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-inator Genisys: Terminating Yahweh

Alternatively Titled: Genocide, Murder and Rape in Genesis

The Bible is a collection of completely human-made stories and myths, well really I should say man-made since no woman ever contributed to the Bible. The Bible, after all, is very primitive and immoral in its view and treatment of women. One doesn’t have to read far into the Bible to realize how primitive and obviously human a creation it is… but then most Christians don’t read their Bibles from front to back, they jump around cherry-picking. It’s the reason why the story of David and Goliath is one of maybe three stories involving King David that the average Christian even knows, because your local pastor knows what scriptures to avoid and what ones he can work into a sermon.

God’s actions in Genesis are a mix of his typical evil bullshit and basic incompetence betraying the fact that the ancient Jews who wrote Genesis did not believe in the omnipotent omniscience disembodied mind that God has become today. Rather the God of Genesis, walks, talks and can even have his mind changed by human beings.

I could talk about any number of stories from Genesis. The Flood, God’s worldwide ethnic cleansing in which infants, children, and animals are all slaughtered for the sins of the rest of humanity. I could talk about the Tower of Babel, where God somehow fears that human beings will build an actual stairway to heaven tall enough to reach him and thus, in his fear, he decides to cast a spell on everyone creating the languages of the Earth.

Really though I think I will start even earlier, with the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Cain and Abel are the first human beings to offer God offerings. God, being that he is the primitive creation of ancient people, prefers Abel’s offering of dead animal parts with favor but looks on Cain’s offerings of vegetable matter not-so-favorably. The Bible never tells us why God requires rituals and blood-magic as offerings but for the ancient superstitious people that wrote this stuff it would have likely seemed obvious that such things were what God wanted.

The story also never tells why God doesn’t like fruits and veggies. It makes very little sense as God created all things and had previously declared his creation GOOD. One would assume that God would therefore look upon Cain and Abel’s offerings, and the toil it took to gain them, equally. In fact its arguable that Abel’s offering is morally lesser, as it involves the suffering of an animal.

Either way Cain is jealous and kills his brother. God arrives and God apparently doesn’t know where Abel is because he asks Cain. Now conventional Christianity holds that the “wages of sin is death” so one would think that God might strike down Cain. Instead God banishes Cain from his little plot of land and tells him that he will be a wanderer for all time. Cain laments that surely those who discover him will kill him, presumably for what he’s done. I’m not sure who Cain is worried about killing him, unless he thinks that Adam and Eve will murder their only remaining son for his act of murdering their other son.

We have to assume he’s talking about his Mother and Father, Adam and Eve, because there aren’t any OTHER people yet. God, stupid fucker that he is, has created a massive population bottleneck when it comes to human beings and the only way out, unless he creates some more people, is for Adam and Eve’s kids to commit incest in order to populate the Earth. The Bible never solves this issue.

God shows mercy to Cain for some reason and places a “mark” on Cain that somehow prevents people from murdering him.

The next verses are rather confusing. Cain fucks his wife, has a son and starts building his own city. Now unless the book of Genesis takes place in Minecraft this makes very little sense. For one thing where did Cain’s wife come from? For another thing what benefit is a city for a family of three? And how does Cain plan to feed his family when God has just cursed him to be permanently bad at agriculture? I suppose he’ll just go into the city and buy food in the markets? The markets that no one works at because a city can’t be for three people.

Another point of interest in this story is that Cain departs from the presence of the Lord by way of going to a place called Nod. God’s presence, in the book of Genesis, appears to have a limited geographic range.

Later on in Genesis, when we get into the Abraham story, there is an interesting visitation of God into Abraham’s life. In reading Genesis Chapter 18, in which this story takes place, remember that in Genesis 3 God walked in the Garden AND couldn’t find Adam and Eve when they hid themselves so he had to audibly call out to them.

In Genesis 18 we have the story of Abraham being visited by three men. Interpretations of who these three men vary wildly. Regardless of who they are one of the men must be Yahweh himself because he begins talking to Abraham after Abraham prepares a feast. God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a child, despite the fact that Sarah is beyond the child-bearing age and Abraham is also far too old. Sarah disbelieves and scoffs at the idea.

God and Abraham depart the tent and God begins telling Abraham about his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they have been so corrupt. But God isn’t sure if the wickedness is as bad as the terrible things he’s heard out of Sodom. Yes God it seems is NOT omniscient in the book of Genesis. God does not know whether or not he’s going to have to destroy the city.

