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. Paul says the reason God gave his laws in the first place was to make people sin more. And he says God may have intended them to bring life, but all God’s deceptive laws did was bring death.
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.
God likes to celebrate his holidays by forcing his people to eat “the bread of affliction“.
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.
One of the main focuses of God’s laws is all the animal sacrifices that God demanded from his people. Sometimes they would only burn part of an animal and eat the rest, which sounds like they’re not really sacrificing much. But in the case of burnt offerings, they just burned the whole animal.
They 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’s law says if you find a person who has been killed, and you don’t know who did it, you can just blame it on a cow. Break the cow’s neck, and God’s bizarre sense of justice will be satisfied. It’s against the rules to kill cows or sheep and also kill their parents on the same day, though. 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.
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.
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. But once you’ve recovered from a skin disease, then you have to spend a week outdoors. You’re not even allowed to use a tent.
God’s laws don’t just encourage generosity, but instead make it mandatory, which makes 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, depending 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 maybe even be personally killed by God.) 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.
God’s law declares Nazirites guilty of “sinning” if they happen to be nearby when someone else dies. Unless all Nazirites are like Samson, that probably wasn’t the Nazirite’s fault. And God says anyone who gets counted in a census has to either “pay the Lord a ransom” or die, when they haven’t done anything.
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. 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.
One of the rules for people who want to be disciples of Jesus is that they have to hate their families.
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’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 isn’t 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 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 selfish behavior.
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.)
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, or else 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.
Discrimination
The Bible has a lot of rules that discriminate against certain kinds of people for no good reason.1 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 will not 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.
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.
Unjust punishments
If your neighbor steals, injures, or kills your animal that they were supposed to be keeping safe for you, God’s law requires you to just pretend it didn’t happen. But if somebody else stole your animal from the neighbor who was keeping it for you, then your neighbor apparently has to pay for it. So your neighbor gets punished only if it wasn’t his fault.
If a man suspects that his wife is cheating on him, she has to drink some dirty water whether she’s guilty or not. Supposedly it will only harm her if she’s guilty, but if that’s not true, nobody will know. People following this law aren’t going to bother doing anything to actually find out whether she’s guilty, other than seeing what happens when she drinks the dirty water. Which probably is going to harm her, because she’s drinking dirty water. Not to mention the further harm she’ll likely be subject to when she’s declared guilty due to failing this “test”.
Part of the punishment when a man slanders his wife because he dislikes her is for the wife to be forced to live with someone who dislikes her till death does them part. Similarly, God’s law requires rape victims to spend the rest of their lives married to their rapists. And if any married woman breaks a vow, her husband is to be held responsible.
God thinks some people deserve to be flogged with up to 40 lashes for being wrong in a dispute.
The penalty for injuring someone is to be injured the same way you injured that person. If you make someone lose an eye, you lose an eye. (And then the person who took your eye will also have to lose an eye, etc., until nobody has any eyes left, which might make things difficult when it’s time to start removing everyone’s teeth…) God’s law also says you should cut off a woman’s hand for saving her husband’s life, if she does it the wrong way.
People who steal can be punished with slavery under God’s law, but only if they’re poor.
Sometimes God commands that anyone who does certain things is to be “cut off” from the community of Israel. It’s not very clear what he means by that. Is that supposed to be a euphemism for execution? Even if it’s not, those people are probably going to die anyway, with everyone shunning them and refusing to help them in any way.
So what kinds of crimes does God think deserve this punishment? Having sex during a woman’s period. Copying God’s proprietary perfume and incense formulas. Eating yeast at the wrong time of year. Not being circumcised.
The Bible’s positions regarding freedom of speech are generally terrible. For example, the law of Moses says anyone who promotes other religions or says anything against the God of Israel must be killed.2 And the Bible approvingly mentions a king making a similar law that applied even outside of Israel.
God’s law says if you’re a “sorceress“, your not allowed to live.3 Sorcery can’t do any harm that would justify the existence of this rule, because sorcery isn’t even real. But that hasn’t stopped people from killing tens of thousands of women because they imagined they were violating this rule.
If your children don’t obey you, don’t aggravate them and provoke them to anger. God’s law says you should instead get people to throw stones at them till they die. That won’t make your kids angry, it will just make them dead. And that will make everyone happy.
You also get stoned to death if you ever have sex before marriage, if you’re a woman. Even if you get raped, that doesn’t make any difference. You still have to die, unless someone heard you scream. Whoever made this rule didn’t realize how unreasonable it is to expect all rape victims to scream for help. What if the rapist threatens to kill you if you scream? And there are plenty of reasons people might not be able to hear you if you do scream, or might not do anything about it even if they do hear you.
There’s also a death penalty for completely harmless things like being a prostitute when your father is a priest, making sacrifices to God in the wrong place, or touching a certain mountain when you haven’t heard the ram’s horn yet.
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”. 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.
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.
And then there’s hell, which is an infinite punishment for finite crimes, and is therefore infinitely disproportionate. No one deserves infinite punishment, except maybe that one guy who keeps condemning people to be tortured forever.