Jesus Was A Servant Of God and Not God Himself

Ethnic Cleansing Is Next To Godliness

The Bible and The Other

By Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

The way people quote the Bible, you would think it was “The Word of God.” Never mind that it has often provided the justification for horrible atrocities committed against those whom its words and interpretations have demonized as The Other.

One of America’s original sins is the horrific enslavement of– and then its continued discrimination against– people of color, in a white-controlled hierarchy of access to economic, political, legal and religious power. The moral rationale for dehumanizing them as the inferior Other is found in the New Testament: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.” (Ephesians 6: 5, 6) Here, enslavement was spiritually sanitized: just think of it as obedience to “Christ.”

Another original sin was the “Founding Fathers’” biblically-inspired belief that America was like “a city built on a hill,” the divinely-guided “light of the world” (Matthew 5: 14-16), a nation crowned with a canopy of “beautiful . . . spacious skies,” and with “God shed[ding] his grace on thee, And crown[ing] thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea.” (From “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” words by Katharine Lee Bates; music by Samuel A. Ward) “Brotherhood?” Except for the indigenous peoples, turned into inferior “savages,” i.e., The Other, who were not included in the “manifest destiny” of “God’s light-shedding grace,” and cast into outer darkness. The divinely envisioned Promised Land led pioneers to kill, drive out and corral indigenous peoples, which was “how the West was won” and settled.

There is more. Belief in the Holy Bible as the infallible “Word of God” provides the religious authority for certain Christian denominations– and many states– to continue demonizing and discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons as The Other. The spiritual violence against LGBT persons is legitimized by biblical passages, like Leviticus 20:13 in the Old Testament: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” And, in the New Testament, there is Romans 1: 26-32: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men. . . . They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die– yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.”

Certain Christian denominations will attempt to dissociate themselves from the biblically-inspired climate of rejection they help to foster, a climate that turns LGBT persons into The Other and leads to their being discriminated against, and even subjected to physical violence. Christian professions of “love” for these scripturely-defined Other, and the simultaneous condemning of their behavior as “sinful,” “unnatural” and “incompatible with Christian teaching,” are merely self-serving, face-saving theological denials—hatred masked as “love”– and said with a straight face. To try to separate who one is from what one does reveals a schizophrenic theology, rooted in fear and ignorance, that sins against another’s authentic identity and integrity. Here there is not “the gospel truth,” but the dumbing down of one’s deity.

The Bible engages in another sleight of hand in putting women down while placing them on a pedestal. Mary may be revered as “The Mother of God,” but her sisters are not lofty enough to be priests and ministers in certain of her “Son’s” Christian churches. So says Paul the Apostle, who is credited with writing almost half of the New Testament, and was the primary leader of the earliest Christian communities. “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission,” he instructed. “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” Why is that? Because “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing . . .” (1Timothy 2: 11-15)

Paul’s women-diminishing patriarchal belief goes back to The Bible’s story of Adam and Eve, whom “the Lord God” created and put “in the garden of Eden . . . to freely eat of every tree of the garden”– except “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” The serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit that would make her “wise” and “be like God, knowing good from evil.” Eve ate from the tree, and induced Adam to eat from it. “The Lord God” found out, and let Eve, especially, have it: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing . . . yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3) Thus Paul the Apostle not only declared that women could not be ordained as priests and ministers; they also were to be submissive to their husbands. “Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior.” And for emphasis: “Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.” (Ephesians 5: 22-24)

Christianity seeks to cushion—and camouflage– the biblically legitimized relegation of women to The “adored” Other. We are reminded that Jesus was very affirming of women, and that they were worshipful toward him. Never mind that all of his twelve disciples were men, which is used as a key scriptural argument for why certain Christian denominations ordain men only as priests and ministers. To counteract this reality, the religious work of women is repeatedly verbalized as invaluable– and it is! Never mind, though, that real equality involves the sharing of power, which is represented in certain Christian churches by a clerical collar or suit, and not a blouse or skirt. Thus certain male-controlled Christian denominations continue to have difficulty cutting the “umbiblical” chord of patriarchy. Contrary to biblical literalism that believes Adam and Eve’s disobedience represents the sinful “fall of man,” the opening of their eyes to “the knowledge of good and evil” represents instead the moral rise of humanity.

Christianity’s ingrained imperialism is prophesized in the first chapter of John’s gospel. Jesus is equated with “God.” His birth is announced: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus was “the true light” for “all people,” and “to all who received him” and “believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

This imperialistic Christian belief is also pronounced in the final chapter of Matthew’s gospel. A resurrected Jesus is recorded as appearing to his disciples and commanding them with, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore,” he continued, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (28: 16-20) Never mind that the doctrine of the Trinity (belief that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are separate and equal substances of the Christian god) was formulated some three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus. The early Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the fourth century; it then became the religion of the state, and Christians, with their imperialistic mission and state acquired power, began evangelizing the Roman world and persecuting the Jews.

It is no surprise then that a majority of evangelical Christians in particular acquiesced, accommodated, or actively supported a prayerful, “hand of Providence”-guided President George W. Bush in his prosecution of the criminal, falsely-based, pre-emptive war against Iraq—certain Christian leaders even seeing it not as a horrible war crime against humanity, but as an opportunity to convert The Other, i.e. [Muslims) to their Christ. (See “Young White Evangelicals: Less Republican, Still Conservative,” by Dan Cox, Research Associate, www.pewforum.org, Sept. 28, 2007; and “Rev. Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse,” by Shelia Musaji, theamericanmuslim.org, May 27, 2012) American exceptionalism and Christocentric belief are two sides of the same imperialistic coin.

People who believe they possess the one true religion, or see themselves in other biblical ways as “God’s chosen people,” are unable to affirm the inherent worth and rights of those who are different. Such biblically-blessed exceptionalism, rooted in a personal or political need to gain power over people or remain submissive, turns persons deemed less than acceptable into The Other, who become objects of paternalistic and predatory behavior. Here, ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. A final example is the State of Israel’s brutal oppression of the Palestinian people.

In seminary, I was taught that “God” liberated the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage and led them to The Promised Land. As the Bible says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt . . . and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land . . . to . . . a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites.” (Exodus 3:7,8) We seminarians were not encouraged to theo-moralize about the fate of the Canaanites and other indigenous peoples, demonized as The Other. Actually, preoccupation with theologizing itself often encouraged obliviousness to pursuing such moral implications.