Abraham actually calls God’s morality into question, begging Yahweh not to destroy the innocent alongside the wicked in Sodom and Gomorrah. So Yahweh makes a deal with Abraham that if he can find fifty righteous people in the city he won’t rain down hellfire on it. What comes next can only be described as haggling, and yet, despite the fact that it is God Abraham is arguing with, it works.

Here is Abraham trying to talk Yahweh out of his genocidal tendencies and actually managing to make some headway! Kudos to Abraham for showing himself to be more moral than the God he serves, though that changes later on God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham was actually going to go through with it – a test that an omniscient God would have no need of running, but the Biblical God in Genesis is NOT all-knowing!

The last Genesis story I want to touch on comes from Genesis Chapter 34 and demonstrates how the Bible treats women. As the story opens Jacob’s daughter Dinah has caught the eye of a man named Shechem, who is a Hivite and not one of God’s chosen people. Shechem jumps the gun and rapes poor Dinah. After he rapes her he decides its for the best if he goes through the direct channels to try to earn her hand in marriage. Now an ordinary moral human being might think that the correct channels would be for Shechem to have asked Dinah to marry her…

But no, in the Bible we have a strict system of arranged marriages (or else selling your daughter into slavery, brides had a PRICE). A daughter was like any other possession and she had something of powerful value, her virginity. Dinah’s family is angry about the whole rape thing but Hamor and Shechem call a meeting between the families. Hamor and Shechem petition Jacob and his sons that their families should intermarry, offering a marital exchange of daughters so that they can all combine forces. The girls have no say in this, they are pieces of property to be moved around, married off in marriages of convenience to help build wealth and social ties.

Jacob and company trick Hamor and Shechem into a deal in which Hamor’s entire group has to get circumcised (because God hates foreskins even though he created them). For some stupid fucking reason Hamor and Shechem agree and their entire group get circumcised. Then, while their enemies are injured, Jacob’s sons move in for the kill raiding the entire city and killing all the men.

And once again they take the women and children as plunder, spoils of war, to be done with whatever they will. Fuck the Bible. Fuck this barbaric horseshit. Why do people pretend this is the Good Book? If this is your idea of good you can fuck right off.

So I’d say that leaves Yahweh in the scrap-heap of history where he belongs. But let’s hear what Sarah Connor has to say –

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

s.

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!

Family Matters Part 1

Alternatively titled: Is it Okay to Beat my Child… and when I can I murder them?

For centuries Christians have used the Bible as an excuse to beat their children. Of course before society solidified enough to give us laws protecting the innocent miniature humans known as children beating your kids was widely considered acceptable discipline. Even in today’s world certain forms of physical punishment are legal in certain parts of the Western civilized world. But there is a difference between a hand smacking a child’s hand away from a hot stove and getting a branch, a rod or another device that will actually leave a serious mark.

Child abuse is a horribly immoral thing so you’d think that the Bible, a book inspired by the infinitely wise and merciful creator of the Universe, would outright condemn the abuse of children. Except that it doesn’t, ever, at all. In fact the Bible is quite in favor of beating your children. Numerous verses claim that beating your child is not only morally okay but its actually beneficial to the child later in life.

Often lauded as the wisest book of the Bible Proverbs, credited to King Solomon himself (though of unknown authorship), tells us that children should be beaten.

Later on in the book we are told that children who disobey their parents should have their eyes plucked out by a raven. How wonderfully wise and merciful! Yes what a truly beautiful sentiment to put down on paper!

Sarcasm aside this is a rather frightening set of passages, although certainly not as severe in their wickedness as other passages I’ve talked about on this blog. It does seem odd that a God would inspire these passages. What, exactly, is God’s obsession with the Earthly authority parents have over their children that would cause him to inspire such cruel proverbial teachings?

Sometimes a beating is not enough. Sometimes it will be necessary to stone your child to death. Sometimes, when your child is rebellious enough, you may have to gather together everyone in town to hit them with rocks until they are bloodied, broken, and just plain fucking dead.

Aside from cursing your Father or Mother the Bible offers another instance in which a child should be put to death – if that child is rebellious, gluttonous and drunk they should be stoned to death.

