A newspaper here in London reported today 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.
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.
In addition to the many cruelties in the Old Testament, we have the bedroom escapades of Solomon, Esther and Ruth, the polygamy of Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon, the pornography of Song of Songs.... Abraham gave the Pharaoh his wife to sleep with so as to save his own life; Lot offered his daughters to be raped by strangers, so they wouldn’t bother him; his daughters later got him drunk, slept with him, and got pregnant. In Judges 19, a priest gave his concubine to a gang which raped her until she died; he then cut up her body. Is this the Word of God, or Law And Order SVU?
The message of the New Testament is also a bundle of joy: 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.
Once you get half a dozen books into the Bible, God is exposed as an immoral mass murderer 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. Sounds to me as though the God of the Bible is all about destroying life, not creating it.
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.
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 behaviours which improve the smooth functioning of the community, i.e. moral and ethical behaviour. 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, 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...
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?
And as I see the way parents, teachers and priests teach religion to children, I’m coming to the conclusion that Christianity is child abuse. Evangelicals, in particular, read their kids the horror stories of the Bible -- the Israelites committing genocide in the book of Joshua, Jehovah constantly killing or threatening to kill individual people or even all mankind -- and then terrorize children with fairy tales about spending eternity in hellfire. They inculcate a fear and hatred of new ideas. They teach kids never to question authority -- never to think, to decide for themselves.
And how can any parent tell their child that God killed his own son for no apparent reason?
They fill their heads with lies, superstition and stupidity. They want science out of the schools -- and prayer into the schools. They tell kids that observable scientific fact -- global warming, evolution -- is just plain wrong; why don't they stop medical schools from teaching anatomy and physiology because it proves that the virgin birth is impossible? Imagine what butchers our doctors would be.
Evangelicals, like the Nazis, target children deliberately, selling a dangerous product to vulnerable minds, like crack dealers. Children have a right to be protected from such abuse, don’t you think?
Kids should never be taught hate or ignorance. If kids were taught to think and question, instead of hating, there would be no suicide bombers.
And then they insist that one of the most dangerous things for children -- sex -- is the one thing they should never have explained to them, so they can be safe. Protecting children from the dangers of the world is admirable, but protecting them from knowledge of the dangers of the world is indeed child abuse.
If a cult brainwashed and abused children the way our established religions have, the police would be at the door lickety-split. Wouldn’t they?
Note: I've also heard good things about Ben Akerley's "X-Rated Bible".
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B8CY1-4TRHCD9-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=05a8a7bd7ea91986730c6a752bcf8fa9
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Why_the_Bible_isnt_such_a_Good_Book&in_article_id=646644&in_page_id=34
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They silently adored this Great Soul in the beginning, and spoke of Him with reverence, and sometimes raised their eyes timidly to His glittering dwelling-place on high.
And soon they learned to pray. When those whom they loved lay dying, they uttered wild lamentations, and flung their arms despairingly towards the mysterious Soul; for in times of trouble the human mind so imbecile, so helpless, clings to something that is stronger than itself.
As yet they worshipped only the sun, the moon, and the stars-and not as Gods but as visions of that Divine Essence, which alone ruled and pervaded the earth, the sky, and the sea.
They adored Him kneeling, with their hands clasped, and their eyes raised. They offered Him no sacrifices, they built Him no temples; they were content to offer Him their hearts which were full of awe, in His own temple which was full of grandeur. And it is said that there are yet some barbarous islands where men have no churches nor ceremonies, and where they worship God, reflected in the work of His thousand hands.
But they were not long content with this simple service. Prayer which had first been an inspiration fell into a SYSTEM of CONTROL, and men already grown wicked prayed the Deity to give them abundance of wild beast's skins, and to destroy their enemies.
They ascended eminences, as if hoping that thus being nearer God, He would prefer their prayers to those of their rivals. Such is the origin of that superstitious reverence for high places which was universal throughout the whole of the heathen world.
Then Orpheus was born. And he invented instruments which to his touch and to his lips, gave forth notes of surpassing sweetness, and with these melodies he enticed the wondering savages into the recesses of the forest, and there taught them precepts of obedience to the great Soul, and of loving-kindness towards each other in harmonious words.
So they devoted groves and forests to the worship of the Deity.
There were men who had watched Orpheus, and who had seen and envied his power over the herd who surrounded him. They resolved to imitate him, and having studied these barbarians, they banded together, and called themselves their priests. Religion -is divine, but its ministers are men. And alas! sometimes they are demons with the faces and wings of angels.
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