The moral of the biblical story was that “the Lord God” created a covenant to reward oppressed faithful Jews with a homeland of their own. The morality of the story? We did not get into that. We paid no mind that “the Lord God” also said,

I will hand over to you the inhabitants of the land, and you shall drive them out before you. . . . And when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. . . . The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the people on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Exodus 23: 31; Deuteronomy 7: 1-6)

In my United Methodist Conference, certain ministers were granted stipends for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was about visiting sacred Christian sites where a liberating and crucified Jesus walked, not connecting with the sights of the oppressed Palestinians of today. It was actually about lifting the spiritual life of the visiting minister, not about liberating the physical lives of the biblically-victimized Palestinian Other.

Greatly needed here is the model provided by Fr. Michael Prior, C.M., Ph.D., biblical scholar, author, lecturer and liberation theologian, who wrote extensively about “the biblical mandate to commit genocide.” He focused on “A Land Flowing with Milk, Honey, and People.” (See “Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” in Burning Issues: Understanding and Misunderstanding The Middle East: A 40-Year Chronicle, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, 2007; see also Dr. Prior’s book, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, England, 1997, 1999) Teaching biblical studies at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, Fr. Prior responded to a Palestinian plea for “pilgrimages from the West to meet the Christian communities” in Palestine, to meet “’the Living Stones’ of the land, and not be satisfied with the ‘dead stones’ of archeological sites.” Thus were established “links between Christians in Britain with the Holy Land.” (Ibid)

Upon Fr. Prior’s accidental death at age 62, in 2004, one eulogy in particular cited his commitment to the “Living Stones” of the Palestinian people. “One of his constant themes,” the eulogy stated, “was to question the motivation of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land who view all the religious sights, but fail to notice or act on the sufferings of the people who live there.” Prior is then quoted:

How, I constantly ask myself, are such people so unconcerned about others being kicked out of their homes, children being shot, people struggling for survival against very oppressive forces of occupation? Instead of trying to give food to the hungry and sight to the blind, as Jesus exhorted, these people support institutions that make seeing people blind, put free people in prison and make the poor poorer. (“In Memorium: Fr. Michael Prior, C.M.,www.domusviridis.org.uk)

Fr. Prior confronted the biblically inspired belief that ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. He wrote, “The view that the Bible provides the title-deed for the establishment of the State of Israel and for its policies since1948 is so pervasive even within mainstream Christian theology and university biblical studies, that the very attempt to raise the issue is sure to elicit opposition.” (“Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” Ibid) He should know. In 2002, Fr. Prior’s invitation to present a lecture on “The Christian Churches, Zionism and the State of Israel” at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts was withdrawn. The reported reason: to “save Holy Cross some further unnecessary division,” as,”most of the Jewish faculty in the college were among the strongest supporters of the college and its Jesuit mission. They were worried about outside media attention.” Still, Fr. Prior’s tour across America included lectures at 15 academic and religious institutions, including Harvard. (“Fr. Michael Prior, C.M.: In Memoriam, Ibid)

Fr. Prior was not insensitive to the horrific oppression of the Jewish people during Hitler’s reign of terror. But, he stated, “Nor can the Shoah (Holocaust) be appealed to credibly to justify the destruction of an innocent third party. It is a dubious moral principle,” he added, “to regard the barbaric treatment of Jews by the Third Reich as constituting a right to establish a Jewish state at the expense of an innocent third party.” He added, “Until Israelis acknowledge their having displaced another people and make some reparation and accommodation, there will be no future for the state.” (“Confronting the Bible’s Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine,” Ibid)

Fr. Prior believed in a bigger god than the one for whom ethnic cleansing is next to godliness. “Namely,” he stated, “that God is fundamentally moral; and, for those espousing the Christian vision, that he loves all His people, irrespective of race, etc.” (Ibid) He had “no doubt that a future generation of diaspora and Israeli Jews will repudiate its presumptions and repent for the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinians by their fathers and grandfathers.” (Ibid)

This liberation theologian contributes greatly to the humanizing of The Other. He said,” It is high time that biblical scholars, church people, and Western intellectuals read the biblical narratives of the promise of land ‘with the eyes of the Canaanites.’” (Ibid)

“The eyes of the Canaanites.” Recently, some three dozen Palestinian villagers, joined by activists, set up a tent village on West Bank land that Israel intends to seize for settlement-building. Last Saturday, Israeli soldiers removed their tents, attacked them, and sprayed them with foul-smelling water. But the reported “villagers and activists refused to leave.” “Said one activist, Mazen Qumsiyeh, ‘It is our natural right to develop, reclaim, improve, use, and live on all our lands, free and without threats from the occupiers.’” They named their tent village “Canaan.” (“Israeli forces remove new Palestinian tent village in West Bank,” By DPA, HAARETZ.com, Feb. 9, 2013)

“The eyes of the Canaanites” are the windows to The Golden Rule and thus to every human being’s inalienable worth and rights.

Does The Bible Make Americans More Violent?

By Valerie Tarico
Courtesy of "AlterNet"

My friend Li is an Evangelical Christian and, in keeping with her family values she keeps an eye on what her children view and read. In the summer, she took her 12-year-old daughter to the Hunger Games. “It’s the perfect movie for her,” Li commented. “No swearing and no sex.” No swearing; no sex. Just people stalking and killing each other.

The Motion Picture Association of America agrees with Li’s priorities. So did the writers of the Bible.  Our love-hate-love affair with violence goes way back.

It goes way back, and it also appears to be changing. In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Stephen Pinker lined up information from a wide variety of sources to show that human societies are less violent now than ever in recorded history. Violence dropped precipitously with the agricultural revolution, and then again with the Enlightenment and more recently, with the emergence of universal human rights. In the U.S., recent decades have seen a decline in murder rates and gun ownership. This finding is counterintuitive for several reasons. We have become more sensitized to kinds of violence that once were accepted as normal, like child and wife abuse; modern weapons of war have made killings more dramatic; we forget how brutish our ancestors really were; and thanks to media, modern incidents of violence produce shockwaves of trauma that once were impossible. All of this obscures a long and vast trend line toward—it sounds weird to say it—a kinder, gentler world. A medieval British man was fifty times more likely to die at the hands of another man than is his modern descendant.

We might be even farther along this path were it not for a love affair with fantasy violence that, if anything, appears to be growing.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been rating sex, violence and profanity in movies since 1968, with the goal of limiting how much of each children absorb—or at least giving parents a tool that lets them make the judgment call. In 2006, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed the top grossing movies since the rating system began.  In fact, they reviewed movies all the way back to 1950. They found that explicit sex and violence had both increased over time, but that “ratings creep” affected only violence. Explicit sex is still reserved for “R” rated films; explicit violence is not.

