Why wouldn’t God be happy about a procedure that has allowed millions of couples to have babies who otherwise weren’t able to? Well, it appears he didn’t intend for these couples to have babies, and what happened? They did an end-around with this IVF malarky.

Look at it from God’s point of view. Traditionally he’s been in full control of the creation of new beings—and each new being means a new soul must be created. The production and punishment of souls is God’s primary business. Heretofore, he’s been the one to decide not only when but if a new soul will be united with a physical body and brought into life. Now, science has taken that away from him.

Wouldn’t you be pissed?

Christians, especially those unmarried men at the Vatican, think God is very upset. God is so pissed about IVF that Cathy Lynn Grossman, author of the USA Today religion blog Faith & Reason, decided ask her readers if they thought God considered IVF children to be real children? Do they even have souls?

Now I’m sure no one, regardless of their religion, denies that IVF babies are real babies with human souls.

But here’s the rub. Christians adamantly reject the notion that the soul is a product of biology. They disagree with scientists who see consciousness (and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave) as something gradually developing in the womb and after birth as a baby grows. It’s not that Christians deny that our bodies are biological entities. But Christians insist that our soul—our consciousness and free will—does not have a biological source. The soul, they maintain, is a spiritual entity which comes from God.

If soul is to be a separate entity of its own, not just something that results from biological development, then it has to join the body all at once, in a unitary moment. The soul can’t be something that gradually comes into existence over months or years. Furthermore, the magical fusion of body with soul must be God’s doing.

This last point is important because it gets to the heart of God’s role in the whole life business. According to Christianity, God assigns our soul to a body at the beginning of our life, and then at the end God decides whether or not we are deserving of going to heaven. This joining of soul with body therefore has a divine purpose—to judge the soul’s fitness for eternity at God’s side. The cruel act of saddling the soul with a temporal, flawed body is all a part of God’s rather elaborate testing operation.

In short, God creates souls and then tests us—these souls—for fitness by combining us with biologically limited bodies and placing us into trying circumstances. And the reason is to find out which of us are good enough to be trusted for eternity in heaven. Not all Christians see it exactly this way. Some denominations believe our souls will not be judged for how we behave but only for whether or not we accept the redeemer, Jesus Christ, into our hearts. A test of a different sort, in other words, but still a test which we either pass or fail.

The difficulty is how to reconcile all of this with in-vitro fertilization.

God is supposed to be in charge of the creation of souls. He is supposed to be in charge of deciding when and if a soul will be combined with a body and therefore a new test of a soul will be done.  But IVF makes it look for all the world as if God is not in control of the creation of souls at all, much less his whole soul-testing experiment.

When babies are the result of the rather uncertain hit or miss of sexual intercourse, it is easy to imagine that God has some hand in making pregnancy happen—at least for those who are inclined to a supernatural worldview. But now that scientists are deliberately creating new babies in test tubes, it looks like God no longer has any control over the matter. Now he is forced to test souls whether he wants to or not.

So yeah, if there’s a God, he’s got to be pissed. And the theologians in the Catholic Church have got to be pissed too, because now they have to explain away one more thing about life that no longer requires their God.

To create the necessary conditions requires the presence of a dangerous, virtually undefeatable enemy. Satan, who is so powerful that God apparently needs our assistance to defeat him, fits the bill perfectly. And the devil is the sort of ubiquitous, wily adversary that can’t help but make believers paranoid at every momentary lapse from the battle, at every voice that isn’t an obvious paean to God.

That is the real reason we invaded Iraq. It is the reason we threaten Iran today with two major carrier groups sitting in the Gulf ready for attack. Fundamentalism relies on struggle with a dangerous adversary. The state of the world in 2007 is the direct result of putting a fundamentalist in the White House and giving him the most powerful position in the world.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, nearly every country on earth offered to help the United States in the effort to find and capture the terrorists behind it. The offer of assistance came even from Iraq and Iran. In the case of Iran, their interests and ours meshed well together. The Taliban who ruled Afghanistan had long been a thorn in their side – there was no love lost between the leaders of Iran and the leaders of Afghanistan. The Taliban tolerated and even seemed to support not just al Qaeda but also anti-Iranian terrorist groups like MEC.

