Bible 4 Cruel God
Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999
The Cruel God
Let a petty dictator of a backward country declare that people should be tortured for not supporting his party and he would be decried by the government of every advanced nation. The United Nations would impose sanctions and a US task force would be despatched. Every western liberal and democrat would support these actions and give thanks to God when the tyrant had been deposed. Yet the very God they were thanking—the Christian God—behaves no differently from the petty dictator. Only those who have faith in the Christian God are saved. The others are sent for eternal torture.
A Christian minister sends every independent soul to hell just as his God does. He demands obedience just as his God does. The tyranny of heaven is repeated on earth and every tyrant quotes God for his authority. Is it credible that anyone today can preach such absurdities, such blind faith, such injustice and cruelty, as the Christian religion? Can anyone believe their own ears when they enter a Christian church? Can anyone explain how this terrible superstition has obtained possession of the mind, or how human beings can be so blinded and lobotomized?
What religion in the world sings of a God more cruel than the God of Judaism and Christianity? No religion of a civilized people has a more vindictive God. How can human beings sing let alone write hymns like Christian hymns. Vengeance and damnation are laid on thick. They are horrific.
Vengeance and damnation lie
On rebels who refuse His grace,
Who God’s eternal Son despise,
The hottest hell shall be their place.
Christians delight in images of hell. God would not be God without promising damnation.
How justice frowned and vengeance stood
To drive me down to endless pain!
But the great Son propos'd his blood,
And heavenly wrath grew mild again.
Christians sing of blood and yet more blood, sounding like savages and scaring children. Cruel sentiments influence the minds of the young more than those of adults. What images are kindled in the mind of a child by the precious blood of Jesus. To have faith in a God of wrath, demanding precious blood must brutalize the believer.
Adore and tremble for our God
Is a consuming fire!
His jealous eyes with wrath inflame,
And raise His vengeance higher.
Almighty vengeance, how it burns,
How bright His fury glows!
Vast magazines of plagues and storms
Lie treasured for His foes.
Those heaps of wrath, by slow degrees,
Are force into a flame:
But kindled, Oh! how fierce they blaze!
And rend all nature’s frame.
At His approach the mountains flee,
And seek a watery grave;
The frighted sea makes haste away,
And shrinks up every wave.
Through the wide air the weighty rocks
Are swift as hailstones hurled;
Who dares engage His fiery rage,
That shakes the solid world?
Thy hand shall on rebellious kings
A fiery tempest pour,
While we, beneath Thy sheltering wings,
Thy just revenge adore.
Man is like the God he worships, and history shows that the Christian church has been as cruel as its God. If God were good, could He have tolerated, in the twelfth century of the Christian era, seeing the cruelty of priests and hearing the cries of their poor victims when their bones were broken upon the rack or their flesh was burning in the flames? If God were good, surely when he saw these priests lifting up their voices to Him to invite His approval for the torture of their victims, He would have raged:
I do not approve. You lie. My command was not that you should murder each other. You are not doing my work. You are the heretics that you deliberately ignore my commandments and substitute your own.
There was no such response. Either there is no God or he was burnt as a heretic.
How can people love hate, vengeance, wrath—even in a God. Christians avow love but must grow into the true likeness of their God. Could that be why wars have got increasingly murderous? Is that why species diversity has fallen as the religious beast waxed. Is that why people savagely rape the earth which succours them? Throughout its lifetime the Christian church has been like its God—full of hate, malice and cruelty. If we must have a God, let us have one that has had the advantages of civilization. Western countries have become civilized and humane to the degree they have rejected the Christian ogre.
It is said in the Bible that God created man in his own image. In ancient times people thought it was literally true because God was a big man. Man was therefore a little god. Who today though could believe it? No one. Yet people remain Christians and call the Bible infallible. They are not reasonable. Their blind, foolish faith in the Bible can only hypocrisy or even dishonesty. If Christian ministers were honest, and had the courage of their honesty, they would tell the world that the being called God in the Bible was no God, only an idol of a rude and barbarous age. Worshippers of this God are a sad commentary on human intelligence and human integrity.
God is an avowal of human ignorance. God does not stand for a person, an object, or a thing. It is something not understood, the unknown, a primitive attempt to explain Nature. God is supposed to be outside the universe but that is to ignore the meaning of words. The universe must mean everything and therefore include God. If something is outside then the universe cannot be the universe. It has to include the God to be the universe. Nothing in the universe mankind observes reveals God. The word fits nothing yet discovered. People who say God are referring to nothing. Literally, they do not know what they are talking about.
Theology is the study of what is not there. It does not belong to the family of knowledge. The foolishness of trying to make God intelligible to human understanding is shown in the creeds of Christendom. Every theology ends in a creed. A creed is a sign that the intellect is moribund. A creed is the grave of thought. People who simply believe have dispensed with their brains. Belief requires no mental exercise. When faith is in, sense is out.
Yet God is omnipotent so He ought to be able to reveal Himself. Christians might say they have seen God in a cloud, or a tree, or the sunlight. Others do not see Him but the natural beauty of the cloud, the tree or the sunlight. That seems to be what the Christian means when they say they have seen God. They have seen something wonderful—Nature is wonderful! Who has really seen or heard God? No one. If anyone says that they have seen God, heard God, and talked with God, they lied. No human being ever had any knowledge of a divine being.
Is it worth it?
The Bible contains nothing particularly good, but a lot that is bad. Reading this book will give false notions, absurd ideas and bad concepts. The injury to the mind of children that read the Bible believing it to be a reliable book is beyond repair.
It is only useful as a relic of a barbarous and superstitious age, and to throw light on the evolution of ideas of God. The fact that there should have been such an evolution, and that it can be seen in the Bible should be sufficient to disprove anyone’s belief in God as an absolute or almighty.
Those who stand in pulpits and call this book the word of God are either seriously deluded or are charlatans. Since, nowadays, every clergyman has the chance of studying all that has been found out about the origins of religion and Christianity, the only conclusion can be that pulpit preachers are charlatans. They have not the muscle to be a labourer and earn a poor man’s living, the brain to run a business or study natural science and earn a comfortable living, or the integrity to earn an honest living, so they repeat this litany of superstition to prey on the doubts and fancies of the grief stricken, the fearful, the sick and the dying.
When the bible is universally recognized as the mythology it is, and the psychological vampires that invoke it are laid to rest, the world will be a better place. People might turn their attention to the here and now rather than dreaming of living forever in paradise, and begin to realise that our world is vulnerable and needs our help.
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