God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (2 page)

Under the leadership of Joshua, they established the nation of Israel, grouped into 12 tribes or clans. In approximately 1050BC the nation of Israel asked for a human king. In turn, Saul was appointed by the prophet Samuel, who turned out to be a complete flop and thus was followed by David and then Solomon who built the Temple in Jerusalem as the center of Israelite worship.

Israel was then conquered and destroyed by Assyria in 722BC and then Babylon in 586BC. Its people were taken as captives to Babylon, but after 40 or 50 years were allowed to return to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. This, in effect, ends the Old Testament story at approximately 430BC.

Israel continually fell under the control of other powers and at the time of Roman control, Jesus was born, allegedly. He was recognized by a handful of eccentric Jews as the Messiah, or God in human form, and his teachings lasted only for a period of three years. Thus commencing the stories of The New Testament, which has its origins nearly a full century after the supposed death of Jesus Christ.

With the Old Testament laying the foundation for the respective Judaist, Muslim and Christian faiths, one can assert that the Bible is the written, or inspired word of God in the minds of more than 4 billion people alive today. But what does the ‘inspired word of God’ actually mean? This is not an easy question to answer because the texts of the Bible are, unarguably, written by human hands. As a matter of fact, not a single word of the ‘Good Book’ was penned by the Lord Almighty. Surprise! Allegedly and without any empirical supporting evidence, the more than 40 various authors who contributed to the texts claim that God spoke to them alone on a mountain top, or via someone else (a medium) that that person personally knew. This always befuddled me as a child, the fact that God only spoke to Middle Eastern men one-to-one, with the risk of the message being lost in translation, rather than just sit us all down for a chat, collectively. Thus believers must believe it is the ‘inspired’ word of God or the book has no meaning at all; and if it has no meaning then you have no religion. Therefore, their belief is based on the fact that the Bible says it is the word of God. Nothing more.

If you ever get into a religious discussion with a Christian, for example, a circular rationale usually ensues, something like this: “The Bible is true because it is the word of God and I know it is the word of God because the Bible says so. And if the Bible says so, then it must be true, because I know the Bible is true because it is the word of God and God wouldn’t lie. I know that because the Bible says so.” Are you dizzy yet?

At the risk of further extending the circular roundabout, the theological conundrum is that the onus is now on the believer to prove the existence of the Biblical God, because if he isn’t real then the book isn’t inspired! And because we know that there were no Xerox machines or Kinkos on the Arabian Peninsula four millennia ago, we can conclude that the words were passed down orally from generation to generation, from one copy to another copy, each producing a slightly different version of the same story. Therefore, for the Bible to be truly inspired by a Heavenly creator, it would require that all the hundreds and thousands of men that took part in the copying and translating were ‘inspired’ by God. I now need to get off this merry-go-round.

But if we grant the believers their faith and be gracious enough to offer our humor, then shouldn’t we expect the Bible to be brim-filled with wisdom, wonder, enlightenment and beauty? Shouldn’t this book, co-authored by the supreme-being, the creator of all, be the most marvellous thing ever written; standing side by side with progressive scientific discovery and not starkly against it? Is this too much to ask? Because having read the Bible back to front, front to back, right to left, left to right, I think it is one of the most uninspiring books ever written. God’s greatest preaching to mankind, his creation, counts for little more than who I can and can’t shag; what I can and can’t eat; when I can and can’t work; how I should treat my slaves; under what terms I can annihilate my neighbors; and how to slaughter an animal as a token of my gratitude to him. Seems a little trivial, doesn’t it? Furthermore, this God has some bizarre and brutish methods for getting his point across, including forcing his prophet Ezekiel to eat nothing but bread smeared with human shit for 430 consecutive days; vaporizing people into salt for innocuous errs; and of course, seeing to the slaughter of entire civilizations because they may happen to be in the way of an Israelite land grab.

Really? Is this his best effort? My god, I can literally walk into any Border’s bookstore blindfolded, march directly to the self-help section and find more wisdom in ‘
Awaken the Giant within’
or ‘
Chicken soup for the soul
’ and these respective books are just full of pseudo pop-psychology at best and utter meaningless bullshit at worst!

To borrow Lewis Black’s comedic wisdom:

It becomes obvious, then, that the Bible is far from the writings of an omniscient, super-intellectual being, but rather the often incoherent rants of a few violent, self-serving, nomadic Middle Eastern yokels, who created these writings, with not only the intention of explaining the inexplicable but also for the moral justifications of slavery, subjugation of women and domination of neighboring societies to steal their land, rape their women and plunder their treasures.

