HI, I’M ELOHIM: THE TROUBLE WITH GOD, (COLLECTED ESSAYS 2025)
CHAPTER 4: 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 an instruction manual 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
A fascist intergalactic empire-building God dances his chosen victims a merry rondo of the Sinai desert. God salivates over droves of domesticated animals driven to slaughter. Blood, blood, glorious blood drips from bullock horns and squelches the mud. A jealous God champs the bit from the idolizing of rivals — mere lumps of wood and ivory. God is on a mission to meet and mutilate and burn the lot — and sodium-ize Mrs Lot — and blot the land of milk-and-honey 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)
The writers of the Bible hand-stitched a holy handbook of genocide under the generalcy of an openly fascist God. ‘O shame! Where is thy blush! Rebellious hell’ (Hamlet III iv 83).
The fascist God of the Koran scares the living bejesus out of her readers with a horror-show obsession of Hell.
Joseph Smith in his poorly written Book of Mormon (… and it came to pass) maintains the meme that God must be mean and fascist.
‘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
Our Old Testament fascist God is muscling in on the action of a bunch of hairless apes, and God has a masterplan to whip her chosen few into fighting shape by making them shamble the desert for forty years.
Or is this desert-loving God leading us by the tail along a fools’ trail of camel doo-doos?
Archaeologists and historians have discounted this mad Exodus of Jah People [♪ cue Bob Marley music ♪] to a Sinai caravan of manna-heads, a round of sand sandwiches, a set of golf clubs, and waiting in vain.
‘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 an Israelite conga to the promised land. No Woman, no Cry. No evidence of Abraham, Moses, no evidence of any miraculous Israelite exodus — none … nada … neyept … except … a single line of hieroglyphics inscribed on the Merneptah Stela housed in Cairo: ‘Israel has been shorn; its seed no longer exists’.
Shorn, eh? Shorn. Sounds painful. So wadda we talking here? Handful of sheep-herders wielding pitch-forks — second-hand coat-of-many-colours for sale — and homicidal prophet urging future generations to genocidal mania?
‘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, knobbly-kneed band of sandal-headed archaeologists need not go shoving their little trowels in the desert for the left-over chocolate wrappers of an Israelite soul-train 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
This historical fuckery degrades unreliable the further back we dig. So why commit your soul on the never-never to the fake treasure of fascist fantasy?
‘Why are we relying on a collection of texts that are thousands of years old from societies completely different from our own? 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 devouring family’s members?