Yearly Archives: 2022

Killings in the Bible

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The Bible has a lot to say about killing. Most of the time, people are being killed for no good reason at all. And most of the time, the Bible totally approves of it.

Sacrifice

The biblical law is full of descriptions of all the animals God wants people to continually sacrifice to him. Never mind that God doesn’t need them because he doesn’t actually eat animals. And he doesn’t always allow other people to eat the sacrificed animals either, so those animals are being killed for nothing. And never mind that God says sacrificing a bull is like killing a human. God won’t let you come near him without an offering. And he won’t forgive you unless you shed blood for him. He likes the smell. Instead of helping diseased people, God demands a bunch of pointless bloodshed from them.

Even the forest of Lebanon isn’t big enough to provide enough firewood and animals to satisfy God’s desire for bloodshed. And when people don’t sacrifice quite as many animals as God would like, he accuses them of robbing him, and punishes them. It may be possible to make offerings to God without killing animals, but God likes it much better when you do kill animals. The Bible says killing animals is righteous, and not killing animals is evil.1 If you don’t kill them, God will.

Killing an animal can convince God not to punish people, regardless of whether they’re actually guilty or not. That means either that murderers can bribe God to ignore what they’ve done, or that the people in this scenario aren’t guilty, but God doesn’t care and would have killed them anyway, but then he decides not to kill them, because they killed a cow.

When two cows brought the lost ark of the covenant back to Israel, the Israelites were so grateful that they sacrificed the cows to God. Solomon wisely sacrificed too many animals to count. Even God sacrifices animals.2

Okay, suppose you don’t care about all that because you disagree with God and don’t think sacrificing a bull is like killing a human. What about human sacrifice, then? The Bible tends to describe sacrificing your sons and daughters as something that only evil people do. Something that God would never think of telling people to do.

But the Bible also says we should love each other the way God loved us… which was by sacrificing his son for us. So are we supposed to sacrifice our sons, too? If God didn’t want us to sacrifice our sons, why would he set such a bad example? And why would he tell his people to give him the firstborn of their sons just like they give him the firstborn of their animals?

The Bible says God did indeed command child sacrifice,3 and he rewarded Abraham for obediently attempting to sacrifice his son to him. And when Jephthah inadvertently made an idiotic conditional promise to sacrifice his daughter to God, God knew exactly how that would turn out… Yet instead of doing anything to stop him, God actively fulfilled the condition that would make Jephthah obligated to carry out the sacrifice.

Suicide and assisted suicide

A woman dropped a millstone on Abimelek’s head, but that didn’t quite kill him. He didn’t want people to think a woman had killed him, so he had his armor-bearer finish him off. Similarly, after a not-quite-successful suicide attempt, Saul asked someone else to put him out of his misery, and he did. But David didn’t think it was ever right to kill God’s chosen king, so he had that guy killed. Saul’s armor-bearer’s response to Saul’s death was to kill himself the same way Saul had tried to.

Samson’s story ends with a suicide attack, where (with God’s help) he causes a building to collapse on his enemies and himself. Zimri set a palace on fire while he was in it.

Ahithophel hanged himself after God made Absalom ignore his advice, and Judas hanged himself because he felt guilty.4

When Jonah told the sailors to throw him overboard, God showed that that was exactly what he wanted them to do (though he didn’t let Jonah actually die). Later, Jonah asked God to kill him, but God just tormented him instead.

The Bible has some terrible advice about love: It claims that you should lay down your life for others just like Jesus did, or else you don’t really love them.

The Bible fails to actually discourage suicide at all. It says the only kind of sins you can commit against your own body are sexual sins. So I guess suicide wouldn’t be considered a “sin” (unless you count deaths from dangerous fetish activities).

Execution

God commanded that anyone who kills a human is to be killed.5 And also that they don’t have to be killed if it was an accident. In that case, you’re safe… as long as you’re willing to be imprisoned in a certain city for as long as some unrelated person lives. But if you leave that city, then God thinks it’s okay for someone to kill you in spite of your innocence.

If someone breaks into your house at night, it says it’s okay for you to kill them. But if you do the same thing during the day, you’re a murderer and now you have to be killed. God also said anyone who kills an animal that belongs to someone else has to “give life for life“… but he failed to clarify whose life he meant.

The biblical law requires the death penalty not just for things like murder, but for all kinds of crimes, many of them quite petty and harmless. God thinks people should be killed for “cursing” their parents, for practicing “sorcery“, for doing any work on the wrong day of the week (or year), for breaking his stupid, unreasonable, arbitrary “uncleanness” rules, for doing anything else God thinks is evil, and for criticizing the guy who came up with all these dumb rules.6

God’s law says people have to be killed if they make sacrifices to the wrong god. Or if they don’t worship other gods, but they encourage other people to. Or if they sacrifice to the right God, but in the wrong place.

God threatened to kill people if any of them went near his tent when they weren’t from the right tribe. Or when they weren’t wearing the right underwear. Or when they hadn’t washed their feet. He said they would also die if they drank the wrong beverages while they were there. And if they entered the wrong parts of God’s house at the wrong time. And if they touched or even looked at God’s things. He also required Aaron’s sons to stay at the entrance of his tent for a week or die.

If you prophesy things that God didn’t say, you have to die.7 But that rule might be a bit hard to enforce, because anyone who questions authorities who claim to speak for God also has to die. Eventually, God seems to have decided that people should kill not just false prophets, but all prophets.

The Bible requires that both of the people who commit an act of adultery be put to death. Adultery is bad because it threatens your ability to stay together with your spouse, right? So killing your spouse seems to me like it would be kind of counterproductive.

