Let’s read through the Bible and look at the main character, Jehovah. According to the prophets, he came out of the southern Arabian desert, from Yemen or Mecca, a long way away from Eden which was in Iraq. He brought with him another fascinating character, Satan (the name Lucifer appears nowhere in the Bible); the versatile demon begins as Lord’s loyal friend, and at various times serves as tempter, arguer, enemy, grave-robber (he fought with the angel Michael over the body of Moses for some reason), and “product-tester”, test-driving Jehovah’s product line of humans to see what they would do under stress.
The picture of God that emerges is that of a complete psychopath. Jehovah was a being that was so full of hate, even for his most treasured “chosen people”, that he could scarcely be restrained from killing large numbers of innocent people at one swoop. In Genesis 6, barely one-tenth of the way through the first book of the Bible, Jehovah had already gotten thoroughly sick of his absurd little experiment with his beloved Adam and his progeny. He limited the lifespans of men, and then got fed up and decided to kill off all of mankind except a tiny handful. Then, because he was truly in a foul temper, he killed off almost all the animals too – what did they do wrong? Kill the people, “and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” He later repeated this feat by killing all the first-born animals in Egypt while he was also slaughtering the first-born human babies.
Killing off almost all the human race in the flood didn’t cool his hate for mankind. Even as the flood was subsiding, and the only humans left were the tiny group he had chosen as the very best, God grumbled that “every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood”. As the Jews fled Egypt, God told them that an angel, rather than Jehovah himself, would lead them forward, because he hated them so much that if he went with them, he would become angry and kill them – then in the very next chapter he described himself as slow to anger.
Just before Jehovah killed Moses, he did yet another terrible thing. He told Moses that the Jews were going to offend him and he was going to have to start killing them again. And he forced Moses to sing a sort of prophetic song to the Jews about how God was going to punish them for straying, almost as a taunt to the wandering, suffering Israelites. Then Moses, possibly fed up because he knew God was about to kill him anyway, responded to God’s song by blessing the tribes, almost as a refutation of God’s musical taunt.
Through the Old Testament Jehovah made his hate for his people clear: he promised to kill two-thirds of them (and then all of them); he promised to make them eat their children and their parents. He begrudgingly said that after he caused the Jews to suffer yet again for decades, in exile, he would let them return home – not because they deserved it, but to glorify himself.
Sometimes Jehovah would even make a game of it, manipulating people into “sinning” so he could punish them. He instilled in Adam a thirst for knowledge and planted the tree of knowledge right in front of him, knowing Adam would reach out for it and “earn” punishment. He repeatedly hardened the Pharaoh’s heart so that the Pharaoh would reject the pleas of Moses and “force” God to punish not only the Pharaoh but also his innocent subjects. God also hardened the hearts of the Canaanites so they would fight Joshua and invite slaughter. Isaiah suggests that God even hardened the hearts of the Jews, to make them sin and invite punishment.
Indeed it seems that God wanted man to fail. In Eden he worried that if Adam and Eve ate both from the tree of knowledge and the tree of life, they would have the same powers as God, and wouldn't need to obey him anymore -- so he shut that whole thing down. He wanted man to fail, to keep him under control, and so he could feel better about himself.
Same theme in Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel. The people of the earth were one people, all speaking one language, and they liked unity and harmony. They built the tower only so they would have a place to gather, to keep them all together. There was no intent to insult God or threaten him. But God was afraid: he worried that if they built the tower, there would be nothing they couldn’t do – they would be on a par with God. “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, which they purpose to do.” So God made them all speak different languages and scattered them around the world, setting mankind up for 3000 years of warfare. Because God would rather have centuries of endless turmoil and misery, than have mankind united and achieving great things.
Jehovah also wiped
out large numbers of non-Jews too. The Egyptians, plague of locusts, famine,
killing all the children….We’re going to make that our holy day in the spring –
celebrating all those dead Egyptian babies, hurray. Then wipe out Sodom and
Gomorrah, just because.
On and on the misery went. God made the Jews wander in the desert and killed the ones who complained. He issued a truly draconian table of laws, with the widespread use of the death penalty, even for children (although weirdly he let Cain live). He told Joshua explicitly that he was empowering the Jews to kill the Canaanites because of their power to kill, rather than their moral righteousness. With no apparent sense of irony, Jehovah had the gall to tell David that he couldn’t build a temple because David had too much blood on his hands, whereas David with a hundred lifetimes couldn’t kill all the people Jehovah did. Jehovah’s behavior was so psychotic and murderous that even his son rejected it: when the apostles offered to punish a sinner with Old-Testament-style killing, Jesus stopped them and criticized them. But of course at the end of the Bible, in Revelation, the old Jehovah returns, killing almost all of mankind.
