I’m an atheist (or possibly a pantheist in the Einsteinian mould), but I dearly wish that more people would read the Bible.

“What? Why?” I hear you cry, possibly alarmed and baffled.

The majority of humans on this planet claim to be theists. Of all the theists, those who self-identify as Christians make up the largest group. Christians, you may realize, are supposed to look to the Bible as the inspired word of God.

Bizarrely, though, it appears that most of the people who claim the Bible to be the word of God… have never actually read it! This, I suspect, has a lot to do with their opinion on the matter, because the Bible may be the strangest collection of sickeningly barbaric drivel and psychotic nonsense in the history of fiction.

Study of the Bible reveals that Abraham, the ultimate founder of all three “great” monotheistic religions, was a volatile lunatic, willing to slaughter his own son on the say-so of strange dreams and voices in his head. Anyone behaving like Abraham today would be confined to a padded cell for his own safety and for the safety of others.

Abraham’s ideas were not even original. Strict monotheism, notions of absolute good/evil, and ideas about free-will already existed in Zoroastrianism, an older religion that was clearly borrowed from by later prophets.

Although followers of Judaism do not generally proselytize, followers of its off-shoots, Christianity and Islam, certainly do – sometimes using ultra-violence and mass-murder to this end. Where Abrahamic religion really excelled, then, was in evangelical proselytizing. Abrahamic faith thus came to dominate much of the world, a position that it still enjoys to this day. This is why, even in an age of supposed rationality and reason, books like the Bible are held to be of singular importance, divinely inspired, containing the Word of God himself.

Some people even claim to derive their morality from the Bible. They cite examples such as the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from a mountain, to show that the Bible instils ethics and moral values.

Moses, with his tablet of stone, is a particularly terrible example for anyone to mention, regarding morality. Those who cite Moses as a potential role-model have obviously never read about him or about the kind of man he was.

Here is one telling example, straight from the Bible. The book of Numbers details how Moses and his tribe conquered the unfortunate Midianite people who had dared get in their way…

“And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.” (Numbers 31:7) “And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.” (Numbers 31:9)

You might find that savage enough, but Moses soon discovered that his men had been unduly merciful during the massacre of the poor Midianites. That is, the behaviour of Moses’s men had not been barbaric enough for his liking.

So this is what God’s favourite prophet ordered his men to do:

“Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” (Numbers 31:17-19)

In the view of Moses (and, presumably, his Lord too), it is perfectly acceptable to kill male children and rape female children, at least in the aftermath of a war. Myra Hindley, Ian Brady, and Adolf Hitler would all be equally fine role-models.

Jews and Christians may argue that, even if Moses appears to be a blood-soaked psychopath in the above passage and elsewhere (do the research yourself, by all means), the actual commandments of the Bible still make for a good moral guide, and they are a foundation of the law itself.

Really?

Imagine for a moment that your young son or daughter returns home from school one day, saying: “Mummy! Daddy! We learned about Hinduism in Religious Studies today - it was fun! I love Hinduism. We should become Hindus and worship Shiva and Vishnu. Can we?”

According to the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible, God has something very specific in mind for such occasions.

“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ unknown to you or your ancestors before you, gods of the peoples surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere in the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him. Your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death, and the hands of the rest of the people following. You must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.” (Deuteronomy 13:7-11)

You won’t hear many Jewish or Christian moderates arguing for a symbolic reading of this sort of passage. Anyway, in this case such contortions are explicitly forbidden by God himself in Deuteronomy 13:1 “Whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away.”

There seems no escape. If your friend or family member tries to “seduce you” into following a different god, you must savagely stone him or her to death, even if the poor victim is your own child. If, that is, you still honestly believe the Bible to be the word of God.

If such behaviour conjures up images of the Taliban butchering women in the dirt for crimes such as “blasphemy”, perhaps you should bear in mind that most of the Bible was composed by similar swivel-eyed peasants whose daily lives were ruled by insane superstition, and little besides.

You’ll probably want to argue that nobody stones children to death for heresy nowadays. Not even Bible-waving fundamentalists go that far. They’d go to jail if they tried.

But isn’t that the whole point? It is only by ignoring reams and reams of life-destroying gibberish in the Bible that any of us can live sanely in the modern world. The Bible is supposed to be the Divine word of God, but only by ignoring most of it can we live truly ethical lives.

Stoning kids to death for heresy may seem harsh, but the above quote from Deuteronomy is not an isolated example. Death is a standard Biblical punishment for many crimes and minor misdemeanours.

Any idea what the Biblical punishment is for taking the Lord’s name in vain? No? It is death (Leviticus 24:16). What is the punishment for working on the Sabbath? It is also death (Exodus 31:15). What is the punishment for cheeking your parents? Death again (Exodus 21:17). What is the punishment for adultery? Take a wild guess (Leviticus 20:10).

