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| Noah was a jerk. |
The God of the Old Testament
is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of
it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty
ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully.
- Richard
Dawkins
1. God drowns
the whole earth.
In Genesis 7:21-23, God drowns the entire
population of the earth: men, women, children, fetuses, and perhaps unicorns.
Only a single family survives. In Matthew 24:37-42, gentle Jesus approves of
this genocide and plans to repeat it when he returns.
2. God kills
half a million people.
3. God
slaughters all Egyptian firstborn.
In Exodus 12:29, God the baby-killer
slaughters all Egyptian firstborn children and cattle because their king was
stubborn.
4. God kills
14,000 people for complaining that God keeps killing them.
In Numbers 16:41-49, the Israelites complain
that God is killing too many of them. So, God sends a plague that kills 14,000
more of them.
5. Genocide after
genocide after genocide.
In Joshua 6:20-21, God helps the Israelites
destroy Jericho, killing “men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and
donkeys.” In Deuteronomy 2:32-35, God has the Israelites
kill everyone in Heshbon, including children. In Deuteronomy 3:3-7, God has the Israelites do
the same to the people of Bashan.
In Numbers 31:7-18, the Israelites kill all
the Midianites except for the virgins, whom they take as spoils of war. In 1 Samuel 15:1-9, God tells the Israelites
to kill all the Amalekites – men, women, children, infants, and their cattle –
for something the Amalekites’ ancestors had done 400 years earlier.
6. God kills
50,000 people for curiosity.
In 1 Samuel 6:19, God kills 50,000 men for
peeking into the ark of the covenant. (Newer cosmetic translations count
only 70 deaths, but their text notes admit that the best and earliest
manuscripts put the number at 50,070.)
7. 3,000
Israelites killed for inventing a god.
In Exodus 32, Moses has climbed Mount
Sinai to get the Ten Commandments. The Israelites are bored, so they invent a
golden calf god. Moses comes back and God commands him: “Each man strap a sword
to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each
killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” About 3,000 people died.
8. The
Amorites destroyed by sword and by God’s rocks.
In Joshua 10:10-11, God helps the Israelites
slaughter the Amorites by sword, then finishes them off with rocks from the
sky.
9. God burns
two cities to death.
In Genesis 19:24, God kills everyone in
Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from the sky. Then God kills Lot’s wife for
looking back at her burning home.
10. God has
42 children mauled by bears.
In 2 Kings 2:23-24, some kids tease the
prophet Elisha, and God sends bears to dismember them. (Newer cosmetic
translations say the bears “maul” the children, but the original Hebrew, baqa,
means “to tear apart.”)
11. A tribe
slaughtered and their virgins raped for not showing up at roll call.
In Judges 21:1-23, a tribe of Israelites
misses roll call, so the other Israelites kill them all except for the virgins,
which they take for themselves. Still not happy, they hide in vineyards and
pounce on dancing women from Shiloh to take them for themselves.
12. 3,000
crushed to death.
In Judges 16:27-30, God gives Samson strength
to bring down a building to crush 3,000 members of a rival tribe.
13. A
concubine raped and dismembered.
In Judges 19:22-29, a mob demands to rape a
godly master’s guest. The master offers his daughter and a concubine to them
instead. They take the concubine and gang-rape her all night. The master finds
her on his doorstep in the morning, cuts her into 12 pieces, and ships the
pieces around the country.
14. Child
sacrifice.
In Judges 11:30-39, Jephthah burns his
daughter alive as a sacrificial offering for God’s favor in killing the
Ammonites.
15. God helps
Samson kill 30 men because he lost a bet.
In Judges 14:11-19, Samson loses a bet for 30
sets of clothes. The spirit of God comes upon him and he kills 30 men to steal
their clothes and pay off the debt.
16. God
demands you kill your wife and children for worshiping other gods.
In Deuteronomy 13:6-10, God commands that you
must kill your wife, children, brother, and friend if they worship other gods.
17. God
incinerates 51 men to make a point.
18. God kills
a man for not impregnating his brother’s widow.
19. God
threatens forced cannibalism.
In Leviticus 26:27-29 and Jeremiah 19:9, God threatens to punish
the Israelites by making them eat their own children.
20. The
coming slaughter.
According to Revelation 9:7-19, God’s got more evil
coming. God will make horse-like locusts with human heads and scorpion tails,
who torture people for 5 months. Then some angels will kill a third of the
earth’s population. If he came today, that would be 2 billion people.
Now,
Christians have spent thousands of years coming up with excuses for a loving god that
would allow or create such evil. In fact, they’ve come up with 12 basic
responses, which are the subject of The Tale of the Twelve
Officers.
