Christians Should Be Poor and Abandon/Hate their Family

Alternatively Titled: Jesus told you to sell your possessions and give to the poor, so why haven’t you?

If you’re a Christian, a sincere believer that following Christ and his teachings is the best way to store up treasure in Heaven, I have a very simple question – WHY do you own a computer or web-enabled phone?

This question might seem out of left field, after all almost everyone in modern society owns a cell phone that can browse the internet and many people also own a laptop, desktop or tablet to surf the web. But if the Jesus of the Gospels looked at most American Christians today he would rather perplexed by their behavior. Many of them buy fancy clothing and dress up each Sunday to go to Church, they own houses, multiple vehicles, computers and electronic devices, television sets and more clothes than they need.

While many Churches these days do help out the poor and hungry in our communities the average individual Christian does not follow Christ’s directions in the Gospels. Which directions am I talking about? Why the ones that tell Christians to sell their possessions, give the money to the poor, and hang out with and help out the poor at every opportunity.

There is no ambiguity in the Gospels that Jesus is preaching a Gospel of poverty. People, he says, should give no care of tomorrow and let tomorrow worry about itself for God will provide for them. And repeatedly, over and over again, Jesus tells those who wish to be followers to give away all of their possessions in order to follow him.

Now there’s a handful of ways for modern Christians to skirt their way around this. They can pretend that Jesus was only talking to his followers in the 1st Century and not to those who would live thousands of years later… this kind of cherry-picking seems severely dishonest. Or those Christians could argue that God provided them the things they have, the cars, the money, the house, etc. The idea these people present, without any backing from the Bible, is that God has blessed them with Earthly treasure for their faithfulness.

Not only does this prosperity Gospel fly in the face of Christ’s actual teachings, which direct followers to give up Earthly goods to pursue treasures that are only in Heaven but it also doesn’t make any sense when you break it down. After all there are plenty of faithful devout believers who ARE homeless or poor and who can’t seem to catch a break and there are plenty of wealthy hypocrites and even wealthy non-Christians. So obviously being a sincere believer does not correspond to one’s worldly goods (duh). Jesus does say that God will provide food and clothing to wear but not any sort of riches or worldly things.

There is this weird contradiction I’ve noticed about many Christians here in America, the majority of them are REPUBLICANS. Republicans demonize the poor at almost every turn and deride the idea of their hard earned tax dollars going to help people on Welfare or Food Stamps. Yet this is exactly the sort of thing Christ wanted, people helping each other, helping to feed the poor, downtrodden or outcast. Jesus didn’t want Christians looking down on the poor, in fact Jesus liked to hang out with prostitutes and poor people an awful lot and only very rarely did he hang out with the wealthy.

Jesus’ philosophy is almost self-destructively selfless. Turn the other cheek, give to those who steal from you even more than they take, bless those that curse you and love your enemies – and do not worry about tomorrow. Judge no one and be sure to remove the sin from your life before you criticize anyone. Help the poor and freely do miracles.

Yet why do we not see any verifiable evidence of miracles? Why do we not see Christians selling their worldly goods so that they can take up their cross and giving the money to the poor?

While I, obviously, do not agree with all of what Jesus says there is wisdom in some of it and while I do not think every American should give up everything they have to help the poor I think a more charitable attitude would help a great deal. Rather than despising those who are own Food Stamps are freeloaders perhaps Christians might look at them as Christ would have, as other fucking people who happen to be in a bad financial spot where they could use a little help to make ends meet.

Obviously this post is a bit different from other Fuck the Bible posts, because instead of saying Fuck the Bible, I am essentially pointing out that Christians aren’t following the book they purportedly think is the Word of God.

As I said though there’s plenty of self-destructive nonsense in what Jesus is talking about when he tells people not to resist an evil person but to submit to them. I understand that Christ was a pacifist (another fact many Christians would angrily disagree with) but he takes it to an extreme degree even telling his followers not to defend themselves. This seems like madness! If some burglar demands my wallet I am meant to give him my shoes as well? No thank you.

Jesus, being an apocalyptic prophet, believed that there was no reason to worry about tomorrow, the Kingdom of God was on its way. But today the advice to let tomorrow worry about itself is itself worrying. How can we possibly not worry about tomorrow? There are goals to be set and achieved, obstacles to overcome, and an uncertain future that we must attempt to shape as best we can. But, if, as Jesus believed, the world was fast coming to an end, there would be no reason to plan.

