Darrell W. Conder's
Things You've Never Heard In Church:
For The Love of God!
While recently driving through the backwoods of Arkansas, I noticed a prominent sign posted in someone's front
yard. It read: "God Is Love." I had seen or heard this "sentiment" many times before, but as I drove along on that beautiful fall day I started reflecting on what these words truly mean. The biggest, fattest truth of all is that no such god exists either in or out of Christian scriptures—that indeed the Christian god is the antithesis of love, the proof of which begins in the opening chapters of the bible.
It is in Genesis where we are first introduced to the elohim (the Hebrew word for "gods") who create a man and a woman and then quickly devised one of the most cunning deathtraps imaginable with a fruit tree and a talking serpent. Overlooking the point that any logically-minded person should reject such a tale as pure fantasy (a talking snake!), let's focus on the fact that the Genesis gods purposely set the stage for humanity's fall from "grace," and then cursed every man, woman and child who will ever be born with indescribable suffering and sadistic death because some remote ancestors fell into their trap. This means that all of history's wars, all of its brutal murders, rapes, plunderings, suffering, diseases, etc., can be traced back to that hideous fruit tree death trap, as St. Paul explains in Romans 5:14: Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come."
After the snake thing in Eden, one would think that the Adam family would keep their distance from the gods described above. Not so. In fact soon after being booted out of Eden we find the Adam family had organized into the world's first church to worship these gods—well, a kind of church, considering that there were only four members: Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. As is the habit within churches the world over, in short order there arose a theological dispute between the two younger members. Setting a precedent for all time to come, the dispute was settled when Cain turned on his brother Abel and bashed out his brains over whose sacrifice had been more acceptable to the gods. And, who do you suppose sat by and watched the world's first murder? It was the omnipotent elohim, one of whom later introduces himself as Jehovah. Even worse, the All-Merciful One didn't seem overly upset about the murder because in one of the few instances in the bible where he shrugged his shoulders over sin, Jehovah let Cain go scot-free. In fact, he not only let Cain go, he gave him godly protection by pronouncing a curse on anyone who sought revenge—even though in Genesis 9:6 this same god commands that "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man."
In the story of Cain and Abel we find the beginnings of humanity's descent into murderous chaos—and all because of a basket of fruit. (Romans 5:12, NKJ: "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned ..." Also see I Corinthians 15:20.) Overlooking the pettiness of the thing, one of the major problems with the C & A tale is that it directly contradicts God's promise that he doesn't hold children guilty of nor punish them for the sins of their fathers, which is clearly stated in Deuteronomy 24:16: "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin." This precept is even more bluntly stated in Ezekiel 18:20: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him." More confusion is tossed into the mix by Exodus 20:5 wherein God gives his famous ten commandments and threatens to punish children for the sins of their fathers: "... for I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. . ." This threat is given force in Deuteronomy 32:25: "The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs."
So, which is it? Did God lie on Mt. Sinai when he handed down his ten commandments, or did he lie in Deuteronomy and Ezekiel? The answer is clear—there is a bold lie somewhere in this mishmash. My vote is for God lying when he promised not to punish children for their father's sins because the bible is full of examples of him smiting children or grandchildren for a trifle committed by a parent or some remote ancestor, such as the murder of righteous Abel because his mom and pop ate a piece of fruit. Hey, when it comes to punishment, the famous "God of love" seldom let bygones be bygones, an example of which can be found in Matthew 23:35 wherein Jesus threatened the Pharisees with revenge for murders carried out by their ancestors, and/or remote relations: ". . . on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar."
The cold hard fact is that no god or goddess can match the bloodlust of Jehovah, a prime example being the story of the Great Deluge. To tell that story we return to the Adam family.