Many parents naively trust that media targeted at young children are developmentally harmless even though brain science suggests otherwise. They similarly tend to assume that a G-Rating means a movie is low on violence. In reality, it may mean simply that the violence is less realistic or designed to trigger laughter rather than fear. A Harvard study published in 2000 reviewed every animated feature film produced between 1933 and 1999, 74 in total. At the time, the findings made headlines because they were startling:

-- Every single film had at least one violent act. The amount of footage devoted to violence ranged from 6 seconds to 24 minutes.

-- Most of the films showed physical fighting as a means of resolving conflict.

-- Characters used weapons including swords and guns and every-day objects.

-- In half of the movies at least one character gave violence a thumbs-up at some point by cheering or laughing.

A follow up  in 2004 showed that G-rated movies, like all others, gradually are becoming more violent. A 2007 study sampled 77 PG-13 films and tallied 2251 violent actions, with nearly half causing one or more death.  Researchers classified most of the incidents as “happy violence” meaning it was “cool, swift, and painless.” Today, by the age of 11, the typical American kid has seen almost 8000 murders on TV. Why? Because we like it that way. Movies that are rated R for violence make more money than those that are rated R for other reasons. We are attracted to violence and we are inured to violence.  Most Americans—not just my friend Li--find murder to be more acceptable fare for children than sex or swear words.

Our peculiar hierarchy of priorities may be due in part to the influence of Abrahamic religion on Western Civilization and the unique standing accorded to the Bible in American Christianity specifically. The Bible amalgamates the mythology and legal codes of a specific kind of culture: a clan-based tribal society in which herdsmen struggling for survival in an arid and increasingly denuded environment. Males competed to control females and territory while maintaining the purity of bloodlines and inheritance; gods that were modeled on warlords competed for fealty. Consequently, while codes governing sexuality and blasphemy were strict, codes governing violence were complicated.

Yahweh himself originated as a war god. Non-Hebrews were regarded with hostility and indeed, much of the founding story of the Israelite people comprises tales of triumphal genocide. The violence in in the Bible is so extreme that it defines vast portions of the book:

[Edmund Leach] looked at the Bible through the eyes of a communications engineer and asked: what message are these authors trying to get through to the reader? The answer, Leach thought, was that they were trying to obscure the fact that mankind began through incest (Adam and Eve) and so the strategy was to compile a list of atrocities so heinous that, in the end, the original incest would come to look like a harmless act.

Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.

Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans see ourselves as peacemakers. During the midwinter holiday season, Peace on Earth is sung from choir lofts and hung in shopping malls. We complain about our role as “policeman to the world.”  And yet, if we could see ourselves as others see us, we would see a people who, like the ancient Israelites have created unparalleled archetypes of violence: the Rambo, the mushroom cloud, the Tommy Gun, the Cowboy. Hollywood ensures that, even independent of the world’s best funded military, violence is one of our top exports.

I once rode a bus to a then small town in Mexico called San Cristobal de las Casas. The ride was my introduction to a new phenomenon that would become a bane during subsequent budget travel: video on buses and trains. It was also my first awakening to the level of violence we Americans export to the world as storytellers. Real dialogue can be hard to translate; psychological or social nuance almost impossible. But sex and violence are universals, which means they are even more ubiquitous in the movies that cross cultural and economic lines than those that don’t.

On this particular bus ride, the gratis entertainment was about a serial killer who was making snuff films. As we swayed around mountain switchbacks, the sound blared. Men, traditionally clad women, and small children pressed against each other, with no option but to face the screen depicting death scene after death scene. My savage hope was that the other passengers were motion sick like me and that the pairing of the film and switchbacks was conditioning a permanent visceral aversion to sexual violence.  Later that year, on an all-night bus, I would find myself assaulted by my first movie about people hunting people. The male lead was a hunky white supremacist, a farmer by day who secretly liked to hunt Blacks.

In movies, of course, it is the bad guys who do the unprovoked killing. Any violence perpetrated by the protagonist, meaning by us at a fantasy level, is vengeance or justice. Most people are deeply ambivalent about violence. We are both attracted and repelled by it. We enjoy and fear it. It turns us on and it horrifies us. Consequently, to get the satisfaction of a good blockbuster we need those bad guys to instigate things. The violence we like best is righteous violence, and—in movies and stories--most violence is just that. It protects innocence and restores justice. It safeguards women and children and the homeland.

Ironically, those who most relish the fantasy power of righteous violence are those who in real life are most likely to perpetrate unrighteous violence. Masculinity, the substance of action films, is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary thus: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men: a need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. Hypermasculine men hit women more, and a woman being pregnant is no deterrent. In the real world, tough guys are good guys until suddenly, sometimes, they are not. In the real world, most murders are triggered by the same motives we find so satisfying on the screen: righteous anger, a sense of violated fairness or honor, the outrage of feeling wronged, the conviction that the one murdered was the bad guy.

Most of us will never kill. These days, most of us don’t even hit. Even so, if we hope to continue the trend toward less violence, the challenge is not whether we can call up the heroism to face down villains and demons like those in our stories but whether we can continue to face away from our own dark fascinations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed the painful conundrum: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Who of us is willing even, to miss the next blockbuster? In The Hunger Games, the bad people are the citizens of the Capitol who demand that outlying districts provide sacrificial contestants for their high tech version of the Roman Coliseum. Movie viewers and readers root for the kids and scorn those who give them no choice but to kill or be killed, those who watch the blood sport for entertainment. But the books and movie work only because we, as readers and viewers, ignore the disturbing obvious: we arethe Capitol. The Hunger Games were staged for us; we are and always were the only intended audience.  Suzanne Collins offered us a chance to watch kids hunting and killing each other, and we ate it up. Did she laugh we flocked to the book stores and theater, as we downloaded DVD’s and shared dog-eared copies and checked sequel release dates? Did she cry? Did she care? Do we? 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

An Egyptian-Muslim Cleric Faces Blasphemy Charge

Ahmed Abdallah, a Muslim television preacher in Egypt, has been charged with blasphemy for allegedly desecrating a copy of the Bible.

Abdallah was videotaped burning the Christian holy book in a protest in Cairo earlier this month.

The preacher's case, along with cases of alleged blasphemy committed by Egypt's Christian minority, have led some to campaign for the country's laws to be revised to ensure the regulations are not being abused by lawmakers and prosecutors.