Dangerously there are some end-times minded Christians to this day who hold to the dangerous belief that the end is coming soon and that we don’t need to worry about abusing the planet and misusing our resources. They look forward to the end, to seeing God descend with fire and wrath and unleash slaughter on all the “evil people” of the world.

If you are a Christian reading this I wonder how closely you truly follow the word of your Savior. Do you keep the commandments, as Jesus instructs? Do you give to the poor regularly and keep yourself from becoming rich? (A rich man cannot pass into heaven, the Bible describes it as nearly impossible, as a camel passing through the eye of a needle). If you do keep the commandments very closely I wonder how you are even reading this, unless you’re at a local internet cafe or public library. Do you love Jesus more than your own family? Because if not you are unworthy. Have you ever been divorced and remarried, than Christ believes you are guilty of adultery, a capital offense in the Old Testament.

How many demon have you cast out? How many miracles do you have under your belt? Because we are meant to know Christ’s followers by their “FRUITS” and if you are not bearing fruit Christ says you may be cut down and cast into the fire.

If you don’t follow after Christ all that closely than I wonder WHY you believe in something you are unwilling or unable to follow. Why not discard it? Give the Bible a much closer examination and study how it came together and then decide whether the commandments are worth keeping and the beliefs worth holding onto. And if they are, then I bid you farewell as you will no doubt sell your possessions to follow Christ. If they aren’t worth believing then I hope you will one day join me when I say, Fuck the Bible.

God Is Unforgiving and Merciless

Alternatively titled: God Is like Immortan Joe from Mad Max Fury Road

One element that is crucial to modern Christianity is the doctrine of God’s mercy and grace being almost limitless. In fact there are numerous verses of scripture about just how kind and forgiving God is. Thanks to Jesus’ brutal ritualistic death and supernatural Resurrection God can forgive just about anything.

However as I hope I have shown on this blog God’s mercy is actually extremely limited. In fact any reasonably moral human being who behaved like God does would be labeled a serial murderer, psychopath, and be thrown in prison for life. When judged by human standards God is a supernatural maniac who kills at the slightest offense and often for things that no sane person would consider offensive. Yahweh is a dangerous war criminal, a spreader of plague and famine. The Bible paints a portrait of a terrifyingly tyrannical celestial dictator bumbling about with some illiterate people in the desert before carving out a swath of land for them via conquest and slaughter.

The Bible also makes sure that we are aware that God’s mercy is not infinite, not only by depicting God as a short-tempered wrath-bringer but by specifically mentioning sins and misdeeds that simply cannot be forgiven.

Take, for example, a story in Deuteronomy 29. God is reminding the Israelites of their escape from and captivity in Egypt when he mentions the detestable religious practices of that land. See God, for superstitious woo woo reasons, doesn’t like idols or depictions of things. God doesn’t like graven images of anything on Heaven or Earth and get’s jealous that people might like the creation more than they like the creator.

He cautions the Israelites not to let idol worship or the worship of other gods enter into their communities and announces that he will never forgive and has no mercy for those who commit this violation of the Covenant.

Not only does this passage mention this as an unforgivable sin but also further indicates the superstitious nonsense we’re dealing with by invoking the “curses in this book”. Spooky huh? And yet Christians are always bragging about how different their religion is, how it can be reconciled with reason and logic and how it is compatible with science. Does a warning about curses set to befall people for building idols REALLY sound enlightened or spiritually deep? Because to me it sounds like primitive Iron Age horseshit.

Of course most believers will be very familiar with the supposed Unpardonable sin talked about by Jesus as the Blaspheming of the Holy Spirit. On what exactly the unforgivable sin entails it’s hard to find two Christians that agree but they all seem in agreement that it is the only unforgivable sin, at least in the so-called New Covenant. But we don’t even need to bring that up to show how merciless God can be…

Meanwhile back in Deuteronomy, which is a great book to read if you’d like to become an atheist, God sends out the Israelites against their enemies and tells them to have no mercy or pity, to spare no one, and to utterly destroy every trace of them.