After God dumped Adam and Eve out of Eden, he essentially went away and left humanity on their own. For the first 2,000 years no laws were given, nor penalties threatened, such as are found in his infamous ten commands. However, the lack of knowing what ticked off God and what pleased him made absolutely no difference to the Almighty as he sat up in heaven looking down on humanity. This is made plain in Matthew 13:14: "And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: 15) For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. 16) But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. 17) For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them." In other words, God purposely kept humanity from understanding his version of right and wrong, which forced the masses to "sin," and for which he perpetually stands ready to exact a terrible revenge.
About 4,000 years ago God looked down on the earth and decided that it was a cess pool of sin—such a cess pool that it should be turned into a giant toilet bowl in which humanity could be flushed away. Never mind that God himself was to blame for human misbehavior when he cursed all unborn generations back in the Eden snake thing. Never mind that he neglected to open their hearts to their "sinful" ways so that they could be given a chance to repent and turn to him. God simply decided to arbitrarily teach the world a lesson in obedience by drowning every man, woman and child, every grasshopper, beetle, worm and ant, and destroying every single tree and blade of grass on Earth—except for a floating zoo and eight people, who, if we judge by their behavior immediately after the flood, were a piece of real work. What I mean by that statement is that after our omnipotent "god of love" carried out his global murder and destruction, old Noah crawled out of the ark and went off on a drunk, during which his son Ham, homosexually raped him in the anus. (For the details of this story, see my eBook on Genesis.)
Now answer truthfully here: Where in the story of Noah's flood do we find any traces of a "god of love?"
Because of the sheer volume of death and destruction, the flood was a hard act to follow, even for the supreme homicidal "god of love." In the rest of the bible's tales of murder the death tolls never approached those of the flood, being a bit more reasonable (i.e., not in the millions but thousands), such as when God rained down fire and brimstone on the defenseless towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, after which he murdered righteous Lot's wife with some kind of salt trick. Okay, I know that bible-pounding preachers say that the queer men of Sodom and Gomorrah had it coming, but let me ask them this: Why would God create homosexuality and then make it a sin for which he demanded the death penalty? (See my eBook "Things You've Never Heard In Church Series: Jehovah Finally Comes Out of the Closet!") Even more, what about the women and children? Why did they need to die for the "sins" of a few oversexed gay men? And, speaking of Lot, don't you think it strange that he and his two daughters were the only ones judged righteous enough to escape God's wrath back in Sodom since Lot left there and immediately went on a drunk, incestuously fornicated with his two daughters and fathered two sons? (So much for God's sense of right and wrong!)
Okay, let's get back to God murdering children for the sins of their fathers, which he says he doesn't do, but then does, a good example of which is the slaughter of Eli's children. Now old Eli was a godly man, being a high priest, judge and ruler of Israel (1Sam 2:31, 1 Sam 22:16-18), but Eli had a problem: He was a lenient father. We can certainly understand the almighty god of love being pissed off about that, since leniency seldom plays a part in his omniscient brain. For his horrendous "sin" God contrived to break Eli's neck; but the All Merciful One didn't stop there. The god who doesn't punish the children for the "sins" of the father, also went after Eli's priestly descendants.
Here they were, the Eli family, busy day and night on God's behalf squeezing gold, sliver, copper and all those other things God needs, like sheep, cattle, grain and linens from the Lord's terrified faithful, so one would expect some little show of mercy from the Great Cosmic Lord of the Manor. Not so! Decades after old Eli had "sinned," and after God had broken his neck, our god of love had the Eli family hacked to pieces.
What is so incredible is that for decades the Eli family knew of God's intentions, since he had it announced via the prophet Samuel, and they were told that their god of mercy wouldn't accept any form of repentance! No way out—the Lord was out for their blood and nothing in heaven or on earth (or hell) would move his resolve: 1 Samuel 3:12: "Behold, I will do a thing in Israel, at which both ears of every one that hears it shall tingle. In that day I shall perform against Eli all the things which I have spoken concerning his house... I will punish his house for ever, for the offense that he knew that his sons made themselves accursed, but restrained them not. The iniquity of Eli's house shall not be purged with sacrifice nor offering for ever."
