How much evil in this world has been done by people in the name of holy books?
After numerous taunts and demands that I read the Bible I have done so. I suggest that you do the same, that is read whichever holy book is most appropriate for the culture in which you live. The Bible needs to be read like any history book or novel. It is impossible to read a large book without forming some idea about what it is, who wrote it and why. For all too many people down the ages this interpretation has been given to them, there has been no possibility of them forming their own opinions because there was a Correct Interpretation which must be applied.
In the Bible I read the Correct Interpretation was written at the top of the columns of text. When Isaiah was prophesying what was about to happen to the local king in the next couple of years the Correct Interpretation told you that this was a prophesy of the coming of Jesus Christ, an interpretation that you would probably not have considered from just reading what the text actually says.
When Christians tell me to read the Bible they often suggest that I start with either Matthew or John, this is a cunning plan to throw the honest reviewer off the scent. I started in the most obvious position, with the title, frontispiece, publishing details and then Genesis 1. Reading the whole book cover to cover and in sequence is very important. If you dip in and out of it you don't notice the way the whole scope of the work changes enormously over time, as does the character of God and the nature of a righteous life.
There is not the slightest hint of life after death in the early books of the Old Testament. In fact the concept of any form of survival after death only really appears in the Book of Daniel. Words such as heavens and soul do appear but it is clear that these are interpretations by Christian interpreters not the content of the original. The early righteous men are simply those who worship Yahweh rather than any other gods. There is little description of any moral acts of men such as Abraham and Moses. They are not described as doing anything out of the ordinary. The morals in the story of Lot are particularly instructive, it seems it is perfectly reasonable to allow or even facilitate the gang rape of your daughter but somehow an offence to allow the gang rape of a male household guest. How does that even begin to make sense? What is the great taboo here, is it homosexuality or the violation of the status of host and guest? To the modern mind both these seem entirely trivial when set against rape and the denial of the personhood of his own daughters. His daughters' virginity was not his to offer up! A modern moral man would ask the angels if they fancied the idea of knowing the men of Sodom, in the biblical sense, and then relayed their message to the crowd. It wasn't Lot's choice to speak for the angels or his daughters. If he was to offer up a sacrifice to appease the crowd he had only one body to offer up, his own.
There are very few hints of any moral acts committed by any of those who are called righteous in the Old Testament, it seems as though there is only one measure of righteousness, refusing to have anything to do with foreign gods. The patriarchs had several wives and many slaves, there is no mention of them being especially kind to their slaves or wives or their flocks. There is no mention of charity or benevolence of any kind. It seems as though the only thing that counts is that they are faithful to their god in the same way they demand their women to be faithful to them. There is a lot of mixing up of the concepts of sex and religion with plenty of images of prostitution being used when describing worship of other gods, think of the famous Whore of Babylon and the numerous references to the Israelites or their womenfolk whoring after other gods.
{34:14} For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD,
whose name [is] Jealous, [is] a jealous God: {34:15} Lest
thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and
they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto
their gods, and [one] call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice;
{34:16} And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and
their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy
sons go a whoring after their gods.
{Leviticus 17:7} And they shall no
more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have
gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them
throughout their generations.
{Leviticus 20:5} Then I will set my face against that man, and
against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a
whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from
among their people.
{Deuteronomy 31:16} And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou
shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and
go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land,
whither they go [to be] among them, and will forsake me,
and break my covenant which I have made with them.
{Judges 2:17} And yet they would not hearken unto their judges,
but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed
themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way
which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments
of the LORD; [but] they did not so.
{Judges 8:27} And Gideon made an ephod
thereof, and put it in his city, [even] in Ophrah: and all
Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a
snare unto Gideon, and to his house.
{ 1 Chronicles 5:25} And they transgressed against the God of their
fathers, and went a whoring after the gods of the people of
the land, whom God destroyed before them.
{ 2 Chronicles 21:13} But hast walked in the way of the kings of
Israel, and hast made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem
to go a whoring, like to the whoredoms of the house of
Ahab, and also hast slain thy brethren of thy father’s house,
[which were] better than thyself:
And so on. Get the picture? It was the standard analogy, being unfaithful to Yahweh was whoring after foreign gods, later false gods or demons, later still perhaps imaginary false foreign gods. Certainly in the earliest days Yahweh did not seem to have a monopoly on existence in the godly realm and his servants did not have a monopoly on magic either.
{Exodus 7:10} And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and
they did so as the LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast
down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it
became a serpent. {7:11} Then Pharaoh also called the wise
men and the sorcerers: now the magicians of Egypt, they
also did in like manner with their enchantments. {7:12} For
they cast down every man his rod, and they became
serpents: but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods.
It's a rod thang.
It takes a special kind of mind to be able to read this stuff as if it was literally true, either a simple and trusting mind that has never been taught how to think or one which has been taught how to compartmentalize so that certain books are to be read in one way and certain books in another. It is not a generalized inability to understand context and bias, some Christians can be very astute, it is just that they can't be very astute when it comes to reading the Bible. They have to read it as if it is the Word of God. They are also able to understand where other holy books come from, they can understand how people can be both sincere and wrong and they can also understand how people can be lying and manipulative in the way they set up and run cults and priesthoods. They simply have a blindspot which ensures that they cannot make use of such analysis when it comes to the Bible. They cannot consider the idea that any words which appear in the Bible were written by men with an agenda, however this analysis becomes available to them when they consider gospels which are not part of the conventional canon or books associated with other religions. They can clearly see that the Qur'an was written by a charlatan, as was the Book of Mormon but for some reason they venerate the tribe of Judah to such a point that they are incapable of asking about the shadowy and manipulative motivations of its members.