God says if a woman is engaged to one man, and then no one hears her scream when another man has sex with her, she has to be killed. Because if she didn’t scream, she must have been intentionally cheating, right? It looks like it didn’t occur to “God” that there are plenty of reasons a woman might not scream when she’s raped,8 and plenty of reasons no one might be able to hear her if she does scream, and plenty of reasons they might not do anything about it even if they do hear her. If any of those things goes wrong, God thinks you should just blame the woman, and kill her.

The Bible says a man should be killed if he has gay sex. And a woman should be killed if she’s promiscuous while she’s living in her father’s house. Or if she’s both a prostitute and a priest’s daughter.

It says if a boy fails to obey his parents, they are to accuse him of being a drunkard and stuff (never mind whether that accusation is true or not), and then they are to have him stoned to death.

When Moses went up on a mountain so God could tell him these rules, God said anyone else who touched the mountain without permission would have to be stoned or shot with arrows.

Paul claims that God also decreed that people deserve death for things like envy, deceit, gossip, insolence, arrogance, and not understanding things. Though I don’t think the Old Testament ever actually says those are capital crimes.

A king of Babylon decreed that anyone who didn’t worship his giant statue would be thrown into a furnace. Another king of Babylon decreed that anyone who prayed to anyone but him would be thrown into the lions’ den. He also threw to the lions people who accused others of breaking that law.

A king of Persia decreed that anyone who interfered with the Jews rebuilding the temple would be impaled on a beam taken from their house. Another king of Persia said anyone in his empire who didn’t obey the Jewish laws, whether they were Jewish themselves or not, could be punished by death. (This is supposed to be a good thing.)

God caused some innocent prison guards to be wrongly executed, by helping a prisoner miraculously escape and then not explaining to the king that it wasn’t the guards’ fault.

Murder

The first murderer, according to the Bible, was Cain. God punished him, but then also kind of rewarded him by personally protecting him for the rest of his life. As a result of God’s mixed messages here, other people were emboldened to murder, since they figured God would protect them too.

God never outlawed cannibalism, but he did repeatedly threaten to punish his people by forcing them to eat their own children. Which he did. He also sent people from other nations to eat the Israelites’ children.9 The vision of Revelation includes a prostitute being burned and eaten by a beast and by its horns, which are all actually kings.

One time when the Israelites sinned, God started killing them, and he said he would stop if Moses killed all their leaders.10 But what actually turned out to make God stop being angry was when somebody drove a spear through a man and a woman while they were having sex. That pleased God so much that he made a covenant of peace with the guy who did it, and with all his descendants.

In the most pointlessly evil story in the Bible, a man’s house is surrounded by rapists, so the man and his guest decide to send the guest’s girlfriend out to get gang-raped to death. Then the guest chops her up into a dozen pieces and has them distributed all over the country, which eventually leads to an entire tribe of Israel being mostly killed off.

Samson’s father-in-law took his wife away due to a misunderstanding, and Samson reacted to that by burning up some other people’s crops. And then those people responded by murdering Samson’s ex-wife and her father.

Two men murdered Saul’s innocent son in his bed because they thought David would appreciate it. David had them executed. After David’s commander Joab killed one of David’s own sons and then scolded David for mourning over him, David tried to have Joab replaced. But then Joab murdered his replacement, so David let Joab keep his job.

Solomon said there are times when it’s right to kill. He thought it was wise to drive a threshing wheel over people he considered wicked. He had his brother killed for asking to be allowed to marry their father’s platonic bedmate, because Solomon thought that meant he was trying to become king.11 Solomon also had someone killed for leaving the city after he told him not to. He claimed that this was also a divine punishment for criticizing Solomon’s father.

A prophet told Jehu he would be king of Israel, so Jehu murdered the existing king of Israel. And the king of Judah. And the wife of a former king of Israel. And he murdered a whole lot of other people as well. God was pleased. Killing the king of Judah too was God’s idea.

God’s priest convinced the Israelites to stop worshipping Baal, so they murdered Baal’s priest. Only one queen ever ruled over either the kingdom of Israel or the kingdom of Judah. She wasn’t very popular, so God’s priest got the people to kill her, along with anyone who liked her. Ahaz king of Judah was evil, so an Israelite killed his son and some of his officials. Jehoiakim king of Judah had a prophet killed for what he said.

When the sexy daughter of Herodias12 convinced Herod to promise to give her whatever she asked for, her mother Herodias got her to ask for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. So Herod had John beheaded, even though he was distressed to have to do that… even though that was exactly what he had wanted to do anyway. One of Herodias’s brothers (who, like way too many people in their family, was also named Herod) later started persecuting Christians, and had one of Jesus’s disciples killed.

Jesus vaguely predicted that children would have their parents put to death, though he didn’t say when or who or why or if it would be legal or justified or not. In any case, people were going to be killed because of Jesus. The book of Hebrews says some people who had faith were stoned, sawed in two, or killed by the sword. But again, there’s so little detail that I have no idea who it’s talking about, what they were killed for, whether it was legal or justifiable, or what the point of mentioning it was.

When a Christian named Stephen was falsely accused of opposing the Jewish Law, he opted not to defend himself against that accusation. Instead, he recited a bunch of irrelevant Bible stories and insulted and falsely accused the Jews, until the Jewish religious leaders were so enraged that they murdered him.

Paul said people are full of murder because God has given them over to a depraved mind. And James said his followers were killing to get what they wanted, when all they really had to do was ask God.