Before this God is telling the Israelites all the blessings he is willing to give them if they do follow after him. Much like a dictator God repeatedly cautions the Israelites that he will revoke the blessings if they trip up or don’t follow orders. In fact given that all of this is taking place in the desert Yahweh is very reminiscent of the Mad Max villain Immortan Joe, only Yahweh is more evil.

In the book of Jeremiah the prophet talks about the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrew people. Jeremiah is believed to have multiple authors, one reason for this is because it often switches between narrative and poetic verse on very short notice. Jeremiah 13 contains a pretty awesome, but merciless, poem where God plans on bringing down darkness on top of Israel but before this there is an even more outright statement of God’s less than benevolent intentions.

So is God merciful? Obviously only up to a point and, as the Bible indicates, that point is a razor’s edge easy to cross. Many far-right Christians here in America talk about how our nation is going to be punished for allowing things like abortion and gay marriage and yet they fail to recognize one of the biggest reasons God would punish us – religious plurality.

The God of the Bible, if it existed, would be vehemently anti-American, after all our nation allows people of all faiths, not just Christianity or Judaism, but those who worship other gods as well. And it is that act that constantly get’s the nations surrounding the promised land into trouble in the Bible. In fact their cultures and gods are seen as so abhorrent to Yahweh that he wants those nations wiped away and every man, woman and child slaughtered without mercy or pity.

In Deuteronomy chapter 7 God directly warns that letting even the children live and be adopted might lead Israel astray.

So when completely insane terrorist groups like Isis threaten America with their fundamentalist version of Islam they are thinking in much the same terms, that Infidels and unbelievers must either be converted or killed. And remember that to them Yahweh and Allah are basically equivalent beings because, hey, they have the same brutally evil personality traits and dictatorial insanity.

In truth the unforgivable sin would be to allow bullshit like the Bible (and Koran) continue to weigh down society and drag us backward. It offers no true redemption, not with blood-soaked pages full of wrath and magic. We’re better off saying fuck the Bible.

Yahweh’s Itchy Trigger Finger

Alternately titled: Moses shows patience and restraint while God just wants to slaughter everyone.

In my last post I talked a bit about the oddly comedic incidents scattered throughout the books of Moses wherein God gets pissed at the Israelites and decides that the best course of action is to either kill them all or just kill some of them. In these situations the stories typically depict Moses and Aaron having to talk God out of it in a VERY similar way to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

You might remember that in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah God warns Abraham that he is going to destroy those cities but Abraham talks God down to the point where if God finds ten righteous persons he will spare the city. To modern Biblical believers this should be frightening. Here is a supposedly perfect and Holy God compromising his morality based on the advice of human beings. Here are human beings talking God into being MORE loving. MORE patient, MORE merciful and all around MORE moral. This is one of those red-flag hallmarks that makes it obvious that these are stories, not historical accounts of actual interactions with any god.

As I said similar scenes occur between Moses and Aaron and God several times in the Old Testament. One example happens during the story of the 10 Commandments. God is coming down to Mount Sinai in a rumbling thundering fiery cloud (you know, the sort that might spew out of a volcano, the sort that ancient superstitious people might mistake for the glory of a god). There’s been plenty of weird superstitious rules and rituals imposed by God thus far but here, at the origin of the Mosaic Law, is where things get really bad, where something as simple as setting foot on the wrong mountain or working on the wrong day of the week meant your neighbors and family were commanded by GOD HIMSELF to execute you brutally.

Now what reason, other than superstitious horseshit, could there possibly be for God to set up this kind of rule? Sure, okay, Moses is his chosen one who is the only one who is supposed to be up there but what, exactly, is the benefit of executing anyone who so much as touches the mountain? Usually rules and laws are meant to maintain the public good or the welfare of people but here we have a rule that just puts people in danger of the death penalty for no reason.

Of course you might say, “well God wanted them to stay away because his glory and power might harm them if they get too close”. There is a recurring theme in some parts of the Bible (but not all) that seeing or being in the presence of God can be fatal to an ordinary human being, even one who believes. But this is superstitious horseshit as well because an all powerful God, especially one who was once incarnated in human form as Jesus, could easily decide to appear without any harm to anyone in a totally benign form. All the pomp and circumstance of mimicking a volcanic eruption and appearing in a form that would be so harmful to human beings it apparently requires their execution if they attempt to be subjected to it does no one any good and makes absolutely no fucking sense…

All of that without mentioning how immoral it is to kill someone just for touching a mountain and how even more bizarre and cruel to want the animals killed as well.

