the Bible advocates genocide

[HelloDollyLlama]

The more I re-read the Bible, the more appalling I find it. This book is supposed to be a moral guide?

As we know from the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, as soon as the Israelites escaped from Egypt, they went to the Holy Land and committed genocide and ethnic cleansing against all of the innocent peoples who had the bad luck to get in the way of the “chosen people�. As commanded by the “all-loving God�, they went from town to town, murdering every man, woman and child, except the pretty girls who were given to the soldiers to be raped.

But in the first book of Samuel (1 Samuel 15), it gets even worse. In that book, God commands Saul to commit genocide against the Amalekites, and slaughter all the men, women and children. Saul does commit genocide, but he fails to kill one Amalekite fast enough to suit God, and also saves some of the Amalekite animals, so they can offer them as a sacrifice, to show their love for God. And for those reasons alone, God rejects Saul. Later, Saul is having trouble on the battlefield, and Samuel rises from the dead to tell Saul, again, that because of his failure to slaughter the Amalekites completely on command, Saul himself is condemned. Soon after, Saul’s army is attacked and he is killed. God condemned Saul for not committing genocide with sufficient brutality (1 Samuel 28).

So, to win God's love, it's not enough to be a mass murderer. You must be a perfectly efficient mass murderer.

[McCulloch]

It changes in the New Testament. To be accepted by God, according to the Christian variation, you must accept that your wrongdoings condemn you to death (or eternal torment) and that God's justice is served by transferring your condemnation to an innocent god-man who died for a weekend to save you.

[HelloDollyLlama]

It changes in the New Testament. To be accepted by God, according to the Christian variation, you must accept that your wrongdoings condemn you to death (or eternal torment) and that God's justice is served by transferring your condemnation to an innocent god-man who died for a weekend to save you.

Um, yeah. The message of the New Testament is a real bundle of joy: God allegedly insists that even the most innocent of us are insignificant sinners who should cringe before him; he pretends he is improving mankind by murdering Jesus, but he is really just killing his own son because he can’t revenge himself upon mankind any other way, having experimented with mass extermination many times already.

And the New Testament message is frankly an insult to the intelligence:

“Hello, you don’t know me, but from the minute you were born, you were condemned to spend all eternity in flames. But listen to everything we say with any questions, and give us money every week, and you’ll go to a really nice place when you die. You want proof? See, there ya go with the questions! It’s a mystery. Here’s another: this bread and wine will change to human flesh and blood by magic, and they you’re going to eat it. Here’s another: this is a bone belonging to one of our greatest members – pray to it and your prayer will come true....Hey, we’re flexible people! It only took us a couple of centuries to admit that man is an animal and the earth is a satellite!�

No God could give us the divine faculty of reason, and then hide himself so that we could not comprehend him unless we set reason (and sheer common sense) aside in favour of faith. He would not hide behind mysteries, and miracles are the lies of men, not the word of God. By the same token, if there is a God, the cosmos would be one of his greatest works, and he definitely would want us to admire and marvel at it. But the Church acting in his name didn’t even want us to look. The Church knew Man would get smarter and ask annoying questions.

Thomas Paine in “The Age of Reason� ridicules the logic of the testaments: “Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded, put Satan in the pit, let him out again, given him a triumph over the whole creation, damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, there Christian mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and man, and also the son of God celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple.�

Paine again, on the alleged rising of saints from their graves at the crucifixion:
“It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them — for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.�

The silliness of Christian logic intensifies the closer you get to the linchpin of their entire reason for being, Jesus’ death and resurrection. If Christ had to die, why not disease, old age...? If the cosmos is filled with inhabited worlds, does that mean Jesus had to go from world to world to world, dying in one after the other, over and over? And why is it that the people directly descended from the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Jews, are the ones who insist that Jesus didn’t magically rise from the dead and fly into heaven a month later?


In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

We should not be angry, or judgmental of others. We should be meek and merciful.

We should turn the other cheek, make peace with our enemies, love them, and even give them more than they want. Only people who forgive should be forgiven.

Do not lust after women; do not leave your wife.

Obey the law – you must be more righteous than the priests. But do not parade your righteousness and charity and piety in front of other people. Look at what people do, not what they say – watch out for fakes.

