Jillette says he gets the “What’s-to-keep-you-from-raping-and-killing” question all the time from religious people. It is a ham-fisted challenge to atheism, and Jillette has no trouble crushing it with rhetorical roundhouses. For example: “My answer is: I do rape all I want,” he told an interviewer. “And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don’t want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to…rape you. You know what I mean?”
Yes, I do know what you mean, Mr. Jillette. You and I share a peaceful disposition. Neither of us wants, or has ever wanted, to rape or kill anybody. And we both find it disturbing that there are people who want to do those things. I suspect we also share a delight in stomping on ill-thought challenges to our philosophical positions with rhetoric that provokes laughter and applause from people who already agree with us. I heard that laughter from another interviewer to whom you made the same point, and I have seen the chorus of glad approvals in various forums from people who feel you have effectively dismantled a challenge that is silly, unconvincing, and self-indicting.
I would like to take your answer seriously though, because even if it was only intended as a shoot-from-the-hip “gotcha” it still merits thoughtful consideration. Your rape-and-murder rant (I don’t mean “rant” pejoratively – I love a good rant, and I do it all I want) gets to the heart of some things I hold dear about theism and moral reasoning.
I wish that rape and murder did not exist and that nobody wanted to do them. But they do exist, and the urges to commit them are more widespread than the acts themselves. This is a horrible fact, and no wishing or preaching can make it go away. Given that there are people out there who would rape and kill if they could, don’t you want them to believe there is a righteous God who would punish them (whether now or in the afterlife) for doing such things? I sure do. I want all potential murderer/rapists to become Christian theists - and heaven help us if they deconvert. You may not need a guardrail God to keep you on the narrow path of nonviolence and sexual benevolence. But some people do. They just do. The last thing they need to absorb into their twisted minds is a contempt for quivering faith in a holy God.
I agree with you that the implication that one might go on a killing raping rampage without a God to hold one in check is “the most self-damning thing I can imagine.” I would go further and say that self-damnation is an ancient and hallowed practice in Christian thought, and you are not the first to find it alienating and repulsive. We Christians are instructed to be cynical of human nature and deeply distrustful of ourselves. The natural self is “desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9) and in need of daily crucifixion (Luke 9:23). St. Paul said “I know that nothing good dwells in me" (Romans 7:18). St. Peter said to Jesus, “Depart from me, I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). Isaiah said, “Woe is me, for I am condemned” (Isaiah 6:5). King David said, “I have been a sinner since my conception” (Psalm 51:5). Job said, “I despise myself" (Job 42:6). And so on and so on. Jesus even told a parable where the hero is not the man who congratulated himself on how good he was but the self-damning humble penitent who stared at his shoes and said, “God be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13).
In the Christian tradition we are even taught to recoil from seemingly innocent statements like, “I’m glad I am not as twisted as that violent pervert.” Instead, we fear the possibility - however remote - that under different circumstances we might find ourselves in the shoes and uniform of a Nazi prison guard, and so we tremble, and plead God’s mercy. “There but for the grace of God go I.” “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” We learn sober lessons from countless fallen comrades, and some of us pray earnestly, as instructed by Jesus, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
When you tell a devout Christian that he has let slip an uncomfortably revealing and self-damning implication, I’m pretty sure he has already beaten you to that point.
But somehow everybody, Christian or not, manages, at times, not to do bad things. Why do we refrain from them? In the extreme case of rape and murder, you say you don’t do them because you don’t want to. I am sure that is true. I am also sure that that cannot be your only reason. You must have a back-up motivation. If you didn’t, then your date at the atheist lecture would have wanted to change her seat not because of the perversely oriented Christian on her right but because of the “I-do-whatever-I-want” atheist on her left.
Our desires change. They do not remain consistent over the course of a lifetime. Again, neither you nor I have ever wanted to kill or rape anybody. But what if – horror of horrors! God forbid! Perish the thought! – that were to change tomorrow? What then is our back-up motivation for doing good and not evil? Do we have one? Must the safety and well-being of our neighbors remain forever dependent upon the current state of our desires – amiable and innocuous though they have been till now?
Life experience has taught me the scorpion sting of that question. Because I have known people who broke bad - people who behaved well in their 20s and 30s but horribly in their 40s and 50s. In probing the mystery of middle-aged moral disintegration, one suggestion that I have heard deserves attention. There exist people who simply do what they want, and desire is their true moral lodestone. That is not a problem as long as the things that they desire are good. But what if their desires turn bad? Well, then they do bad things – and they do them with a transition that is shocking to us but seamless to them because their internal motivation remained constant throughout. I think for example of a couple physicians who served in far-off lands in the developing world, and were heroes to the needy. And then both coldly dumped their faithful wives when a younger prettier version came along - and neither man could understand why people made such a big deal about it. One way of understanding their behavior is to say that when they wanted to do something heroic and benevolent, they did; and when they wanted to do something dastardly and cruel, well, they did that too. Their moral compass never budged an inch from “I do what I want.”
It is a feature of Christian morality - and, I would argue, of universal ethical behavior – that sometimes we must do what we don’t want to do, and sometimes we must not do what we want to do. Put starkly, our desires are a moral irrelevance. Sometimes they correspond to the good and sometimes they don’t. When they do, all is happy and sweet. When they don’t, it becomes a duty to adjust them, to make them fit, to exercise our will to see if we can desire differently. But whether we succeed in that effort of the will or not, the good remains just as it was before, and does not give a hoot about our desires.
This fixed, immutable nature of good – sometimes affirming us, sometimes condemning us, sometimes standing with our desires and sometimes against them, always in relation to physical nature but never reducible to it – is an unavoidable Fact that has led many a reluctant soul to conclude that a righteous Creator is the author of it. Some even give in and allow that truth to change their hearts and govern their thoughts - like former atheist C. S. Lewis, who came to theistic faith “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape.” That is, they come to believe in God not because they want to believe in him, but despite the fact that they would rather not.
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