I posted the following op-ed screed to my FaceBook page
yesterday:
“So, for those of who may believe recent mass shootings in
schools are because "We've banned God from schools" check out Genesis
32. Has there ever been a larger single mass killing than "God"
ordered through Moses, his hit man? 3,000 killed in one day at the insistance
of the "deity." Wow...and "he loves you!" Riiight.”
My target audience, knowing me, “got” that it was a mix of
sacrilege and irony. I believe most also understood that there was a kernel of
truth hidden away inside. Apparently one reader didn’t. They styled it thus:
“This has to be one of the most ridiculous posts I've read on Facebook!”
Allow me to posit that the writer has apparently read very
little on Facebook if this is “the most ridiculous” post they’ve read. Hell, I
have personally posted waaay more ridiculous stuff.
After reflecting most of
today on this, I decided to do two things. The first, an act of charity, was to
block the person in question to avoid hurting their feelings again,
inadvertently. The second is to expand on what I meant and why I feel
commentary such as mine is so offensive to people of faith. Having said that,
let’s get to it.
The idea that a
deity (let’s specify, here; the deity in which they believe) exists is
extraneous to some, honored primarily in the breach by most, and deeply
ingrained in some. My respondent is
apparently of that last segment. What I pointed out is, that when we hear
statement or claims such as “We banned God from schools and that’s why there are
shootings,” we have essentially said that this god is subject to human approval
yet has infinite power, loves humanity but is prepared to watch them kill each
other. If that is so, I pointed out, it
is merely consistent with the recorded scripture so oft quoted by those who believe
it to be the divinely inspired, word for word, spoken word of Gawduh!
The
instance in Exodus Ch 30 contains grossly contradictory statements from the
same deity. Earlier (chapter 20) he spoke from some smoldering brush heap and
ordered that “his people” obey a set of ten laws which he had the angels carved
in stone on both sides! As a point of further ludicrosity, John Wesley’s
personal exegetic commentary on this actually says, “probably the first writing.”
Let’s park here a moment and reflect on just
how ridiculous that statement is, even coming from the founder of Methodism and
a college educated man. If the Ten
Commandments as “delivered” to Moses were the world’s first writing, who could
read them? More troubling is that while most scriptologists actually
doubt that the events described in Exodus actually occurred, including Israeli
archeologists who would desperately love to prove it did, the events, if they
transpired, would have been in the mid-1400s BCE. The cuneiform and
hieroglyphic writing systems had already been in use for about 2000 years by that time! Hammurabi’s code dates to 300
years earlier than the Exodus s is dated.
So; continuing along with the fable, Commandment
number 6 is pretty specific regarding taking lives. Specifically, it says not to.
Later, in Ch 32, apparently, God has second thoughts and either 3,000 or 30,000
(depending upon translation) are killed on his orders. Wow, some temper, huh?
Now my pointing this out is what caused my young acquaintance to label it
“ridiculous.”
Later, however, as the Children of Israel
blunder aimlessly, allegedly for 40 years, in the desert we have other cases of
a vengeful and killer God. Jericho, dating to 9600 BCE had been continuously
inhabited for millennia before the Hebrews show up out of the desert and tell
the inhabitants that they’re lease is up and their god told them it’s to be
their town now. Wouldn’t you think a benevolent God who controlled human
destiny would have told the residents, to avoid many needless deaths among his
“children?” Not so much.
In fact this
philosophy of “It was promised to us” is used to justify many killings by the
Hebrews along the way to Canaan. This includes the astonishing statement that God caused the sun and moon to
stand still during a battle with the Amorites. Of course, for those who believe,
and I know several, this really happened, for the rest of us with
a brain, we can use what we know about the actual revolution of the spheres,
and what would happen if the earth were actually to suddenly stop rotating. The
fact that I’m writing this is proof that it just didn’t happen.
Now to my conclusions: I realize that
people come to states of belief (or disbelief) from many different directions
and for many different reasons. For those who were either inculcated with
fundamentalism from birth or who, like Mike Pence, converted for who knows what
specific reasons, the result is similar. Anything which threatens the
fundamental foundations of the faith by requiring actual thought is seen as not
only threatening but immediately brands the questioner as, pick one, heretic,
blasphemer, godless Atheist (a redundancy). Critical thinking simply has no place in any
standard deistic belief system, because they all have one commonality in the
light of reason – they all fail.
When further
confronted by the fact that somewhere around 6 million Jews, many observant and
devout, died in the Holocaust, God apparently uninvolved or concerned, we see
one of two reactions. One, and by far the easiest to refute, is to deny it
happened. Dwight Eisenhower had the foresight to understand this in 1945, and
ordered the Army photographers to document the atrocities they saw. The far
lamer and actually more pitiful answers are similar to that proffered by the
individual mentioned earlier.
Here is it
and I quote, “Prayer doesn't get rid of evil. That will exist no matter what...
unfortunately.” And so? This is what the late Ben Bradlee called a “non-denial
denial.” It simply means that the answer
is obvious but impossible for the individual to iterate because to do so
threatens the entire foundation of his self-delusion. Isn’t it fascinating that
some American Holocaust deniers also claim a muscular strident Christianity?
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