I have lost count of the write-ups and letters – some of them verging on panic and hysteria – published in local newspapers on the need to ‘protect’ the Catholic religion.
Let’s examine some religious beliefs, based on ‘the Word of God’, and see whether they are worthy of belief or ‘protection’.
“Consider first God’s moral character as revealed in the Bible,” wrote Elizabeth Anderson in an essay entitled If God is dead, is everything permitted? “He punished all mothers by condemning them to painful childbirth, for Eve’s sin. He punished all human beings by condemning them to labour, for Adam’s sin. He regretted His creation and, in a fit of pique, committed genocide and ecocide by flooding the earth.
“Look at what God commands humans to do. He commands us to put to death adulterers, homosexuals and people who work on the Sabbath. He commands us to cast into exile people who have skin diseases and who have sex with their wives while they are menstruating.
“Blasphemers must be stoned and prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burned to death. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. God repeatedly directs the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing and genocide against numerous cities and tribes. He commands them to show their victims ‘no mercy, to ‘not leave anything alive that breathes’. These genocides are, of course, instrumental to the wholesale theft of their land and the rest of their property.
“Consider also what the Bible permits. Slavery is allowed. Fathers may sell their daughters into slavery. Female captives from a foreign war may be raped or seized as wives. Prisoners of war may be tossed off a cliff. Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle or to persuade Him to end a famine.
“Here are religious doctrines that license or even command murder, plunder, rape, torture, slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We know such actions are wrong. So we should reject the doctrines that represent them as right. There is no way to soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications of these biblical passages.”
Christian apologists would observe that most of these transgressions occur in the Old Testament. Isn’t the Old Testament God a stern and angry God, while Jesus of the New Testament is all-loving? We should examine, then, the quality of the love that Jesus promises to his followers. It is not only Jehovah who is jealous.
Jesus tells us his mission is to make family members hate one another, so that they shall love him more than their kin (Matt. 10:35-37). He promises salvation to those who abandon their wives and children for him (Matt. 19:29, Mark 10:29-30, Luke 18:29-30). Disciples must hate their parents, siblings, wives, and children (Luke 14:26). The rod is not enough for children who curse their parents; they must be killed (Matt. 15:4-7, Mark 7:9-10). These are the family values of Jesus.
Peter and Paul add to these family values the despotic rule of husbands over their silenced wives, who must obey their husbands as gods (1 Cor. 11:3, 14:34-5; Eph. 5:22-24; Col. 3:18; 1 Tim, 2:11-12; 1 Pet. 3:1).
At the Second Coming, any city that does not accept Jesus will be destroyed. God will flood the Earth as in Noah’s time (Matt. 24:37). Or perhaps He will set the Earth on fire instead, to destroy the unbelievers (2 Pet. 3:7, 10). But not before God sends Death and Hell to kill one quarter of the Earth ‘by sword, famine and plague and by the wild beasts’ (Rev. 6:8).
In Revelations, we are further told that an angel will burn up one-third of the Earth, another will poison a third of its water. Four angels will kill another third of humanity by plagues of fire, smoke, and sulphur. There will be assorted deaths by earthquakes and hailstones.
Death is not bad enough for unbelievers, however; they must be tortured first. Locusts will sting them like scorpions until they want to die, but they will be denied the relief of death. Seven angels will pour seven bowls of God’s wrath, delivering plagues of painful sores, seas and rivers of blood, burns from solar flares, darkness and tongue-biting.
That’s just what’s in store for people while they inhabit the Earth. ‘Eternal damnation awaits most people upon their deaths’ (Matt. 7:13-14).
In a lecture entitled End of the World Blues, delivered at Stanford University in 2007, author Ian McEwan described The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, as “perhaps its most bizarre and certainly one of its most lurid.
“The cast and contents of Revelation have all the colourful gaudiness of a children’s computer fantasy game – earthquakes and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts, a scarlet woman, four riders, four beasts with seven heads, seven seals, ten horns, ten crowns, four and twenty elders...
“Thirty years ago, we might have been able to convince ourselves that contemporary religious apocalyptic thought was a harmless remnant of a more credulous, superstitious, pre-scientific age, now safely behind us.
“But today prophecy belief, particularly within the Christian and Islamic traditions, is a force in our contemporary history, a mediaeval engine driving our modern moral, geo-political and military concerns.
“The various jealous sky-Gods – and they are certainly not one and the same God – who in the past directly addressed Abraham, Paul, and Mohammed, among others, now indirectly address us through the daily news. These different Gods have wound themselves inextricably around our politics and our political differences.”
Robert G. Ingersoll, an American lawyer and orator, summed up the teachings of the Bible as follows: “If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane.”
John Guillaumier
St Julian’s