Revelation predicts that even after wiping out large portions of humanity, God will fail to get people to repent of their murders. (Maybe he should try setting a better example.) It also says he’s going to send two horrible fire-breathing prophets to torment everyone for several years, and they will burn to death anyone who opposes them.

Divine murders

Job said God destroys the blameless along with the wicked, and mocks the despair of the innocent as they’re dying. God starves people and gets them killed with the sword, not because they’re wicked, but just because they happen to have wicked parents. He also kills people for being good at complimenting people. God confirmed that what Job said about him was true.

With barely any warning, God killed Lot’s wife for the completely harmless action of looking at something.13 He killed Onan for refusing to get his brother’s wife pregnant. He killed Naomi’s husband and their sons, too. Another time, God killed a boy who was the only good person in his family. God also killed the oldest and youngest sons of the man who rebuilt Jericho.

God burned some of Aaron’s sons to death for making an offering to him, because they used “unauthorized fire“, whatever that is. And then he threatened to kill Aaron and his remaining sons if they mourned for them. Similarly, when God murdered Ezekiel’s wife just to try to make a point (which wasn’t even effective), he ordered Ezekiel not to mourn for her.

God once killed somebody for trying to protect the ark of the covenant. Another time, God sent a lion to kill someone for being so foolish as to trust the words of a prophet. He also sent a lion to kill someone for refusing to injure a prophet.14

David wanted to have Uriah’s wife in addition to the wives he already had. So he arranged to intentionally get Uriah killed in battle. God responded by torturing and killing David’s baby, and then making sure the rest of his descendants would constantly be violently attacked as well.

God killed Jeroboam, the man he had chosen to be king of most of Israel when he decided to take the kingdom away from David’s descendants just two generations after he had led David to believe that his descendants would rule over Israel forever.

When people were resorting to eating their own children because of a famine God had caused, and then a prophet said food would be easy to get again in just one more day, an officer said he doubted it. God didn’t like that, so he made sure that officer got trampled to death.

God killed a king who he considered good, just because he didn’t want that king to see what God was about to do to Judah. God thinks killing good people is a good way to make sure nothing bad happens to them.

Jesus told a parable where God killed a rich man, because God forgot that it was possible for people who hoard wealth to be godly. He told another parable where a character representing Jesus came home and found one of his servants getting drunk and beating the others, so he chopped his servant into pieces.

God gave Lazarus a terminal illness just to give Jesus a chance to show off. And Jesus deliberately waited till Lazarus was dead before visiting his house. Then he brought Lazarus back to life,15 so he would have to experience death twice. Jesus was glad he hadn’t been there to save Lazarus from dying.

The Bible says God made an innocent man suffer and die for everyone else’s sins. He didn’t have to do that. Since everything is possible for God, he could have accomplished the same goals without anyone having to suffer and die. But God wanted to crush him and make him suffer.

God killed a couple for choosing not to fully participate in the early Christians’ communist system where they had to give 100% of their income to their leaders to be distributed among the community according to their needs. Paul said God also killed a number of Christians for eating and drinking “in an unworthy manner”.

God had an angel kill Herod Agrippa just because his subjects thought he was a god. Herod himself never said he was a god. God just killed him immediately after some other people said he sounded like a god. He never even gave Herod a chance to say what he thought about it.

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Did the serpent deceive Eve?

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When God asked Eve why she and Adam had Eden eaten the forbidden fruit, she said the serpent had deceived her. God accepted her explanation and punished the serpent. Paul described the event the same way, saying Eve became a sinner because she was deceived by the serpent.

But if you look at what the serpent said would happen and compare it with what the Bible says actually happened, you’ll find that every single statement the serpent made was true:

  • The serpent said eating the fruit wouldn’t kill them, and it didn’t.
  • The serpent said their eyes would be opened when they ate the fruit, and they were.
  • The serpent said the fruit would give them knowledge of good and evil, and it did.
  • The serpent said this new knowledge would make them become like God, and God said it had.
Continue reading Did the serpent deceive Eve? →
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The Story of Samson and Delilah—
Brawn and No Brains

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Samson got a new girlfriend, named Delilah. Samson’s enemies, the Philistines, paid Delilah to figure out Samson’s secret weakness, so they could capture him. So Delilah asked Samson three times how such a strong man could be successfully tied up, and Samson gave her three false answers.

Each time, Delilah tied him up the way he suggested while he was sleeping, and then woke him up by telling him the Philistines had come for him, but Samson easily broke out of his restraints. Delilah kept nagging him every day, saying if he really loved her, he would tell her how to drain his strength and allow his enemies to capture him. So he did.

Continue reading The Story of Samson and Delilah—
Brawn and No Brains →
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Should people gain knowledge?

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No.

When God created humans, the very first command he gave them was that they must not eat fruit from the tree that would give them wisdom and knowledge about morality. God thinks knowledge can mislead people. He overthrows people who dare to learn things. It’s a fatal mistake even to try to find out what God wants you to do, because he won’t punish you as much if you don’t know you’re doing anything wrong.

Solomon didn’t think it was honorable to “search out matters that are too deep“. He said the more knowledge you have, the more grief you will have. He thought you should be willfully ignorant, just because you might not like what you hear.

Paul said everyone should just continue believing whatever they already believe, rather than learn the truth. He thought it was best to know almost nothing. He thought knowledge just made people arrogant. Sometimes Paul didn’t seem to think people should know anything, except maybe if they didn’t know they knew anything.

Yes.

But God causes people to gain knowledge, so it must be a good thing, right? When God offered to give Solomon anything he wanted, Solomon asked for wisdom and knowledge, and God was so pleased with that choice that he gave him bonus gifts that he hadn’t asked for as well.