Most people would probably try an intervention first, perhaps alcoholics anonymous or some other therapy group (somewhat ironically Alcoholics Anonymous is a religious institution that requires you to call on a higher power to break your addiction, rebellious children shouldn’t call on Yahweh). If your kid won’t listen to you after you’ve talked to him about his ways there is only one Biblical solution – take your kid and stone them to death, they are evil. In today’s society there is question as to whether capital punishment is a moral thing in the first place and there are Christians that would object to the death penalty. Yet the Bible is clear on a whole host of issues that are deserving of the death penalty.

So let’s look at another passage that reflects the Bible’s “Family Values”. What should Christians and Jews do when a member of their family turns to another religion. Let’s say your Niece becomes a neo-pagan for whatever reason or your Brother is a Wiccan or your dear Auntie Edna is a Hindu… what do you do when they begin talking about their religion and trying to get you to join them?

Do you,

A) Politely decline and agree to disagree on the subject of religion

B) Get into a Heated Religious Debate

C) Stop talking to them and even ignore them at Thanksgiving Dinner

D) Gather everyone together and stone them to death, you and your family MUST be first to cast stones and participate in the brutal execution

So as you can see the correct answer is actually D. See following some other faith or worshiping some other God is a capital offense in the Bible, it is punishable by one thing and one thing only – DEATH. Just like Islamic scriptures calling for unbelievers to be smited (smote?) the Bible is clear that those who worship other gods are deserving of DEATH.

And of course in this case you have to stone your own family together? Ask yourself, Christians, would you be willing to hurl stones at a loved one because they worshiped another God and watch the life leave their eyes? Do you have the bile, hate and evil in your heart to follow the word of God?

I know, I know, I know what you’re saying. Jesus says he who is without sin should cast the first stone. Jesus came and he gave us a new way to live and that includes a new way to deal with our families right?

Right.

Please people take the time to actually read your Bibles.

Because its fucking atrocious, its filled with awful laws, evil “morals”, and depicts a stupid, cruel, self-contradictory God that is so stupid and evil it can only be man-made. Stay-tuned for my next post which will also be about the unsavory ways in which Biblical characters and stories completely demolish the notion that the Bible is the good book and its God anything other than an evil invention of sadistic primitive minds.

Sex Slavery and the Bible

Alternatively titled: Liam Neeson finds Yahweh and Kills him Faster than an Unnamed Vaguely European Bad Guy, to Save his Daughter

Ordinarily the barbarism of ancient times frightens modern people of today. Tales of Vikings or other war-like cultures pillaging and plundering and raping everywhere they went sound scary. The idea that just a few centuries ago we were still so obtuse and cruel as a species as to carry out such horrific acts is indeed a frightening mirror to hold up, as is the fact that we still have a long way to go because such acts still happen even in our modern world (though with far less frequency given our population).

We live in a world where the underground human trafficking trade, the sex slave trade, is an illegal and shady business that most people want stopped. Although it receives far too little media attention egregious human rights violations occur all over the world and end with people, often children, being sold into slavery. Most decent folk understand that owning another human being, whether you’re planning to derive pleasure or labor out of them, is an absolutely sickening and evil thing to do. We know this because we ourselves would never want to be taken as slaves and because the injustice of such slavery has been burned into our unconscious by images and tales of slavery in the not-too-distant past.

So where are we going with this? Well the Bible of course.

Along with explicitly supporting owning other people as property and being able to beat them severely (EXODUS 21) the Bible, on numerous occasions, permits the Israelites to take sex slaves as spoils of war. It is bad enough and would be enough for one post, just to talk about slavery by itself, how silly it is that people think a perfect God with perfect morals who had just delivered his chosen people out of slavery would turn around and tell Moses that the Israelites were allowed to purchase, keep, beat, and inherit slaves.

Disturbingly though these rules are grossly disproportionate when they come to female slaves. The Bible is easily one of the most anti-human collection of documents ever compiled but it is particularly cruel to women. And we would expect it to be, I suppose, given that it was written by ancient people ignorant of the benefits of a society where women were equals, not property or chattle.

A Father was allowed to sell his daughter into slavery and if she didn’t ‘please’ her Master there were consequences – this proposed direct from the Mouth of God in Exodus 21. This isn’t even as pleasant as something like an arranged marriage, its an actual form of servitude with the sexual part heavily implied.

