THE RELIGIOUS TEXT HAS A UNIQUE POWER TO CAUSE AND WREAK VIOLENCE
It is uncanny and frightening how there are many violent texts and movies about but a text invoking God and claiming to be his word and which calls for and celebrates violence can have people doing what it says so easily. It happens quite often.
The Christians regard the Bible as having been authored
by God and by man. It is fully the word of God and fully the word of man. They
compare this to the mystery of how Christ is fully God and fully man. Without
this doctrine, Christianity would have to say it is simply a man-made religion
that is searching for the truth about God. It would have to claim to be man's
thoughts about God and about what man thinks God has said. It would not be God's
action to save and enlighten the world.
The Bible God explicitly commanded that certain sinners be stoned to death. There are many other evils - a priest's daughter can be burned to death for sexual sin.
Christianity generally does not carry out these executions today. A tiny minority do. The principle of giving certain sinners a terrible shaming death was observed until a few centuries ago by Roman Catholicism and other Christian systems.
The Church says the Bible murders were right and God's will.
The Church recognises the authority of Isaiah who wrote
that anybody who does not speak according to the law of Moses and in agreement
with it is a fraud (Isaiah 8:20).
The Church honours Jesus who said that the Bible is from
God and does not err.
The Church takes its authority from the apostles - one of
whom wrote that Jesus is the go-between between man and God and gave the law
(Galatians 3:19-20).
The Church usually ignores the rules about killing today.
It is a worry.
If we look at human nature we worry more. The human being
is selective in her or his compassion just like everybody else is! She or he can
be glad that others are suffering and not loved ones. She or he can think that
those who suffer deserve it. Human nature often condones terrible treatment of
oneself and others for it relieves and keeps anger and hatred at bay and they
are horrible emotions. Human nature does not love good - it loves good when it
fits. Is that the kind of creature that should be respected for saying God lets
evil happen for a purpose and even writes violent commandments for a purpose?
And people are attracted by imperfection to one degree or another. Some like
everything to have another side, an evil side. Are they in a religion that
praises the God of the evil Bible because his commands were evil? Do you want to
be the kind of person who deliberately condones? You may do it because you see
many others doing it. Do you want to be the kind of person who sees inexcusable
evil, useless evil, the suffering of little babies, and who imagines there is a
divine purpose? That is very serious if there is no God. It means you fail to
understand fully what happened to the babies. You are not trying to. You are
excusing something that cannot be excused. You are hailing vicious ruthless
nature as God. To worship a non-existent God means you imagine that God has done
what God has not done. If you are decent, you will expect to be told if you are
making such a hideous mistake - the greatest one of all. Remember if you
believe, "God is right to let that plague torment babies to death though I don't
know why" you are saying you would do the same thing or try to if you were God
or if God asked you to run things for a while.
The rules have not been officially repudiated - there is
no apology for revering a violent Bible and no apology for condoning those
murders.
An official repudiation would involve denying the Bible
really is God's unerring book and asserting that it is responsible for great
suffering. It would involve asserting that the Church does not wish to set up
religious and social conditions that make it possible for such murders to
resume. It is immaterial that the Church may not actually send people out to
kill.
Whether the Christian knows it or not, he or she
represents a faith that refuses to detest religious violence completely.
People do good works - sometimes big ones - but are not
really good. A good doctor is not really a good doctor if he has abused a child
in his care even once. People point to the good works of Moses and Jesus and
call the Bible the good book. That is treated as a justification for not being
put off by the violence and the acceptance of violence commanded by God through
Moses and Jesus. It is a disgrace. The good is irrelevant. To use the good as an
excuse for embracing the bad is a further insult to the people corrupted by
those scriptures and to their victims. There is no excuse for not being in a
religion with scriptures that abhor violence. Or you could be a secular
humanist!
People of different religions do terrible things. Some
religions revel in bloodletting. A faith with peaceful scriptures waging war in
the name of faith would be strange. We do not find a faith like Christianity or
Islam murdering people and endorsing violence to be very odd. You would not
believe that a yoga group would murder and kill but you would believe a
Christian group would. You would believe it easily.