Certainly, Eli was a special case, meaning that God took a personal interest in killing his family. In the case of plain garden-variety sinning Israelites, God sometimes let nature do his dirty work, such as when he let a tornado wipe out Job's children because Job was worshiping too perfectly. In Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28:53 and Jeremiah 19:9, God threatens disobedient Israelites with wild beasts, which will drag off and eat their children alive. If this failed to strike the required amount of fear, God threatened to cause the Israelites to eat their own children, which they ultimately did, if what we read elsewhere in the bible is to be believed. But, if God really got miffed, he didn't hold back—all-out murder and mayhem followed his displeasure, which we read in Hoesa 13:16: ". . . because they have rebelled against their God [read tired of worshiping an unpredictable homicidal deity], they will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open." Isaiah 13:16 threatens: "Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes...and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children."
I ask: God is love? God is mercy? God is forgiveness?
Skipping over a fair amount of godly blood and gore, let's direct our attention to the tale of the Israelite Exodus. First of all, let me point out that for no rhyme or reason God arranged for the Israel family to move en masse down to Egypt to be tossed into the misery, abuse and murder of slavery for the next four hundred years! I say for "no rhyme or reason" because we never really learn what the children of Israel did to deserve this punishment, except that they had the misfortune to be selected as the chosen ones of an unpredictable homicidal supreme torturer. Anyway, four hundred years of misery and death dragged by as God listened to the prayers and supplications of his chosen ones begging on their gnarled knees for deliverance. Interminable waiting being the key ingredient of prayer, God finally moved against Egypt with all his homicidal inventiveness—in such proportion as to put old Cecil B. DeMille and his Hollywood film to shame!
To get even with his quarry, God needed a front man for his dirty work. Now, far be it from the Holy One of Israel to simply select a man from among the millions of Israelite minions. Being the Supreme Dramatist, he first contrived to kill off all the little Israelite baby boys, save one, whom he saved in a water-logged basket. The little runt was called Moses, and in the fullness of time became to be one of the Lord's most zealous admirers.
After first murdering an Egyptian, Moses fled into the wilderness where he had his first encounter with God via a burning bush. I think Charlton Heston and his boss Cecil B. DeMille have made most of us familiar with that tale, so we skip ahead to the time when Moses reappears in Egypt, presents himself to pharaoh and performs some divine magic with the demand to let the Israelites go free.
Now old pharaoh, being smart enough to see that he was dealing with a fire-breathing homicidal god, wisely decided to be rid of the Israelites rather quickly! But God would have none of that. He had cast the Israelites into bondage for no good reason, set the Egyptians up as the fall guys, and now he was hell-bent on killing off a large number of helpless people—and no rational human was going to spoil his fun, pharaoh or not. So what did he do? God "hardened" pharaoh's heart, which means that he prolonged the Israelite's bondage so that he could torture and kill Egyptians. Oh, and what methods of madness, mayhem and murder God used on them!
Trapped like rats, the God of Mercy tortured and killed the helpless Egyptians with a variety of ingenious tricks. He tortured them with utter darkness, he sent locusts to bring on mass starvation, he sent frogs to blanket the land, he poisoned the Nile River with blood, he rained deadly hail stones down on their heads, he covered them with boils, etc., until the land was a ruin of death and stink. It was only then that God sprung the final phase of his death trap—he "unhardened" pharaoh's heart who promptly freed the Israelites.
One can almost hear old pharaoh's sigh of relief as he watched the Israelites waddle off into the desert, only to have the Lord zap him yet again with another dose of heart-hardening. And so God's puppet pharaoh took off in pursuit after the departing Israelites. Finally catching up to the lot at the Red Sea, God sprung his trap on what was left of the Egyptians in a cunningly-devised water death. One thing you can say about the All Loving One—he does have a flare for inventive murder! But here's the real icing on the divine cake: After God had put pharaoh and his people out of their prolonged misery, he turned his "love" on the poor Israelites, who didn't fully realize what kind of deity who had them in his grip, they being cut off from his "mercy" for the past four hundred years.