Christian Jihad

Laying Down The Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, 
Philip Jenkins, HarperOne, 320 pages 

By Patrick Allitt 
February 1, 2012 
Courtesy Of "The American Conservative"


Is it true that the Bible teaches peace and the Koran war? Only if you approach the books selectively, taking the gentlest of Jesus’ teachings and setting them against the harshest of Muhammad’s. Philip Jenkins’s challenging new book Laying Down the Swordshows that the Bible contains incitements not just to violence but also to genocide. He argues that Christians and Jews should struggle to make sense of these violent texts as a central element of their tradition, rather than hurry past them or ignore them altogether.

The most painful passages come in the books of Joshua and Judges, which Jenkins describes as an “orgy of militarism, enslavement, and race war.” The Israelites, emerging from the desert after their escape from Egypt, attack Canaanite cities, whose people are described by the biblical narrator as very wicked. God commands the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants—men, women, children, and animals alike, until nothing is left alive. Likewise in the Book of Samuel, King Saul eventually loses God’s favor not for his bloodthirstiness in war but for his restraint—he fails to annihilate his enemies. The prophet Samuel denounces him for sparing some of the Amalekites, takes up a sword, and personally hacks the captive King Agag to pieces. To make matters worse, says Jenkins, God sometimes deliberately “hardens the hearts” of other peoples, using them to chastise the sinful Hebrews. Then He raises up Judges, righteous Israelites, to smite and destroy them in turn. It’s almost as if He wanted the highest possible body count.

Jenkins offers a useful thought experiment, asking readers to view these stories through the eyes of the Canaanites themselves. To them, the Israelites would seem as terrifying as the Janjaweed militia of Darfur in our own day, or as the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, whose leader, Joseph Kony, has justified the mass torture and killing of men, women, and children in God’s name.

For centuries Jews and Christians have struggled to come to terms with these stories. One option was always to take them at face value and act accordingly. Crusaders in the Middle Ages, militant Christians on both sides during the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, and extremist Zionists in Israel today have taken the stories as evidence that killing your enemy without mercy is exactly what God wants. Sometimes, in their view, we must accept that God’s purposes are inscrutable but nevertheless just and righteous.

Similarly, the genocidal passages settled the consciences of European empire-builders between 1500 and 1900. They attributed “Canaanite” wickedness to their American, African, and Asian enemies, then exterminated them, noting that in doing so they had emulated God’s chosen conqueror, Joshua. One of the difficulties of becoming Christian for Native Americans and Africans since then has been God’s apparent willingness to victimize people like themselves en masse.

Another common approach has been to overlook or exclude these genocidal texts. In the Revised Common Lectionary, published in 1994 and now used by a wide array of Protestant and Catholic churches in America, the biblical readings recommended for every Sunday of the year carefully omit all the warlike texts while emphasizing the most benevolent themes in the Old Testament that prefigure Jesus’ message of peace, love, and social justice. “Modern preachers,” notes Jenkins, “regularly proclaim the confrontational and challenging character of the Old Testament, by which they mean the social radicalism of Amos, or the withering critiques of war and injustice in prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Yet few indeed are the sermons that explore the injunction to leave nothing that breathes, or condemn those who fail to kill the last victim.” He speculates about what would happen if a typical suburban minister were compelled, one Sunday, to preach on the text from Deuteronomy 7: “You must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”

Early figures in Christian history approached the genocidal passages in different ways. Marcion, leader of a highly influential Christian movement of the second century AD, argued that the God of the Old Testament, capricious, brutal, and violent, was the antithesis of the God of Jesus in the New Testament. His own proposed version of the Bible omitted the Old Testament completely. So, a century later, did that of Mani, founder of the Manicheans, who thought of divine history as a great battle between light and darkness and denied that the New Testament fulfilled prophecies made in the Old.

Arguing against the Marcionites and the Manicheans, some of the Church Fathers, including Origen and Augustine, denied that the genocidal passages should be taken literally. In Origen’s view they should be read metaphorically or spiritually so that the Canaanites or Amalekites were not actual groups of people, deserving of death, but the tendency to sin in every human heart, against which we should make perpetual war. At one point in the book of Joshua, for example, five kings hide in a cave until the Israelites find and kill them. To Origen this story meant not that the Israelites were murderers but that the five senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) are always at work in the “cave” of the human mind, always offering temptation, but that a truly religious man, with the help of Jesus, will overcome them.

Not until the Enlightenment did significant numbers of European intellectuals begin to use the genocidal passages to argue against religion itself. Some, like Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and a hero of the American Revolution, regarded the God disclosed by these passages as so morally inferior that no civilized people should accept him. In The Age of Reason he described the Old Testament as “a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” Paine became a radiant figure for skeptics through the 19th and 20th centuries. His most recent heirs include our own era’s leading atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Scholars of historical criticism offered yet another approach to the Bible. Starting in Germany and gradually coming to dominate the academic study of scripture, they recognized that the canonical books of the Old Testament were written in different times and places by different authors with different intentions. By now, biblical scholars are largely in agreement about the existence of four main traditions woven together in the Old Testament: the Yahwistic, the Elohistic, the Priestly, and the Deuteronomic. They have also shown that the familiar order of the Old Testament books is not the order in which they were written. On the contrary, Joshua and Deuteronomy, whose historical passages deal with events in about the 12th century BC, were almost certainly written 500 or 600 years later, at about the same time as the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Amos, whose peaceful and universalistic message appears to contradict them. In other words, the genocidal actions were attributed by much later writers, to men who had lived as remote from them in time as Christopher Columbus is from us.

Jenkins believes that these much later writers attributed to Joshua actions that never happened. Their motive was to exhort their own contemporaries to live up to the rigors of monotheism and not to let their attention be drawn away by the multitude of other gods, from the surrounding empires and societies, competing for their loyalty. He admits that praising their forefathers for genocide implies that they were familiar with the concept, but takes consolation from the fact that the pitiless massacres in question almost certainly did not take place.

Scholarly evidence now supports the idea that the Hebrews coexisted with many other peoples in the Canaan of the 12th century B.C. Archaeologists in particular cast doubt on the claim that a new group of marauders came out of the desert and annihilated pre-existing cities and peoples; the evidence of such massacres simply is not there. What really happened, Jenkins argues, is that the Deuteronomic writers, concerned about dangerous political and religious conditions, were “telling a story and at every possible stage heightening the degree of contrast and separation between Israel and those other nations,” not for the sake of historical accuracy but to send a spiritual message to their own people. “Israel had to kill its inner Canaanite,” so “perhaps the later commentators, Jewish and Christian, were not that misguided in seeing the massacres in allegorical terms.”