But of course the implications of Exodus 21 are not the only instance of sex slavery in the Bible. We talked, in the last post, about a Concubine, a subservient mistress brow beaten into following after her master only to be betrayed by him when he has her raped and later cuts her up into tiny pieces. In Deuteronomy 20 Yahweh, the jealous and warlike storm god of the Israelites, sets up some rules for going to war.

Of particular cruelty in the prior verses is not just the seizure of women and children to be used as slaves but the latter rule that other civilizations, others cultures, were simply to be wiped out. And of course we have the perverse equivalence of PEACE and SLAVERY offered at the beginning, that if anyone surrendered to the Israelites they were to be taken as slaves and live in peace with them. I don’t see anyway that a modern Christian, without compromising their morality rather horribly and showing themselves to be the very thing they revile (moral relativists) could defend this. It is an indefensibly cruel doctrine to role up to the gate of some city you want to conquer and if they resist to murder them all and take their children and women as slaves. And even more wicked to slaughter everyone, children included, as was often the case in the Old Testament, full and complete genocide complete with the dehumanization that comes with notions of absolute superiority – calling the others wicked, inhuman, evil, etc, to excuse your own wicked and inexcusably evil solution (extermination).

It makes my stomach churn to think of this stuff buried at the center of the Bible, all of it condoned by the Biblical God, lurking in the spaces that pastors, preachers and Sunday school teachers avoid at all costs. Many adult Christians know this stuff is in there and choose to ignore it, when its brought up they change the subject or say “it was a different time, the Israelites had to defend themselves.”

Defend themselves? Fuck right off. When the Israelites “defended” themselves against the Amalekites they killed everyone down to the last INFANT and slaughtered the animals as well.

In Deuteronomy 21 further rules for war are set up. In this chapter it is explained that when you go in and slaughter all the men and win the day any woman who strikes your fancy can be your wife. There is no consent involved as already explained in Deuteronomy 20 women and children taken in this way are spoils of war, God has given them over to you to do with as you wish. The context is quite clear, you can take a female sex slave from any nation or city you conquer.

In Numbers 31 the great and righteous leader Moses, one of the most famous men in the Bible, shows that he adheres to Deuteronomy 20 and 21. After a battle with the Midianites his soldiers have managed to show some restraint for they return home with women and children. Moses scolds them telling them they should have killed the women for they were among those tempting the children of God away from the way of Yahweh. He then instructs the soldiers to kill all the young boys but to check the women to see if any of them are virgins, they are then to murder the non-virgins and keep as sex slaves all the virgins.

This is Biblical morality folks, please don’t take my word for it, go and actually sit down and read your Bibles. This fucking book wasn’t written under the inspiration of a real actual perfect God. Don’t kid yourselves, stop being deceived by apologists, preachers and your own absurd mental gymnastics and actually judge the text. The Bible is the work of ancient people who didn’t have a good grasp on ethics or morality, who didn’t have a good grasp on how the world works or the Universe. Why are you holding up this book filled with immoral horseshit like this as if it is the most morally righteous book on the planet?

And if your idea of righteousness is as evil as the Biblical one than I happily condemn you as being evil. Anyone who thinks slavery, sex slavery and conquest in which every last civilian child is brutally killed, is EVER okay can go fuck themselves. Anyone who defends this horseshit deserves scorn.

To those who actually read these passages and find themselves having a dilemma, as I once did reading the Bible, who find doubts swirling in their minds, I say this: You don’t need this book and you are better than the Bible ever gives you credit for. Do not fear, for any God who would punish doubters is not worth worship and almost certainly an invention of twisted human minds. Be free to doubt for doubt is the first step toward the truth and without doubt you are locked into whatever you currently believe with no freedom to think.

Except for being told by someone else, or being misled about the content of the Bible, why would you believe it had anything to do with a God:

Lot Reloaded

Alternatively Titled: One Night in Sodom makes a Strong Man Crumble 

Few stories are more depraved and insane than the Biblical story of the scorching of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis. God doesn’t merely unleash wrath he decimates and entire city and turns one woman into a pillar of salt for the mere act of looking over her shoulder at the desolation. Prefacing the story is Lot’s decision to move to near the cities, just outside the gates, until two apparently gorgeous angels show up. Almost immediately they are surrounded by an angry mob of perverts who want to gangbang the two angels that are staying in Lot’s house.