Solomon wrote proverbs to give people knowledge, and he encouraged people to listen to the knowledge others had. He said knowledge is extremely valuable, as well as pleasant to have. Desire without knowledge is not good. Knowledge makes people strong and helps rulers maintain order. Righteous people have knowledge, which helps them survive. If you’re wise, you will have knowledge, which fools lack, and you will seek to gain more knowledge. Knowledge comes along with fear of God. Only fools hate knowledge.

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Discrimination by nation

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I’ve been cataloging everything the Bible has to say about various forms of discrimination. One type of discrimination that gets a lot of attention in modern times is racism. And the version of the Bible I’m working with does appear to use the word “race” in that sense a couple of times. But back in biblical times, they didn’t really have the same concept of “race”. So rather than write about “racism” in the Bible, I’m going to discuss the closest thing the ancients actually did have: Discrimination by nation.

Equality?

Let’s look at the least discriminatory parts of the Bible first. It says Israel isn’t the only nation God cares about; the nations are all the same to him. He cares about what people do, not who their ancestors are. God loves foreigners and wants his people to love them too. He says his people shouldn’t mistreat or oppress foreigners. They should judge everyone fairly and justly and treat the foreigners among them the same as the native-born Israelites, because they once lived as foreigners in Egypt.16

In fact, there’s one passage that just assumes Israelites want to help foreigners in need, and encourages them to help each other the same way they would help foreigners. (That’s not going to do much good in the cases where that assumption is wrong.)

Sometimes the Bible says its laws should be applied equally to Israelites and foreigners living in Israel. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, though. Mostly what that means is that people will get stoned to death if they don’t follow the rules of the religion of the people of the country they happen to be in. But if foreigners do worship and obey him, then God will… allow them to worship and obey him.

God did occasionally disapprove of his people oppressing foreigners. (At least when they did it without fearing him.) But that didn’t do much good when he was telling them to oppress them most of the time. Foreigners were amazed and confused on the occasions when Israelites actually decided to be nice to them.

An angel who was the commander of God’s army said he was not on Israel’s side or on their enemies’ side. God thinks all nations are worthless and just wants everybody to die.17 Equality! David once entrusted the ark of the covenant to a Philistine, and later he allowed hundreds of Philistines to join his army.18 That’s quite a difference from how he normally treated Philistines. Solomon asked God to answer the prayers of foreigners, though I’m not sure it says God agreed to that part.

When Ezra said all the Jews should disown their foreign wives and children, there were about four people who disagreed. Jesus once healed a girl even though she was a Canaanite, though it took some convincing. There was one Samaritan who was willing to help a Jew… in a story Jesus made up.

After Jesus died, Peter convinced himself that foreigners could be saved, which his peers thought was a pretty weird idea. He decided he should preach to Gentiles even though it was against God’s law to associate with them. Paul, too, thought God now judged people according to their actions, their beliefs, or his own whims, and not by their nationality.

Ambivalently unequal ordinances

Sometimes the Bible says things about certain nations that I’m not sure whether to classify as favorable or unfavorable treatment.

It says God gave his laws to Israel, and not to any other nation. Some of those laws suggest that being a foreigner living in Israel automatically makes you disadvantaged and unable to provide for yourself somehow. But to make up for that, God’s law says Hebrews have to give foreigners free food. It says Hebrews aren’t allowed to eat animals they found already dead, but they can give them to foreigners to eat.

It says every seven years, an Israelite has to cancel any debts that another Israelite owes them. But they don’t have to do the same for a foreigner. And an Israelite isn’t allowed to charge another Israelite interest. But they can make a foreigner pay interest.

Jesus told his followers to only preach their message to Jews, at least at first.

Between Gentile nations

The Bible says God had his people wipe out a lot of other nations and steal their land. But it says God didn’t want them to invade the land of the Ammonites.

The Moabites and the Midianites both led Israel into sin in the Peor incident. God told Israel to go to war against Midian because of this. But he told them not to go to war with Moab, even though they did the same thing.

The Romans thought it was okay to violently punish people without a trial, as long as they weren’t Roman citizens.

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How did Saul feel about Michal being in love with David?

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The Bible says when King Saul found out that his daughter Michal was in love with Saul’s rival David, he was pleased. Saul had been afraid of David, but this gave him hope. Now he would have an opportunity to try to get David killed in the process of proving he was worthy to marry the princess.

But a few verses later, it says when Saul found out that Michal was in love with David, it just made him more afraid of David.

Continue reading How did Saul feel about Michal being in love with David? →
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The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat

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Samson was another judge, who saved his people when God let the Philistines take over Israel. Samson was a life-long Nazirite, which required him to abstain from wine, corpses, and haircuts.

While Samson was on his way to a Philistine city to visit a Philistine woman, he was attacked by a lion. God gave him the strength to easily kill the lion with his bare hands. Later, when he was on his way to the Philistine city again to marry the Philistine woman, he found that some bees had made a nest in the lion’s body. He took some honey out of the dead lion and shared it with his parents. But he didn’t tell anyone where the honey came from.

Samson challenged 30 Philistine men to try to solve a riddle by the end of his week-long wedding feast. They agreed that the losing party would have to give the winning party 30 sets of clothes. So Samson told them a “riddle” that they couldn’t possibly make sense of without knowing about the lion incident that no one but Samson knew about.

The Philistine men realized that Samson was unfairly trying to take their property. So they threatened to burn down his new wife’s house unless she told them the answer to the riddle. Samson’s wife cried constantly for the rest of the week until Samson gave her the answer. Then she told the answer to the men, and the men gave the answer back to Samson.