The killing off of the free Israelites started almost immediately once they got into the desert, and continued for the next forty years. With the exception of Caleb and Joshua, every last man and woman who escaped Egyptian slavery was exterminated by God with armies, snakes, heart attacks, thirst and earthquakes, until the "love of God" had slaughtered the whole damned bunch—including his loyal servant Moses! The only twist in this tale is that this time God spared the children for the sins of their fathers—a logical move since there wouldn't have been any Israelites left to occupy Canaan, and no chosen ones for God to "love" in the coming years. (Actually, the children made it into Canaan by the skin of their teeth, since on two separate occasions God decided to kill off every last one of them had not Moses begged for their lives!)
It is the fashion of Christianity to preach the love of God for all humanity. "We are all one in the Lord!" "Red and yellow, black or white, we are all precious in his sight!" We see an example of God's love for people of color when he led the Israelites to the borders of Canaan. Since the land was already inhabited with people, what do you suppose our God of mercy did? Did he order Joshua and his priest to convert the Canaanites to "God's truth" so that all could live in peace and harmony? No! Did God at least order the Canaanites to leave the land? No! The all-merciful God of the bible, who loves all peoples in all lands, commanded the Israelites to murder every last man, woman, child and animal down to the suckling lamb: Deuteronomy 7:1 "When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; 2) And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: you must utterly annihilate them."
We are talking godly genocide here folks, a prime example being the Midianites, who actually were cousins to the Israelites—being descended of Abraham. Kinship notwithstanding, we read in Numbers 31 how God ordered that every Midianite man, woman and child—including every suckling babe, down to the last suckling lamb—to be hacked to death. But there was a snag to God's order. Some of the Israelite commanders didn't have God's appetite for wholesale murder, even after killing an estimated 250,000 people. What they did was to allow the Midianite women and children to live. Of course this didn't set well with the "God of love," nor his chief executioner. Giving the whole thing some thought, Moses, that supposed champion of liberty and justice, first ordered that all the little infant Midianite boys be dragged from the arms of their terrified, screaming mothers and hacked to pieces by razor-sharp Israelite blades. Casting his eyes over the female captives, and undoubtedly noting that some were quite young and beautiful, Moses displayed a spark of humanity when he decreed that all virgins were to be spared. Well, sort of spared.
Mothers, who had earlier watched their terrified infant sons hacked to pieces, were now slit open by God's sword-wielding executioners, while their pregnant daughters had their unborn babes sliced from their bellies. Those who were not mothers or pregnant, were stripped naked and herded into groups where they were "examined" by the bloodied soldiers to determine their virginity. When this perversion ended, and more sliced-up girls joined their butchered sisters, mothers and baby brothers, 32,000 naked survivors were handed over to the leering, lustful Israelite men for a giant gang-rape! And what of God's holy priests? They took their share of the booty, including 675 sheep, 72 head of cattle and 61 donkeys, and 32 virgin girls! Who among those reading this wants to try and convince me that God is love? If you want to try, then let me direct your attention to King David.
Where do we begin with David? How about in Acts 13:22 where we read the boast that David was a man after God's own heart, which, when we consider David's bloodlust, is one of the few truths found in the bible! In fact, reading through David's résumé, at times it's hard to distinguish between him and the homicidal god he served. Like his master, David's life was one long history of murder, rape, plunder and revenge—a prime example being when God used David to execute his revenge on children for the sins of their father.
