible are not to be interpreted by the common people, but only by those who have special credentials and have made it their life's work.

This has certainly been the position of the Catholic Church (and probably most others) since time immemorial. The laity simply is not equipped to properly distinguish between morality and immorality without expert guidance.

However, there is at least one question where the priests and the laity would seem to be on an equal footing. Let's suppose that God has established laws for the moral comportment of Man. Equally, let's suppose that God dictates that failure to obey these laws will result in eternal damnation.

Accepting these two ideas means that the concepts of sin and punishment become nonsense. Why? Because they are logically contradictory.

In view of the terrible consequences, who in his or her right mind would fail to obey? There would seem to be only two possible explanations:

1. The "sinner", for whatever reasons, simply does not believe that he or she is disobeying.
2. The "sinner" is not in his or her right mind. Who with properly functioning synapses would choose temporal gratification at the cost of eternal grief?

For God to cast such people into hell would not be punishing sin, but rather ignorance and mental illness. Even in the belief that whatever God does is by definition moral, this is a hard concept to swallow.

If all this sounds a bit too theoretical, here is a practical example.

Some years ago I met a missionary priest in Tanzania, East Africa. He said he had sent to "spread the Gospel of redemption and salvation." He also assured me that if they had lived moral lives, those who had died before he and his fellows came to deliver the good news could still have gone to heaven.

"Now that you are here, what will happen to those who don't accept your message?" I asked. "They will of course go to hell," he replied.

"If I understand correctly, before you arrived, the people here had the possibility of going to heaven without ever having heard of the Bible. But now that you are here, if you do a poor job of converting them, they are condemned to hell. Satan must be immensely pleased that you decided to come."

He was taken aback by my observation. This learned man of the cloth had admitted -- even proudly proclaimed -- that God is prepared consign people to perpetual torment people not because of their sins, but because of their ignorance. He was suddenly caught in the logical contradiction. Since he didn't know what to do, he simply refused to continue the conversation.

If there is any explanation for God's apparently inexplicable and seemingly immoral behavior, i.e. inflicting ever-lasting punishment on His children for ignorance rather than misdeeds, I have yet to find it. I would be eternally grateful if someone could tell me where to look.

Philip Yaffe is a former writer with The Wall Street Journal and international marketing communication consultant. He now teaches courses in persuasive communication in Brussels, Belgium. Because his clients use English as a second or third language, his approach to writing and public speaking is somewhat different from other communication coaches. He is the author of In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional, available from the publisher (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com). Contact: phil.yaffe@yahoo.com, phil.yaffe@gmail.com