What does all this imply for practicing Christians today? In Jenkins’ view, ministers and worshipers should face up to the genocidal texts because they are an integral part of the Bible, whose Old and New Testaments, he believes, depend on one another. He invokes the authority of Martin Luther, who reminded the excitable first generation of Protestant Bible readers not to take any passage out of context, always to think of the overall meaning of a book, and to be attentive to the setting and specifics of a passage. Deuteronomy 7, for example, can then be understood not as a claim that it’s right for Christians to massacre their enemies but as “a call to absolute dedication.” If we continue to ignore or deny these texts rather than face up to them in their proper context, we will be taken by surprise when another fanatic uses them to justify murder.

That’s asking a lot of ordinary Christians because only sustained study in the historical-critical method can lead them to understand and share his conclusions. Jenkins must know he’s aiming far higher than most congregations are willing to stretch. As I reached the last chapter of Laying Down the Sword, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand this book is a wonderful example of the kind of rigorous work Christians must do if they are to retain intellectual credibility—Jenkins is doing just what Mark Noll asked for in his 1995 manifesto The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He’s also right to show the unreasonableness of thinking that Islam is essentially a religion of violence and war and Christianity a religion of peace. On the other hand it’s hard to escape the feeling that he is making excuses for the biblical authors. Perhaps it is true that they used the language of genocide only figuratively, but in doing so they gave warrants to people who not only committed actual genocide but claimed God’s blessing for it into the bargain.

Let me end with another paradox about which I would have liked to hear Jenkins’s thoughts. He encourages us to look at historical events from the vantage point of the weaker party, and he tells us that we need to reincorporate the genocidal passages into our understanding and worship. That got me thinking about another biblical genocide—Noah’s flood. We are all familiar with pictures of the animals lining up two-by-two and parading into the ark; these plucky survivors have become a staple subject for greeting-card artists, songwriters, cartoonists, even environmentalists. What we are not used to thinking about is the fact that God Himself in this story is committing genocide, killing everyone in the world except for the members of a single family. It’s a horrifying tale but one that our culture treats as colorful and uplifting, a prelude to the first rainbow. I’ve never heard a sermon on it as an act of divine rage and apocalyptic destruction. Perhaps that just confirms Jenkins’ general point that we should be a lot more self-aware and self-critical when we think about our religion and a lot slower to condemn the violent tendencies in the religions of others.

Patrick Allitt is a professor of history at Emory University and author of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History and Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985.

Rescuing Jesus From St Paul

Posted by Ronald West at 8:53 pm
August 7, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

It occurs to me when: ignorant people criticizing other faiths cannot get their own faith right, it should be pointed out. So it is with the case of the Koran burning by a small mind and those even smaller minds who give hate speech wide coverage in media.

Moreover, were we in the west to look closely in a self-examination of the facts, particularly those of us in the USA, it would become readily apparent there is a double standard.

If we held the American extremist sects of Christianity to the same standards we put upon Islam, the Southern Poverty Law Center would have declared so called ‘mainstream’ groups, such as the ‘Assemblies of God’ to be hate groups, based on their promulgating “Muslims are the children of Satan” in ‘advanced Bible study’ programs attended by both John Ashcroft and Sarah Palin.

Ashcroft introduced the torture of Muslims to American jurisprudence and Palin is curiously quiet on the matter of Christian extremism and with good cause. Her credentials might suffer were the more moderate extremists [oxymoron, I know] to discover Palin had been blessed against witchcraft by a Kenyan bishop from a community where people, including numerous children, are routinely murdered every year, following witch accusations by Palin’s fellow ‘charismatic’ Christians.

Perhaps it would be wiser to criticize our primary beliefs and let Islam produce its own critics in line with the teaching:

“You hypocrite. Remove the log  from your own eye, so you may see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” –Jesus

In the ‘Acts of the Apostles’, when the wind that is called spirit manifest in the miracle of Pentecost, there was no need for interpreters, everyone understood the other’s language directly. These were known languages, however different, commonly spoken in communities. These people had experienced something very different from that which has been handed down to the modern Pentecostal from St Paul.

St Paul was never taught by Jesus and in fact never even met him. All of St Paul’s information concerning Jesus was 2nd hand at best, and anecdotal. St Paul was not present at Pentecost. Jesus disciples, almost to a man, refused to meet with St Paul, a man they resolutely despised and mistrusted. St Paul’s relationship to St Peter is highly questionable and Peter was the least reliable of Jesus disciples after Judas. Jesus was constantly annoyed with Peter according to the gospels and the idea Jesus would found his church on Peter were words put in Jesus mouth by people with a political agenda, after the fact of Jesus life:

“Eighty-two percent of  the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were not actually spoken by him” according to the Jesus Seminar.

And relating to Paul specifically:

“For Paul, the Christ was to be understood as a dying/rising lord, symbolized in baptism (buried with him, raised with him), of the type he knew from the hellenistic [Greek] mystery religions.  In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role.” -Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar

Think about it. “In Paul’s theological scheme, Jesus the man played no essential role.”

That could also be stated ‘what ever Jesus had taught was irrelevant’ to Paul (if for no other reason than Jesus had never taught Paul, a man he never knew.) St Paul’s inventions concerning Jesus, adopted by the church and incorporated into the Bible have in fact largely supplanted the teachings of the authentic Jesus according to the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:

“The church appears to smother the historical Jesus by superimposing this heavenly figure on him in the creed: Jesus is displaced by the Christ, as the so-called Apostle’s Creed makes evident.”

St Paul was a self-anointed Apostle, that is to say he took it upon himself to claim his membership among the disciples of Jesus. Paul NEVER KNEW JESUS. Paul could not know Jesus intention except to rely on remote accounts or the accounts of people Jesus himself found to be unreliable (Peter.)

The contrast is startling between the two. The mystic Jesus was a tolerant man. The Greek language and Roman citizen Paul was intolerant, rules obsessed, and misogynist, whereas Jesus was none of these and had great respect for women.

The teaching of Paul versus Jesus creates a contrast so great, it would require to be a ‘Christian’:

1) Choosing between one or the other or:

2) A life in denial

In effect, the church has, since its organization under the Roman Emperor Constantine, and its subsequent scripture considered imperatively sacrosanct, demanded faith be founded on belief in a lie:

Jesus had taught not to make a show of your religion, fasting, faith or prayer (“Do not be like the hypocrites”) but instead to express your faith modestly and communicate through prayer in private. Paul taught organized worship in public. And it is in this ‘public’ scene of Paul the entire Pentecostal teaching falls apart.