So what does Lot do? In one of the most disgusting and obviously anti-woman moments of the Bible Lot offers his two VIRGIN daughters up to the mob to be raped, lest a hand be laid on God’s angels. True to Biblical morality Lot shows that what’s really valuable in life isn’t your family but your relationship with the all powerful dictator in the sky. Let an angry mob rape your own daughters for God? SURE you would, IF you were a righteous man. And yes Lot is meant to be righteous in this story, after all he’s the one God has chosen to spare the wrath that’s about to fall.

Of course Lot later spends his time in a cave getting drunk and fucking and impregnating both of his OWN DAUGHTERS. Or, if you prefer the version that saves Lot some dignity, his daughters rape him by getting him drunk enough to have sex with them. Oh what wonderful family friendly fun the Bible is chock full of! It’s TOTALLY not an absurd book of mythology written by anonymous Iron Age zealots over the course of centuries, edited and translated multiple times and then arbitrarily smashed together by the Roman Emperor and his friends.

But this blog post isn’t about Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah or my dripping sarcasm, it’s about a later re-telling of the story found in the book of Judges which actually ups the ante on the barbarism, sexual violence and bloodshed of the original story. So kindly get out your Bible and turn to Judges 19.

The Bible retells a lot of stories in fact there has been some great scholarship out there which shows that many stories of Jesus’ life and miracles are re-tellings of Old Testament stories that borrow language directly from the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament.

Here in Judges however we get an upgrade of the anti-woman themes of the Bible to an extreme level. At the beginning of the story a man visits the Father of his “wife”. I say the word wife but the actual word here is translated as Concubine all 37 times its used in the Bible. A Concubine for those unfamiliar is like a mistress but back then, since women were seen as lesser, men were allowed to have such extra women around. So our mysterious man goes to retrieve his Concubine after she leaves him to return to her Father’s house.

After some stalling from the Father the man get’s fed up and leaves with his Concubine in tow. They decide to stop in a town called Gibeah and an old man offers to take them into his house and treat them. Almost immediately the house is surrounded and guess who it is, it’s the rape mob from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah – this time they’ve come to rape the old man ‘s house guest. So what happens?

Just like in the story of Lot two people are offered to sate the lust of the crowd. Once again the man who owns the house offers his own virgin daughter but he also offers the crowd the Concubine of his guest. Keep in mind that in this version there are no angels to protect, the only ass this guy is saving is that of his house guest, by throwing two people out to be raped. The Concubine is raped, brutally abused, in this version of the story.

She isn’t even a consenting partner to the relationship she’s already in as she starts this story trying to leave her master. She is dragged along against her will and what does he do? He sends her out to be raped instead of taking it himself. And the verses of scripture, in this book Christians hand to little kids and tell them to believe, says that she was raped UNTIL DAWN at which time they let her go.

Fuck this fucking book

At any rate the story actually manages to get worse. The man collects his brutalized Concubine and here the text implies she has actually been RAPED TO DEATH, he takes her and cuts her into pieces mailing the pieces out like a deranged serial murderer in a bad CSI spin-off. This sickening shit is actually IN THE BIBLE that billions of people on this planet revere as a holy book. Don’t believe me? You should be reading along. The man commits this heinous act because he wants to motivate the Israelites into a war against the city of Gibeah because they raped her. Even though his decision to let her be sent out there, instead of him going out, is why she ended up raped to death to begin with.

You may be sitting there fuming saying, “yes but God didn’t condone any of this!”

And you’d be wrong. Reading along into Judges 20 God actually helps the Israelites conduct the war. He never condemns the man for his actions in having his Concubine raped  and then dismembering her. He never condemns the blood-thirsty way the Israelites seek revenge. He sends the Israelites out to fight and a massive war takes place.

What level of violence and bloodshed ensues? Tens of thousands are slaughtered and killed in the war that follows, a war directed by God and started by a madman who cut up his own Concubine after sending her out to be violently raped for an entire night.

This is a book Christians call Holy, this is a book they deliver into the hands of unsuspecting children and tell them its all true. And they brow beat them with threats of Hell, with threats of real-world reprisal, if they question this book. They tell them its not just A good book but its THE good book to end all good books. This is an obvious pile of horseshit to anyone who has actually read the damn book without the helplessly ignorant faith of an indoctrinated child or the willfully ignorant faith of someone self-deceived. Children naturally listen to what their parents teach them and religion insidiously takes advantage of this by spilling ancient lies into the minds of young people all over the world.