Iranian/US cooperation against terrorists operating in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East seemed natural, and the Iranian government made overtures to the Bush Administration to set up just such an arrangement. There is a poem by Edwin Markham that perfectly encapsulates the opportunity that was suddenly available.

He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win
We drew a circle that took him in

The tragedy of 9-11 had a silver lining: it created an ideal opportunity to bring former enemies together in a spirit of cooperation against a common enemy. That enemy, suicide Islamic terrorism, was being condemned even in Tehran and Baghdad, and civilized people of all religions including Islam wanted to join us in stamping it out.

But that, unfortunately, would have left an adversary too small and weak to satisfy the needs of the fundamentalism inhabiting the White House. One can’t be involved with God in a cosmic struggle if the enemy is minor and easily defeated. Where’s the fear, the risk, the paranoia necessary to make people reject creature comforts and pleasures, the bodily satisfactions of life on earth, and embrace heaven?

You see, that is the fundamental challenge of afterlife. How to get people to stop loving the good things of the body, the social pleasures of food and sex and the genial enjoyment of the company of others, and get them to turn their allegiance toward what comes after death? Love, in all its forms, naturally draws us toward the embodiment of life, toward each other as body-beings.

To transfer our allegiance elsewhere, fundamentalism has to find a way to break people up, replace love with strife, condemn bodily pleasures as “sin”, create exclusive circles to drive people apart, divide human loyalties between “us” and “them”. Only by creating inordinate fear and dissonance is it possible to re-make something as undesirable as death into something to be worshipped.

That’s all heaven is: death marketed as something wonderful.

Death is eternal all right. Non-existence is the only thing that can be eternal. Call it heaven, give it wings and violins, declare the wasteland of non-existence “paradise”: that is what the cult of afterlife is all about.

Life, on the other hand, can only be temporary. Pleasures must be temporary or else they would cease to remain pleasurable, would become tedious and eventually a nightmare. Imagine having sex and being forced at the moment of orgasm to endure that sensation constantly and unchanging for weeks, years, centuries, a million billion centuries. It would utterly destroy the pleasure of it. It would transform the initially wonderful sensation into nothing less than torture.

Pleasure has to be temporary to be pleasurable. Life must be fleeting to be wonderful. We have to be able to die and cease to exist in order for life to be valuable and good for us. That is the simple reality. And our lives are good, our pleasures are supremely wonderful.

But fundamentalism has to find a way to make us forget that. It has to sabotage our human desires and pleasures. Has to, because fundamentalism is committed to worshipping not our existence but our non-existence, and calling it heaven.

It is not easy to make human beings turn against life, but fundamentalism has been successful at doing so. The fundamentalists who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center were so turned.

The trick is to create a climate of fear and paranoia peppered with the threat of a virtually undefeatable enemy, a Satan, a devil incarnate. That is what is required in order to motivate human beings sufficiently enough that they will abandon the pleasure of life for the mirage of afterlife. It is the modus operandi of fundamentalism.

And that is why the fundamentalist in the White House has positioned two carrier groups in the Gulf armed and ready to pummel Iran. It is why the administration manufactured a reason to invade Iraq four years ago. Fundamentalism must have as frightening an adversary as possible in order to turn us against life.

I doubt President Bush or the fundamentalists in his administration even understand their need for a powerful enemy. If they understood their actions, if they comprehended the fear and paranoia which pushes them to draw circles to shut others out and create enemies, that itself would be a step toward self-enlightenment.

It might even be a step toward comprehending the fundamental flaw of the cult of afterlife.

Imagine the news now comes that an enemy of yours has captured the clone and has begun to torture it, under the assumption that torturing your clone will have the effect of torturing you.

Undoubtedly you consider this behavior barbaric and evil. But you will probably also find it bizarre that your enemy honestly believes that inflicting pain on the clone will literally inflict pain on you—as if the clone was some kind of voodoo doll. You will consider the enemy’s behavior evil, certainly, but also stupid.

But what now if the clone is somehow downloaded with your memories, so that it becomes not just a duplicate of your body but also a duplicate of your mind. Would this new twist make a difference when the bad guy tortured the clone? Would it make it so that torturing the clone now had the literal effect of torturing you?

Quite obviously, it would not.