All this mayhem sounds crazy, right? Most of the other gods of that era were portrayed as benevolent or at worst indifferent: sacrifice at the altar and perhaps the gods will help you if they’re in the mood. Why would the Jewish priests go out and tell the Jews that they were being supervised by an all-powerful being who hated them and wanted every minute to slaughter them? Simple! So they could tell the Jews – “You must do everything we say, build us a beautiful building, and offer us food every day, or that crazy Jehovah guy will kill kill kill you! Only the priests can save you! Now, here are the rules…”
It was even decreed that during the census, every Jew must pay a tax to the priest, just so God won’t kill them. Now that takes chutzpah: pay me or God will kill you!
Year after year the priests told the Jews all the good luck that would come their way, if they only tried hard enough to follow the rules the priests imposed on them. Over and over the priests claimed that Jehovah made these very conditional promises: “Obey, and I will give you this land and make you prosperous, the king will have a son and long life….ooh, sorry, you fell short so, disaster, death, sorry about that!” God allegedly promised long peaceful reigns and the kings were assassinated over and over; he promised to free the slaves and didn’t deliver; he promised one king to withhold punishment until after the king’s death and then killed the king in battle. Then, just to cross up the Jews, God would throw them a curve: a good obedient king would be cut off after a short reign, and then a completely evil king would enjoy a long and destructive reign.
Then the Jews would notice that their fortunes seemingly had nothing to do with their obedience – “we kept the law and you forgot about us anyway!” And the priests, claiming to quote God, would switch to the Lucy-with-the-football gambit – “This time it will go better!” In Exodus, God “remembers” his covenant with the enslaved Israelites; Isaiah, he promises that he will never again let the Jews falls into the hands of their enemies; Jeremiah, he promises that never again will Jerusalem be in jeopardy; Ezekiel, he promises the Jews will never again be exiled. And of course all those promises were broken – those pesky Jews just couldn’t do enough to prove their love for Jehovah. So, the Romans conquer, Jerusalem falls, the temple is destroyed, the Diaspora, the Holocaust. Dang, how much sinning did the Jews really do, to deserve that?
This breathtakingly dishonest method was mirrored in the New Testament as well. In the Old Testament, the gambit was that only the priest could protect the believer from the bloodthirsty Jehovah. In the New Testament they added a twist: original sin, bequeathed to us by Adam, a concept hinted at by Paul and then codified by the church a century later. In simple terms, each of us was doomed to hell from the minute we were born, and the only way out was to obey the priest. And for 2000 years this stunning chutzpah has actually worked. They just assumed no one had ever read Ezekiel 18: the child will not share the guilt of the parent, which pretty much invalidates the doctrine of original sin.
When priests weren’t using God as a bogeyman to frighten believers into obeying him, they were instilling fear in other ways. The priests told the flock that the evil Egyptians enslaved them and that only God was able to free them – but historically that never happened. The priests claimed that the Canaanites were usurping the Jews’ birthright, the Holy Land, and only with God strengthening their swords could the Jews conquer them. Again, historically, never happened. The priests kept telling the believers that God and the priest had saved them from scary (and unbelieving) enemies, peddling stories of war and strife that were entirely imaginary. Sheer genius.
On and on the misery went. God made the Jews wander in the desert and killed the ones who complained. He issued a truly draconian table of laws, with the widespread use of the death penalty, even for children (although weirdly he let Cain live). He told Joshua explicitly that he was empowering the Jews to kill the Canaanites because of their power to kill, rather than their moral righteousness. With no apparent sense of irony, Jehovah had the gall to tell David that he couldn’t build a temple because David had too much blood on his hands, whereas David with a hundred lifetimes couldn’t kill all the people Jehovah did. Jehovah’s behavior was so psychotic and murderous that even his son rejected it: when the apostles offered to punish a sinner with Old-Testament-style killing, Jesus stopped them and criticized them. But of course at the end of the Bible, in Revelation, the old Jehovah returns, killing almost all of mankind.
