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The Logic of Christians
Why I am an Atheist
Why We are Atheists
Do You Want to Buy My Soul?
The Power of Faith
Faith, Hope and Belief
The Leap of Faith
What the Bible Says About Abortion
Aborting Babies
Respecting God
Animal Rights
Women and Islam
Religious indoctrination is child abuse
Evils of Music
Kill the Puppy Dogs
Masturbation
Does God Bless America?
Teenage Sex
The Clitoris
Christians are taught to fear God and to love God. How can this be? Loving and fearing at the same time is what the children and wives of psychotic monsters have to put up with. Quite.
I have little sympathy for people who live in abusive relationships with monsters. In my book violence within the family is completely wrong and should not be tolerated. Very young children who are too underdeveloped to understand reasoning can be trained with small tokens of violence in the way cats and dogs treat their young but very quickly other methods of correction become more appropriate, suitable and effective. Smacking as a punishment as opposed to a form of non-verbal communication is simply wrong. The sooner you can reason with your child the more likely they are to grow up reasoning and reasonable with a functional morality. Don’t do it because I’ll clout you one doesn’t teach a child anything useful. Neither does watch out the master’s looking at you. Good parenting requires teaching right from wrong and explaining why something is wrong. The Hebrew God didn’t do a lot of explaining. What part of it’s an abomination to me are you having a problem with?
Yahweh at no time explained what the problem was with foreskins, menstruation, mixed fibres in clothes, mixed crops in fields, seafood without scales, cloven footed animals which did not chew the cud, bats, homosexuality or seething a kid in its mother’s milk. This is evidence of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It seemed the priests liked things in neat categories. Things which blurred the lines cause them mental anguish and they resolved it by saying the prophets had been told by God himself that these things were just wrong and no explanation would be offered or required. Men give, women take. Men wear men’s clothes, women wear women’s clothes. Men who wore women’s clothes or liked to take it were mixed up, wrong, and therefore against God’s plan. The fact that animals don’t observe those neat categories didn’t seem to matter. The priest wears the linen trousers and makes the rules.
The Hebrews had been avoiding eating pork for millennia, ancient archaeological studies clearly show that Canaan/Palestine had been in continuous occupation by tribes who kept pigs and other tribes for whom pig remains were conspicuous by their absence. Circumcision and avoiding cooking kids in milk doesn’t preserve well in archaeological sites but it would be reasonable to infer that there were cultural differences in religious taboos between the two competing tribal groups. I almost put civilizations, that would be a laugh, the only civilized people in the Old Testament are Egyptians and Assyrians, the Israelites and Judeans were technologically backward and lacking in culture compared to Egypt, Greece, Persia, Assyria and even the Philistines. They were scarcely a step up from the camel-eating Arabs.
Yahweh’s hang-ups were the hang-ups of his tribe and especially his priesthood. The commandment not to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk was clearly based on the signature dish of the “People of the Land”, the non-Hebrew people who built Jerusalem and most of the other cities of the land of Palestine, where their descendants still live, many in refugee camps. The Old Testament is full of admonitions on the Hebrews to destroy the non-Hebrew tribes of Canaan such as the Jebusites who built the city on the mount of Zion that David sacked and made his capital, after drafting in volunteers to live there. But despite dozens of wars they never managed to pull off the complete genocide which Yahweh kept demanding. Jews to this day still have a passionate fear of being polluted by Gentiles, and especially the Palestinians, by making the very thought of eating with the enemy unthinkable, by harnessing the power of disgust a powerful block on integration was established. If the very idea of sharing a meal with somebody makes you nauseous you are unlikely to want one of these eaters of disgusting food to be your wife, your son-in-law or your brother-in-law. It is also a possibility that the Hebrew religious instruction not to eat pork might have a sinister explanation as some of the Hebrew’s neighbours were believed to have engaged in human sacrifices at times, avoiding eating anything which smelt like pork would be a reasonable way of avoiding a genuine abomination. Of course human sacrifice and pork are both abominations in Islam too and so that Jewish taboo is well out of date.
I am quite prepared to explain to my children what the problems with stealing, adultery, drug taking and promiscuity are and under what circumstances they may not be wrong. I will not ever fall back on simply stating that they’re wrong because I bloody well say so. If I can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for a moral lesson then I will either not give it or admit that the best I can come up with is my own feeling, along with an explanation for why gut feelings often are helpful and are often rather universal and so presumably hard-wired into our nature. For example if I was hiding in a bush from a band of brigands who were about to descend on my home village I would feel it was moral to shoot an arrow at a chicken in the hope of alerting and saving the village but if the only target was a child I wouldn’t be justified in shooting at the child unless I knew I stood no chance of accidentally hitting the child even though the entire village was at risk. Explaining exactly how and why that is the case would be very hard other than to say that’s the way most people think regardless of their culture and so you would be as well to go with them unless you could come up with a very good reason why they’re wrong. Using people as a means to an end is just something that most people instinctively know is wrong. Using a chicken as a means to an end, as an intruder alarm or a pie filling, is reasonable, doing the same with a person is simply wrong. Always.
