Some people think the Bible is a good source of morality. Have those people read the Bible? I don’t see how you could think that, knowing the things the Bible tells people to do.
God even admits that, at least at one point, he was giving his people bad laws. That’s meant to contrast with the laws he had given before, but those were bad already. Laws are supposed to prevent people from doing bad things, but a lot of God’s laws instead encourage or require people to do bad things. Paul says the reason God gave his laws in the first place was to make people sin more. And he says even if God intended them to bring life, the only thing God’s deceptive laws did was bring death.
There are all kinds of problems with the Ten Commandments, as I’ve detailed in another blog post. About half of those commandments really aren’t good rules at all, and the rest are handled rather too simplistically. Most of them are punishable by death, even though half of them are victimless crimes. God doesn’t actually follow the Ten Commandments himself, which shows that either they’re not good or he’s not good. Or both.
It’s against the rules to kill cows or sheep and also kill their parents on the same day. What good could this rule possibly do? The only result I can see this having is that animals will suffer more due to being separated. But I guess God likes to cause suffering. He likes to celebrate his holidays by forcing his people to eat “the bread of affliction“.
The law states that people are to be considered clean when there’s a disease visibly covering their whole body. And that people who are confirmed to be diseased are not to be isolated. How does God manage to get these things so completely and obviously backwards? Then once you’ve recovered from a skin disease, he says you have to spend a week outdoors. You’re not even allowed to use a tent.
God’s law has a lot to say about “uncleanness”. But as you can tell from the bloody nasty rituals he prescribes, God’s concept of “cleanness” has nothing to do with actual hygiene. Instead, it’s about random things that he’s decided people need to avoid for no real reason. The only reason to avoid this kind of “uncleanness” is because if you don’t, God will kill you for breaking his stupid, unreasonable, arbitrary “uncleanness” rules.
God’s laws don’t just encourage generosity, but instead make it mandatory, which turns it into theft. God says a little stealing is fine, just don’t do a lot of stealing. At least not all from the same person. But if you kill a thief who breaks into your home, you may or may not be considered guilty. It depends on what time of day you did it.
God’s laws condone brutal slavery. Apologists like to focus on the less terrible temporary debt slavery when they discuss biblical slavery. But the Bible also allows much worse slavery practices that are no better than what normally comes to mind when you think of slavery. And the Bible’s laws regarding slavery are discriminatory, so being a slave is much worse if you’re a women or a foreigner. God’s law also allows for slaves to be irreversibly “devoted to the Lord”, which apparently involves getting killed.
God says if you find an attractive woman among the captives of war that you’ve taken, then after she’s done mourning for her parents that you killed, you and your captive can get married. Like she would want to.
If a man’s married brother dies childless, God’s law requires the man to either marry the widow and have kids who won’t be considered his, or be publicly disgraced. (Or in some cases, God decides to just personally kill a man for not impregnating his brother’s wife.) God doesn’t even consider the possibility that the widow doesn’t want to marry her husband’s brother. Or the possibility that someone in this situation is incapable of having kids.
Even Jesus thinks the laws God gave his people are an unreasonable burden. And the law says none of these terrible rules can ever be changed in any way. You can’t add anything to them, and you can’t subtract anything from them. Good thing everyone ignores that rule. Even God ignored it, and continued making up new insane rules later on. Like requiring all prophets to be stabbed to death by their parents.
Mandatory violence
In the Bible, God makes circumcision a requirement for all male descendants of Abraham forever. If you’re going to be mutilating the genitals of babies, you’d better have a very good reason. But the only reason God has for this rule is that it’s the sign of the covenant he’s making. If it’s meant to be a sign, that means the purpose is to communicate something. Why can’t God think of a better way to communicate than by cutting off part of a boy’s penis?
If you want people to be marked with a sign, a body part that people aren’t going to be able to see most of the time is the worst possible place to put it. This rule was stupid. Even the Bible itself later says that circumcision is worse than useless. According to Paul, it can prevent Jesus from saving you. So apparently all of Abraham’s descendants are going to have to go to hell because God made them follow this rule.
One of the main focuses of God’s laws is all the continual animal sacrifices that God demanded from his people. God won’t let you come near him without an offering. And he won’t forgive you unless you shed blood for him. He just likes the smell.
Sometimes they would only burn part of an animal and eat the rest. In that case, they’re not actually sacrificing much, are they? But in the case of burnt offerings, they just burned the whole animal. God likes to call these sacrifices “the food of your God“, but of course God doesn’t actually eat animals, and doesn’t need people to feed him, so that’s no excuse.
God’s people were required to sacrifice the best animals they had, which isn’t just needless killing, and isn’t just a waste of good meat, but is also dysgenic selective breeding. By specifically killing the best animals they had, they were probably causing the quality of their livestock to continually get worse over time. They were required to waste other kinds of food, too.
God wants you to give his priest a dove, so he can wring off its head, splash some of its blood on things and drain out the rest, tear it open, and burn it, because God likes the smell. He also wants the priest to dip a live bird in the blood of a dead bird. And use it to sprinkle blood all over your house. To make it “clean”.