Samson knew those 30 Philistine men must have cheated, since there was no other way they could have possibly solved his “riddle”. But he gave them the promised 30 sets of clothes… which he got by killing 30 other Philistine men.

Continue reading The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat →
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Was Mahlon’s name maintained?

Contradictions,

In ancient Israel, it was customary for a remarried widow to name the first son she had with her new husband after her dead husband. In fact, God’s law required it. In order to maintain Mahlon’s name in his family, his widow (Ruth) and her new husband (Boaz) should have named their son after Mahlon.

And that’s what Boaz said he was going to do. He even said that was the reason he was marrying Ruth, so the dead man’s name would be maintained and wouldn’t disappear.

But apparently that’s not what they actually did. Boaz and Ruth named their first son Obed, not Mahlon.

Continue reading Was Mahlon’s name maintained? →
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Everything wrong with the Ten Commandments

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The 1st Commandment

You shall have no other gods before me.

  • This rule is based on the idea that God is jealous of other gods. But the Bible says jealousy is a sin! If God is jealous, he should get the plank out of his own eye before he starts blaming other people for failing to accommodate his own moral flaws.
  • Why would God be so jealous of other gods anyway, if other gods don’t even exist?
  • What harm could having other gods cause? God can’t be the victim, since nothing humans do has any effect on God. Maybe it would harm other people if those “gods” required people to do bad things. But this God’s instructions are already so bad, I doubt following other gods’ commands could be any worse.
  • Despite failing to explain how following other gods would cause any more harm than following this God, the Bible says the punishment for worshipping other gods is death. God seems to be commanding people to kill people for no good reason.
  • If God is so great, why can’t he just persuade people to prefer him by showing everyone how much better he is than the other gods, instead of resorting to (ineffective) threats?
  • The goal of getting people to stop believing in gods that aren’t real is good, but the method is all wrong. You don’t change people’s beliefs by force. That’s not how belief works.
  • Legally restricting who people can worship is a violation of freedom of religion, which is regarded as a fundamental human right in most of the modern world.19
  • God seems to be saying he doesn’t want people to regard any other gods more highly than him. So is he okay with people worshipping other gods as long as they consider them to be lesser or equal to him? If not, why didn’t he say so here? Why specify “before me”?20
  • In the Bible, God himself pretty much fails to keep any of the Ten Commandments, possibly even this one. God offers sacrifices, which implies that there must be a god or gods that he regards as higher than himself.

The 2nd Commandment

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.

  • Well, that first sentence was poorly worded. Did they really mean to say you’re not allowed to make any images of things? Does God hate art? Is photography a sin?
  • Making images doesn’t harm anyone, including God, so this is a victimless crime.
  • And a victimless crime is not worth cursing people over.21
  • Legally restricting how people can worship is another violation of freedom of religion, which is regarded as a human right in most of the modern world.22
  • God goes on to suggest that if someone breaks this rule, he will punish several generations of that person’s descendants, regardless of whether those descendants actually broke the law themselves or not. Even God admits that that’s an absurdly unjust thing to do, but he’ll do it anyway.
  • A lot of Christians are pretty bad about breaking this rule. They make tons of religious images, and sometimes it seems like they even kind of worship them. And they seem to think God would approve of that somehow. Amusingly, one excuse Christians make for doing this is that they’re not worshipping an image of Jesus, they’re just using it to help them worship who the image represents… just like every other idolater.
  • The Bible says God told Moses to make the ark of the covenant, which had graven images of heavenly beings on it. The ark was treated as a physical representation of a god, just like every other idol. God didn’t even seem to mind people treating the ark as an object of worship. When Joshua bowed down to it, God rebuked him… but only because he didn’t think Joshua should be praying at that time because he should already know the answer to what he was asking. He didn’t rebuke him for bowing down to the wrong thing. God doesn’t seem to have a problem with this particular idol.
  • Even God failed to keep this rule. When he created humans, he was making an image of something in heaven (himself). He even apparently wants people to worship one of the people he made in his image! I guess we’ll have to stone God to death now.

The 3rd Commandment

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

  • A law restricting how people can use religious language is a violation of the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Trying to make a law like this would doubly violate the 1st Amendment in the US.
  • Saying God’s name doesn’t harm anyone, including God. So this would be a victimless crime even if there was a God.
  • Despite that fact, the Bible says people have to die for not harming anyone. Killing people just for breaking petty rules like these is barbaric.
  • Or is there more to this crime than what it sounds like? What exactly does it mean to “misuse God’s name”? Or to “take his name in vain”, as it’s sometimes translated? A lot of people interpret this as a rule against using expressions that involve a name for God, but that aren’t actually being used to talk about God. But what this commandment is most likely really about is taking oaths. When someone uses God’s name to take an oath, they’re inviting God to punish them if they fail to do what they swore to do. If you swore by God like that even though you had no intention of keeping your promise, you would be taking God’s name in vain, making it useless as a guarantee of your honesty. But assuming that’s what it means, this commandment is redundant. Taking false oaths is covered by the 9th Commandment.
  • What if someone doesn’t believe, for whatever reason, that God would punish them if they took a false oath?23 That would make it impossible for them to use God’s name in an oath without using it in vain. There are better ways to make sure people aren’t lying. Modern legal systems ensure that there are people who actually will punish perjurers, giving people a real incentive to tell the truth regardless of what they believe about God.
  • Because Jews have been so careful to keep this commandment—hardly ever saying or writing God’s actual name at all,24 and using different words in its place—and because the written Hebrew language didn’t originally use vowels, nobody really knows for sure anymore exactly what the correct pronunciation of God’s real name is. And the original wording of the commandment suggests that it only applies to that particular name… So as long as you’re not saying God’s real name that nobody knows, as long as you’re using other words instead (like “God”, or “Lord”, or even “Jehovah“), I guess you’re not really breaking this rule.
  • God himself sometimes swears rather carelessly by himself in the Bible, like when he said Abraham would have descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky“. (Depending on how you interpret it, that number is either way too high or way too low.)

