God: An Evil Make Believe Bully Used To Frighten Simple People
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The identities of the authors of the Old Testament are unknown. The writings are the output of many very imaginative men. They’re also the products of many “cut and paste” jobs. There was no celestial dictator bellowing instructions from the clouds, just Iron Age bullshitters bolstering their own authority. The passive/aggressive love affair between God and man is fictional, because there’s no god; he’s just a make-believe bully used to frighten simple people.
An omniscient god would have ethical standards that were timeless and beyond question, but the ethics described are deplorable. These books contain obsolete, superstitious, and barbaric beliefs. They’re rife with immorality, jingoistic warmongering, racism, genocide, infanticide, bigotry, cruelty, rape, pedophilia, homophobia, and sexism. They’re clearly only a reflection of primitive people’s prejudices.
Some Christians claim it’s unfair to criticize the bible out of context. Yet in what context is it ok to smash babies onto rocks, rape children, disembowel pregnant women, kill people for sexual indiscretions, or commit genocide?
There’s never been anything new in the Old Testament. No science. No unique knowledge. No advances in navigation, astronomy or medicine. The Hebrews lived no better or longer than Greeks or Romans. They weren’t known as great philosophers, or healers, or lawmakers, or even as especially kind people.
That being said, the ancient Jews shouldn’t be judged by today’s moral and ethical standards. They didn’t know any better. The people were originally from different cultural and religious backgrounds. God’s laws were created and enforced by priests and prophets, petty rulers who needed to use fear as a means to an end. They weren’t the most socially aware, and were focused on forming a powerful and pure Israel, and preserving their own authority. To unite people under one God that all would obey would have required people skills, a heavy hand, and a fertile imagination.
Like all cultures of the time, they had different standards for the treatment of foreigners, women, and children compared to today. In twenty-five hundred years’ time, there’s no doubt some of our laws will appear primitive and barbaric. Some other cultures in ancient times were just as superstitious and backward as the ancient Jews. They did have some positive and admirable traits, such as a strong sense of community and a satisfactory social security system. Some of them obeyed the laws of the Roman Empire, which nullified many of the Laws of Moses. In practice, the people often ignored scripture, just as they do today.
Jewish priests had several centuries to perfect the art of inculcating their teachings into the next generation, and proto Christians took a leaf out of their book. Christianity launched Europe into the dark ages, and kept it there for hundreds of years, and thereby derailed the social, moral, and scientific progress of much of mankind. Without Judaism, there would have been no Christianity, and we would now be far more scientifically and ethically advanced than we are today.
To revere the nasty Yahweh is a dangerous delusion. It’s tragic that churches have taught the Old Testament literally described what to do, and set examples of what to do, in real-life situations. Throughout history many Christians and Islamists have blatantly ignored basic human rights. Consider the millions of real people; men, women and children, who’ve been slaughtered, burned, suppressed, raped, enslaved, or stolen from their families in God’s name, for instance in the crusades, the witch hunts, the Inquisition, the forced conversion of natives, the wars between Catholics and Protestants, and the holocaust. The Old Testament has been used to justify war, support slavery and capital punishment, suppress women and deprive citizens of free choice. It’s true that wicked men do wicked deeds, but if Yahweh had been a tolerant, peace-loving, open-minded character, it’s probable that some of these atrocities wouldn’t have occurred.
“God” has been the greatest inspiration for evil the world has ever known. In terms of duration of influence, lives lost and ruined, Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin are minnows compared to old Yahweh.
The Old Testament still taints some peoples’ attitudes toward non-Christians, women, war, science, sexual abuse, and homosexuals. Fundamentalist Christians are morally wrong in claiming that some of it might be divinely inspired, and then reading it with reverence in churches, thereby giving it credibility it doesn’t deserve. The myths, injunctions and poetry should be read for historical interest only, not with the bias of reverence.
It’s time Christianity’s spokespeople publically admit what many every-day Christians already quietly know; that none of it should be read as truth. They won’t do that because they’re too rigid to consider new ideas. How pure, real, and sensible is science in comparison! Science invites questioning; churches usually suppress it. If a scientific theory is proven flawed, it’s discarded and a better one replaces it. Scientists learn from their mistakes, usually no one is offended, and progress continues. No excuses or reinterpretations are needed. Christianity, on the other hand, is stuck with its ancient texts – and humanity has repeatedly suffered the consequences.
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Me at the pearly gate…
God: “did you believe in me?”
Me; “nope”
God; “why not?”
Me: “you should know, you’re God”
God: “I gave you no proof, did I!”
Me: “nope”
God: “I like honesty…here, have a beer”
LOL! Good one Mark.
I like being agnostic so when I shuffle off either I simply cease to be or……
God : “Did you believe in me?”
Me : “Not exactly”
God : “How do you mean?”
Me : “It was 50/50. Thought I’d hedge my bets”
God : “Fair enough. Heads you’re in tails you’re down in hell”
50% chance of paradise if God does exist. Better odds than you athiests! 😉
Nah Norman. An Agnostic is simply an Atheist without the courage to acknowledge it or the sense to realize it 🙂
I think I must disagree with the author. Civilizations have long worship a god or gods as a point of fact. As the priests began to spread out from the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth century they found civilizations with their own versions of god in the sun, the wind, the earth. The Romans had their gods as did the Greeks. Looking for an explanation for why certain things occur during a time when humans had no way of explaining them was on natural for humans. During the attempted conquests of England the Norsemen (Vikings) had Odin. As recently as 90 years ago in South America an undiscovered Tribe in New Guinea was found that had a god of the forest. Except for a couple of quirks in history most of us could have been Druids instead of Christians.
