WILLIAM HARWOOD
Christian sects tend to regard the capricious rules in what they call the Old Testament as superseded. While they accept the declaration of Leviticus that the victimless recreation practiced by homosexuals is forbidden by their deity, they reject the same book’s prohibition of eating pork, lobster or cheeseburgers, or wearing a cotton-and-polyester shirt. They argue that their junior god, Jesus, changed the law, so that only those taboos Jesus endorsed are still valid. Their rejection of Leviticus’s death penalty for homosexuality stems from their dogma that Jesus abolished capital punishment. But while they reject the status of the Old Testament as unchangeable divine law, they accept it as a revelation whose portrayal of its paramount deity is totally accurate. It follows that, if the OT god was intrinsically evil when the OT was composed, then he must be intrinsically evil today.
Consider the following passage from Deuteronomy, chapter 7:
“When Yahweh your gods [dual-sex, generic plural] has settled you in the land you’re about to occupy, and driven out many infidels before you … you’re to cut them down and exterminate them. You’re to make no compromise with them or show them any mercy … You’re going to exterminate them in a massive genocide until they are eliminated.” (1) Jews see that passage as justification for the Likud Party’s continuing annexation of Palestinian land never recognized by the United Nations as part of Israel. Christians tend to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. I have yet to encounter a godworshipper of any stripe willing to concede that his Sky Führer was once a capricious, partisan, mass-murdering psychopath, but is much nicer now. But either the OT is a product of the human imagination, or its protagonist was and is exactly that.
Consider also Genesis chapter 3:
“Yahweh informed Eve, ‘I’m going to intensify your pain in childbirth. You will give birth to your children in agony. Your man is going to exercise authority over you’ … He informed Adam, ‘Wrestling food from the ground is going to exhaust you, every day of your life.’” Even if the crime of Adam and Eve had been far more serious than worshipping the Mother Goddess by eating the pomegranate that was her sacramental vulva, the imposed punishment is bound to strike the morally evolved as disproportionately severe—even if it had only been inflicted on the perpetrators. But the author of the fable was trying to justify Yahweh’s infliction of such unspeakable sadism on all humans. Not only did Yahweh inflict such monstrous atrocities on Adam and Eve; he did the same to all of their descendants. Hitler executed descendants of persons guilty of the crime of choosing to be Jewish. Can identical behavior be evil when Hitler did it but not evil when a god does it? Godworshippers think it can.
Genesis chapter 6: “The time came when humans had begun to proliferate upon the surface of the land … Yahweh then said, ‘Humankind must not retain forever the breath that is mine, since he is mere protoplasm. Henceforth his life is to be limited.’ Yahweh saw that the disobedience of humankind was great in the land, and that he was continually plotting disobedience in his heart [thoughtcrime] … So Yahweh said,’I'll destroy the humans that I created from the surface of the land … for I regret that I ever made them.’” Whether one sees the offence for which Yahweh murdered the entire human race, except for one family of his pets, as thoughtcrime, or the failure to grant blind, unquestioning obedience to an unelected dictator (as Syrians are currently refusing to obey their unelected dictator), it makes the genocide of Hitler and Stalin pale into insignificance. And believers hail such a homicidal maniac as a loving father figure? The filicidal King Herod was a more loving father.
It was the deity of the OT who perpetrated such atrocities. But the New Testament god is no nicer. Matthew 10:29 reports, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for one coin? Yet not one of them can fall to the ground except through your father.” The gospel author thus affirms that the reason 250,00 humans die every day is that the Christian sky father executes them.
The god of the Jews murders every human being ever born for the crime of being descended from disobedient ancestors. But having exterminated a human, it cannot punish him further. So when capital punishment strikes it as inadequate, it magnifies its punishment by the means reported in Exodus 20:5, “I Yahweh your gods, jealous Allah, will make the descendants of the third and forth generation of those who despise me, victims of the same crimes committed by their ancestors.”
The god of the Christians is subject to no similar limitation. According to Jesus (Mark 9:47-49), the god’s imagined enemies are going to be posthumously “tossed into Gehenna, where their maggot never dies and the fire is never extinguished. For Everyone is going to be pickled with fire,” That sadistic torture in an underworld Auschwitz is described as “eternal” (Matthew 25:41). And to guarantee that there will be no shortage of victims to barbecue with flamethrowers, Jesus explained to his followers (Mark 4:10-12) that, while he preached to them in plain language, “to those who are on the outside, all things are to be told in fables, so that in seeing they may see but not perceive, and in hearing they may hear but not understand, in case they convert and obtain forgiveness.” That speech alone shows Jesus to have been a sadistic psychopath. But there is more. He is depicted in Luke 16:1-9 as preaching a fable whose moral can be summarized, “Swindle those who can no longer be of use to you, and use the stolen money to bribe those who are in a position to do you good.” Reminder: While historians view Jesus as a mortal who may or may not have been a real person from history, Christians see him as the incarnation of their god.
The god of the Moslems is equally reprehensible. Only a statistically insignificant number of Moslems , and not all Christians, buy into the Big Lie that, despite their unrelated origins, the Christian “God” and the Moslem “Allah” are the same deity under interchangeable names. But even those Christians who believe that Christians and Moslems adhere to the same Sky Führer reject the Koran’s pretence to be a divinely inspired revelation from their god. Passages from the Koran that portray Allah as morally depraved will only convince such people that it was Mohammad, not Allah/God, who was an evil madman. Nonetheless, the point that the Moslem deity is every bit as evil as its Christian counterpoint is worth making. Consider:
“Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other …. Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience … beat them” (4:34). “Allah misleads whom he will, and guides to the right path whom he pleases” (6:39). “You are forbidden to take in marriage married women, except captives whom you own as slaves” (4:24). “Slay the pagans wherever you find them. Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.” (2)
The Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible and the Moslem Koran present dissimilar philosophies. But the one point on which they present identical portraits is that their paramount deities are as evil as Hitler, as insane as Caligula, and as subhuman as the Marquis de Sade.
(1) All translations are from the Prostestant Bible Correctly Translated, World Audience, 2010.
(2) Islam Unveiled, Robert Spencer, pp.1, 18, 29.