The 4th Commandment

Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work.

  • Legally mandating religious observances is yet another violation of the right to freedom of religion, not to mention the right to work.
  • Choosing to work on a certain day of the week doesn’t harm anyone, including God. So this is another victimless crime.
  • It would be a terrible idea for everyone to take off work on the same day. That would mean on that day, no services would be available to anyone. There would be no one available to help you if an emergency happened to fall on the wrong day of the week.
  • Which day exactly is the Sabbath supposed to be, anyway? People don’t seem to be able to agree on that. Some might say it’s Sunday, or Saturday, or maybe even Friday.25 How are we supposed to figure out which of those people we need to slaughter for taking the wrong day off? What the Bible says about the timing of the Sabbath apparently isn’t good enough to clear that up. Since people have failed to remember what the Sabbath day is, it’s going to be hard to keep the Sabbath properly anymore. That’s why the five-day work week was invented, because people couldn’t agree on which day was the Sabbath.
  • Working five days a week is actually more productive than working six days a week. Working even less than that would probably be even better for your productivity and for your physical and emotional health. If God invented this regular day off for our benefit, he didn’t go far enough. But the commandment doesn’t even allow for people to improve on it by taking more days off in addition to the Sabbath. It says you have to work six days.
  • The Bible can’t make up its mind what God’s reason for making this law was, though. Sometimes it says it was purely for our benefit, and sometimes it says it was more about making sure people acknowledge God. And sometimes it says the reason behind this rule has something to do with some made-up story or other, which wouldn’t make any sense even if the stories were true. Why would an all-powerful God need to take a day off and rest? What does the exodus story have to do with taking a day off?
  • If God gave us the Sabbath for our benefit, it seems weird to punish us with death just for choosing not to accept that gift. And regardless of why the Sabbath was established, it’s insane to kill people for working, as the Bible requires. That’s not how people deserve to be repaid for their work. People who choose to work overtime should be paid extra, not punished.
  • This law says there’s one day every week when you can’t make your slaves do any work.26 A good law would have outlawed slave labor altogether.
  • Many people attend church on the day that they consider to be the Sabbath, and the clergy perform their religious duties at church on that day. Aren’t the clergy breaking this commandment when they do that?
  • Jesus, despite supposedly being the same guy who made this rule in the first place, worked on the Sabbath, told other people to work on the Sabbath, and made a bunch of lame excuses for why he thought it was actually fine to work on the Sabbath. And Paul took this rejection of God’s law even further, saying Christians shouldn’t observe any special days.

The 5th Commandment

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

  • Honoring your parents may be a good thing in some cases, but it definitely shouldn’t be an absolute rule. Some parents just aren’t honorable. Some parents neglect or abuse their children. Those parents don’t deserve anyone’s respect. Children shouldn’t have to live with bad parents, much less be forced to honor them.
  • Maybe this rule wouldn’t be so bad if God had also commanded parents not to mistreat their children. But the Bible doesn’t have much to say about that, beyond telling people not to sacrifice their children to the wrong god. Instead, it encourages people to beat their children with rods.
  • If you think your parents are honorable, you’re going to honor them without having to be told. And if you don’t think your parents are honorable, somebody demanding that you honor them isn’t going to change that. The best you could do is fake it (which would possibly conflict with the 9th commandment).
  • The Bible says we should kill kids for disrespecting their parents. That’s a seriously excessive reaction when they haven’t done anything worse than speaking.
  • What exactly does honoring your parents entail? Do you have to always agree with them, no matter how stupid their ideas might be? Do you have to always obey them, making you unlikely to become an assertive and successful person, giving up your autonomy to make moral choices for yourself, and basically making you a slave? Do you have to obey your parents even if they want you to do something bad?
  • There’s no sign that this is limited to children. Apparently God thinks people have to always obey their parents all their lives, or die. There also doesn’t seem to be any exception for children too young to understand what they’re doing. Do we have to kill every toddler that ever throws a tantrum in front of their parents?
  • If God wants people to obey their parents, why did he give them over to a depraved mind, causing them to disobey their parents?
  • Jesus, who the Bible claims never sinned, was rather rude to his parents. He required his followers to be disrespectful and hateful to their parents, too. So is the biblical law wrong about this, or should Jesus have been stoned to death as a boy?

The 6th Commandment

You shall not murder.

