“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, 9 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.
Thus demonstrating that the loving God of the Bible is either a liar, or a lie.
If you look at Genesis 2 and 3, “Our Loving God” planted two special trees in Eden: the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warned Adam against eating from the tree of knowledge, because if Adam and Eve ate from that tree, they would be “as gods”. God said nothing about the tree of life. Eve saw that the tree of knowledge would make her wise; and when Adam and Eve ate the fruit they did become wise. God was horrified: in Genesis 3:22-24 he thundered that Adam had become like God and the angels, and he had to be thrown out of Eden so that he wouldn’t also eat from the tree of life. So he expelled Adam and installed cherubim to guard the tree of life.
Some argue that God was terrified that Adam would become as wise and powerful as God and the angels were. He saw his greatest creation....as a threat to “Him”. He condemned all mankind, for all time, to toil, pain and death....due to his own fear.
But if God was afraid of that happening, he didn’t need to plant either of those trees – he could have kept knowledge and eternal life all to himself, since he was omnipotent. Jehovah wanted Man to fail the test, so that God would remain superior, and in control. Planting the tree of knowledge, and then instilling an incredible thirst for knowledge in man, was simply tempting man on purpose, knowing he would fail the test and leave God in charge. An exercise in ego.
Of course this Genesis story was a myth concocted by a priest, to prove that men were sinful and inferior, and in need of constant guidance (for a fee) from God’s self-appointed representative, the priest. What a racket.
The Bible tells that Our Loving God pulled the same trick at Babel. Men built a tower which looked close to touching heaven, so God punished them, just because he felt the men were being uppity.
Moving on... Our Loving God demands the unconditional love of Abraham, insists he kill his own child as proof of his love, and changes his mind at the last minute. Jehovah later allows Jephtha to sacrifice his daughter to prove his devotion to God.
Jehovah demands that Moses take on the impossible task of building the nation of Israel out of a bunch of slaves. Moses achieves the impossible, over decades of backbreaking work. Then, fed up by 50 years of abuse from Jehovah, he has one moment of doubt. One moment in which his faith – not even his love – of God wavered just a bit. And for that, Jehovah banned him from the very country he created.
(And what he did to 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!)
Look at this guy Noah! I’ll force him to do some impossible stuff, like he’s pledging the world’s worst fraternity – build a boat the size of a football field, and fill it with every animal in the world! And for a finale, I will kill every man, woman and child on earth, because they didn’t love me enough. Look at all the water!
Then I’ll wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah for dessert.
Speaking of obedience, how about Job? Jehovah takes his most obedient servant and destroys his whole life, on a bar bet with Satan. Like the Duke brothers in "Trading Places", ruining their own nephew's life on a one-dollar bet. And when Job has the nerve to complain, Jehovah says "I'm God and you're not, so screw you. -- And I still expect you to worship me next Saturday." Such are the wages of obedience. What's the point, if you get screwed anyway?
As with God, so it is with his anointed leaders. Joshua is a whole book about how he launched a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing upon all the Holy Land, 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).
Oh, let’s see. Psalms 137, dashing children against stones; Zechariah 13, kill your child if he even mentions another religion; dead children throughout 2 Kings, cannibalism in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel; 2 Samuel, God creates a three-year famine because the wrong people were massacred. And through the centuries ...priests terrorizing all of Europe with inquisitions and executions and excommunication, with horror stories about children going to limbo, with incredibly dangerous and counterproductive claims such as the assertion that condoms don’t really work. 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.”
But in the first book of Samuel (1 Samuel 15), there’s a new twist. In that book, God commands Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites, and slaughter all the men, women and children. Saul does commit genocide, but he fails to kill one Amalekite fast enough to suit God, and also saves some of the Amalekite animals, so they can offer them as a sacrifice, to show their love for God. And for those reasons alone, God rejects Saul. Later, Saul is having trouble on the battlefield, and Samuel rises from the dead to tell Saul, again, that because of his failure to slaughter the Amalekites completely on command, Saul himself is condemned. Soon after, Saul’s army is attacked and he is killed. God condemned Saul for not committing genocide with sufficient brutality (1 Samuel 28). So, to win God's love, it's not enough to be a mass murderer. You must be a perfectly efficient mass murderer.
So, God loves us, huh...? Well, "His" book is one massive orgy of cruelty.
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The first century was a time when the masses of people had a very inordinate appetite for emotional stimulation. This abnormal craving itself can be understood even when its pathological character is recognized. Directly or indirectly it was due, more than to anything else, to the terribly depressing experiences through which society had passed during the wars that filled the years immediately preceding the Christian era.
For four hundred years wars had been unceasing. Greece had no sooner finished her glorious Persian Wars than she started that inglorious internecine strife which ended immediately in the exhaustion of all and the final snuffing out of Greek freedom by Philip at Chaeronea. Alexander's stupendous world conquest had been followed by the petty struggles of the Diadochi and the Epigoni, and thus the eastern world was filled with conflicts which did not cease until Rome's universal conquest. The Romans themselves had gradually extended their rule over Italy by a process of long warfare. They had made the Mediterranean a Roman lake by fighting Carthage to a finish, and finally in their own civil wars they had deluged the whole world with blood. Directly all these military operations had entailed terrible suffering for all classes. Quite apart from the killing or the maiming of combatants there were pitiful consequences for the non-combatants. Breadwinners had been drafted into service. Crops over large areas had been destroyed. Conquered lands had been plunged into debt and bankruptcy, while thousands of men, women, and children, formerly free, had been sold as slaves. The Mediterranean world had known war at its worst, and this long series of conquests, civil wars, proscriptions, and insurrections had produced an untold amount of agony.
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