To reinvent Pentecost, Paul had to come up with ‘speaking in tongues’, and then Paul had to invent ‘interpreters’ for the otherwise ‘unknown’ languages. Sorry folks, but neither was the case at the original Pentecost as described in the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ at which Paul was not present. It did not even remotely happen that like that. And the people who primarily follow Paul’s teachings, do not remotely resemble anything close to the lived and taught example of Jesus,

It is claimed that Paul, when traveling to Damascus to kill followers of Jesus, something he was keen to do, was blinded by a light identifying itself as Jesus. St Paul had later written “Satan is the author of all lies” and “The Devil masquarades as the Angel of Light.”

This begs the question: who did Paul meet on the road to Damascus? It was not the Jesus who gave the Sermon on the Mount… because Jesus never came back and said ‘Paul was right and I was wrong.’

It is pretty easy to see St Paul counterfeited the phenomena of Pentecost he could not duplicate. This is a dichotomy the Church has played down for the past 1,700 years, or that is since two mutually exclusive set of ideas had been incorporated into what had to become a schizophrenic religion with people from the same faith always on both sides of any major issue.

Paul had said Jesus return was “imminent” -that is any day- not still waiting after 2,000 years, he got that wrong too.

More from the scholars of the Jesus Seminar:

“The first step is to understand the diminished role the Gospel of John plays in the search for the Jesus of history.  The two pictures painted by John and the synoptic [Matthew, Mark, Luke] gospels cannot both be historically accurate.”

“The Fellows of the Seminar were unable to find a single saying [in John] they could with certainty trace back to the historical Jesus.”

“The words attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.. ..are the creation of the evangelist for the most part..”

“Words borrowed from the fund of common lore or the Greek scriptures are often put on the lips of Jesus.”

“The evangelists frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus.”

“We know that the evangelists not infrequently ascribed Christian words to Jesus-they made him talk like a Christian, when, in fact, he was only the precursor of the movement that was to take him as its cultic hero.”

“Jesus rarely makes pronouncements or speaks about himself in the first person.  Jesus makes no claim to be the Anointed, the messiah.”

“Jesus taught that the last will be first and the first will be last.  He admonished his followers to be servants of everyone. He urged humility as the cardinal virtue by both word and example.  Given these terms, it is difficult to imagine Jesus making claims for himself-I am the son of God, I am the expected One, the Anointed-unless, of course, he thought that nothing he said applied to himself.”

Jesus was a great man, not a hypocrite. Those who follow his Sermon on the Mount live intelligent lives, contrasted to: everywhere you see people following the teachings of  the liar Paul, the psycho-misogynist who’d introduced the worship of Jesus’ murder and the subsequent ritual cannibalism called communion, ideas Paul took from animal sacrifice in Greek Paganism, consequently you see organized Christian religions murder in the name of love while pursuing narcissistic intolerance, hate, violence and/or destruction.

“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” -Thomas Jefferson

Ronald Thomas West is author of Penucquem Speaks, ranked five stars by Howard Zinn at Amazon. A former sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces and past Investigator for a law firm aligned with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and Gerry Spence (Mueller Law Office, Austin, TX), Ron is co-author of the Mueller-Wilson Report with Dr Mark D Cole (International Law & Human Rights.) Briefly a professor at Johannes Guttenberg University, Ron is persona non-grata at the law school, after having taught a course on U.S. Constitutional Law as satire, in stand-up comedy format. A political exile and fugitive from American intelligence agencies since July 2007, other than the occasional analysis/exposé, presently Ron writes prurient satire from undisclosed location in Berlin. More of Ron's work is available at: http://www.scribd.com/Penucquem/info and his public email is: penucquemspeaks@googlemail.com

The Bible: Full Of Holes & Contradictions

After 2000 Years, The Bible Still Can’t Get Its Story Straight

“The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say."

- Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade

By Paul Richard Harris,
Axis Of Logic Editor
Sunday, Aug 14, 2011
Courtesy Of "Axis Of Logic"


I’ve been watching the drama unfolding in the United States over who’s going to be running for elections in November 2012, on the off chance that it’s actually going to matter to anyone, including Americans, which clowns get elected. As an American comedian explains it, ‘When you go into the booth, your choice is between two bowls of shit. The only difference, is the smell’.


But I’ve become even more agitated than I used to be because of all the damn Bible thumping. The United States is currently polarized between multiple views of the greatest con job ever – religion. In this case, it’s mostly Christianity. And it’s getting worse.

So here’s the thing – ‘The Bible’ is the authoritative text for Christianity. The first part of it is holy to the Jews; even the Muslims make some concessions to it and actually think Jesus was a pretty decent fella.


In the United States – and to a lesser but still powerful degree here in Canada – the Bible is THE authority. The Bible is the Word of God (always capitalized). It is referenced constantly as the sole arbiter on what is right or wrong, and is frequently used to back up an amazing array of arguments – whether or not the Bible actually refers to the issue at all. In the US, it is almost inconceivable that anyone could hold high public office without making clear that this book guides his or her every thought. That’s not so much of a problem in Canada, although there is a frightening increase in the evangelical movement here.


The problem is, whether one wants to believe the fanciful stories of the Bible or not, the book utterly fails to tells its own tales without contradicting itself. A lot. It’s pretty clear that either God needs a much better public relations firm, or a better editor. [Or perhaps a new book altogether. Personally, I’d recommend The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the only five-part trilogy, so far as I know. And in it, we do meet the creator of the universe. And his cat, whose name is Our Lord.]


Here Is My Main Thesis: If you are going to use a book as the basis for how you will demand that everyone else should run their lives, and use that same book to dictate what kind of government and society people live must with, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use a book that isn’t so full of holes you could drive several trucks though it?


I’m reading here from The New English Bible with Apocrypha, Oxford Study Edition, 1972. So the text might not be identical to what is found in other versions, but it’s going to be damn close:


The Almighty Himself

God is happy with all he has created (Gen 1:31)

God is unhappy with at least one of his creations (us), and he was grieved (Gen 6.6)

God dwells in chosen temples (2 Chron 7:12, 16)

No he doesn’t (Acts 7:48)

God dwells in light (1 Tim 6:16)

God dwells in the dark (1 Kings 8:12, Ps 18:11, 97:2)

You can see and hear God (Ex 24:9-11, 33:11 33:23, Gen 3:9-10, 32:30, Is 6:1)

God is invisible and can’t be heard (John 1:18, 5:37, Ex 33:20, 1 Tim 6:16)

God is never tired, never rests (Is 40:28)

God gets tuckered out, needs a nap (Ex 31:17)

God is everywhere, sees everything, knows everything (Prov 15:3, Ps 139:7-10, Job 34:21-22)

God isn’t always around, and there’s stuff he doesn’t see or know (Gen 3:8, 11:5, 18:20-21)

God knows what in men’s hearts (Acts 1:24, Ps 139:2-3)