  • After getting halfway through the list, we finally get to a reasonably good rule. Maybe it shouldn’t be an absolute rule, though. There are conceivable situations where killing someone would be the best thing to do. Like if you had to kill an attacker to save your own life, or to save other people’s lives.
  • This one is also sometimes translated as “You shall not kill”. But the Bible commands people to kill a whole lot more often than it forbids people to kill. How are people supposed to follow God’s instructions to kill animals, lawbreakers, and foreigners, if they’re not allowed to kill at all?
  • “Murder” might be a more accurate translation, and it might seem like it would make more sense or be more consistent that way… But what exactly does “murder” mean? It basically means unlawful killing, which means it has different meanings in different societies that have different laws. Not all killings that we would consider murder now were against the law in ancient Israelite society. So this commandment as it was originally intended was inadequate. Outlawing “murder” means making it illegal to kill in ways that are illegal. That can only be meaningful if the law also specifies which kinds of killings are to be banned. But the closest thing the Bible has to a specific definition of what should be considered murder fails to resolve the contradiction between this commandment and all the times God told people to murder people. Not only that, but most of the distinctions it makes regarding what counts as murder aren’t morally relevant at all, and are instead based on things like what kind of material the weapon is made from.
  • A lot of laws in the Bible, including laws against killing people, are punishable by death. But anyone who is involved in executing the lawbreakers is breaking the law against killing, so they have to be killed too. Or if you prefer the “murder” version of the law: Anyone who participates in the Bible’s favored execution method (stoning) is a murderer according to God’s law,27 and so must be stoned to death themselves. And then all the people who stoned them have to be stoned, too… If people actually followed these rules, everyone would be dead. That seems kind of counterproductive for a law against murder.
  • This law supposedly comes from someone who kills innocent babies. Someone who kills people just for being related to other people who did something he didn’t like. Someone who proudly commits multiple genocides. Someone who once drowned nearly everyone in the world. Someone who is planning to kill everyone again. How can he claim to be against murder?

The 7th Commandment

You shall not commit adultery.

  • The main reason adultery is considered bad is that people don’t tend to like their spouses having sex with other people. But what the Bible fails to acknowledge is that there are people who don’t mind their spouses doing that at all. In those cases, an act of “adultery” wouldn’t negatively affect anyone. So it wouldn’t actually be a bad thing to do. But the Bible ignores that fact, and says people would have to be killed for that victimless crime.
  • As for people who aren’t polyamorous or whatever, the Bible says it would be bad to have sex with their spouses because of their jealousy. But isn’t jealousy a bad thing? The Bible says it is. So if that’s the case, why is God commanding people to comply with other people’s wrong feelings? Why isn’t he commanding people not to have those wrong feelings in the first place? Or designing them not to have those wrong feelings?
  • The Bible requires that both of the people who commit an act of adultery be put to death. But if the reason adultery is bad is that you don’t want to lose your spouse, killing your spouse seems kind of counterproductive.
  • You wouldn’t know it from the way it’s translated, but this commandment wasn’t originally intended to cover all of what we would now consider to be infidelity. In the past, women were property owned by men. So adultery was defined as a man having sex with another man’s wife (using someone else’s property). Since women didn’t own men, it was perfectly legal for a man to cheat on his wife.
  • Since the Bible assumes that wives are property, this commandment is redundant. It’s already covered by the 8th commandment.
  • Jesus tries to make this into a thought crime. He claims that even just looking at a woman and feeling lust makes you guilty of adultery and can get you sent to hell. Obviously, he’s wrong about that, for a bunch of reasons. For one thing, not all women are married, and you can’t commit adultery if there are no married people involved. And it’s possible to look lustfully at your wife, but it’s not possible for you to commit adultery with her. But if Jesus was right about lust, that would basically mean heterosexual men go to hell. Also, if nobody ever wanted to have sex, humanity would go extinct. Is that what you want, Jesus?
  • Jesus also broadens this commandment when he declares that divorce is not a legitimate concept. He says anyone who gets divorced and remarried is actually committing adultery.28 The resulting lack of options for unhappily married people is one of the things that leads people to think that people should be required to regularly have sex with their spouses even if they don’t want to, for the rest of their lives. That sounds like a terrible idea to me.
  • Banning divorce is a bad idea to begin with, because it turns marriage into captivity, forcing people in unhappy or even abusive situations to stay that way for the rest of their lives. Banning divorce, or even just banning no-fault divorce, also makes adultery happen more often. Jesus got it backwards. Divorce doesn’t lead to adultery, divorce prevents adultery.
  • God once got somebody else’s fiancée pregnant. That seems a lot closer to being adultery than the things Jesus calls adultery.
  • If God doesn’t like adultery, why does he keep making people commit adultery? Why did he give people over to a depraved mind, causing them to have no fidelity? And if God doesn’t like divorce, why did he give his people rules commanding them to get divorced in certain situations?

The 8th Commandment

You shall not steal.

  • This is certainly a good rule generally, but maybe it shouldn’t be an absolute rule. There are conceivable situations where stealing something would be the best thing to do. Like if you had an opportunity to take a weapon away from someone who was about to use it to kill a bunch of people.
  • People can’t always agree on whether something should be considered “theft” or not. For instance, some people would say tax evasion is theft, but others would say taxation itself is theft. It would have been nice if God had thought to clarify exactly what theft is.
  • God seems to think it’s fine to steal things for him, just not for yourself. And sometimes in the Bible he even tells his people to take plunder for themselves. God also apparently helped enforce the early Christian leaders’ practice of forcing their followers to give them all the money they earned.
  • The Bible says God forcibly took land from the Canaanite nations to give to his own chosen people. If God steals other people’s land, that must mean it’s a good thing to do, and we should follow his example, right?