Most Christians know that while Moses is being talked to by God Aaron and company are down below making idols and worshiping them, apparently forgetting the shit they just went through with the plagues and apparently turning a blind eye to the fire and quaking and the very voice of God which God himself tells Moses he will be able to hear.

The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.” Then Moses told the Lord what the people had said. 

– Exodus 19:9

“Mount Sinai was covered with smoke,because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently”

–  Exodus 19:18

Admittedly God’s words to Moses do go on for quite a few chapters as God details a whole bunch of pedantic overly detailed and obviously manmade nonsense that is supposedly the basis for the ancient Jewish faith. It isn’t until Chapter 32, when Moses is about to come down the mountain, that the idols are finally cast by Aaron and the other Hebrews. Of course God’s first instinct isn’t to show restraint or mercy or understanding but to shed blood.

To someone like me this screams, “We made this story up!” and “This isn’t meant to be taken literally” but to a Biblical literalist this is ACTUALLY what happened and why it happened. God is actually such an evil monster that his immediate reaction is to wipe out his own people, or, at the very least, to slaughter all those who worshiped the idols. Idol worship of any kind is forbidden under penalty of death by Yahweh as does any attempt to practice religious liberty. In fact taking the Bible at its word Yahweh is 100% opposed to the idea of religious liberty and if our legal system mirrored the Biblical one we would be executing anyone who did profess their belief in Yahweh and Jesus.

Moses, as I stated before, becomes the voice of reason against God’s insane knee-jerk blood-thirst.

The same story is actually retold in Deuteronomy Chapter 9 but this time it is written from Moses’ point of view. And, surprise, Moses’ version is much the same with him claiming that only through fasting and prayer and begging God not to do it he manged to save Israel from disaster… and by disaster I mean the furious wrath of God.

So now we come to the end of our wonderful tale. Moses manages to convince God to spare some of the Israelites but Moses, being only slightly less of a dick than God, isn’t going to spare everyone, not even close. And, just with all punishments in the Old Testament law, the brutal executions will be conducted in the name of God and upholding righteousness and will involve people killing their friends, family and loved ones themselves.

That is some fucked up shit right there and kinda explains Jesus’ whole spiel in Matthew about how “anyone who does not hate their Father or Mother is not worthy of me” and how all of his followers are required to love him more than they love anyone else or they are unworthy.

If you accept the Bible as the word of God than THAT is the kind of God you serve.

God Turns the Plagues up to 11 (and then keeps going)

Alternatively titled: Yahweh the Plague Bringing God of Disease, Decay and Death

Most Christians are familiar with the 10 plagues of Egypt, you know, the ones that God made sure to carry out to the bitter end going so far as to harden Pharaoh’s heart to make sure he could get to the part where he murders children in an act of cruel revenge. The story of the Exodus is one of the most popular and, bizarrely, beloved tales from the Bible.

We’ve established in past passages that Yahweh is a warlike God who enjoys giving over other tribes to complete slaughter or enslavement to the Israelites but the God of the Bible also has a habit of causing famine, disease/plague, death, etc. In fact all Four Horsemen are the sole domain of God and are under his command, not Satan’s. Almost all the evil done in the Bible is done by God or at God’s command.

(okay wrong Apocalypse but you get the idea ^)

The first story I want to focus on comes from Numbers Chapter 14. In this Chapter Moses and the Hebrews are STILL wandering around waiting to get to the promised land but every time they seem to get going on the right track someone disrespects or disobeys Yahweh and he sets them back a few steps. In fact this comedy of errors goes on and on for forty years according to the story, with the Israelites disobeying a God who literally rains down food from Heaven.

So God shows up and is pissed about the way the Israelites have been behaving, particularly because some scouts went to the promised land and returned with reports that it actually kinda sucks. God says to Moses,

“How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them? I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.”

So here’s God threatening to strike down his own people and just set off with Moses and his elect few to start a separate nation of their own. Moses talks God out of it by saying this:

“ If you put all these people to death, leaving none alive, the nations who have heard this report about you will say,  ‘The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land he promised them on oath, so he slaughtered them in the wilderness.” (Numbers 14:15-16)

Here is Moses showing better moral restraint and more patience than God, if you ask me there are few verses that make it MORE obvious that this is a STORY and was never EVER meant to be taken as a literal history of shit that actually happened. God never said these things – how could he? How could Moses ever be right and show more compassion and more restraint than a PERFECT and MERCIFUL God?