Do not hoard the treasures of the earth. Do not obsess on getting enough for yourself. Give to the poor.

Those who mourn should be comforted. Anyone who seeks help should get it.
Build for the future.


So he preached against anger and hate, dishonesty and hypocrisy, greed and spendthrifts, and adultery. Keep the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the rest of the Bible can be discarded -- and by all means it should be kept away from children. Genocide, slavery, giving away your female relatives to be raped, endless wars....If it was a movie it would have to be on cable.

[tlong]

It changes in the New Testament. To be accepted by God, according to the Christian variation, you must accept that your wrongdoings condemn you to death (or eternal torment) and that God's justice is served by transferring your condemnation to an innocent god-man who died for a weekend to save you.

Um, yeah. The message of the New Testament is a real bundle of joy: God allegedly insists that even the most innocent of us are insignificant sinners who should cringe before him; he pretends he is improving mankind by murdering Jesus, but he is really just killing his own son because he can’t revenge himself upon mankind any other way, having experimented with mass extermination many times already.

And the New Testament message is frankly an insult to the intelligence:

“Hello, you don’t know me, but from the minute you were born, you were condemned to spend all eternity in flames. But listen to everything we say with any questions, and give us money every week, and you’ll go to a really nice place when you die. You want proof? See, there ya go with the questions! It’s a mystery. Here’s another: this bread and wine will change to human flesh and blood by magic, and they you’re going to eat it. Here’s another: this is a bone belonging to one of our greatest members – pray to it and your prayer will come true....Hey, we’re flexible people! It only took us a couple of centuries to admit that man is an animal and the earth is a satellite!�

No God could give us the divine faculty of reason, and then hide himself so that we could not comprehend him unless we set reason (and sheer common sense) aside in favour of faith. He would not hide behind mysteries, and miracles are the lies of men, not the word of God. By the same token, if there is a God, the cosmos would be one of his greatest works, and he definitely would want us to admire and marvel at it. But the Church acting in his name didn’t even want us to look. The Church knew Man would get smarter and ask annoying questions.

Thomas Paine in “The Age of Reason� ridicules the logic of the testaments: “Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded, put Satan in the pit, let him out again, given him a triumph over the whole creation, damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, there Christian mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and man, and also the son of God celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple.�

Paine again, on the alleged rising of saints from their graves at the crucifixion:
“It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told. The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them — for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, he-saints and she-saints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con. against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.�

The silliness of Christian logic intensifies the closer you get to the linchpin of their entire reason for being, Jesus’ death and resurrection. If Christ had to die, why not disease, old age...? If the cosmos is filled with inhabited worlds, does that mean Jesus had to go from world to world to world, dying in one after the other, over and over? And why is it that the people directly descended from the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Jews, are the ones who insist that Jesus didn’t magically rise from the dead and fly into heaven a month later?


In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

We should not be angry, or judgmental of others. We should be meek and merciful.

We should turn the other cheek, make peace with our enemies, love them, and even give them more than they want. Only people who forgive should be forgiven.

Do not lust after women; do not leave your wife.

Obey the law – you must be more righteous than the priests. But do not parade your righteousness and charity and piety in front of other people. Look at what people do, not what they say – watch out for fakes.

Do not hoard the treasures of the earth. Do not obsess on getting enough for yourself. Give to the poor.

Those who mourn should be comforted. Anyone who seeks help should get it.
Build for the future.


So he preached against anger and hate, dishonesty and hypocrisy, greed and spendthrifts, and adultery. Keep the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the rest of the Bible can be discarded -- and by all means it should be kept away from children. Genocide, slavery, giving away your female relatives to be raped, endless wars....If it was a movie it would have to be on cable.

Do you feel better now?

[catalyst]

Hi Dolly,

I don't even know if bible jesus CAN be credited for the "sermon on the mount". Like most things attributed to this biblical character, it was done before and done better.

A lot has been said about the assumed utterings of bible jesus, but if people explore and delve further than their DESIRED belief system, they will see that xianity is nothing more than the regurgitation of ancient pagan belief systems which had their origins in the observations ancient people made of the solar system. There are plenty of proofs that this is in fact so, and the "sermon on the mount" falls into the same category. Before I get to the "sermon", just sus out how much this sounds like the jesus character:

In some areas, the calendar originally began in the constellation of Virgo, and the sun would therefore be "born of a Virgin."

The sun is the "Light of the World."

The sun "cometh on clouds, and every eye shall see him."

The sun rising in the morning is the "Savior of mankind."

The sun wears a corona, "crown of thorns" or halo.

The sun "walks on water."

The sun at 12 noon is in the house or temple of the "Most High"; thus, "he" begins "his Father's work" at "age" 12.

The sun is hung on a cross or "crucified," which represents its passing through the equinoxes, the vernal equinox being Easter, at which time it is then resurrected.

Replace SUN with SON and..bam...some assumed god/human "saviour", known as bible jesus.

Many a comment are assumed of this SUN..oops SON.

These things were also known as the Sayings of the Saviour, Sayings of the Sage or the Oracles of Jesus. The sayings or logia constituted one of the many shared texts used seperately by many evangelists in the creation of the gospels. This logia collection was eventually published as the "Gospel of Q", or just plain "Q". This stands for "Quelle" in German and the meaning of the word is "source". Q scholarship revealed that the logia themselves are composed of three separate texts, being Q1, Q2 and Q3. Most scholars recognise from this that the logia is mythical in its entirety, and attempts to find the "real" Jesus in a handful of sayings that originally appeared in Q1.

When trying to find an historical bible jesus in Q1, history boffins are left with an assumed "man" who was first remembered as a Cynic sage and only later imagined as a prophet who uttered apocalyptic warnings and supposedly other such stuff. Even The Lords Prayer was a knock-off from prior times! In reducing bible jesus to a handful of logia, we are left with nearly verbatim sayings from manuscripts preceding the bible jesus story and the xian era, proving that bible jesus didn't exist in reality, but instead as a mythical story, with no basis in history. The Logia Iesou, as it was called in Greek, are not, as supposed, the genuine sayings of an historical Jesus, but in fact represent orally transmitted traditions common in the various brotherhoods and mystery schools long before xianity was created.

The logia are in fact repetitions of the sayings of Horus, as The Word, or Iu-em-hept, 3 000 years PRIOR the xian version.

These sayings were common property in the mystery ages before they were written down. Matthew 25 is merely a reproduction of the scenery within the Last Judgment in the Great Hall of Justice, as represented in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

These saying are also found within the sayings of Osiris as written down by Taht-Matiu. Same for the sayings of Dionysus.

Horus delivered a sermon on the mount and there is within the Egyptian Hermetic or Trismergestic tradition a discourse called The Secret Sermon on the Mount. Furthermore, a lot of the Egyptian saying found their way into the Old Testament. As for the sermon on the mount by by bible jesus, it's merely a regurgitation of ancient sayings, as well as a patchwork of utterances found within the pages of the Old Testament. These include the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemoneheresh (Hebrew Prayers), and others.

You will also find the same words in some of the other gospels that did not make the cut into the bible, sometimes called "The Little Apocalypse". They seem to be verbatim quotations from the Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.

Some of the most beautiful sayings within the Sermon on the Mount actually come from the doctrines of the pre-xian Nazarenes.

Therefore, the Sermon on the mount, pretending to be the words of a "true" jesus, is nothing other than a pre-meditated attempt to further dupe the gullible. It never really happened, and if it did, it happened a few thousand years prior to the xian era and was just another carefully constructed lie by a few early plagiarists. In early days, people could easily be fooled because they did not have access to any of the writings themselves nor the scientific knowledge and discoveries we have today.

If you study Jainism and a little bit of Buddhism, you find the same kind of things being said within those philosophies. In order to rationalise this, some people have created the concept within their own minds that during the 18 year absence of the bible jesus character, he travelled to India and studied Buddhism. That conveniently slots in with the compassionate sayings he uttered as part of the sermon on the mount, and it also explains his total absence from the scene during that period. These are the alleged "jesus sutra's" which are nothing more than benign wafflings.

There are a number of Eastern religious movements within which the same words can be found, most of which once again pre-date the bible jesus fable by thousands of years. The arrogance with which xianity claims these words to be those of their mythical founder, is typical of a close minded view of history and the world.

[HelloDollyLlama]

Quite right. Since Jesus was born into a Jewish community that was more Hellenized than people truly appreciate today, a lot of the myth and tradition surrounding Christianity was actually borrowed from Greco-Roman traditions, or in some cases from their also-Helllenized neighbors the Egyptians. Jesus' teaching methods had roots in Zeno and the Stoa, and his philosophy had Aristotle written all over it. If Jesus had had the good fortune to be born in Roman-era Athens, he could have had a long career as a teacher, and died in his bed. His misfortune was being born in Nazareth and catching the Messiah bug from his mother (or perhaps from John the Baptist), in a time and place that was hostile to messiahs.

[cnorman18]

Okay, here we go again.

The Bible is a collection of very, very old documents, from a time and place far removed from our own; the words of men, not the Word of God. To read the Bible responsibly is to take that into account first.

Some of those documents were apparently intended to be read as history, but modern scholars - historians, archaeologists and Bible scholars alike - know better. The bloody conquest of Canaan never happened, for instance, and there are indications of that in the Bible text itself - not in the narratives themselves, but in the apparent agendas and emphases of their writers. Further, even if many of the gory and brutal massacres of the Bible did in fact take place - as they probably did - that was the nature of war in the ancient world. One will not see much evidence of the Geneva Convention in the Bronze Age.

I would heartily and readily agree that basing one's religious beliefs and values on a literal and uncritical surface reading of the Biblical text is foolish, unreflectively dogmatic and quite probably counterproductive and even evil.

But then, assuming that all who take the Bible seriously read it in that manner and endorse those brutalities as commanded by God and therefore good, and assuming that all religion is so structured and based, isn't all that accurate or fair either.

(In defense of the NT, I have nothing to say.)

[HelloDollyLlama]

No society would claim to acts of genocide unless they actually did it. It happened.

Okay, here we go again.

The Bible is a collection of very, very old documents, from a time and place far removed from our own; the words of men, not the Word of God. To read the Bible responsibly is to take that into account first.

Some of those documents were apparently intended to be read as history, but modern scholars - historians, archaeologists and Bible scholars alike - know better. The bloody conquest of Canaan never happened, for instance, and there are indications of that in the Bible text itself - not in the narratives themselves, but in the apparent agendas and emphases of their writers. Further, even if many of the gory and brutal massacres of the Bible did in fact take place - as they probably did - that was the nature of war in the ancient world. One will not see much evidence of the Geneva Convention in the Bronze Age.

I would heartily and readily agree that basing one's religious beliefs and values on a literal and uncritical surface reading of the Biblical text is foolish, unreflectively dogmatic and quite probably counterproductive and even evil.

But then, assuming that all who take the Bible seriously read it in that manner and endorse those brutalities as commanded by God and therefore good, and assuming that all religion is so structured and based, isn't all that accurate or fair either.

(In defense of the NT, I have nothing to say.)

[McCulloch]

No society would claim to acts of genocide unless they actually did it. It happened.

Are you sure?

[cnorman18]

No society would claim to acts of genocide unless they actually did it. It happened.

On the contrary; in the ancient world, the total extermination of one's enemies was something to be proud of and boasted about, and frequently exaggerated. Any number of Egyptian steles and Persian monuments, not to mention ancient documents, attest to that.

The archaeological evidence unambiguously and conclusively proves that there was never any genocidal "conquest of Canaan" as related in the book of Joshua. It very clearly DID NOT happen.

It is objectively and scientifically clear that the Israelite people, who were primarily indigenous to Canaan anyway, slowly spread throughout the area and intermingled with the previous inhabitants over the course of centuries. There was no whirlwind conquest as depicted in the Bible.

I find this post of yours amazing.

Do you realize that YOU, of all people, are here defending a wholly literal surface reading of the Bible as historically accurate, in direct contradiction to established science, in order to support an a priori assumption about the veracity of Scripture and the nature of God and religion?

Does that sound at all familiar to you? Have you not expressed contempt and disdain for fundamentalists who do that same sort of thing?

Why do you (rightly) dismiss narratives that are fantastic and self-serving and intended to promote the primacy and superiority of the Hebrews, but enthusiastically endorse narratives of that very same nature as literally true when they support your polemic? In other words, why is the Bible a load of ridiculous fables when you don't like the content, but dependably and literally accurate when you do?

Don't people normally call that "picking and choosing"?