God commanded his priests to sprinkle and smear blood all over each other and diseased people and everybody else. When a new altar was made later, God made sure to give his people regulations for how to properly splash blood all over it. (To “purify” it.)
God even commanded human sacrifice, requiring his people to sacrifice some of their slaves as well as some of their children to him. They had to give him the firstborn of their sons, just like they gave him the firstborn of their animals.
The biblical protocol for dealing with infectious skin diseases involves a lot of pointless bloodshed. God should be able to easily fix everything without requiring any of that. But he thinks bloodshed is the only possible way to make things right.
God had rules for how his people should go about attacking cities that were nowhere near the land he had told them to take over. (As opposed to cities within that land, where he said they should just kill everyone and everything living there.) In these distant cities that they had no reason to invade, God wanted his people to offer to enslave everyone there. And if the people of those cities didn’t like that idea, then God wanted his people to kill all the men, and enslave and rape the women and children.
Discrimination
The Bible has a lot of rules that discriminate against certain kinds of people for no good reason. For instance, it’s unbelievably sexist, forbidding women to have any position of authority or even to speak at church. It treats women as property, and says people who do bad things to a woman have to compensate the man in charge of her, instead of having to compensate her.
Paul says women need to submit to their husbands like they’re God. And Peter says women need to submit to their husbands the same way he thinks slaves should submit to their violently abusive masters.
The Bible says men who have sex with men have to be killed for their wicked, detestable, vile, outrageous, shameful sin. And that they won’t be allowed into the kingdom of God. God’s law also demands that anyone who worships any other gods be killed.
A lot of the stuff that the law of Moses required other Israelites to tithe “to God” actually went to the Levites. Moses was a Levite, by the way. Moses kept claiming that God wanted the people to give Moses’s family and tribe free food and money. And people could be executed for doing things that the priests and other Levites did all the time. But even the priests were at risk of God killing them if they broke his arbitrary rules about things like what to drink and what kind of underwear to wear.
Because some Amalekites attacked Israel once, God decided that all their descendants should be treated as enemies forever. God bans people from his assembly for the crime of having a forbidden marriage in their ancestry ten generations in the past. And he bans descendants of Ammonites and Moabites, because they have some ancestors who weren’t nice to the Israelites when the Israelites were trying to destroy all the nations in their path.
God’s laws demand that you respect old people, even though not all old people are respectable. The law also says you shouldn’t say anything bad about your rulers and religious leaders. When Paul realized that he was talking to a ruler, he decided he had been wrong to point out that that person was violating the law. According to the Bible, everyone should just let the rulers and leaders do all the bad things they want, without anyone even being allowed to talk about it.
Christian rules
One of the rules for people who want to be disciples of Jesus is that they have to hate their families.
If one person gets angry at another, that’s likely because the latter did something wrong. But Jesus says getting angry is what’s going to bring God’s judgment on you.
Jesus has a horrible rule about punishing yourself when you sin. He thinks you should just cut off whichever part of your body “causes you to sin”. He claims you’ll be better off if you gouge out your own eyes and cut off your own hands. Because apparently you can’t go to heaven otherwise. (And apparently when you’re living in heaven, you’ll still be missing whatever body parts you cut off.)
Jesus’s rule for how to deal with evil people abusing you is to not resist them. If people are stealing from you, hitting you, or kidnapping you, just encourage them to do even more evil. He says you have to forgive people for what they did to you, if you want God to forgive you. But forgiving people is not an inherently good thing. By forgiving everyone unconditionally, you would just be making people more likely to do bad things to you.
Jesus says you should do to others as you would have them do to you. Which sounds like a pretty good rule, if you don’t think about what it’s saying. A lot of atheists even agree with it. But I’d say it’s really not a good rule at all. I’ve written a whole other blog post explaining why. Basically the problem is that it completely fails to take into account what others want. Which is a pretty important thing to consider when you’re deciding what to do to others.
Jesus says you should deal with your own problems before you worry about helping others. Well, he was probably trying to say something else. But the way he put it sure makes it sound like he’s promoting selfishness.
Here’s another command Jesus gave his followers: Love each other the way he loved you. Which was by getting himself killed. Jesus wants you to show your love for your fellow Christians by dying. If you don’t follow his evil, unreasonable command, you are no friend of Jesus. (Jesus has a weird idea of friendship.)
The original Christians were communists. Any money they earned had to be brought to their leaders to be distributed among the community, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs“. (That’s a communist slogan, likely inspired by the Bible.) People who opted not to give up 100% of their income were killed.
Paul had a rule for his followers, which he claimed was a command from God: Married people can never get divorced. This is a bad rule 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. Even God disagrees with Paul’s rule. If he didn’t, God wouldn’t have given his people rules commanding them to get divorced in certain situations.
The Bible tells people to embrace faith, and other irrational and anti-intellectual ways of thinking that are inherently opposed to truth. God apparently even wants people to be ignorant of his own laws, since he says people who didn’t know they were disobeying won’t be punished as hard.
Continue reading Bad rules in the Bible →