God tests men, to find out what is in their hearts (Deut 8:22, 13:3, Gen 22:12)

God is all powerful (Jer 32:27, Matt 19:26)

God is not all powerful (Judges 1:19)

God never changes (James 1:17, Mal 3:6, Ez 24:14, Num 23:19

God is changeable (Gen 6:6, Jonah 3:10, 1 Sam 2:30-31, 2 Kings 20:1, 4-6, Ex 33:1, 3, 14, 17)

God is just and impartial (Ps 92:15, Gen 18:25, Deut 32:4, Rom 2:11, Ez 18:25)

God is unjust and partial (Gen 9:25, Ex 20:5, Rom 9:11-13, Matt 13:12)

God is the creator of evil (Lam 3:38, Jer 18:11, Is 45:7, Amos 3:6, Ez 20:25)

God did not create evil (1 Cor 14:23, Deut 32:4, James 1:13)

God will give freely to whomever will ask (James 1:5, Luke 11:10)

God withholds blessings, and deliberately prevents men from receiving them (John 12:40, Josh 11:20, Is 63:17)

God can be found by anyone who looks for him (Matt 7:8, Prov 8:17)

God likes hide-n’-seek, refuses to be found (Prov 1:28)

God is warlike (Ex 15:3, Is 51:15)

God is a peaceful guy, and not warlike hardly at all, despite overwhelming contrary evidence (Romans 15:33, 1 Cor 14:33)

God is cruel, unmerciful, destructive, and ferocious (Jer 13:14, Deut 7:16, 1 Sam 6:19, 15:2-3)

God is actually a nice guy - kind, merciful, and good (James 5:11, Lam 3:33, 1 Chron 16:34, Ez 18:32, Ps 25:8, 145:9, 1 Tim 2:4, 1 John 4:16)

God's anger is fierce, and he holds a grudge (Num 25:4, 32:13, Jer 17:4)

God is slow to anger, and it only lasts for a minute (Ps 30:5, 103.8)

God commands, approves of, and delights in burnt offerings, sacrifices, and holy days, likes to party (Ex 29:18, 36, Lev 1:9, 23:27) 

God disapproves of and gets no pleasure from burnt offerings, sacrifices, and holy days (Jer 6:20. 7:22, Ps 50:13, Isaiah 1:11-13)

God accepts human sacrifices (2 Sam 21:8-9, 14, Gen 22:2, Judges 11:30-32, 34, 38-39)

God forbids human sacrifice (Deut 12:30-31)

God tempts men (Gen 22:1, 2 Sam 24:1, Jer 20:7, Matt 6:13)

God tempts no man (James 1:13)

God cannot lie (Heb 6:18)

Instead, he lies by proxy, sending out lying spirits to act for him (2 Thes 2:11, 1 Kings 22:23, Ez 14:9)

Because of man's wickedness, God destroys him (Gen 6:5, 7)

Because of man's wickedness, God will not destroy him (Gen 8:21)

God’s attributes are revealed through his works (Rom 1:20)

God's attributes cannot be discovered, hides his light under a bushel (Job 11:7, Is 40:28)

There is only one God (Deut 6:4)

There is a plurality of gods (Gen 1:26, 3:22, 18:1-3, 1 John 5:7)

And you’ve gotta wonder at the morals of this God. The Bible is the ‘Word of God’, we are told. Okay, then let’s hear some justification for these moral lapses:

Robbery commanded (Ex 3:21-22, 12:35-36)

Robbery forbidden (Lev 19:13, Ex 20:15)

Lying approved and sanctioned (Josh 2:4-6, James 2:25, Ex 1:18-20, 1 Kings 22:21-22)

Lying is forbidden (Ex 20:16, Prov 12:22, Rev 21:8)

Killing is commanded (Ex 32:27)

Killing forbidden (Ex 20:13)

If you make someone bleed, you must die (Gen 9:5-6)

If you shed someone’s blood, you’re cool – never mind (Gen 4:15)

The making of images forbidden (Ex 20:4)

On second thought, go ahead and make images (Exodus 18, 20, 25)

God is okay with slavery and oppression (Gen 9:25, Lev 25:45-46, Joel 3:8)

Slavery and oppression forbidden (Is 58:6, Ex 21:16, 22:21, Matt 23:10)

It’s okay if you’re clueless, or waste money (Matt 6:28, 31, 34, Luke 6:30, 35, 12:3)

Improvidence condemned (1 Tim 5:8, Prov 13:22)

Anger is alright (Eph 4:26)

Anger is not alright (Eccl 7:9, Prov 22:24, James 1:20)

Judging of others forbidden (Matt 7:1-2)

Judging of others is just fine (1 Cor 5:12, 6:2-4)

Christ taught non-resistance (Matt 5:39, 26:52)

Christ taught and practiced fighting back (Luke 22:36, John 2:15)

Christ warned his followers not to fear being killed (Luke 12:4)

Christ himself – a Jew - avoided the Jews for fear of being killed (John 7:1)

Public prayer is sanctioned (1 Kings 8:22, 54, 9:3)

Public prayer disapproved (Matt 6:5-6)

Prayers that pester and nag commended (Luke 18:5, 7)

Pestering and nagging prayers condemned (Matt 6:7, 8)

The wearing of long hair by men sanctioned (Judges 13:5, Num 6:5)

Long hair on men condemned (1 Cor 11:14)

Circumcision instituted (Gen 17:10)

Leave that little thing alone - circumcision condemned (Gal 5:2)

The Sabbath is good (Ex 20:8)

The Sabbath repudiated (Is 1:13, Rom 14:5, Col 2:16)

The Sabbath instituted because God rested on the seventh day (Ex 20:11)

The Sabbath instituted because God brought the Israelites out of Egypt (Deut 5:15)

No work to be done on the Sabbath under penalty of death (Ex 31:15, Num 15:32, 36)

Jesus broke the Sabbath and made excuses for his disciples doing the same (John 5:16, Matt 12:1-3, 5)

Baptism commanded (Matt 28:19)

Forget it, no baptism (1 Cor 1:14, 17)

Every kind of animal allowed for food (Gen 9:3, 1 Cor 10:25, Rom 14:14)

Some animals prohibited as food (Deut 14:7, 8)

You can take an oath (Num 30:2, Gen 21:23-24, 31:53, Heb 6:13)

Meh, no you can’t (Matt 5:34)

Marriage approved (Gen 1:28, 2:18, Matt 19:5, Heb 13:4)

Marriage disapproved – not just the gay ones (1 Cor 7:1, 7:7, 8)