All this mayhem sounds crazy, right? Most of the other gods of that era were portrayed as benevolent or at worst indifferent: sacrifice at the altar and perhaps the gods will help you if they’re in the mood. Why would the Jewish priests go out and tell the Jews that they were being supervised by an all-powerful being who hated them and wanted every minute to slaughter them? Simple! So they could tell the Jews – “You must do everything we say, build us a beautiful building, and offer us food every day, or that crazy Jehovah guy will kill kill kill you! Only the priests can save you! Now, here are the rules…”
It was even decreed that during the census, every Jew must pay a tax to the priest, just so God won’t kill them. Now that takes chutzpah: pay me or God will kill you!
Year after year the priests told the Jews all the good luck that would come their way, if they only tried hard enough to follow the rules the priests imposed on them. Over and over the priests claimed that Jehovah made these very conditional promises: “Obey, and I will give you this land and make you prosperous, the king will have a son and long life….ooh, sorry, you fell short so, disaster, death, sorry about that!” God allegedly promised long peaceful reigns and the kings were assassinated over and over; he promised to free the slaves and didn’t deliver; he promised one king to withhold punishment until after the king’s death and then killed the king in battle. Then, just to cross up the Jews, God would throw them a curve: a good obedient king would be cut off after a short reign, and then a completely evil king would enjoy a long and destructive reign.
Then the Jews would notice that their fortunes seemingly had nothing to do with their obedience – “we kept the law and you forgot about us anyway!” And the priests, claiming to quote God, would switch to the Lucy-with-the-football gambit – “This time it will go better!” In Exodus, God “remembers” his covenant with the enslaved Israelites; Isaiah, he promises that he will never again let the Jews falls into the hands of their enemies; Jeremiah, he promises that never again will Jerusalem be in jeopardy; Ezekiel, he promises the Jews will never again be exiled. And of course all those promises were broken – those pesky Jews just couldn’t do enough to prove their love for Jehovah. So, the Romans conquer, Jerusalem falls, the temple is destroyed, the Diaspora, the Holocaust. Dang, how much sinning did the Jews really do, to deserve that?
This breathtakingly dishonest method was mirrored in the New Testament as well. In the Old Testament, the gambit was that only the priest could protect the believer from the bloodthirsty Jehovah. In the New Testament they added a twist: original sin, bequeathed to us by Adam, a concept hinted at by Paul and then codified by the church a century later. In simple terms, each of us was doomed to hell from the minute we were born, and the only way out was to obey the priest. And for 2000 years this stunning chutzpah has actually worked. They just assumed no one had ever read Ezekiel 18: the child will not share the guilt of the parent, which pretty much invalidates the doctrine of original sin.
When priests weren’t using God as a bogeyman to frighten believers into obeying him, they were instilling fear in other ways. The priests told the flock that the evil Egyptians enslaved them and that only God was able to free them – but historically that never happened. The priests claimed that the Canaanites were usurping the Jews’ birthright, the Holy Land, and only with God strengthening their swords could the Jews conquer them. Again, historically, never happened. The priests kept telling the believers that God and the priest had saved them from scary (and unbelieving) enemies, peddling stories of war and strife that were entirely imaginary. Sheer genius.
Even today the Jesus
people say that “God loves you!”
Does he, now?
Only a particularly pusillanimous people could stick with a god as cruel as Jehovah.
No God could claim to be loving and merciful, and then give us mosquitos, flies, cockroaches, fleas, locusts, ants, bedbugs and boll weevils. And of course rats.
And the viruses for influenza, HIV, polio, foot and mouth, cervical cancer, chickenpox, herpes, Ebola, bird flu, smallpox, hepatitis, yellow fever, dengue, measles, rabies, meningitis and Reye syndrome.
And the bacteria for tuberculosis, bubonic plague, cholera, salmonella, typhus, diphtheria, syphilis, leprosy, anthrax, tetanus, botulism and Chlamydia.
And the potato famine spore, Multiple sclerosis and ALS.
And congenital defects.
And lymphomas, sarcomas, melanomas, carcinomas, leukemias and blastomas.
And floods, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, fires, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and blizzards.
And now the swine flu, which ironically has struck hardest in the one of the most religiously devout nations in earth.
No God who loved mankind would work so hard, to kill so many millions of innocent people, in so many cruel ways. Incidentally, Nine million children under five died last year, and another 9-10 million will die this year. Because God loves the little chillun so much. And their parents.
Does he, now?
Only a particularly pusillanimous people could stick with a god as cruel as Jehovah.
No God could claim to be loving and merciful, and then give us mosquitos, flies, cockroaches, fleas, locusts, ants, bedbugs and boll weevils. And of course rats.
