Actually, for some time I've been puzzled: how is the Bible supposed to be a moral guide?
There are people who insist that the Bible is the only book you need, as a guide for morality. Well, I’m no expert, but the more I read the Bible, the more I get the impression that the Bible is too immoral to expose to children, and organized religion itself is child abuse.
Once you get half a dozen books into the Bible, God is exposed as an immoral mass murderer, jealous and paranoid, imposing cruel laws, a being who loathes the human race because we don’t love him enough, and can scarcely get through a chapter of the Bible without trying to murder or torment a man, a city, a country or all of mankind. And then killing his own son to drive the point home. Sounds to me as though the God of the Bible is all about destroying life, not creating it.
We can reject the Bible as a moral code because the people who are
identified in the Bible as the leaders of the faith are often the most morally
repellent of all. Joshua
sent his troops into the Holy Land and their first act there – the culmination
and reward for forty years’ wandering -- was to spend the night in a
whorehouse. Joshua is a whole book about how he launched a campaign of genocide
and ethnic cleansing upon all the Holy Land, with
Jehovah’s approval, killing man, woman and child, except the virgins,
save them for the soldiers! He undoubtedly got the idea from Moses in Numbers
31 – kill everyone including the children, but save the virgins for the party.
Kings
and Chronicles continue the story of endless war, murder and treachery. In 2
Kings, children are torn apart by bear and their heads are thrown in baskets
(ch. 10); pregnant women are sliced open (ch. 15). Psalms 137, dashing children
against stones; Zechariah 13, kill your child if he even mentions another
religion; cannibalism in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel; 2 Samuel, God creates a
three-year famine because the wrong people were massacred.
Abraham
“heard voices” and almost killed his son, before marrying his half-sister, and prostituting his wife to save his life, and Lot doing the
same with his daughters, who later got Lot drunk and seduced him. Jacob
deceived both his father and brother for personal gain. Rachel was a thief.
Moses’ first public act was killing an Egyptian. Ahab tried to disguise himself
in battle to save his life. Solomon with hundreds of
wives and sex slaves, in violation of Deuteronomy, writing Song of Songs which
is essentially pornography. David arranged for a romantic rival to be
killed, and shed crocodile tears over the killings of other enemies; one of his
sons raped his sister and another tried to overthrow his father. The bedroom
escapades Esther and Ruth. A priest
giving his concubine to a gang which raped her until she died, and then cutting
up her body. Joseph intended to abandon his pregnant “virgin” wife. Slavery,
senseless cruelty, intolerance, racism, masturbation, voyeurism, adultery,
bestiality, rampant polygamy.
When
the Jews were preparing their first great religious movement, from Egypt to the
Holy Land, God allegedly told them to steal the Egyptian gold and silver on
their way out the door. As soon as the Jews reached the promised land, they instituted
genocide, slavery and mass rape (although Deuteronomy bans murder for hire).
Solomon’s holy of holies, the temple, was built with slave labor. Elisha
watched as bears killed children who had mocked his bald head; then God sent
lions to kill Samaritan settlers who didn’t believe in him.
Incidentally the kings of the Holy Land were not only a wild bunch, they were truly erratic in making policy. They regularly made dubious political alliances in the quest for safety – Solomon even married the Pharaoh’s daughter. They enacted punishing taxes which backfired. A number of times they threw policy to the winds in dangerous times and simply trusted in God to protect the entire nation. Hezekiah showed a visiting Babylonian his vast rich storehouses, practically begging Israel’s eastern neighbors to invade and steal everything. They did not offer an example for people to follow.
The message of the New Testament is also rough sledding: God allegedly insists that even the most innocent of us are insignificant sinners who should cringe before him; he pretends he is improving mankind by murdering Jesus, but he is really just killing his own son because he can’t revenge himself upon mankind any other way, having experimented with mass extermination many times already. What moral lesson am I supposed to derive from that?
And of course the narcotic, hallucinatory nonsense of the Book of Revelation.
Scarcely an election goes by without at least one politician implying that he is morally upright because he follows the Bible. One would think that a leader who followed the Bible and swore his oath of office on the Bible would do as they did in the Bible -- genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, senseless cruelty, rape, infanticide, intolerance, racism, pornography, masturbation, abortion, incest, the death penalty prescribed for offenses that are minor or just plain silly....Any leader who was repellent enough to use the Bible as his moral guide would end up ruling like Caligula or Robert Mugabe.