Of course my morality would not allow me to accept the scapegoat concept of forgiveness for my sins by the suffering and death of Jesus. That is immoral. That is using a person as a means to an end. Even a mythical scapegoat is still immoral. It is also immoral for God to declare mankind to be guilty of the sins of mythical ancestors. In my morality nobody is born sinful or guilty. Nobody can be held guilty for sins committed by their ancestors. It is barbaric. These days we don’t treat bastards as guilty of any sin. Still less do we follow the biblical concept of that sin passing down through ten generations, around 280 years! The entire concept of sin is deeply flawed and dangerous. People who claim that foundling children are rightly suffering for the sins of their parents are immoral monsters, only one step short of the pious scum who claim that blind beggars are carrying the sins inherited from a previous incarnation. Yes, isn’t the Dalai Lama a wonderfully kind spiritual man, as long as we overlook the obscenities he believes in and tries to spread. Nobody is born full of sin, nobody is born to suffer. Suffering is not noble, it is nasty and obscene. The optimum amount of suffering in the world is as little as we can reasonably achieve.
If a man beats up his wife she should leave him. There is no question about that. Fear has no part to play in true love. If you fear your spouse you don’t know how real love works. God it seems went to the drunken sailor school of family life skills. He gets into moods and smashes things up, he holds grudges, he has favourites among his children and he needs constant reassurance that his family love him or he is provoked to anger and violence. I have heard tales of fathers and husbands smashing the place up and feeding pet rabbits to the children but that is nothing to what the monster Yahweh gets up to. Just think about that fairy story of Noah’s Ark. God gets pissed off at the antics of the people of the Earth he made so he decides to kill them all. But he doesn’t just kill the guilty men, he doesn't show any form of targeting like he does later with the firstborn of Egypt he sets out to wipe away the whole of life on the planet with just one ship full of exceptions. That is not just wrong but it is insane. It goes beyond homicidal mania and genocide it is without a shadow of a doubt the most heinous act in all fiction with the possible exception of the Krikkit Wars. Yahweh makes Darth Vader’s attack with the Deathstar look like Peter Rabbit caught being a tad rascally Mr McGregor's garden. Nothing Satan / Lucifer / Beelzebub / Adolf Hitler / Genghis Khan / Pete Doherty has ever done come remotely close to it in terms of sheer destructive evil. Just think about it for a moment, all the men, women and children, all the cats and dogs and kittens and bunny rabbits. All of them. The heavenly psycho-bastard murdered them all in cold blood and he wants you to keep telling him how wonderful he is or else you might experience his wrath too. Sweet dreams, you're living in a universe created by a psychopath who will get you when you can't get away and not even death can save you.
Think about those crowds of Christians outside abortion clinics bewailing the death of innocent unborn children and yet every Sunday going to praise the name of the biggest killer of children born and unborn and the biggest drowner of kittens the world has never seen. There’s surely something just a little bit amiss with that picture isn’t there? Mass slaughter on a global scale and yet this guy is meant to love us.
On the subject of scale I find it deeply offensive when people use the word biblical to suggest something on a big scale. The world of the Bible was small. A mere couple of thousand miles across. You could hitch hike across it in less than a week, satellites track across it in three minutes. Just a few light milliseconds across, less than the range of Iranian missiles. In contrast the real planet is significantly bigger and the universe vaster on a totally different scale. The size of the universe is so big that the human imagination can’t grasp it all in one go. When I try flat out to get my head around it and fully appreciate (as much as is humanly possible) it takes me several minutes and several gasps and tears every time. Biblical? That really is an insult to the universe.
Of course it didn’t happen, but does that make it alright? Jesus believed it happened, as far as we can know anything about Jesus we know that if he lived he did not repudiate Yahweh but claimed him as his father.
Another thing we can learn about God from the behaviour of Jesus is that he is happy to get blood sacrifices. When Jesus visited the Temple he threw out the money changers but was quite cool with those selling turtle doves to be killed to glorify Yahweh or attract his attention. Apparently killing animals in order for them to be a burnt offering is perfectly reasonable but turning a profit in the Temple is abominable. Holocaust good, profit bad. Jesus did not say that his father found blood sacrifices objectionable, pointless, stupid, wasteful, superstitious or Old Testament. Jesus was an Old Testament guy. He had no other scripture, he had no other learning except the Old Testament and the endless debates about what it meant. It is absurd to distance Jesus from the Scriptures he loved so much and the hatred, filth and violence they stink of.
Do you love the police or fear them? The answer is usually one or the other. It is extremely rare for anybody to both love and fear the police. If you support the police the chances are that you don’t expect to get persecuted by them and if you fear being persecuted by them the chances are you don’t love them. But God is different. He has power without responsibility, he is answerable to nobody. He can make up the rules as he sees fit and break them as he chooses and if anybody points out an inconsistency that is impious impertinence which will surely be punished by eternal hellfire, a New Testament invention. Yahweh works by making up his own rules. He made a covenant with Israel. A covenant appears to be a one-sided promise with no negotiation. Israel didn’t get to decide the terms of the covenant. Of course Israel, Jacob, is a fictional character invented years later. Nations and languages don’t have single historical founders who are literally the father of a nation. That is clearly a myth. Jacob did not send his family into Egypt where they lived for 430 years emerging with just a single Egyptian word (Pharaoh) departing across the desert living in tents for forty years and yet never running short on lamp oil. Anybody would think it didn’t grow on trees. It’s an absurd claim. The absurdity of it can be clearly seen by reading the Bible, the Israelites knew about barley, they grew it, they supposedly lived for 430 years in Egypt being downtrodden and shat upon but never learned how to brew ale. Absurd!
A psychopath in the family, a pet saltwater crocodile and Yahweh. Can you think of anything else you can both fear and love? My advice for anybody in those circumstances is the same. Walk out the door. Don’t look back. Find a less dangerous and complicated love and don’t be afraid to ask for professional help.