Time and time again we are told by Sunday School teachers, priests, vicars and assorted
believers about a "Wondrous, Loving God", "All-
How perfidious, hypocritical and sickening this is! The reality is that the God described in the Bible is a petty, vengeful, jealous, genocidal maniac.
Let's look for a moment at some of the actions and ideas promoted and supported by this kindly old God and saintly Jesus.
First, the bible describes numerous examples where God wilfully directs or commands the wholesale slaughter of thousands of men, women, children and animals, for no other reason than that "his" people should have their land. A few choice examples, first from Deuteronomy 2:
33 And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons,
and all his people.
34 And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed
the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain
Just in case you missed it with a quick reading, let me just repeat -
This is no ordinary bible passage to be quickly skipped over in a casual reading. This passage clearly indicates that God has no compunction whatsoever in directing the slaughter of masses of people, even children, when it suits his purposes. Perhaps this is a verse that ought to be read out at christenings, just to let the parents know what they might be letting themselves in for…
And this from Deuteronomy 20:
16 However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance,
do not leave alive anything that breathes.
17 Completely destroy them -
This is an astounding passage. Here God tells the Israelites to seize the lands and cities of several other nations, and in doing so "do not leave alive anything that breathes". Isn't that a pretty good definition of genocide? Furthermore, didn't God himself create the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites and all the rest, as descendants of Adam? Why now would he choose one particular grouping of Adam's descendants and order them to annihilate the rest? How can anyone be anything but sickened and repulsed by the actions of this God?
And from Joshua 11:
20 For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that He might utterly destroy them, and that they might receive no mercy, but that He might destroy them, as the LORD had commanded Moses.
In this passage, it explains explicitly that God "hardened the hearts" of the Joshua's opponents deliberately so that they would come up against Israel in battle and be annihilated with his help.
Next, the account of what Joshua, at God's command, did to the inhabitants of Ai (Joshua 8):
24 And it came to pass when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants
of Ai in the field, in the wilderness where they pursued them, and when they all
had fallen by the edge of the sword until they were consumed, that all the Israelites
returned to Ai and struck it with the edge of the sword.
25 So it was that all who
fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand -
26
For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the spear, until
he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
Just so there's no misunderstanding here, let's just recap what this passage tells us. It tells us that God's people pursued the fleeing inhabitants of Ai out into the wilderness, and hacked them down with swords. They then returned to the city of Ai to finish the job, and ended up killing twelve thousand people, men and women, the entire population of the city of Ai.
Finally, on the subject of genocide, remember the famous story of the Walls of Jericho, often told in children's books and Sunday School, of how Joshua caused the fall of the city of Jericho by marching round and round it with his priests, blowing their trumpets? Here's how the bible describes the final moments (Joshua 6:20):
20 When the trumpets sounded, the people shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the people gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so every man charged straight in, and they took the city.
That, of course, is where the Sunday School lesson finishes -
21 They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing
in it -
In other words, Joshua and his army carried out indiscriminate mass slaughter against all the inhabitants of a major city (including a presumably large number of unarmed women and children), at the express command of God. Odd that the Sunday School teachers couldn't go just one verse further, don't you think? Or perhaps not.
Now just one appalling example of the indifference with which God seems to regard
his people, and the callousness with which he orders death on them for little reason.
Look up 2 Kings 2: 23-
23 Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up the road, some youths
came from the city and mocked him, and said to him, "Go up, you baldhead! Go up,
you baldhead!"
24 So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse
on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled
forty-
This is short story about the prophet Elisha, out walking one day when a group of
lads from a local village rush out and start shouting "Baldy!, Baldy!" at him. So
what does he do -