No civilized society would base its laws on the Bible. Any country that attempted to do so would soon find itself condemned by the UN and the international community.

What about theology, then? What does the Bible “reveal” about the God of Abraham and Moses? What is God like? Unfortunately, as it turns out, God isn’t very nice. He’s often rather creepy, in fact. And for plain horrible weirdness, little can beat the Bible.

The book of Numbers contains a bizarre little yarn about discontentment in the camp of Moses. Numbers, Chapter 11, tells how these people were weary and hungry, and not too sure why they had left Egypt. In the midst of their unhappiness they unwisely decided to complain… to Moses or to God, or both.

God’s initial response to this complaining was to burn some of the people alive.

“And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp.” (Numbers 11:1)

However, the people were evidently still hungry and still somewhat peeved, so they kept on moaning, saying “Who shall give us flesh to eat?” If they were starving, as the text seems to imply, you can hardly blame them.

Moses, unsure how to handle the situation, decided to put in a request with his God for some “flesh” to feed all the hungry mouths – some six hundred thousand of them, according to the story.

God was not exactly sympathetic to the plight of all these people. This is what he told Moses:

“Ye shall not eat one day, nor two days, nor five days, neither ten days, nor twenty days; But even a whole month, until it come out of your nostrils, and it be loathsome unto you: because that ye have despised the LORD which is among you, and have wept before him, saying, Why came we forth out of Egypt?” (Numbers 11:19-21)

Why indeed. If this is how God treats his followers, why would anyone be mad enough to follow him? Force-feeding his own chosen people with “flesh” until it comes out of their nostrils is very strange behaviour for a deity.

As it transpires, though, even this mad punishment was not harsh enough for God. Numbers 11:33 further tells us that “while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the LORD smote the people with a very great plague.”

Does God seem a bit… unhinged? This is nothing. God has much sicker ideas than this to fall back on.

Leviticus 26:16-45 is a tediously long and rambling list of what God will do to all those who won’t obey him, won’t listen to him, and who won’t repent for the crime of disobeying him.

To summarize with a few examples… God will curse you with terror and a “burning ague” that will eat your eyeballs. He will send wild beasts to eat you and your children. He will allow rival armies to come and massacre your people. He will attack you with pestilence and ruin the land so that you starve to death… On and on it goes, page after page, each punishment more deranged and brutal than the last.

Suddenly, in the middle of this list of insanity, you notice a punishment that is sick and revolting even by the standards of God and his Bible:

“And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.” (Leviticus 26:29)

So. If you dare to cross God, if you don’t repent quickly enough, there will come a point where he forces you to cannibalize your own children.

Whoever wrote “God is good” had a strange conception of omni-benevolence. Benevolent? The God of Abraham acts like an out-of-control delinquent, abusing every power that he has available to him. He’s like one of those young sociopaths you read about who spend all their time in the backyard, torturing insects and small animals. He has power over them, so he will indulge every sadistic whim. Richard Dawkins has accurately referred to this fictional monster as a “misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”; any reasonable person reading the Old Testament would be inclined to agree with him.

Some Christians, well aware of just how barbarous and weird the Old Testament is, attempt to distance themselves from it. Their attitude is that, however incoherent and sinister the first half of the Bible, Jesus comes along in the New Testament and undoes all the damage.

However, while Jesus puts a far greater emphasis on turning the other cheek (he’s nothing like the slavering butcher, Moses, for instance), he doesn’t “undo” anything in the Old Testament. He often refers back to the OT, and in every case he indicates that he believed it to be the historically-accurate word of God.

See Matthew 5:17-19, Luke 24:27, and John 5:39 among many examples of Jesus defending the Old Testament. Christians who try to distance themselves from taking the Old Testament seriously seem to be going against the unequivocal words of Jesus himself.

Jesus, though, is certainly the best source for morality within the Bible. Many atheists will acknowledge this fact. There is even an organization called Atheists for Jesus, proving that you don’t need to be superstitious to admire the man depicted in the Gospels. He is such an improvement upon monsters like Moses and Abraham because he broke with tradition and preached the Golden Rule, a tenet that can be found in many religions, and even pre-Christian pagan religions. The Golden Rule can be summed up as: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”

By sanctioning the Old Testament, however, Jesus condemns those who believe in his divinity to also look up to the holy thug who stalks the pages of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and all the rest. Or the cosmic halfwit of Genesis who can’t go from chapter 1 to chapter 3 without contradicting himself several times. Even for people who think faith is a valid reason for holding onto strange beliefs about the nature of the universe this must be intellectually and morally corrosive.

As for New Testament theology, we have Saint Paul’s creepy little theory of atonement for Original Sin, whereby God had himself incarnated as a man (Jesus) so that he could be tortured and murdered to rid the world of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve.