And the viruses for influenza, HIV, polio, foot and mouth, cervical cancer, chickenpox, herpes, Ebola, bird flu, smallpox, hepatitis, yellow fever, dengue, measles, rabies, meningitis and Reye syndrome.
And the bacteria for tuberculosis, bubonic plague, cholera, salmonella, typhus, diphtheria, syphilis, leprosy, anthrax, tetanus, botulism and Chlamydia.
And the potato famine spore, Multiple sclerosis and ALS.
And congenital defects.
And lymphomas, sarcomas, melanomas, carcinomas, leukemias and blastomas.
And floods, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, fires, avalanches, volcanic eruptions and blizzards.
And now the swine flu, which ironically has struck hardest in the one of the most religiously devout nations in earth.
No God who loved mankind would work so hard, to kill so many millions of innocent people, in so many cruel ways. Incidentally, Nine million children under five died last year, and another 9-10 million will die this year. Because God loves the little chillun so much. And their parents.
The
extraordinary contrast here is between Jehovah and Satan. In the Bible, the
devil is Jehovah’s opponent and accuser, an admirable trait since Jehovah in
the Bible is a psychopathic monster; the devil tries to lead Adam and Eve away
from blind obedience to the monster and toward knowledge. In the book of Job,
the devil correctly points out that Job only puts up with Jehovah because
Jehovah hasn’t tormented him the way he tormented so many others. So Satan is
the Biblical figure who prefers knowledge and honesty to tyranny and cruelty.
And now, Jesus.
And now, Jesus.
You could absolutely make the case
that Jesus was crazy. A clinical analysis of his behavior would quickly lead to
the conclusion that he had one of the most severe forms of mental illness,
paranoid schizophrenia with strong delusional features.
The most prominent feature of his
psychosis was his broad pattern of delusions of grandeur. His ego was simply
spectacular: he said that he was destined to rule the world, that he was the
light of the world, that he had come to bring fire to the earth, that he was
wiser than Solomon in judgment, that anyone who is on the side of the truth
listens to him, and that his puny followers could do nothing without him.
Also in keeping with the pattern of
delusion, he claimed a close relationship with the local tribal deity, who as
we know is a really unpleasant fictional character. He said the kingdom of
Jehovah was coming any day and that he would rule it, that Jehovah had assigned
him work to do, that he could play Jehovah’s role in forgiving sin, and that
anyone who rejected him would be punished by Jehovah. He also said, while
dying, that he was going to Jehovah’s magic house.
He claimed magical superpowers: he
claimed that he saw the devil fall from heaven, that he found a devil in the
wilderness and argued with him, and that he himself could rise from the dead.
He claimed that his magic would save his followers when they were arrested: all
twelve of his apostles went out into the world with this “magical protection”,
and an astounding eleven out of twelve were killed while doing his work.
Throughout his life he evinced the
kind of erratic behavior one often sees in psychotics. When he was a child he
ran away for no reason and was not found for days. He insisted on eating with
the unclean, he repeatedly violated the law, he interfered with an execution,
he often spoke in bizarre riddles that even his friends couldn’t understand, he
killed a fig tree for no reason, he regularly went into the streets of
Jerusalem to insult essentially the entire population of the city, and finally
he built a whip of cords, went into the holiest of holy sites in the country,
and trashed the place.
And here is the critical point. Throughout
the gospels there is evidence that the people who knew him knew he was insane.
The people of his own hometown, who knew him the best and the longest, thought
he was nuts. Many who heard him “preach” thought he was insane. When he told
his own followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood, at that point most of
his disciples left. Even his own brothers didn’t believe his gibberish. Finally
his chosen successor denied any connection to him, his bizarre sayings or his
erratic behavior; at the same time his right-hand man agreed with the
authorities that he needed to be seized because he was too dangerous.
Accordingly he was arrested, and the people of Jerusalem were so unnerved by
his behavior that they told Pilate they’d rather put Barabbas – a notorious
criminal -- back on the streets than set Jesus loose. Then he was executed, and
right on top of his crucifix they nailed a sign denoting what everyone thought
of him: “this nut thinks he’s King of the Jews”. Afterward his chosen successor
admitted that the resurrection lunacy was untrue, and that Jesus really died,
and lived afterward only in spirit.
And this is all in the Bible. This
is according to the stories told by his closest supporters – the gospels. Imagine
what the rest of the people of Jerusalem would have said about him.