When you praise the Bible as being unerring in its teaching and doctrine, you
are saying it is right to say that God commanded that homosexuals be stoned to
death. That is to mention one evil out of many that it commands. This is extreme
evil. Respecting and approving of it makes you no better than those who picked
up the stones. To praise the Bible is to indirectly respect and approve the
evil. To praise the God of the Bible is to implicitly respect and approve the
evil. The evil being implicit or indirect does not make it any less bad. It is
still as reprehensible and intolerable. In one way, you are worse than the
killers for they had more chance of feeling bad about it than you!
Many say that a religion is not to blame for everything
that bad members do. It is to blame when it can stop them but won't or if its
scriptures command them to wrong others. A religion is to be firstly judged by
its source of authority be that a God or a Bible or a Prophet. An evil Bible for
example is a foundation for either an evil religion or a hypocritical one if not
both. Judge the authority. Then you may judge the role of the religion in the
evil that its members do.
A common tactic among believers in religion to say that the scriptural violence was
right in its time for it was done in self-defence or a just war or something.
You need proof that it was a just war but all you get is speculation and weak
evidence. Nobody has the right to approve a war on slender evidence even if that
war happened in 10,000 BC. What does approving say about you?
Some say, "The bad things my faith has done and which its
Bible says God did are in the past. We have moved on and learned from all that."
They are implying that if they were alive then and not today they would not
condone or participate. But they probably would. It is very likely that they
would for those Christians in the past who opposed slavery for example were very
few in number. The chance that you would live in 1300 and not want to see
heretics burned to death and witches murdered would be so statistically small
that it is virtually certain you would be as bad as the Church that destroyed
them. The chance that you would want them murdered by the Church is
statistically huge. It is arrogant to say you would not kill or enable the
killing if you were alive then. You cannot know that and you are using the
deaths of those people as an excuse to boast that you would have nothing to do
with it. If you say your religion knows better now, you cannot say it did in
1300. If you were in the religion and leave then you would be as bad as the
rest. Indeed you are in your heart for you should not be in a religion that has
done such great evil even if it has changed. The evil proves that the religion
is not immune to doing it - you are encouraging a religion and serving it when
it has no intrinsic power to avoid evil to a reasonable degree at least. What if
there is something subtle in the religious doctrines or some supernatural force
supporting the religion that leads you to execute evil when the time is right?
What if this kind of evil is intrinsic to the religion?
Liberal Christians claim that the Bible shows how God
gave revelation progressively, he helped the true and good religion evolve. This
is the excuse then for the violence commanded by God in the Old Testament. But
the history of the religion looks like there was no divine guidance at all and
any improvement came through trial and error. The talk about progressive
revelation can be used by any religion even a religion based on deliberate
hoaxes. To say that God let us murder and maim for he didn't think we were ready
to be told that it is wrong is disgusting.
The Christian view that slavery is bad but we were too
stubborn to give it up so God had to tolerate it and wean us away from it
progressively is an excuse for tolerating the intolerable. They want us to
believe that God accommodated his revelation to us by at first saying nothing
against slavery and when we were ready he got us to abolish it and see it for
the evil it truly is. That is just an excuse for saying that a collection of
books purporting to give us instruction from God are from God despite the
terrible moral teachings. With an excuse like that, you could write Mein Kamph
volume 2 and fill it with nice thoughts and say that it and Mein Kamph are
inspired by God.
Despite ordering that people be stoned to death, God "failed to provide his
people with reasonable rules of evidence to judge criminal cases".
Christians often say that the killings of babies in the Bible were justified for
they were going to grow up sinful anyway or perhaps killing them saved them from
a life of sin so they had a chance to go to God by dying early. So much for
being non-judgemental! It is the filthiest example of judgementalism imaginable.
Many Christians admit that if they were miraculously sent back in time to kill
the children they would.
The Catholic Church says that Jesus is the head of the
Church and the catechism says Christ is the Bible and the Bible is Christ. But
Jesus said in John 8 that it was okay to stone a woman to death for adultery as
long as those who stoned her were sinless themselves. He gave out to the Jews
for not killing men who cursed their parents. I would be concerned about a faith
like that getting too much power. It did heinous things when it was able in the
past. The pope saying capital punishment is a sin is lying. The Bible endorses
it strongly in the name of God.
Leave those religions of the Bible - they have no moral authority to call you a member or require that you should be one. To honour them is to honour their holy books indirectly. And those books are evil rather than holy.