When David ascended the throne of Israel he learned that God was cursing the land with a famine because king Saul had sinned. What do you suppose Saul's sin was? Something rather horrid you suspect? No! Saul's sin and ultimate fall from God's grace was because he showed mercy when God sent him to annihilate the Amalekites: Samuel 15:2-11: "Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." Now, we aren't talking about Saul sparing hundreds of people, or even a few dozen—he spared one man and a few miserable sheep and cattle, the animals being intended for a sacrifice to the God of love. For this "sin" God ultimately killed Saul, stripped away his kingdom and went on a bloodletting spree against his children.
Actually, one of the most hypocritical, lying utterances in the whole bible is found when Saul attempts to repent of his sin and begs Samuel to intercede with God. Samuel tells Saul that the kingdom will be ripped away from him and given to another and then says: "He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind." God "does not lie"? God "does not change his mind"? What god was Samuel talking about here! The bible is full of example of God lying and changing his mind—an example being when he twice decided to kill off the whole of Israel, only to change his mind when Moses interceded. Indeed, if God doesn't change his mind, then the whole of the New Testament, with its formula for a sinner's redemption, is bogus!
Let's have this clear. The bible teaches that God does not lie: 1 Samuel 15:29: "The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent." Titus 1:2: "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began." Heb.6:18: "It was impossible for God to lie." Sounds good, except for these contradictory revelations: 1 Kings 22:23: "Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee." 2 Chronicles 18:22: "Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of these thy prophets." Jeremiah 20:7: "O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived." Ezekiel 14:9: "And if a prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet." 2 Thessalonians 2:11: "For this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie."
Anyway, the cure for God's curse on Israel was for David to offer seven of king Saul's sons as a human sacrifice on crosses. This was done and the story is capped off by the scene of the murdered boys' pitiful mother sitting for weeks below the rotting corpses of her sons driving off animals and vultures. (2 Samuel 21:1-10) Perhaps this story explains the meaning of Ezekiel 18:4, when God warns: "Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
My opinion when reading the tales of King Saul and King David, is that I cannot help but feel sorry for Saul and outrage at David! Saul showed mercy by sparing a life for which he and his sons were killed by God, while in David's case no crime was too great to incur divine wrath. Take David's rape of Bathsheba and his plot to murder her husband to conceal his crime. If God does not lie, nor change his mind, as the bible clearly teaches, then God should have followed his own command and punished David with death. But he didn't do that. Indeed, God didn't even remove David from the throne of Israel. Instead he killed a new-born baby, caused a rebellion that killed off tens of thousands of Israelites, had a group of David's sex slaves publically raped, and lastly killed off David beloved son Absalom. One can argue that David suffered through these losses, but the fact is that he got away with murder and remained on his throne to a ripe old age, at which time he was given a young virgin to molest on his death bed. Even more disgusting is the fact that this wasn't the only time that others paid the ultimate price for David's follies. Let's take the time when David conducted a census of Israel.
Before the time of David there was no problem with Israel being numbered. The Torah grows tedious with Israelite census numbers. But, for some arbitrary reason God decided that in David's time it was a sin to number Israel. Okay. God being God, we shouldn't question his wisdom. However, what is questionable is the fact that it was God who tempted David to number Israel, which immediately placed David in the role of a sinner, for which God turned and exacted a penalty for David's "sin.": 2 Samuel 24:1: "And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah." God's treachery in the census trap is further compounded when we read the same story in1 Chronicles 21:1, except this time it was Satan causing David to number Israel. This strange twist is part of the reason that some Jewish biblical scholars teach that Satan and God are one and the same being! (For a complete history of the biblical Satan, see the author's eBook A Study of Satan and Human Tragedy.) This aside, let's put the census story into perspective.
1) God got ticked off with Israel, so 2) he made it a sin to number Israel, and 3) laid a trap for David to sin by numbering Israel in order to go on a bloodletting binge—to the tune of 70,000 dead Israelites men, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of women and children caught in the wake. Where in this tale do we find a fair, compassionate god? Nowhere! God set up David, killed off a few hundred thousand people, and then turned around and heaped the blame on his loyal servant for their deaths!