Who better to put this all into some realm of reality than the great late comedian Mr. George Carlin?

If the God of the Bible is all-powerful and therefore omnipotent, then his wickedness is second to none. To be omnipotent means that not only did he create evil but he does nothing to prevent it. When small children were being thrown alive into burning furnaces during the Second World War, God did nothing to prevent their agonizing deaths, therefore permitting evil to take its course. Or put another way still, by the time you have completed reading this page, another few hundred children will die of thirst or starvation. Epicurus, the Greek Philosopher, had the common sense to write way back in 300 BC:

‘God’ and ‘evil’ in the one sentence surely challenges the public relations spin of God being a loving, just, peace-endorsing heavenly father. With ‘spoiler alert’ disclaimer up front, this examination will ultimately lead you to one of the following two conclusions, that either:

God is just a creation of man’s imagination or,

God is an evil bastard.

Be assured that my caricature of the celestial cloud merchant is not just something that I have grasped on my own, as much smarter men than I contend similar. Take Richard Dawkins’, biologist and author of
God Delusion
, depiction of God from chapter two of his book:

And don’t be fooled into thinking that anti-God rhetoric is confined solely to nerdy looking 21
^st
century scientists. To the eternal surprise of American Christians, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of America, shared his biographical portrayal of God with Dawkins more than 200 years earlier when he wrote:

Now, if your knowledge of the Bible is confined to the religious preacher sound bites, then I am sure the aforementioned quotations from Messrs. Dawkins and Jefferson come as a bit of a shock. But I dare anyone to come up with a better personality profile of the God of Abraham having read the Bible from Genesis right through to Revelations. This God created by the Hebrews is far removed from the propaganda spun by priests, pastors and popes, who use these pithy sound bites of ‘love thy neighbor’ and ‘do unto others’, or ‘turn the other cheek’ as means of packaging Christianity for sale. The Biblical reality is that this particular God will smote you for working on the wrong day; wearing the wrong clothes; sex with the wrong person; thought crimes such as wanting a new car, a new boat, or a holiday; complaining about a lack of food; complaining about the quality of the food; eating the wrong food; occupying land allotted for his ‘chosen’ people; talking back to your parents; questioning authority; looking back to see his destruction of a city; breaking the rules for owning or buying slaves; and ultimately hates you for not being an Israelite, to name but a few. He truly punctuates the air with far more reasons to hate the human condition than love it.

Henceforth, for every ‘love thy enemy’ there are dozens of God’s commands endorsing the rape and killing of thy neighbor. The sprinkles of self-evident moral ideals are well and truly outnumbered by some truly wicked ideas, barbaric rituals and genocidal endorsements. The God of hate is revealed within the Bible and therefore my intent is to demonstrate that assertion throughout my summary of the ‘Bad Book’.

So, the claim that God is a tyrannical monster has been made – let’s find the proof of such a contrarian assertion within the passages of the Bible. But before we do I just want to tackle the issue of religion and morality. The argument of morality is the tip of the sword that Christians use in defence of their beliefs.

So, what about morality? A question often posed to atheists and agnostics. Where do we get our morality from if not the Bible? This is a daft question that many free thinkers take utter umbrage to. Especially so when one considers that morality is older than religion itself. As human beings with a higher consciousness to our fellow mammals in the animal kingdom we have an innate sense that what is good for our society is also good for us. Gene survival in social animals depends on the principle of looking after one’s peers. The ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ ideal is law of nature. This is a nice segue for introducing our cousins the chimpanzees.

Consider that chimpanzees are socially evolved enough to take care of their young and elderly; perform roles in social teams; and are able to compete for social promotion for what zoologists label the principle of social service. They are able to do all of this without a sky-god to watch over them, without the benefit of a book written 4000 years ago by other chimpanzees. With this in mind, why do Christians, Muslims and Jews continue the self-loathing and self-doubting assertion that the Bible forms the framework for human morality? Laughable isn’t it? Like the chimps, we have a mutual investment and moral empathy in ensuring that perpetrators of deeds that cause harm to us are ultimately isolated from us, whether by imprisonment or ostracization. The reality-show ‘Survivor’ makes a dim-witted case in point for this dynamic. Watch any elimination episode and it is primarily those individuals that offer no altruistic value to the tribe, whether physically or politically, who are sent home for an early shower.