Fuck the Bible. Fuck it all throughout the night and do not allow it to go until dawn and then hack it into pieces and mail it to every Christian who has not actually taken the time to read it and digest its pages.

Please share this page if you agree that the Bible needs to be exposed for what it is and its vile contents disemboweled in the public square.

Yahweh Has People Eat their own Children

The Bible is one of those books that just keeps on giving. You’d think there’d be a limit to the insane depravity of its God. I mean we’re talking about a being capable of anything, any wondrous miracle beyond imagination, who mercilessly drowns everyone because they won’t listen to him… even though he hasn’t been down to Earth to set any rules since that whole Eden thing went south.

You’d also think that burning people in a Lake of Fire for all eternity is pretty bad. Well some will suffer horrific fates evem BEFORE they burn forever. Today’s tale of horror from the ancient haunted crypt of Biblical bullshit is found in Jeremiah 19. The people in this story have been performing human sacrifices to Baal, Yahweh’s main enemy. Both Yahweh and Baal are storm gods, they bring thunder, smoke, fire from the sky and rain (see the story of Elijah testing Baal and Yahweh in 1 Kings).

So people have been sacrificing children, you might expect such an act to piss God off pretty badly. I mean its hard to imagine anything more sick, twisted and delusional than killing a person or animal and using the blood and body parts as some kind of magical appeasement to call down the blessings of, or block the wrath of, an invisible supernatural force. Oh wait, that’s right, Yahweh likes sacrifices. If you read Jeremiah 19, and I hope you’ve already googled it by now and are reading, it never says Yahweh is upset about the act of human sacrifice itself (although it does mention the spilling of innocent blood). Rather it seems Yahweh is more keen on the fact that these sacrifices are to his main rival, Baal (from which we get the term Beelzebub).

So what rescue plan might we expect a good and righteous God to cook up and what fair but tough punishment might he bring down on the sickos who are sacrificing children on altars? Is it

A) He teleports the children to safety and traps the parents in the phantom zone

B) He sends the Israelites to get the children out and THEN sends down hellfire Sodom and Gomorrah style.

C) He causes great calamity and tragedy to befall the city in such a way that it will cause starvation leading to MASS CANNIBALISM specifically including parents devouring their sons and daughters. Forever the city will be cursed.

D) He does nothing.

It we were going by the real world answer, it would be D, since God doesn’t exist he doesn’t ACTUALLY do anything … BUT in the story the answer is actually C. C for tasty tasty Cannibalism.

This stomach turning horseshit makes Yahweh out to be a completely petty jealous megalomaniac. His reaction to the idea that this cult is more popular than his and is SACRIFICING CHILDREN apparently doesn’t involve any rescue op to get these kids out of danger. In fact the kids endangered by these insane religious practices are just part of God’s revenge against Baal and his followers, destined to be devoured when the wrath starts pouring out.

So here’s where the obvious part comes in, God never did any of this shit, I mean story-wise his character did but since he doesn’t exist the cruelty here is either fictional or a representation of what the batshit crazy Israelites were doing to people via their sieges (driving them to acts of mass cannibalism) – probably the former option here. What we have is a story written by human beings, which is portraying the Israelites as a warlike people with a powerful and jealous God. To rally the troops and the people prophets often spoke for Yahweh and this case is no different, God’s voice is conveyed to us through the voice of the prophet, which is through the pen of someone else, which is through the translation of someone else, followed by another edit, than another translation, etc… on and on and on until it gets to us.

Fuck the Bible for promoting such a wretched idea as going to war so hard against another culture they devour their own children. No loving God, no loving human, would ever be in favor of this and there are no mental gymnastics or apologetic tricks that can take away the meaning of the words.

If you are willing to admit that this is just a story written by humans, that all the Bible is is stories to be judged o. their own merits apart from any presuppositions about their truth or about dire consequences for doubt, thank you.

And for those anti-theists and fellow atheists, don’t shy away from being passionate, angry or offensive. The BIBLE is offensive, it has caused, war, bloodshed and discrimination and STILL IS doing so around the world. Fuck that fucking book. Pick up your unholy hand grenades of truth and upside down crosses of reason, we have scripture to deconsecrate.