Divorce permitted (Deut 21:10-11, 14, 24:1)

Nope. Divorce restricted (Matt 5:32)

Adultery forbidden (Ex 2:14, Heb 13:4)

Adultery okay after all (Num 31:18, Hos 1:2, 2:1-3)

Marriage or cohabitation with a sister denounced (Deut 27:22, Lev 20:17)

But Abraham married his sister and God blessed the union (Gen 17:16, 20:11-12)

A man may marry his brother's widow (Deut 25:5)

Oh no he can’t (Lev 20:21)

Hating your kinfolk is okay (Luke 14:26)

Hatred of kindred condemned (Eph 5:25, 29, 6:2)

Booze recommended (Prov 31:6-7, 1 Tim 5:23, Ps 104:15)

Don’t drink (Prov 20:1, 23:31-32)

It is our duty to obey our rulers (seriously, it says that), who are God's ministers, and punish evildoers only (Rom 13:1-3, 6)

We can disobey rulers because they sometimes punish the good and condemn themselves to damnation for being so stupid (Ex 1:17, 20, Dan 3:16, 18, 6:7, 9-10, Acts 4:26-27, Mark 12:38-40, Luke 23:11, 24, 33, 35)

Women's rights affirmed (Judges 4:4, 14, 15, 5:7, Acts 2:18, 21:9)

And women's rights taken away (Gen 3:16, 1 Tim 2:12, 1 Cor 14:34, 1 Peter 3:6)

You should obey your masters (Col 3:22-23, 1 Peter 2:18)

You should obey only God (Matt 4:10, 23:10, 1 Cor 7:23)

The So-Called Historical Facts

Forty percent of Americans believe Adam was made out of mud and stuff, and that Eve was made out of a bit of Adam. So no doubt they’ll be able to explain the contradictory ‘facts’ below:

Man was created after the other animals (Gen 1:25-27)

Man was created before the other animals (Gen 2:18-19)

God hardened Pharaoh's heart (Ex 4:21)

Pharaoh hardened his own heart (Ex 8:15)

All the cattle and horses in Egypt died (Ex 9:3, 6)

All the horses of Egypt did not die (Ex 14:9)

Moses feared Pharaoh (Ex 2:14-15, 23, 4:19)

Moses did not fear Pharaoh (Heb 11:27)

Plague killed twenty-four thousand (Num 25:9)

Well, twenty-three thousand maybe (1 Cor 10:8)

The father of Joseph, Mary's husband, was Jacob (Matt 1:16)

The father of Mary's husband was Heli (Luke 3:23)

The father of Salah was Arphaxad (Gen 11:12)

The father of Salah was Cainan (Luke 3:35-36)

There were fourteen generations from Abraham to David (Matt 1:17)

Only thirteen generations from Abraham to David (Matt 1:2-6)

There were fourteen generations from the Babylonian captivity to Christ (Matt 1:17)

Only thirteen generations from the Babylonian captivity to Christ (Matt 1:12-16)

[Note: the fact Matthew doesn’t seem able to count very well is probably explained by the fact he was a tax collector.]

Baby Jesus was taken into Egypt (Matt 2:14, 15, 19, 21, 23)

The infant Christ was not taken into Egypt (Luke 2:22, 39)

Christ was tempted in the wilderness (Mark 1:12-13)

Christ was not tempted in the wilderness (John 2:1-2)

Christ preached his first sermon on the mount (Matt 5:1-2)

Christ preached his first sermon on the plain (Luke 6:17, 20)

John was in prison when Jesus went into Galilee (Mark 1:14)

John was not in prison when Jesus went into Galilee (John 1:43, 3:22-24)

Christ's disciples were commanded to go forth with a staff and sandals (Mark 6:8-9)

Christ's disciples were commanded not to dress like hippies (Matt 10:9-10)

A woman of Canaan sought out Jesus (Matt 15:22)

Well, maybe it was really a Greek woman – they all look the same (Mark 7:26)

Two blind men besought Jesus (Matt 20:30)

Actually, only one blind guy (Luke 18:35, 38)

Christ was crucified at the third hour (Mark 15:25)

Christ was not crucified until the sixth hour (John 19:14-15)

The two thieves reviled Christ (Matt 27:44, Mark 15:32)

Only one of the thieves reviled Christ (Luke 23:39-40)

Satan entered into Judas while at supper (John 13:27)

Satan entered into him before the supper, which would certainly be more polite (Luke 22:3,4,7)

Judas committed suicide by hanging (Matt 27:5)

Maybe not (Acts 1:18)

The potter's field was purchased by Judas (Acts 1:18)

The potter's field was purchased by the Chief Priests (Matthew 27:6, 7)

There was but one woman who came to the sepulchre (John 20:1)

There were two women who came to the sepulchre (Matt 28:1 although by now you’ll easily believe Matt didn’t have enough fingers to count properly)



Dr. Laura


Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a strident US radio personality who dispensed moral and lifestyle advice to people who called in to her radio show. She was a real peach.


After a series of really atrocious comments from the good doctor got her into a heap of trouble, she finally gave up the radio program in 2010 and now talks the good talk via her website, including cute little video clips where we can see she fancies herself a stand-up, er sit-down, comic. She says she made this change because taking herself off radio would restore her First Amendment rights to speak like an idiot whenever she chooses. [Actually, that’s a liberal interpretation of her real words – but close enough.]


Although she puts herself forward as a counselor, her PhD is actually in physiology, with her doctoral thesis covering insulin in rats. Just the credentials I’d seek out for moral guidance.
She has long expounded that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, she knows homosexuality is an abomination (because it says so in Lev 18:22), and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. 


Noting that her mother was Italian, she barely qualifies as a Jew at all, let alone Orthodox, but let’s not nitpick.


The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a US resident, named Jack, searching for guidance, which he posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
   
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
   
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15:19-24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
   
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
   
5. I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
   
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
   
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
   
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?
   
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
   
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? -Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,
Jack

AUTHOR NOTES: A bunch of the discrepancies noted above were pointed out to me over the years, although there are some that I noticed myself. But an anonymous person made a list that contained most of these, and a few I hadn’t seen, and posted it on the Internet a while back. So to her or him I offer my thanks. And thanks to Jack.


I have not even suggested the most obvious truth about the Bible – that God is the leading cause of death. Since the advent of Jesus – who, if we are to take any of this book seriously, must have been a staunch socialist – God’s followers have assumed the killing role, usually in God’s name though. Because Jesus sure as hell wouldn’t have approved.


But that’s a story for another day. Right now, I’m putting my Bible back on my bookshelf where it usually sits. In the fiction section.


Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com.



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