Much of the early things in the bible were more about populating the earth, having children to help with the rural farm chores, and, as they were discovered, keeping people from partaking of foods that would be unsafe (pork being a good example). An interesting aspect to the Middle Eastern early culture was that those who found a way to seemingly have a special connection with a god were also the leaders which was not necessarily true in other parts of the world. In Native American culture the religious person, or Shaman, was only an adviser. But, Mark Fulton is incorrect when he states that god, or gods, held back humanity. In the early going leaders used this as a way of organizing and protecting people around a certain theme.
Bill I do think that gods held back humanity as well as helping them move forward. I suspect if there were no gods to worship there would have been less wars, and less idle time, well, worshiping idols.
Mmmmmmm.
I must disagree. This is how I see it.
Backward Thinking and Divisiveness….
“But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
(Reg, leader of the People’s Front of Judea, from the film “Life of Brian”)
Jewish priests badgered their fellows into a fanatical reverence for scripture. As a consequence, most Jews looked backward by trying to rigidly conform to the last jot and tittle of the Torah, instead of being open-minded and flexible. They were obsessed with ingratiating themselves with their imaginary God, which excluded them from having cordial relations with gentiles.
Most people from conquered nations came to realize that while they may have had no great love of Rome, it was in their interests to be part of the Empire, because it usually bought them peace, law, order, and trade. The Palestinian Jews were different. They refused to learn from foreigners because their imaginary God had already told them how to live. They failed to adapt to what was then a more modern world, and suffered recurrent military defeats at the hands of gentiles as a result.
Their obsessive reliance on scripture meant they were subject to primitive law and ethics. They frequently fought and argued amongst themselves, partly because God’s rules were so open to interpretation. Their religious leaders, not democratically elected, who claimed to know how to interpret scripture, asserted an elevated status for themselves and taxed the people’s incomes.
At the beginning of the Christian era, an eclectic mix of Jews and gentiles wrote more stories about God with the explicit, but not admitted, aim of asserting authority over everyone in the empire. Some of these writings eventually became the New Testament. They instilled similar convictions in their converts, such as an injunction to obey priests, a reluctance to embrace new ideas, and an intolerance of all non-believers. Ever since the dawn of Christianity, Christians have been squabbling with each other and outsiders, just as the ancient Jews always did, and the baloney in the Bible is largely to blame.
Islamists also took a leaf out of the Jewish practice, to write their own version of scripture, the Koran, about 600 years after the Christians. It too is still being used to control people.
The human family is still suffering from belief in holy books, with Jews, Christians and Muslims at odds with each other.
“God is not the problem. God’s fan clubs are the problem.”
I normally agree with Ema Nymton, but in this case I have a question about that statement.
Isn’t it the “fan clubs” following what God supposedly wrote in the Bible that is the problem. This statement is correct:
“An omniscient god would have ethical standards that were timeless and beyond question, but the ethics described are deplorable.”
Even if slavery was acceptable in those ancient civilizations, an omniscient god would never, never have sided with such an inhuman institution. That’s just one obvious problem with the Bible and what people say is the inerrant word of God. We know now that it is full of errors, and even if we’re reading it as 21st century people instead of 1st century people, a god who supposedly created everything from multiverses to vibrating strings would NOT have made such egregious mistakes.
You will be cast down into the pit for your blasphemy Mr Fulton, and you will suffer for eternity. Shame on you, and may you be cursed until the end of your days by our almighty God.
You have got to be kidding! There is no pit, and no god. The sooner you realize that the better off you will be.
And you will sit in Jesus’ bosom and praise him for an eternity as a reward for gullibility.
I know where I’d rather be.
Have you ever paused to consider how weak your argument about the threat of hell is?
Consider priests and preachers. They threaten people with eternal damnation and bribe them with promises of heaven, in return for which they can control people’s behaviour and tax their income. This punishment, or the promised reward, never has to be delivered by them, yet they get to reap the rewards of the bribery. It’s a one-way con.
There is no God, no heaven and no hell.
When we die we enter a sublimely peaceful nonexistence.
I suggest you try and get on with getting the most out of the one and only life you will ever have, and try not to be a victim of corporate criminals sucking you dry.
A friend once convinced me to go to church to see what it was like. What struck me was the opulence, and then the hundreds of intelligent, reasonable people who were raising their hands to the sky, mumbling gibberish and otherwise acting deluded. How can intelligent, educated people believe in such obvious garbage?
Peter I had the same experience once. I was asked to go to a church service by my then girlfriend, who was trying to get me to join the army of the Lord. I saw huge screen TV’s all over the place, with each playing FOX News before the beginning of the service. During the singing I saw people I knew, a judge, a couple of lawyers, and a HS science teacher raised their hand to some supposed heaven. It wasn’t until the final hymn that I saw my doctor raising his hands and jumping up and down. I never went back to him. I want a scientist for a doctor not someone who may believe in the creation myth.
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“An omniscient god would have ethical standards that were timeless and beyond question,…”
God is not the problem. God’s fan clubs are the problem.
Ema Nymton
~@:o?
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You raise a good question Ema. If, however, we accepted that premise we would have to throw out the entire bible. Wait! What’s wrong with that?