So what does God do?

That’s right, he decides that the people responsible for all the bitching and moaning of his people should be punished rather severely by striking them down with a plague. For sharing their opinions of the promised land in a less than positive way these scouts weren’t just denied a place in that land they were actually executed by God via some kind of disease or plague.

A few chapters later we have another plague and we have a Bible quote that is easily one of my favorites, and here I’m not being sarcastic, taken totally out of context this would easily be one of the most metal-as-fuck Bible verses:

“He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague stopped.” – Numbers 16:48

Kinda reminds me of a kickass movie I just saw:

The story is about a group of “sinful” Israelites who rise up against Moses. God decides its time to deal with the rebels, the unbelievers and those who just have it coming.

Interesting thing about this verse is the use of the phrase “realm of the dead”, other translations render it grave, still others prefer the term Sheol. This is because in Jewish belief there isn’t a Hell perse but rather a realm of the dead called Sheol. Some books of the Bible espouse this idea and suggest that everyone goes to Sheol not just the damned while other books, like Ecclesiastes, do not support the idea of ANY AFTERLIFE at all. I know, I know, I’m repeating myself, but it bears repeating that Jewish teachings and ideas on the afterlife are vastly different from Christian ones.

Immediately the ground does open up and swallow the followers of Korah, who was the on inciting the whole would-be rebellion. The Israelites decide the best course of action is to blame Moses and Aaron for killing off those who were swallowed up. God shows up and decides he’s done enough fucking around with the idea of punishing the Israelites. While Aaron is begging for God’s mercy on his fellow Israelites Yahweh is out amongst them spreading a plague and wiping out over 14,000 people.

You read that correctly – not only is the Biblical God obsessed with and continuously carrying out or commanding genocide against enemies of his people but he frequently murders entire swaths of his own chosen people when they disobey him. The verse I quoted before about standing between the dead and the living is in reference to Aaron who intercedes on the behalf of the Israelites and gets Yahweh to stop his murderous outburst.

Moses and Aaron once again are trying to prevent the horrible thing God is doing just outside their tents:

This whole exercise in story-telling shows a constant tug and pull, ebb and flow, with Aaron and Moses standing between God and absolute annihilation of the Israelites. The danger of the Bible comes from those who seek to make it more than mythology, more than theology, they seek to make it history, to live by its morals and passages as literally written. Of course even most Biblical literalists are not actually literalists, they do not practice the Jewish laws and cherry pick from them at will – BUT they are still trapped in a dangerous mindset.

They celebrate their chains, rejoice at the wickedness of their fictitious God and go headlong toward death with a fantasy of bowing and reveling beneath a massive throne where there is no escape and no end.

That is why Fuck the Bible exists, to get these people to see what the Bible actually says and, perhaps, after they think about it and actually read the damn Bible, get them to see it for the manmade fiction it is.

According to a search of the NIV Bible the word plague occurs well over a hundred times. If you are a Christian you serve a God of disease, or genocide, of mayhem and of war and no amount of pretending is going to change what the Bible actually says.

Fuck the Bible.

God Murders Kids for the Sins of Others

Alternatively Titled: God Stages a Mass Orgy and Kills innocent Children

Probably the only thing harder than being a woman in the Bible is being a child. Not only are you subject to being taken prisoner as a spoil of war in the event that your parents are slaughtered in war with the Israelites but you may find yourself among those being slaughtered just because of your the sins of your parents. Yahweh often sends out the Israelites to do away with entire cities under the pretense that those people are somehow so evil and so corrupt that even the children and cattle deserve to be slaughtered.

But it isn’t just the bad side of the blood-thirsty Israelite army that you might end up on by no fault of your own, Yahweh is quite clear that children are subject to the sins of their parents in his eyes, not just in the eyes of his human killing squads. You might find yourself punished, held accountable, for the sins of something your ancestors have done.

As you can see this verse is part of the 10 Commandments in the Bible, part that everyone ignores or glosses over. No Christian has ever given two shits about the Graven Images commandment (except maybe the Amish), they even have crucifixes with Jesus on them, Nativity Scenes – they break this commandment all the time, blatantly, and give 0 fucks. And of course this is one of the Biblical passages that suggests Yahweh will punish people for sin that their parents, grand parents, great grand parents, etc, committed.