A newspaper here in London reported not long ago that a professor of forensic medicine reviewed the Bible from the point of view of sexual crimes and deviant behavior, and found date rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, necrophilia, adultery, incest, sexual harassment, drug facilitated sexual assault, rape, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism, and bestiality.
Incidentally the kings of the Holy Land were not only a wild bunch, they were truly erratic in making policy. They regularly made dubious political alliances in the quest for safety – Solomon even married the Pharaoh’s daughter. They enacted punishing taxes which backfired. A number of times they threw policy to the winds in dangerous times and simply trusted in God to protect the entire nation. Hezekiah showed a visiting Babylonian his vast rich storehouses, practically begging Israel’s eastern neighbors to invade and steal everything. They did not offer an example for people to follow.
The message of the New Testament is also rough sledding: God allegedly insists that even the most innocent of us are insignificant sinners who should cringe before him; he pretends he is improving mankind by murdering Jesus, but he is really just killing his own son because he can’t revenge himself upon mankind any other way, having experimented with mass extermination many times already. What moral lesson am I supposed to derive from that?
And of course the narcotic, hallucinatory nonsense of the Book of Revelation.
Scarcely an election goes by without at least one politician implying that he is morally upright because he follows the Bible. One would think that a leader who followed the Bible and swore his oath of office on the Bible would do as they did in the Bible -- genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, senseless cruelty, rape, infanticide, intolerance, racism, pornography, masturbation, abortion, incest, the death penalty prescribed for offenses that are minor or just plain silly....Any leader who was repellent enough to use the Bible as his moral guide would end up ruling like Caligula or Robert Mugabe.
A newspaper here in London reported not long ago that a professor of forensic medicine reviewed the Bible from the point of view of sexual crimes and deviant behavior, and found date rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, necrophilia, adultery, incest, sexual harassment, drug facilitated sexual assault, rape, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism, and bestiality.
So
does church attendance make people more, then? Apparently not. Surprisingly,
evangelical Christianity does not lead to moral behavior: the red states with
more religious folks have 76 percent of the most dangerous cities, all of the
top states for burglary rates, almost all the top states for theft and murder.
It truly is possible to live and teach a child morality without a Bible in your hand – in fact it’s easier that way. A study run in the University of Virginia proves that morality is actually innate in humans due to evolution – as man evolved and began forming primitive societies, human development fostered behaviors which improve the smooth functioning of the community, i.e. moral and ethical behavior. And religion had nothing to do with it. In fact religion allows the immoral to pretend superior morality, substituting belief and ritual for real virtue.
I find it bizarre that priests who preach, but don't practice, celibacy, demand the right to lecture the rest of us on what morality is, and what "unnatural sex" is. Celibacy is the most unnatural form of sexual preference there is. So there’s another puzzle right there.
And that's before we even get to their antediluvian attitudes to marriage, divorce, contraception and a woman's right to choose. As though you want advice on love and marriage from the one guy in town who knows nothing about either one. Like having a blind man drive you to the airport.
And then the priests go back to their church raping their "housekeepers" and their "altar boys", and the wine and the candles and the incense. Isn’t it odd that the more modern society takes a good hard look at these religious people, with all the investigative power of the media and the internet, the creepier they look? Even beyond the rampant pedophilia in the Catholic church – unsurprising when you put the sexually repressed in control of the totally vulnerable -- there is the epidemic of financial crimes by churches and preachers, the sexual escapades, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker...
And along the way murdering and torturing thousands who were suspected of wavering in their faith, or accused of trying to demonstrate that man is an animal and the earth is a satellite. Three thousand years of moral crimes committed by men holding Bibles in their hands. And above all, the terrible moral crime of teaching fear, hate and ignorance to a hundred generations of children. Again wielding the Bible as the instrument of torture. An earthquake kills a thousand men, women and children, and the priest smirks at the weeping survivors and says “see, it’s all because you didn’t love God enough, and you didn’t listen to me.”
It truly is possible to live and teach a child morality without a Bible in your hand – in fact it’s easier that way. A study run in the University of Virginia proves that morality is actually innate in humans due to evolution – as man evolved and began forming primitive societies, human development fostered behaviors which improve the smooth functioning of the community, i.e. moral and ethical behavior. And religion had nothing to do with it. In fact religion allows the immoral to pretend superior morality, substituting belief and ritual for real virtue.
I find it bizarre that priests who preach, but don't practice, celibacy, demand the right to lecture the rest of us on what morality is, and what "unnatural sex" is. Celibacy is the most unnatural form of sexual preference there is. So there’s another puzzle right there.
And that's before we even get to their antediluvian attitudes to marriage, divorce, contraception and a woman's right to choose. As though you want advice on love and marriage from the one guy in town who knows nothing about either one. Like having a blind man drive you to the airport.
And then the priests go back to their church raping their "housekeepers" and their "altar boys", and the wine and the candles and the incense. Isn’t it odd that the more modern society takes a good hard look at these religious people, with all the investigative power of the media and the internet, the creepier they look? Even beyond the rampant pedophilia in the Catholic church – unsurprising when you put the sexually repressed in control of the totally vulnerable -- there is the epidemic of financial crimes by churches and preachers, the sexual escapades, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker...
And along the way murdering and torturing thousands who were suspected of wavering in their faith, or accused of trying to demonstrate that man is an animal and the earth is a satellite. Three thousand years of moral crimes committed by men holding Bibles in their hands. And above all, the terrible moral crime of teaching fear, hate and ignorance to a hundred generations of children. Again wielding the Bible as the instrument of torture. An earthquake kills a thousand men, women and children, and the priest smirks at the weeping survivors and says “see, it’s all because you didn’t love God enough, and you didn’t listen to me.”
Incidentally,
people who behave in a moral way only because of belief in God are not showing
morality, just obedience based on fear. Only freely-chosen morality is the real
thing, right?
Using
the Bible as a moral code must be particularly difficult for women. Following
on the model of Eve, men of the Holy Land equated women with temptation, and
compared idolatry to prostitution; Zechariah said wickedness has a woman’s
face. And women bore the brunt of the brutality in the Old Testament: mass
murder and rape, stoning for real or imagined sexual offenses, men twice offering
their daughters to be raped, the mass kidnapping of wives in Judges. Exodus
gives detailed rules for men who want to sell their daughters into slavery. In
Ezekiel, God wants to illustrate how Jews should mourn the loss of Jerusalem,
and he illustrates it by striking Ezekiel’s wife dead on the spot. One bright
spot is Habakkuk, who condemns date rape. The disciples were also completely
old-school regarding women and their obligation to obey their husbands, like
the Old Testament was; they also were very serious about women not braiding
their hair for some reason. Anyone who thinks the Bible can be relied on as a
moral code on issues such as homosexuality, needs to look at how women were
seen and treated.
And yet even the rigidly patriarchal leaders of Israel couldn’t hide the fact that women were key players in the Holy Land, and rather ballsy. Queen Athalia, who ruled as regent and killed off rather a lot of potential male rivals; Phebe, whom the misogynistic Paul entrusted with his all-important message to Rome; Priscilla, Paul’s travelling companion and probably the real author of the Epistle to the Hebrews; Judith, who saved the Jews by sneaking into the enemy camp, getting the Assyrian leader drunk, beheading him, and then bringing back the head, just to show off (great story). Proverbs 31, calling for strong assertive women -- wonder who wrote that one?
And of course Mary Magdalene, queen of many myths. I always wondered why the resurrected Jesus allegedly first appeared to women, who were less likely to be believed? That episode injects some unexpected humor at the end of the last Gospel: Mary discovers Jesus in the graveyard and, not recognizing him, takes him to be the gardener. There is a school of thought indicating that Mary was Jesus’ true right-hand man in his ministry.
So perhaps a woman could use the Bible as a model – by embracing the women who broke the Bible’s rules.
And yet even the rigidly patriarchal leaders of Israel couldn’t hide the fact that women were key players in the Holy Land, and rather ballsy. Queen Athalia, who ruled as regent and killed off rather a lot of potential male rivals; Phebe, whom the misogynistic Paul entrusted with his all-important message to Rome; Priscilla, Paul’s travelling companion and probably the real author of the Epistle to the Hebrews; Judith, who saved the Jews by sneaking into the enemy camp, getting the Assyrian leader drunk, beheading him, and then bringing back the head, just to show off (great story). Proverbs 31, calling for strong assertive women -- wonder who wrote that one?
And of course Mary Magdalene, queen of many myths. I always wondered why the resurrected Jesus allegedly first appeared to women, who were less likely to be believed? That episode injects some unexpected humor at the end of the last Gospel: Mary discovers Jesus in the graveyard and, not recognizing him, takes him to be the gardener. There is a school of thought indicating that Mary was Jesus’ true right-hand man in his ministry.
So perhaps a woman could use the Bible as a model – by embracing the women who broke the Bible’s rules.
