CHAPTER 5: THE MURDEROUS MISADVENTURES OF ELOHIM
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Professor Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion p31
How low can we go? To what base uses may we return? To the bowel-spilling privy-horror of the devil’s diary where tragically the religious wretch comes reading. O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible! Then is doomsday near. But yet I could accuse the Bible of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. And yet in my youth I did love you once.
... Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty:
Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there. (Hamlet III iv @ 42)
How in God’s name did the Abrahamic rump of the world’s religions mutate from so sadistic a book of murder and mayhem? It warms the very sickness in thy heart.
It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine and murder. For the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. And the Bible is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind. Thomas Paine
God o’erhangs the desert with a doom-laden cloud of dark threats. God salivates at the disgusting spectacle of droves of domesticated animals driven to slaughter. Blood, blood, glorious blood drips from bullock horns and squelches the mud. A jealous God champs at the bit from the idolizing of rivals — mere lumps of wood and ivory. God is on a mission to plague or famine or drown or burn the lot, and sodium-ize Mrs Lot, and allot the yellow dust of a land of milk and honey black-red with the Burgundy of a human abattoir.
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads. All this can I
Truly deliver. (Hamlet V ii 362-368)
How many honourable lives have been sacrificed on the altar of this vile volume of evil?
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is indeed no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world. H L Menchen
What then the difference the between God and a fascist intergalactic empire-builder?
This holy handbook of genocide is flawed with a fascist, fake, tribal, nationalistic God. ‘O shame! Where is thy blush! Rebellious hell’ (Hamlet III iv 83).
The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in our canon. Professor Noam Chomsky
For God’s favoured few is discounted to a caravan of camels, a round of sand sandwiches, and a set of golf clubs:
There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people — the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were — irony of ironies — themselves originally Canaanites! Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
No evidence of a public holiday to the promised land, no evidence of Abraham, Moses, no evidence of any miraculous Israelite exodus — no evidence except for one line of hieroglyphics on a slab of stone known as the Merneptah Stela housed in Cairo: ‘Israel has been shorn; its seed no longer exists’.
The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land [of Canaan] in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the twelve tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united kingdom of David and Solomon, described in the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. Professor Ze’ev Herzog
The khaki-shorted, deep-tanned, knobbly-kneed band of shag-headed archaeologists are resigned not to go poking their fingers in the dry dust and dirt of the desert for the wreckage of an Israelite soul train supposedly snaking the sand dunes for forty years.
However, one mutters a few sympathetic words for the forgotten and obliterated Hivites, Canaanites, and Hittites, also presumably part of the Lord’s original creation, who are to be pitilessly driven out of their homes to make room for the ungrateful and mutinous children of Israel. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p101
The Great Flood, the destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah, the Israelite invasion of the homelands and the genocide of its resident tribes — is this the summation and triumph of God’s masterplan?
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p102
Or was God making up the murder and mayhem as She went along? If genocide is the central theme of a narrative more historically unreliable the further back we trove, why commit your soul for treasure on the never-never to an afterlife of a fascist fantasy?
Why are we relying on a collection of texts that are thousands of years old from societies completely different from our own? Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, interview Nicky Campbell, Big Questions: Is the Bible Still Relevant Today?
Who in their right mind would want to make a covenant with God if only to prevent Her from pulverising those who refuse with a plague du jour?
The Biblical account of the Creation seems to be a meld of at least two minds; we have separate accounts of the Grand Covenant made between God and Abraham, and separate accounts of Moses tapping the rocks for gin ‘n’ tonic.
The identity parade of authors has acquired the name Documentary Hypothesis. The authors who hang with Elohim as the God of the hood are known as the E gang; the authors who hang with Jaweh are known as the J gang; and the Deuteronomy authors are the P & D gang.
Inspired? The Bible is not even intelligent. It is not even good craftsmanship, but is full of absurdities and contradictions. E Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning of Atheism