A clone—however careful an imitation of you it may be—is not you. It is a separate being, a different existence.

Let’s go a step further. Imagine that something unfortunate happened to you, and you died. Would the painful experiences your enemy inflicts on the clone suddenly become your experiences? Would you, because you are now dead, suddenly turn into the clone?

Again, not bloody likely.

That is the problem with punishment after death. When we die, our bodies rot in the ground, our minds cease to exist, our ability to experience is lost. If some god now tries to reassemble the body in order to punish us, it will be no different than creating a clone and loading it with our memories—it would not be us. It cannot be made into us.

This is why the threat of eternal punishment means nothing to an atheist. If death is real (that the body rots in the grounds proves it is), then it means the cessation of experience. All any god, however evil, can do is to create a replica of us—and punish the replica.

Evil on that god’s part, certainly. Unfortunate for the replica, certainly. But it’s not us.

Christians object to this, though. They say death is not real, that the body dies but the soul does not, the mental self survives. Therefore, they say, God can throw this soul or mental self into another body and make it feel pain, punish it. And it would be us feeling the pain, for we are the soul which survived, not the body which rotted.

But all the evidence is that the soul and body cannot be separated like that; all the evidence science has uncovered so far shows that the soul is a quality—a living quality—which the body has. Death means simply that this quality of aliveness is lost, and therefore we die.

All the evidence, in other words, is that life is bodily—that we cannot have a soul unless we have a body. And it is the body which is primary. We know this because things which affect the body affect the soul. If we drink alcohol we get drunk, if we take drugs we get zonked and out of touch with reality, if parts of our brain get damaged, we lose our memory, or our ability to speak or do certain kinds of thinking.

Even if the soul could survive the body’s death, it could not be punished without a body—indeed, it is the material or sensational, sensing, sensitive body which alone can feel. Which means that if the soul could somehow become attached to a different body, it would be the different body which then does the sensing and feeling. The soul disembodied can bring nothing to the table in that regard.

Nor is anyone capable of imagining the disembodied “soul” without imagining it with some fashion of body—”spiritual” or “astral” or whatnot, but in fact body. The reason we can’t picture life without a body of some kind or another is simple: life is a bodily enterprise.

We are bodies that have minds, not minds that have bodies. To have feeling and experience is to have spirit or soul, but to die is to lose the ability to feel or experience: that is the scientific reality of being a body.

Christians have to disagree, or else their religion falls apart. They have to disagree, because otherwise punishment in hell and reward in heaven become meaningless, even impossible. Christians have to disagree, otherwise it becomes evident that they worship death instead of life.

I longed to have something to retaliate with. So I made plans to create my own pamphlets to give in kind. I made lots of notes, and had titles planned out like: Is God Real? , Christian Vanity , Bad News for Modern Man , Is God Any Good? , The Faithlessness of Faith , and Make-Believe God.

But my favorite had the title, The Devil’s Christianity. I imagined it with a red and black devil lurking on the cover, much like many of their booklets. Only this one would put Christianity on the run—and do so using nothing but God and Genesis.

And I more or less completed it, though I never managed to turn it into a pamphlet. This was partly because I found myself exposed to pamphlet-bearing Christian far less frequently after moving to Atlanta.

But here is the text. And yes, it does put Christians on the run!

The Devil’s Christianity

A large sum of money was delivered in our city the other day—something like half a million dollars. The authorities took every precaution to protect it while delivery was made. Yet somewhere in route to the bank, the shipment was stolen.

How?

It turned out that the thief had disguised himself as one of the guards—in fact the very man placed in the rear of the armored truck to protect the treasure had stolen it.

The devil is craftier than any crook. We need only recall the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. The devil did not beguile the first couple with promises of riches or fame. What he offered was simply the opportunity to have the kind of wisdom God has, knowing both good and evil. You see, Adam and Eve were not content to be as God made them: they wanted to be more like God, to have the knowledge of gods. With this vanity the devil beguiled them.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Had I been in Eden and the devil appeared before me, I would not have been fooled. I’d have observed the red horns protruding out of the head, the sharp ears, the pitchfork, the sneer on the face, and I would have been on guard immediately.”

