God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (48 page)

Paul then extends this proclamation with the metaphor of a clay potter:

This is not some vague implication that Paul is making here, this is a statement of fact. This states that God created us as he chose and therefore he makes the arbitrary decision to reward whom he made good and punish those he made evil.
Therefore god created evil!
Which means God is evil. Gotcha!

Much of the final passages of Romans refers to Paul’s contempt for the non-believing Jews of Israel. The overwhelming majority of Jews continue to reject Christian belief and still believe Jesus to be little more than a dead, eccentric preacher. Paul prays that Israel will one day join the gradually growing ranks of Christians:

Attempting to lure them away from their Abrahamic worship of God to that of Christ, he offers the carrot of eternal life:

The Israelites, for the most part, were not swayed by Paul’s promises or godly threats, but not disheartened by their rejection of him and Jesus, he predicted that Israel will one day eventually end its stubbornness and turn to Jesus as a result of continued recruiting and conversion of non-Jews to the Christian faith:

Well, he got that part wrong didn’t he? 2000 years later and Israel is not a Christian nation, and doesn’t look remotely close to being so!

It is Paul that urges the utterly absurd idea to love your enemies and to feed them when they are hungry. Are we to love the purveyors of Islam that fly planes into our offices? Are we to love fundamentalist Christian activists that bomb abortion clinics, killing innocent doctors and their staff? I know these kinds of teachings seem nice and rosy on the surface, but they are not practical; they are not rational; and therefore they are ridiculous. If you consider that somewhere in the Muslim world there is a nineteen year old would-be suicide bomber just itching to splatter your brains and intestines across a cafeteria wall, I believe the only thing we should be feeding this guy is lead. As rationalists, it should be our aim to continue to take the fight to the enemies of reason, armed with education and knowledge, so as to reduce the number of would be martyrs willing to kill themselves in order to harm us or our children. But when education is too late, then intervention is required and that does not mean helping your enemy with food and shelter. Richard Dawkins said in his documentary,
The Root of Evil,

Reasoning with men who are not only prepared to die for their religious belief, but wish for death is futile. Sometimes, war is a necessity of the human condition, in ensuring our own genetic survival. Choosing to insert flowers down the barrel of a Jihadist’s rifle will certainly ensure the death of your genetic code. Just trust me on this.

Paul finishes his letter to the Romans with the words:

A philosophical delink that Paul, via the early church of Christianity, has trapped itself in is that Paul preaches that the only way to the kingdom of heaven is for one to believe that Jesus is not only the son of God, but he also died for our sins on the cross. Those that don’t believe are sent for torture for the duration of eternity. The question this begets is what happens to babies or young children that die before they have the chance to know who Jesus was? Where do these dead babies go to in the afterlife? Are babies and young children tortured 24/7 in the bowels of Hell? This is preposterously evil, if so. But Christians today choose to speak on God’s behalf by presuming that babies do go to heaven because they haven’t had the opportunity to sin yet.

Well, this positioning only creates a further dilemma as a lack of evidence for the existence of God, the choice of a thousand religions a growing child or adult is faced with and the temptation to commit any number of seemingly minor infractions which would cause a trip to Hell. It would appear that it is in your baby’s best interest to kill them whilst they are still young, thus ensuring them an eternity in heaven. Thus, if Christianity is to be believed and rationalized then God has inspired us to become baby killers just like he was in Egypt and throughout other conquests in the Old Testament period.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The book of Corinthians 1 is Paul’s first of two letters to the Church in the Greek town of Corinth. The city of Corinth was one of the most vibrant cities of Greece during the lifetime of Paul, a cultural center that welcomed foreign travellers, for the Greeks were fond of learning and debating new ideas. Pick up any book on first century Corinth and it will concur this metropolis to be one of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant of religious freedom of expression. Although, I did find one prominent Christian author who described the city differently. Dr. Henrietta Mears wrote in her book
What the Bible is All About
:

Mears implies that only believers in the God of Abraham or Jesus can be capable of morality. This being a worrying example of how religious belief causes division, elitism and exclusion. Mears further writes that the ‘immoral’ pagan practices of the freedom and tolerant Corinthians were penetrating the Christian church there:

Isn’t it lovely that Christians label anyone that doesn’t share their belief a ‘heathen’? How quickly the ‘love thy neighbor’ creed gets lost in the wash.

Remembering that these letters were written approximately 40 - 100 years after the death of Jesus, there were still no churches, as we know churches to be today. The churches that Paul refers to are small congregations of men who met in secret, so as to avoid Roman or Jewish persecution. The first church, in the way that we understand a church to be, did not appear until a further 200 years after the final book of the New Testament in 337 AD, after Emperor Constantine had made the persecution of this fledgling minority religion illegal.

Whilst Mears’ summary of Corinth is misguided, she is correct in asserting that Paul’s concerns were that the early Christians were being led astray by non-believers and were therefore backsliding in their faith. Paul also expresses angst in relation to rumors he had heard, that there has been quarrelling and division within the Church. As a number of the church members argued amongst themselves who it was that they should be following, as the Christian doctrine was not yet defined. Some of the church-goers were choosing to follow Paul, whilst others were still worshipping Greek gods such as Apollo and Venus. But few were actually praising the headline act, Jesus Christ. Paul, in his letter, attempts to set the record straight and advises them that it is foolish to follow him as he is but a messenger and that they should save their worship for Jesus only.

Paul then draws his attention to making derogatory remarks against scholars, and the wise within Corinth, as the educated elite dismissed the evangelism of Jesus’ followers. A demographic statistic that continues to run 2000 years later, where the correlation of increased education equates to reduced religiosity. But the smarty-pants of the day posed a threat to the conversion of the masses to the way of Christ. Hence, Paul launches a scathing attack against the intellectuals:

Paul adds that ‘true’ wisdom can only be sought through the spirit of Jesus Christ, as he writes:

Paul also writes an articulate warning against those that indulge in processed foods, simple carbohydrates and/or smoking cigarettes:

Whilst managing to ‘stay on point’ with his anti-homosexuality rhetoric:

Paul’s stance on sexuality is somewhat humorous. He claims that our bodies are not our own, that sins outside of the such as stealing or murder are in fact less of a crime because those are not sins against God’s property, you!

He rams this point home with a reminder of God’s track record in smiting those who have deviated from Christian or Jewish sexual norms:

If to this point you had any doubt that Paul was frustrated with his lack of sexual charisma, then his attitude towards the fairer sex in general should put that doubt to rest. Here he opines what involvement women should have in the Church:

If the above passage isn’t enough to convince women that little accommodation is made for them in the church of Christianity, then let this writing from Paul put your mind at ease: