[This post will soon be obsolete as Google is going to retire its Pages feature. In anticipation of this, The Will of God has been reproduced here.]
My article on The Will of God: 24 Evil Old Testament Verses is now available again for viewing. Among much else. Apparently Google changed a setting on us without telling us and the companion site to the book The Christian Delusion has been inaccessible for almost a year. And we didn’t know, because Google didn’t change the setting for everyone, so it appeared to work fine for some people, including us. It took until now to find out. But that’s fixed. We set the setting back. So now if you’ve been trying to access it (as apparently hundreds of people were), you can. Merry Post Christmas!
I always liked Malachi 2:3.
Richard,
Have to say that I’ve visited your blog quite a few times as a regular on Freethought Blogs. Like you, I am a committed atheist, and interested in Old Testament (Pentatuch) apologetics.
I’ve found your blogs often interesting, always irreverant and impossibly sophomoric.
I really don’t understand your audience. If it’s atheist you preach to, well, they have no interest in OT moralities. It seems to be simple gloating, sniping, and gratuitious sarcasm to point out that the OT offers contrary and an often merciless temperment in the way of moral guidance.
To believers, I think you’re just trying to belittle their faith in the OT; a futile tactic if you wish to communicate your own moral standards to them
What is the OT? It is the voice of a culture that lived some 2500 to 3500 years ago. It is a tale of what happened from a people (by tradition) who, freeing themselves from bondage, formed a nation. As such, it is a story with heros, villians, saints, sinners. Above all, it is an epic of a army led by a great spiritual commander. It’s also a great story! Full of intrigue, sex and violence. I’m convinced if it were not it would have long ago faded into obscurity.
Yet you seemed to be obsessed by a certain literalism very much in the same vein as the fundamentalist. That is, let’s look at the literal words without the context of culture or history and condemn them.
I am left especially unimpressed by your link to ‘The Will of God
Assembled with commentary by Dr. Richard Carrier.’
You claim ‘Few ever actually read the so-called Good Book…’ Are you nuts?! Millions upon millions have ‘actually’ read the the so-called Good Book, from antiquity to today – but I suppose you mean to say that despite that indesputable fact, only you understand it. What an arrogant statement.
‘It is the will of God…etc.’ You don’t believe in god (neither, do I), so how do you impugn your understanding of his will upon the text? When the text claims ‘The Lord spake unto whomever…’ it is a biblical author asserting the authority of the text that follows. And what follows is often not what you claim it to be.
A few examples:
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you … and when…you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them…”
In antiquity, this is a common, even necessary practice. When you conquered a people, in those times, generally small city-states, you killed the inhabitants, especially men of fighting age, and often kept the women for breeding stock. In this manner, obviously, you would wind up with more of Us and less of Them and important security issue. What would you suggest in 800BC? Remote monitoring with electronic ankle bracelets?
The issue of women, whether to kill or enslave or simply rape and discard receives inconsistant treatment. War-like tribes – and the ancient Hebrews were nothing if not war-like – tended to destroy everyone in their path, it served as notice to the village down the road: evacuate or die.
However, consorting with the female enemy appeared to be quite popular.
We have the famous story of Pinchus (Phineas), who avenges the followers of Baal-Peor and their cavorting with Midean women. Later, in Kings and Chronicles, we read exhortations for men to rid themselves of their Midean and Edomite wives, killing them if necessary. Must have been a lot of guys who penises trumped their faith in yahweh.
‘It is the will of God to hideously maul dozens of children merely for being silly: Then [the LORD’s Prophet Elisha] went up from there to Bethel…’
The prophet Elisha provides us with many boogie-man stories. Elisha’s tales from Judges were written at a time of lawlessness, after Judea was conquered, but before governing institutions were established. This story is similar to Santa’s admonition of ‘Naughty or nice’ and not some moral imperative. (No doubt because Elisha was a ranting maniac made fun of by the local yokels.
And finally, a complete mis-interpretation:
It is the will of God that when he commands you to bake your meals with human shit and you complain, he’ll have mercy on you and only insist you roast it with bullshit instead:
‘[The LORD said to me, His prophet Ezekiel], “You shall eat [your food] as a barley cake, having baked it in their sight over human dung.” Then the LORD said, “Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will banish them.”
But I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I have never been defiled. For from my youth until now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has any unclean meat ever entered my mouth!”
[So] He said to me, “[Then] I will give you cow’s dung in place of human dung over which you will prepare your bread.”’
No, no, no! Dried human dung was used, in a pinch, as fuel. It was no where near as efficient as cow dung as it contained far less fiber (and stunk more) than cow dung, a very common cooking fuel back then. Using human dung as fuel was also a status issue: it meant you had no livestock. Later Talmudic text declaim food cooked over human dung is not kosher, citing this passage. It doesn’t mean you should eat human or cow shit in your barley soup.
I could certainly quibble more. But my main objection is your style of OT criticism offers so little insight or content.
Try to imagine yourself the Judean of three millenium ago. Try hard to hear these voices. Contemporary concepts of governance, justice, equality, mysogeny did not exist then; these ideas took thousands of years and millions of lives to develop. All you had was this story, or at least some parts of it, and the circumstances of your precarious and probably very short life.
Respectfully,
Noah
Oh, the she-bears sent forth to kill the mischievous children!
Perfectly nice people justified this to me when I asked about it when I was in my “reading the whole Bible” project. One of them said it was wrong to make fun of the Lord’s prophets. (So they deserved what they got.)
Another (she was in her early 20s) had learned in Bible study that the Hebrew word translated as “children” actually means “youths,” so the Lord’s prophet was actually being harassed by a very large street gang and not a bunch of kiddies. I was a little dubious that they deserved to be eaten by bears. Certainly the Lord has the power to teach them a lesson with something a little less drastic.
One big problem I have with religion is that it turns perfectly nice people into bloodthirsty zealots who have an irrational knee-jerk reaction to many situations that shouldn’t be that hard to figure out morally.
Glancing over the companion website again, I see that the images ‘chart to help Dr. Weikart’ and ‘classes of people’ seem to be a broken/nonfuntioning: https://sites.google.com/site/thechristiandelusion/Home/darwinism-and-nazi-ideology Perhaps there are still some needed tweaks to the Google page?
Now why would someone working for Google decide to secretly switch off access to an atheist site?
Thank you for the content you posted here. I’ve recently read your book Sense and Goodness without God, and I appreciated the manner and tone of your essays.
What do you think about evilbible dot com? I have gotten a lot of good information from it but I’ve found some quotations to be somewhat misleading such as the quote from Luke 19:27 “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”. I believe that is a parable told by Jesus about someone else. He wasn’t saying that about himself.
This is a useful list. I need to find similar material from the New Testament to counter the all too common “all that stuff was changed by Jesus’s sacrifice” argument. I’ve heard Dr. Carrier mention at least one or two New Testament examples in the same vein in his talks.
Link is broken now. All these years later.
Um. Didn’t you read the first paragraph, the one in italics?
This page has already been updated. As explained there. And the link there works. I just checked.