The ultimate hypocrisy in the tale of David and God is God deciding that David had spilled too much blood in his life to build God's holy temple. With God's record of arbitrary murder and mayhem one would have thought that David's life of murder and mayhem would have been a prerequisite for building such an edifice! Nevertheless, with a straight, stern face God deprived David of temple building, while giving a resurrected king David the consolation prize of reigning over the twelve tribes of Israel in God's prophesied coming new world order. I don't know about you, but with these two running the future, I opt to be elsewhere!
Earlier I mentioned that God's curse on Israel was lifted only when David offered seven of Saul's sons as a human sacrifice. Like virtually all the gods of the time, from time to time Israel's god demanded human blood as an offering. Usually he got his dose of blood from the murder of Israel's enemies, or from plagues on Israel itself, but on occasion God took direct human sacrifices, including those of young virgins.
When I related the rape of young Midianite virgins by Israelite soldiers, I neglected to mention that the original Hebrew text leaves open the very real possibility that the thirty-two virgins given to the priests were offered to Jehovah as burnt offerings, as the text specifically states that they were Jehovah's portion of the war spoils. This is a rather involved theological discussion, but one that leads into the next tale, which is the story of Jephthah and his young virgin daughter, which itself lends weight to the above possibility.
Jephthah vowed that he would offer as a human sacrifice to the "Lord" the first person who came out of his house, if God would give him victory over the Ammonites. Now the very fact that Jephthah made such a vow proves that human sacrifice was a way of life for the worshipers of Jehovah, which is a point not made by your average Sunday-morning preacher. It also tells us something else about dear old Jephthah. My guess is that his wife was customarily the first one out the door to greet him on his return home, which would explain his vow. This aside, God gave Jephthah his victory and looked on approvingly as his henchmen sliced up twenty towns full of men, women, children and suckling babes. Upon his return, Jephthah's virgin daughter was the first one to come out of his house to meet him, which caused old Jephthah great misery. What did God do? Did he remind Jephthah of the ten commandments, which clearly state that it is a sin to commit murder? No. Did God remind Jephthah that he did not punish children for the folly of their parents? No. Did God at least feel generous towards Jephthah for butchering twenty towns full of people in his name—telling him to just forget his vow, spare his daughter and slop a few hundred gallons of sheep's blood on his holy altar instead? No. Our god of mercy and forgiveness, who had looked on approvingly as Jephthah and his butchers sliced up all those people and their unoffending babies, held Jephthah to his vow and watched as the young virgin girl was offered to him as a human sacrifice! (Judges 11:30-38) Again, I ask: God is love?
I could go on for many more pages with such examples, but I'll skip over these to get to the real culprit of this genocidal madness—Jesus Christ! I blame him because we are told in John 1:1-3 that Jesus was the god who created everything "in the beginning", which means that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, a.k.a, Jehovah. This is made even more plain in Colossians 1:16-18 NKJ: "For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." (Also see John 8:58, when Jesus told the Pharisees: "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am." This verse fits well with Exodus 3:14: "And God said unto Moses, i am that i am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, i am hath sent me unto you.")
So, Jesus was the god who set up Adam and Eve for their fruit fall and then cursed all humanity to an existence of misery and death; it was Jesus who watched as Cain knocked out Abel's brains; he was the god who drowned damned near every living thing on earth in the great Deluge; Jesus was the god who killed off a large portion of Egypt during the Exodus, and then all the generation of Israelites who came out of bondage during forty years of torment and misery; it was Jesus who gave his nod of approval as his chosen ones slaughtered hundreds of thousands during the Israelite invasion of Canaan; it was Jesus who oversaw the slaughter of Midianite infant boys and pregnant women, and the wholesale rape of the Midianite virgins, and who accepted the sacrifice of 32 virgins from his holy priests—and the sacrifice of Jephthah's virgin daughter!
