Old Testament God

The biggest problem with Christianity is Jesus' father.

The second biggest problem is his son.

There is a certain logic to the idea of a single god who created everything in the universe. I see no great problem in believing in such a god and I can respect people who have such beliefs. That is not to say that I am convinced by the evidence for such a god because there isn't any, or there is a universe full, it depends which way you look at it. What I cannot accept is the jealous, petty-minded vindictive genocidal bastard of a god that fills the Hebrew scriptures. It is simply no answer to say that Jesus saves Christians from the embarrassment of believing in such a god because it is precisely this god who Jesus claims is his father, not the only god, a god of love, but specifically the god shown in the Hebrew scriptures.

Christianity was an attempt to build a synthesis between a (then) modern mythical resurrected god-man, son of the one true god, the pure unchanging essence of godhead and the old tribal warlord sky god Yahweh. The result is a chimera of a god that is in danger of coming apart at the stitches.

Jesus had things attributed to him which would be extremely familiar to any contemporary expert in comparative theology. Sons of the one true god were ten-a-penny. So were virgin births in caves or stables, symbolic meals of bread and wine, unjust executions on trees and resurrections into a higher level of heaven (higher than the mythical level the other "events" take place in). The only novelty in the Jesus story was the Jewish angle, this was the first time the Jewish psychopath Yahweh was said to have a son. Plenty of other gods had sons in those days, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East was a veritable deity nursery, that was a fashion started by Alexander the Great.

No doubt you have heard the one about the madman who thought he was Napoleon?

"Who told you that you were Napoleon?"

"God did" says the little chap puffing out his chest.

"I never did any such thing!" says the man in the next bed.

Alexander of course was bigger than Napoleon, and bigger than anybody in history so it is quite understandable that he took to believing some of the stories told about him, or at least took to believing how useful such ideas were to him. A man who was a god is a very valuable commodity. Of course any sceptic can disprove a man-god claim very easily with the help of a sword or knife. The sooner your god-man is safely and unjustly killed and dispatched to the safety of the spirit world the better. 'Coincidentally' it is shortly after Jesus is reported to have died and been resurrected and then vanished again that non-Christians first become aware of the story. Nobody, Christians, Jews or Romans wrote a single word about Jesus in the present tense or wrote about a man who was yet to die or ascend into heaven. Jesus in history is 100% in flashback.

The only things about Yahweh that fits the job description of a creator god are his uniqueness and his powers, as long as you ignore his problems with chariots of iron (Judges 1:19), perhaps it's like one of those weak body parts or strength-sapping green glowing minerals that otherwise boringly powerful characters need to keep the story interesting. Does Yahweh's problems with chariots of iron extend to an inability to overcome modern armoured cars and tanks? What about a Fiat Punto?

Yahweh's chauvinism and tribal loyalty do not make any sense, which is understandable for a Bronze Age deity pressed into service in the modern age. The God of Concrete, God of Steel doesn't go well with the ineffectual, racist and barbaric plague-inflictor of the Moses story. A god who makes galaxies and super-clusters one "day" and then gets uptight about menstruating women in his temple later does not seem to make a lot of sense. Neither does it make any sense for the creator of the entire universe to have a favoured race of people - unless you belong to that race - and of course the vast majority of Christians don't.

The problem with Christianity is that you have to believe in Jesus, a man who did not distance himself from the psychopathic monster of a god Yahweh. Calling somebody father doesn't mean he's not a psychopath. There was no apology for wiping out cities and encouraging the men of Israel to take women and girl children as plunder of war. Neither was there any explanation or denunciation of the story of Noah - a single family spared from global devastation. Do we assume that the god of love that Jesus claims is his father is happy for you to see him as capable of killing everybody on Earth, man, woman and child and all the animals except for a tiny breeding stock?

How many mass murderers have you hugged to your bosom, invited into your home, and given up your children to, in round figures?

The story of Jesus cannot be separated from the story of torture and sacrifice. In what way is the godhead helped by torturing and sacrificing an avatar of the godhead? In what way is torturing a part of yourself and allowing it to be killed going to buy off your own wrath against your pets? By whose warped rules? If God wants to forgive us why is that beyond his powers without this ridiculous blood-spectacle and the need for us to show we are prepared to lay down our logic and scepticism to embrace a myth? In what way are children helped by being told this story? The moral of the story is not do the right thing because it is right but believe the right thing because you are told it is right, and there's glory in torture, suffering and death.

Christianity cannot be seen as a respectable religion as long as it features Jesus, a man who claims as a father a god whose character revealed in the Old Testament is so flawed that it looks like a diabolical plan to discredit godhead in its entirety. How can anybody who believes in a god of love have anything to do with the apologist for a psychopathic genocidal monster that is Jesus Christ?

Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature's night. These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt. — Robert Ingersoll

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