Of course the idea of punishing someone for someone else’s mistakes is an affront to the basic concept of justice and fairness that no modern person would be dumb enough to support. And yet, God it allowed to be as barbaric and immoral as the ancient people that created him and people will defend him.

But you might be wondering about when this involved killing children… Well of course the biggest instance is the revenge God gets against Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. God, having repeatedly hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he can finish all 10 unnecessary and evil plagues, takes his ultimate revenge by killing the first born children of Egypt.

This action by Yahweh is revenge, make no mistake, for earlier in the story Pharaoh has the Hebrew children killed. So for the sin of Pharaoh, for the sins of the Egyptians, children are made to pay the ultimate price. (And remember folks death is the ultimate price as Christians often say that Jesus paid the ultimate price).

Of course Yahweh’s thirst for revenge isn’t limited to the grandiose show-boating he does in the Exodus. Take the story of King David. After sleeping with a married woman named Bathsheba, a deed normally punishable by death in the Old Testament, God decides to commute David’s sentence. David also had Bathsheba’s husband, a soldier, purposely moved to the front lines so that he would get killed. David’s punishment will be to witness someone raping  his wives, his Concubines. (The story is in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 if you’d like to read it).

At worst this is God having a bunch of women raped, but even if we assume that consent was given at best God is staging a massive reverse gangbang orgy in order to punish David.

The child murder comes a bit later when Nathan, God’s prophet, reveals to David that Bathsheba’s child will die. God is going to kill the baby. The baby is born sickly, suffers for seven protracted days of God’s vengeance, before finally succumbing to death.

So God murders children and infants, and sometimes stages mass public orgies, all to punish sins. Of course people will say that Jesus made all of this better, as if somehow Jesus’ death absolves their primitive morally backwards God of his sins as well. Fuck those stupid excuses and as always fuck the Bible.

Remember, Obi-Wan paid the ultimate price…

Family Matters Part 2

Alternatively Titled: Mutilations, Sacrificing your Own Child and Why your Wife Should STFU until Church is Over

In the last post we started talking a little bit about how the Bible dictates ways in which we should interact with our families, particularly our children. The God of the Bible seems to support beating kids and, in numerous situations, gathering together everyone in town to help beat our own children to death.

Of course there are a host of other bizarre and disturbing passages of the Bible which demonstrate that it’s God considers himself owner of his chosen people.

Take, for example, the mass genital mutilation of circumcision. Once a Jewish custom in today’s world circumcision is the normal despite the fact that it provides little or no benefit while removing the most sensitive nerve endings of the penis from a child that isn’t old enough to understand or consent to ANY operation – let alone one as pointless as circumcision. Such genital mutilation is now considered normal in our society and we have the fucked up pages of the Bible to thank for that.

Yahweh, God of the Bible, is obsessed with foreskins, for reasons that are never fully explained he sates his fetish for foreskin by having his people mark their covenant with him by cutting off their own… but then he also has them do this to their unsuspecting children. This alone is stomach-churning and sick. The idea that God, after having created his amazing and perfect creation, would want men to disfigure themselves in such a way is weird and disturbing but inflicting it on children who don’t know any better, when it serves no purpose other than as a ritual, is immoral and evil.

God sets up this system of sex organ disfigurement through Abraham instructing Abraham to perform the act on himself before turning his blade on his eight day old son Isaac. Yes God apparently gives Abraham the surgical advice on how to do the operation, an act that I imagine would have raised eyebrows and been impossible to complete if Abraham had been a real actual person and God had not been fictional as well. Of course given what Abraham was later instructed to do, sacrifice his own son, it isn’t surprising that he was willing to go through with this small act of absolute horror when he would have put a dagger in his own son had God not revealed that he was just fucking with the old man.

The most disturbing verses about circumcision don’t have much to do with families but I’ll share them here. While David and Saul are fighting the Philistines the Bible depicts Saul as descending into madness as David rises through the ranks following the slaying of Goliath. Saul is getting really jealous and what’s worse God has sent an evil spirit to deceive him. No you’ve read that right, God has sent an evil spirit and revoked his own spirit from Saul. You can read along in 1 Samuel 18 if you’d like to confirm that this is indeed a real story.