Sophisticated/moderate Christians no longer believe in the literal story of Genesis with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of course. The Original Sin can be taken as an allegorical story. There was no Adam. The story was only ever meant to be symbolic.

As Richard Dawkins mused in his TV documentary on religion: "Symbolic? So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a nonexistent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than barking mad."

Even if you did believe in Abraham’s God and Adam and the Original Sin (fundamentalists take note), the theory would still be barking mad. If God wanted to wipe away all of our sins, why not just wipe them away with a flick of the old magic wand? He’s meant to be omnipotent, after all. Why does he need to get himself hideously tortured and killed by some Romans centurions in order to do it? Does this strike you as the kind of stunt the God of Leviticus or Numbers would pull? The same God who will melt your eyeballs and force you to eat your own offspring if you don’t act like a sycophant around him? Where did the sudden personality bypass come in?

Yes, Saint Paul’s theory is utterly nonsensical and absurd, and yet widely accepted without question or criticism. Like the most of the Bible, then.

Here, to round this blog entry off, are a few of the things on my religious wish-list:

1. I wish that “Christians” who’ve never read the Bible would read it… no, study it, with a critical eye. How can you be indifferent to the book if you think the creator of the universe wrote it? Many such Christians, already on their way to atheism due to rejecting 99.9% of the gods that people have ever believed in, will probably end up ditching one further god and becoming atheists and agnostics themselves. You won’t know how confused and self-contradictory the Bible is until you’ve read it!

2. I wish that more atheists, particularly in America, would come out of the closet. American atheists are browbeaten into thinking they are a tiny minority, liable to be rounded up if the Christian majority ever sniff them out. However, it is estimated that there must be as many as 30 million atheists in America. That’s more than all the Jews worldwide, and yet the Jewish lobby is the more notoriously effective political force in America. If secular rationalists could assemble themselves into an equivalent lobby-group in America, the possibilities would be endless. There’s no strength in silence. Seek out like-minded people, form freethinking communities, and take America back to the secular values of the Founding Fathers. 30 million people make an extremely significant minority. The more people of reason that come out of the closet, the easier it will be for others to follow. You may even become the majority some day. Please.

3. I wish that some militant atheists would stop arguing that we censor the Bible or get rid of it. The Bible is one of the best pieces of literature we have for combating faith-based religion. It is so absurd and so barbarous that it is one of the best tools available to any rationalist trying to argue about the dangers of unquestioning faith.

4. I wish that we could hasten the death of the Abrahamic religions. It is a sad and perverse fact that the religions to have the worst impact upon societies are the most popular religions. Christianity and Islam are responsible for centuries of bloodshed, war and persecution. Christianity is the reason Galileo was locked away for the crime of revolutionizing our view of cosmology, and yet Catholic Adolf Hitler was never even excommunicated. Islam is the reason women can be hung from cranes in modern-day Iran for the crime of being raped. Socially, these religions continue to breed ignorance, backwardness, sexual repression, sexual neurosis, misogyny, fear, homophobia, the love of illiberalism, and suspicion towards any/all progressive thought. What are the main barriers that prevent us from progressing as a species? What eats our time and resources, what causes us to expend so much effort on trying to bring about ancient prophecies while waging wars upon private sin? Christianity and Islam.

5. I hope we can discover a new spiritual tradition to replace Christianity and Islam. When comparing these faiths to philosophies like Buddhism, we find that members of the Abrahamic religions are spiritual pygmies. This I put down to the emphasis in Abrahamic religion upon incurious faith itself. Buddhism is philosophical and, to a degree, investigative. Practitioners use tried and tested methods in their quest for enlightenment, seeking to vanquish the ego and recognize the illusory nature of the self, for instance. Buddhism promotes a worldview based upon empathy rather than condemnation. Jainism is another religion promoting love and peace rather than the subjugation of infidels. Compared to Christianity and Islam, it is a beautiful and non-violent religion. However, even Buddhism and Jainism are saddled with areas of pseudo-science, requiring some credulity, which may get in the way and discourage people of reason. I’m currently involved in a project trying to develop a spiritual tradition that we can use to fill the space left by the dying Abrahamic religions. This will take a long time, but stay tuned.

6. Lastly, I wish all of you health and happiness. If you value reason and science, go forth and multiply. You have a moral duty to lift your fellow man out of the abyss of ignorance. If you’re trapped in a belief-system containing spiralling mazes of circular logic, you owe it to yourself to step outside and taste a fine breath of fresh air. Peace and good fortune to you all.





A quick note: interested parties should check out the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. This is a useful (and sometimes very funny) resource that could save you a near lifetime of wasted time and misery in venerating such a silly text. While it misses one or two glaring contradictions (they come thick and fast in Genesis, for example) it picks up on enough silliness to establish the point it is trying to make. You can also find the Skeptic's Annotated Qur'an and the Skeptic's Annotated Book of Mormon on the same website.

Have fun!