Suppression of Dissent: What if it's what God wants?

This post concludes a series. You may find it helpful to read this Part I and Part II.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to pretend you agree with me, that Christianity often involves the surrender of (a significant part of) adherent's rationality and self governance, and a commitment to agreeing with the dogma of the Christian religion. I'm going to answer one objection to this - if God orders us to submit to his religion, then shouldn't we submit to show our obedience?

Well, as I have partially addressed in the first post of the series, what is being asked here is not right, in fact, it's interfering with what is right. And if someone is asking us to submit to something that is wrong, it is our ethical duty to refrain from doing so, no matter who tells me otherwise, no matter what the consequences. So it is our ethical duty to not submit to the suppression of dissent.

But these are big words when we are talking about God, and not to be taken light heartedly, who wants to suffer for an eternity in hell because of an ethical ideal? Thankfully there is more to it, because as any Christian will tell you, God would never tell you to do something that is wrong. This is a useful philosophical argument (even though it doesn't always hold up in light of certain biblical passages), and so I argue that if God is good (and omnipotent), he would not require such a thing of us.

Suppression of Dissent just isn't something an all-powerful all-loving God would do. If he (or she) is as amazing as Christianity claims about him, the great creator of the universe, and alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, solitary in all his glory etc, etc..., then why does he care that humans are slightly misguided? why does he need people to follow this code, to the letter, to worship him and adore him?

Lets look at it the other way round. Think of a dictator, any dictator, suppressing dissent, enforcing their will on their people, taking away their freedoms, etc. Why do they do this? It's because they need to control the people, it's because they are aware of the limits of their power, and so need to ensure people won't rebel. But God? who can rebel against him? he's omnipotent right? and he has no need to control people, because there is no limit to his power!

This leaves one further question; is Christianity really about controlling people? How did it end up that way? To this I would respond that Christianity is not primarily about controlling people, that it wasn't part of the initial plan, so to speak, but that its controlling nature developed. Now I don't think its controlling nature developed when a bunch of people sat round a table and decided they needed to control people. I've a feeling it was more subtle than that - over time, various subgroups within a religion are going to drift between various ideas, and the ideas of the subgroup will influence how successful that subgroup is. Ideas that are successful at making new members, and keeping old members will make the group more successful, and so these ideas will become more common. And controlling ideas are going to made subgroups very successful. Hence it's entirely plausible that with time (and with variation and selection) a religion will develop controlling tendencies.

So, the Suppression of Dissent is likely to be the product of the natural development of ideas, and not the product of an omnipotent, beneficent God. At the same time, it is not good, does not produce good, and so it is my belief that it is my ethical duty to take a stand against it.

This concludes the series, thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, I hope I haven't offended anyone in my discussions, hopefully you can appreciate where I'm coming from, and can recognize when I got a bit 'ranty'. I welcome any thoughts below.