Saul cooks up a plan to send David on a suicide mission by promising him that he could marry his daughter Michal if he can come back with One Hundred Philistine foreskins. Now please note he’s not going to talk the Philistines into voluntarily chopping off the skin at the end of their dicks, he’s going to do it himself, by force. David goes out and slays the Philistines and comes back not with the measly price of one hundred foreskins but with TWO hundred. They are counted in front of Saul so there can be no confusion.

This is a book that people hand to children and say it contains invaluable wisdom for living your life even in today’s modern world. Wisdom like, women are worth a certain number of dead-man dick-tips AND that God can send evil spirits when he’s pissed off at you. Yes, such wonderful and endearing wisdom as war, barbarism and bloodshed so often depict.

We touched a little bit on Isaac earlier and how Abraham was ready to carve up his son as a burnt offering to God before God finally revealed it was all a test. An unnecessary test, of course, for God knows the contents of the heart of every man and would have no need of putting Isaac and Abraham through such hell.

But the aborted sacrifice of Isaac is not the only instance of human sacrifice to Yahweh. In fact in one Biblical story Yahweh directed and accepted the human sacrifice of a man’s daughter after giving him victory in battle. I am, of course, talking about Jephthah and his daughter, who, in true Biblical fashion, doesn’t even have a name. The spirit of the Lord comes upon Jephthah just before he goes to war and causes him to make a vow to God. If God grants him the victory he will give as a burnt offering the first thing that comes out his door to greet him.

Now it seems to our modern tastes that this is a foolish bet to make with God but this is in ancient times where the first thing that came out to meet him might well have been a goat, a donkey, or a chicken. Far animals were often kept on the first floor of houses in that day and age. However it does turn out to be a fucking stupid bet to make as Judges 11 records.

After this his daughter actually volunteers to be sacrificed, goes off to weep for her virginity and then Jephthah does as he had promised and sacrifices her. Yahweh doesn’t intervene, he doesn’t come down and stop Jephthah at the last second. She is the only directly mentioned human sacrifice in all of scripture, other than Jesus, that Yahweh accepts as an offering. Only here one man and his poor brain-washed daughter are paying the price.

Outside the barbarism of the Old Testament the New Testament paints a picture of family relations that is not much better, although it doesn’t involve any foreskins or burning your own children (thank goodness). Rather it involves verses of scripture used to uphold the inequality of the sexes. The Bible is an absolutely terrifying book when it comes to how it treats women, they are second class citizens, chattle, and are made into slaves and property.

In the New Testament things improve only slightly. For example 1 Peter chapter 3 says that women should submit themselves to their husbands and that in their submission they would somehow help their husbands stay true to the path. It also says that they should call their husband lord and obey their commands. Women are later referred to as the weaker of the two sexes here:

I’m not really a feminist per se but I certainly do not support the idea that women are the weaker sex or are somehow lesser than men are nor do I particularly find the idea that women should be submissive to their husbands compelling. Of course the Apostle Paul also has some advice to Christians on whether women should become leaders in Church.

2 Timothy claims that women are never to have authority over men, certainly not in spiritual matters and are not allowed to teach in Church. This sexist nonsense was supposedly authored by the Apostle Paul, a man who claimed to be in contact with Jesus and the creator of the whole Universe. 2 Timothy chapter two also blames women for the Fall of man and says that women can be saved through bearing children. The childbearing verse is one of two big verses that form the pillars of the so-called Quiverfull movement, a far-right Christian movement that seeks to have as many children as possible.

1 Corinthians doubles-down on the whole submission thing claiming that women with questions in Church ought to just wait for church to be over to ask their husband

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Most Christian women, especially evangelicals, like to ignore these passages, as Christian cherry-picking causes most Christians to ignore a great deal of what the Bible actually teaches and says. Wives are to be submissive, women aren’t to talk or preach and a wife can be bought for a certain price in foreskins and sometimes it might be necessary to murder your own daughter and burn her as a ritual human sacrifice and those are just some of the wonderfully fucked up things we learned from the Bible today!

Join me next time for further exploration of the fucked up and ridiculous nonsense of the Bible, a book written by ancient people for ancient people held up as some kind of moral guide in today’s world because thousands of years of brainwashing are just beginning to wear off now. Thanks for reading!