The 9th Commandment

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

  • (This commandment was most likely only intended to be about specific crimes like false accusation and perjury. But an awful lot of religious people interpret it more generally as “You shall not lie”, so let’s go with that.) I think it’s generally good to avoid lying, but maybe it shouldn’t be an absolute rule. There are conceivable situations where telling a lie would be the best thing to do. Like if someone asked you where they could find someone they wanted to harm.
  • In fact, the Bible commends someone for doing just that! Rahab was considered righteous for saving Israel’s spies with her lies. It also says God blessed Jacob even though Jacob only got his blessing by deception. When Jehu lied to the Baal-worshippers in order to get them all in one place so he could kill them, God said Jehu had done what was right in his eyes. God even directly tells people to lie sometimes. He told Moses to tell Pharaoh he only wanted him to let his people go for three days, when he really intended for them to leave permanently. He told Samuel to say he was going to Bethlehem to make a sacrifice, to hide his real purpose for going there. And Jonah tried very hard to avoid giving a prophecy that he knew was false, but God forced him to do it anyway. If God wants people to be truthful, why did he give them over to a depraved mind so that they were full of deceit?
  • Even if you think lying is always wrong, having a law against it doesn’t really work. How are the fallible people enforcing such a law supposed to always know for sure that what someone said wasn’t true? And that the person knew it wasn’t true?
  • And that’s if the authorities are even trying to enforce the actual truth. More likely they would just decide for themselves what to declare to be the “truth“, and force everyone to go along with that.
  • If you were going to outlaw lying, you would need to have a rigorous definition that makes it clear exactly what is and what is not a lie. Do technically true but misleading statements count as lies? How about technically false statements that nobody takes seriously, that do not and are not intended to lead to false beliefs? Are those “lies”? The Bible doesn’t say.
  • Lying may be a bad thing to do, but it’s definitely not so bad that it should be punished with neverending torture.
  • God deceives people quite a lot in the Bible. If he wants us to always be honest, he’s not setting a very good example.
  • Why specify “against your neighbor”? If someone doesn’t happen to live near me, does that make it okay to testify falsely against them?

The 10th Commandment

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s house or land, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

  • Is this a good moral rule? It doesn’t look too promising, since it assumes that women are property. It lists wives along with cows and donkeys and slaves and other things your neighbor might own.
  • Oh, and speaking of slaves, a good law would have discouraged people from wanting to enslave people at all, not just in the specific case where the person already belongs to somebody else.
  • This law is a thought crime, which means it’s not really enforceable, among other problems. There’s no way to even know whether someone is breaking this law, so why bother making it a law?
  • Thoughts aren’t exactly voluntary and controllable, so it would be pretty hard even to enforce this rule on yourself if you wanted to. And it would potentially be psychologically unhealthy to try. If God didn’t want us to think a certain way, he should have designed us not to think that way. That seems like it would have been a lot more effective than telling people what not to think.
  • The biggest problem with a thought crime like this is that it’s just a thought. Coveting shouldn’t be illegal because it has no consequences and causes no harm. Unless you act on it by stealing or something. But if that’s what you’re worried about, this rule is yet another redundant one. Stealing was already covered in the 8th Commandment.29
  • Envy doesn’t necessarily lead to bad things like theft. It can instead inspire people to “get what others have” by emulating what others have done right. The Bible says envy is the root of all achievement. If that’s true, envy must be a very good thing!
  • Like the previous one, this commandment creates loopholes by needlessly specifying that the “victim” has to be your neighbor.
  • If God doesn’t want people to be envious, why does he keep making people envious? Why did he give them over to a depraved mind so that they were full of envy?
  • If God doesn’t want people to be envious, why does his book tell people to eagerly desire the superior gifts that only some people have been given?
  • As with just about all of the Ten Commandments, God is guilty of breaking this rule himself. The Bible says God is a jealous God.30
Continue reading Everything wrong with the Ten Commandments →
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Do Gentiles have to obey the Law?

Contradictions,

The Bible says God requires his chosen people, the Jews, to obey the laws he gave them. But what about people who aren’t Jewish? Do Gentiles need to obey God’s laws too?

Yes.

When the kingdom of Israel was overthrown, the Israelites were deported to Assyria. Then people from other nations came to live in their land. But God didn’t like how those foreigners didn’t do what he required. So he started sending in lions to kill them. Then the king of Assyria had to send an Israelite priest back there to teach the new inhabitants what God required them to do.

Ezra praised God for giving the king of Persia the idea to severely punish (sometimes with death) anyone in his kingdom (not just Jews) who didn’t obey God’s Law.

Paul required Timothy, who had a Gentile father, to be circumcised before he could go anywhere with him. Paul said Jesus wanted him to call all the Gentiles to obedience. He said God judges and punishes everyone the same way, regardless of whether they’re Jews or Gentiles. And the way he judges them upholds the Law, rather than nullifying it. Paul told his Gentile followers to put someone to death for breaking one of the Jewish sex laws. He did not think it was okay for Gentile Christians to do whatever they wanted.

No.

God’s Law itself says Jews can give Gentiles things to eat that would be forbidden for the Jews themselves to eat.

The apostles declared that Gentile Christians should not be required to keep the law of Moses, which even the Jews had been unable to fully obey. They rejected the idea that people could only be saved if they were circumcised. They said anyone could be saved by the grace of God.

Paul took this further and said that all believers, no matter if they were Jews or Gentiles, could be saved by grace and by faith apart from the Law. He said no one can be justified or saved by keeping the Law, since everyone inevitably sins. Paul didn’t think Gentiles should be forced to follow Jewish customs. And he didn’t require his Gentile companions to be circumcised.

Paul said anyone who relied on the Law was cursed, and could not be justified before God. He taught his Gentile followers that they were not under the law, because Jesus had set aside the Law and set them free from that curse. Paul’s followers tried to follow the law anyway, which he thought was foolish. He said there would have been no point in Jesus dying if following the Law was what people needed to do to be saved.

According to Paul, even if the Gentiles were under the Law, it would kill them, and then dying would release them from the Law. If Paul’s claims are true, it’s impossible for anyone to remain under the Law!

Continue reading Do Gentiles have to obey the Law? →
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