There is no reason to be intimidated by any threats of hellfire or of them being “offended”. We are not beholden to their beliefs and do not owe their beliefs any more respect than we’d give to Scientology, crystal healing or any other outright bullshit and quackery. Merely because their parasitic belief system and evil book are embedded in our culture does not mean we should be afraid to speak out or worried about hurting feelings. The Bible is harmful, Christianity is harmful, stop babying believers.

How I will Judge the “Ultimate Judge”

Alternatively titled Yahweh is METAL AS FUCK.

Any Christians stumbling across this might be tempted to see just another angry atheist spouting angry hate-filled nonsense about the Bible. How, they might ask, could some atheist on the internet possibly judge the God of the Bible? What gives him the right? Well for one thing this view presupposes the truth or specialness of the Bible, an unreasonable presupposition if ever there was one. It’d be like if I, as a huge fan of Star Wars, argued that anyone who criticizes it and its creator George Lucas have no right to do so. We’re dealing with a literary work or rather a series of them written by anonymous authors across the course of centuries and later cobbled together into a compilation by Constantine and his cronies in the 4^th Century.

The first assumption here, though it is a hidden one, seems to be that a religious document deserves some kind of special treatment, as though because it claims to reveal the hidden truths of supernatural forces at work in the world it somehow elevates itself above criticism to at least some small degree. This simply isn’t true and very few Christians would offer the same deference and respect to the scriptures of other faiths, such as Mormonism, Islam or Hinduism – this despite Hinduism being our oldest surviving religion far pre-dating Jewish monotheism.

But even if a Christian were willing to offer the same elevated level of importance to other works of religious thought by default they would still be mistaken in doing so. Simply because something claims to have some revelatory power in regards to the supernatural does not mean we treat it as though we must be careful in our questioning of it. For one thing there is another hidden assumption, sometimes outright stated by Christians, that the mere act of questioning God or the Bible somehow might bring down wrath. But of course this warning looks ridiculous to the outsiders and only frightens those who already believe, scaring them away from their doubts by threats of hellfire or other supernatural reprisals.

Of course I could point out how vile and evil such thuggery is, to beat back into submission the faithful who dare to doubt with promises that hellfire is licking at their heels. Its not just death they are threatened with but eternal torment never to be escaped from and thus such a threat is at once an empty one – in that it carries no force of reality and is completely fantasy to those outside the cult – and a completely wicked one as it terrorizes those who hold some degree of belief however small.

So when I judge the Bible I am not looking at it as some kind of ultimate authority, at least not anymore. Because I, like many atheists, was raised a Christian, taught to believe in the fundamentalist viewpoint, taught that the Bible was the perfect word of God and it was only man failing to interpret it correctly that made any doubt possible. And so with awe and passion and a desire to seek the real truth and have God be revealed to me I read the Bible in its entirety and with that act I delivered the first blow to my belief in God.

Like a Labyrinth stacked high with minotaur shit I found my way out of the muck of Christianity slowly but surely. Now, years later, I can stand on the rim of that great feces ridden maze and see the rotten broken down walls of the Bible (Labyrinth) are nothing without the indomitable mountains of bullshit and the brow-beating the minotaur inflicts upon the lost souls wandering in that squalid maze.

So no I will not respect anyone’s beliefs though I may respect their right to hold those beliefs. And I will not respect the Bible because I’ve actually read it and – here’s the important part – refused to be threatened by its passages. I will not pull any punches or shy away from anger, passion, conviction and righteous indignation.

Don’t think that this will be all negative, I’m going to be having plenty of fun informing anyone who actually reads this of all the fun shit in the Bible that you don’t know about and that your parents probably wouldn’t have told you about when you were in Sunday School. Like the softcore erotica that is Song of Solomon.

You should look it up, do it right now, its easily one of the best books of the Bible.

Or perhaps something that pushes God into such dark territory that it sounds like something Satan would do. Maybe something that makes Yahweh look METAL AS FUCK. Such as this description of a plague that went on to inspire some awesome face melting special effects in Spielberg’s excellent movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.

No this blog will not merely be vitriol and anger, there will plenty of fun-poking, insults and bizarre shit that somehow made it into the ‘Good Book’. So stay-tuned and spread the word.