But you forget, the devil is crafty. Had he chosen to appear before the original humans with horns, pitchfork, sneer and all, he would have fooled no one. Instead he came as one of God’s humble creatures, a snake. Remember that this was before serpent and devil were identified in anyone’s mind; that association came later. To Adam and Eve, the serpent was just another one of God’s myriad creations.

There is also an early Church tradition that the devil appeared before our first parents in the image of an angel. If so, he could have had no better disguise.

The thief dresses in policeman’s clothing; the devil in an angel’s garb. After all, the devil is the world’s first thief—and its last. What he steals from us is our honesty, our integrity of thought. He likes to push us into false presumptions about ourselves and the world, and about what God means us to be. Any trick that will succeed is fair game to the devil. He will as soon appear in the guise of an angel preaching God’s word as in the guise of a big paycheck, and he comes often as both.

We saw earlier that the devil tricked Adam and Eve by preying on their desire to be like gods. When they ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge, our first parents lusted after the wisdom of the ages. Later, had not the Lord guarded it with a flaming sword, they would have lusted after the tree of eternal life as well. These two lusts constitute our human weakness, and it is essential that we not forget it.

Why? Because they are the same temptations which, as Christians, we grasp after today. We must not mistake ourselves. The devil is nothing less than the common voice inside us which insists that we are like gods, that we shall ascend to heaven, that we shall never die.

The devil whispers his beguiling music into our ears, that there is a way for us to escape this earth God placed us on, a way to move to heaven and live like eternal beings, like gods. It is precisely as Christians and through Christianity that the devil beguiles us. We are going to rise to heaven and dwell there eternally at God’s right hand, he whispers. We are going to be—take that back, already are—of the same eternal stuff that God is.

And don’t we want it—to be like God and live forever? Isn’t that so much more pleasant than the truth of our mortality?

Truth is hard to face. Yet face it we must. For having fallen for the belief that our final nature is eternal soul rather than mortal body, we have tumbled head over heals into that age-old error of Adam and Eve’s. Like them we have fallen for the devil’s whispering lies: the enticing presumption that we “can be as gods.”

We would do well at this point to observe that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not found in the Old Testament. Yet it was a doctrine wide-spread throughout the ancient world. We find it among the Greeks and the Romans, but we do not find it among the chosen people, the ancient Jews. If the Old Testament is indeed the word of God, then the notion that we are immortal must come from the devil. And the New Testament, which is wrapped around that blasphemy of immortality like a snake, is the devil’s wicked deceit.

Because, in fact, in wanting to “be as gods” what we are really wishing for is to not be what God intended for us. God, after all, formed us of clay, and dictated that we should die.

But we rebel. We want something better than this confinement to earthly life, this entrapment in bodies. Well, if there’s a lie to be sold, it will never want for someone to sell it. Along comes the devil, whispering that we can have something better, if only we listen to him.

“Devour this apple from the tree of eternal life, and be as gods. Have faith in me, for I am the path to eternal salvation.”

Thus the devil dressed as an angel beguiles us.

We stand in the shoes of Eve and Adam. The sweet-talking angel has just handed us his polished apple, and calls it the key to heaven.

So he claims. But what are we to believe?

Truly we desire to be supernatural. We are so sick of earth, which we’ve polluted, and of our limited bodies, all this hurt and disease and injustice (most of which we have inflicted on each other). Naturally we envy God’s existence, and not just His lifestyle, His home. Who doesn’t yearn for a heaven?

Isn’t it the easiest thing in the world to ignore the obvious facts of our existence, and hope for better? Let the devil sell us our dreams.

The devil says it is only what God wants for us, and who are we to deny what it pleases us to hear?

Yet the fact is, and Genesis confirms it, God formed us from clay. He created us as animals, not as angels. Intelligent animals, without question, but animals nonetheless. We are inescapably tied to our bodies, of this we cannot doubt; more than this we cannot know.

If God has plans for us beyond this life, we simply cannot know. What Christianity arrogantly calls the Word of God may as easily be the word of the devil, and in a world where we truly cannot know, even to speculate is to push our opinions on God.

We simply cannot know.

What we can know, however, is very clear, We are bodies, and it seems obvious that since we are, it is bodies that we were intended to be. We have feelings, we have thoughts, we have pain, we have joy, we live, we die, all by the dictates of this physical planet. These limits, this mortality, is God-given.