Jesus, the homicidal Jehovah of the Old Testament, resurfaces in Matthew wearing a mask of meekness, love and mercy—something like a Mafia lieutenant who dons a new identity under the Federal Witness Protection Program! Jesus' rehabilitation as a god of respectability, meekness, love and mercy is debuted during his pious but ridiculous Sermon on the Mount (turn the other cheek, bless those who curse you, etc., etc., ad nauseam), but a duel personality like Jehovah can't keep up such a demanding masquerade for long.
In Luke 19:27 shades of the old Israelite "god of love" come shining through when Jesus utters this command: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." Did you catch this? The same Jesus who commands his sheep to bless those who curse them, to let people slap the hell out of them, to let thieves rob them (a handy excuse for a priest or minister), does not practice what he preaches. When it comes to someone slighting our "god of love," he wants blood—and not just a little blood! Before his supposed return to earth, Jesus the Christ outlines in the book of Revelation how he will exterminate most living things on earth and utterly destroy most of the earth's surface. Talk about the spirit of revenge, and talk about not teaching an old god new tricks!
Perhaps my fundamental mistake here is misunderstanding the word "love." Perhaps I should reconsider the word within a Christian perspective—you know, the way God truly "loves" people. If I did this, maybe I could become one of those good Christian examples that one finds in history.
When Pope Innocent III was anointed as the Vicar of Christ in 1198, one problem that faced him was heresy—a heretic in his time being someone who studied the bible. Darling old Innocent decided the best way to deal with this annoyance was a bit of Jehovah-style bloodletting. So his holiness cast an eye on Beziers, France to put the fear of the Lord into his subjects. It is recorded that the last savage Christian persecution under a pagan Roman emperor, Diocletian, killed some 2,000 Christians. In Beziers, Pope Innocent III killed at least six times that number—12,000—in one afternoon! For this day's holy work, his holiness pronounced a special blessing for his soldiers, and promised an indulgence from purgatory. Where was Jesus when Christian soldiers murdered Christian men, women and children in his name? In the same place when his soldiers sliced open pregnant Midianite girls back when he was calling himself Jehovah, that's where!
At least the victims of Christ's love died somewhat quickly in Beziers. Those who fell into the hands of the Holy Inquisition, which was a Christian office set up to seek out and punish heretics and witches, had it a bit more rough. One eye witness wrote: "feet wrenched off legs, eyes torn from their sockets, and the prisoner burned with brimstone and basted with oil." This is no exaggeration.
First of all, let's understand that torturing non-believers has a precedence in God's holy word. In 2 Samuel 12:31 we can read about David, a man after God's own heart, taking the men, women and children of Rabbah and all the other Ammonite cities by putting man, woman and child "under saws, and under harrows [toothed plows] of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln." So the Holy Inquisition had its authority to torture and murder in God's name by simply imitating the work of a man "after God's own heart," the details of which were to be found in scripture.
When "heretics" were arrested, they were taken to a torture chamber, stripped naked (in case the Devil had applied some secret mark to their body), and were made ready for the holy work of the ministers of Christ. Typically a victim was hoisted into the air by their hands, which were tied behind their back, effectively dislocating shoulders and arms with horrific pain. While hanging in this agony, a priest might apply flaming balls of sulfur to the genitals, or feet, or breasts, or under the arms, or on the back. If the victim was a woman, there was a special device for spreading the vagina (called the vaginal pear), which allowed for the ripping of the cervix and also for placing flaming sulfur directly inside the vagina. In fact, genitalia was a special target for the Holy Inquisition, as historian Barbara Walker notes: ". . . [priests] liked to attack women's breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers, and red-hot irons." Even more terrible to contemplate is that in some cases there were no breasts to mutilate because under the rules of the Holy Inquisition, girls as young as nine years could be tortured in the name of Jesus. (Walker, Barbara G. The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983, p. 445.)