However this dogged refusal to think bad of the Jews evaporates at the moment of the Last Supper. The Jews magically transform from a people who will naturally be able to detect the difference between true prophets and false prophets unto a people blinded by Satan, misguided and deluded. For obviously it follows axiomatically that any Jew who hears the voice of God after the crucifixion must be either deluded or under Satanic possession because if they did manage to hear the voice of God then surely God would have told them that the old covenant was null and void. If you can't trust the voice of God in your head then you really are screwed.
When you allow yourself to think about Men of God first and foremost as men then it becomes absurdly easy to spot self-serving lies and manipulations. The Book of Job for example when read by anybody with their critical and literary faculties in full working order can clearly be seen as a fictional tale from start to finish. If Job was a real person we would have been given his genealogy and his address in great detail, but we don't, he's just this guy.
{1:1} There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name
[was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one
that feared God, and eschewed evil. {1:2} And there were
born unto him seven sons and three daughters. {1:3} His
substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three
thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five
hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this
man was the greatest of all the men of the east
Which story is that more reminiscent of, the account of the life of King David or the account of the life of Jack who climbed the beanstalk? Real stories ground their characters in space and time. Which part of Uz? We might know it. When was this? Who was this man's father? Do his kin-folk still live there? Who is telling this tale and how well did they know Job? Come on, be reasonable here, this is a fairy tale! We can deduce that much even before we confront the details of God and Satan having conversations and the unnamed storyteller somehow being privy to their content. Such a story can teach us nothing about the nature of God or the universe because it is clearly fiction. You can't learn anything about the bravery of lions by reading about a man who lived in the land of Oz, the most you can possibly learn is the ideas of the person who told the tale. But even then you cannot know whether the storyteller was telling what he knew to be true, was telling a tale he knew to be untrue which he expected to be taken allegorically or whether he was deliberately telling a lie expecting it to be taken as truth.
In modern times we know that people who weave tales of magic expect people to see them as fiction but hope to get across messages too. For example the work of J K Rowling is clearly told as fiction, to be accepted as fiction, not to be confused for reality pretending to be fiction but for all that she hopes that people will take away some lessons from the tale. Rowling wants us to associate evil with racism and intolerance and good with peaceful coexistence and tolerance of difference. Love is shown as a virtue, so is friendship and loyalty. Obeying tyrannical authority is shown to be weakness and resisting tyranny and upholding truth are virtues while belief in the supernatural and new age stuff is shown to be a bit silly. Considering the subject matter is magic the way she manages to poke fun at irrational beliefs is quite a feat.
As consumers of works of art or fiction we allow the artist some licence to influence the way we think and when the message they want to put across is one we are sympathetic to we can relax and enjoy the experience. I trust J K Rowling not to put any truly sinister ideas into my head, or the heads of my children. I can see where she is coming from and her world view does not clash with mine. She does not expect you to start believing in magic, she has made no attempt to use magic as an explanation for human mysteries (as did Erich von Daniken) which would have been an easy thing to do if that was her purpose, no, she wants the reader to suspend disbelief only long enough to read the tale. In contrast I cannot enjoy reading Ian Fleming in the same way as I have found him to be a broad spectrum bigot and his creation a superficial snob whose only redeeming feature is being a ruthless tool in the service of his country, right or wrong, which ranks rather low on my list of principle virtues. With music the same dilemma arises, musicians feel duty bound to fill their songs with messages about their politics, world view and religion which can really get in the way of enjoying the sound of the music. If somebody is trying to send me a message I don't agree with then the struggle my mind has with resisting that messages destroys the enjoyment of the song. I don't want music to try to make me a Christian, I don't like music which is trying to link ideas I don't believe in with other ideas to sell a third idea. I much prefer the French national anthem to the British one, partly because of the music but more so because my French isn't good enough to find things to object to in the lyrics. As far as God Save the Queen is concerned I see it as the happy song, because happy is just about the only word in the first verse I don't object to. I don't mind the Queen being happy but she shouldn't be ruling over us and she shouldn't be in a position to represent national victories and none of this has got anything to do with an imaginary god. Elizabeth Windsor, live long and prosper, but not at our expense.
Getting back to the Bible for a moment... If we don't ask who was telling the tale and why then we miss the entire point. It is obvious that the tale of Job is fiction because the whole tale is told as a narrative, a narrator who does not introduce himself or give any clues as to how he knows the tale describes events from the perspective of a man describing scenes being played out in his imagination. From the events described in the story it is clear that nobody but God could have been the source for the story, unless it was made up entirely. There are two possibilities, one is that an anonymous scribe took dictation from God and got that dictation accepted as the true word of God or that the same scribe merely made out that he had got the story from God or allowed people to believe the story was sufficiently good to be considered divine.
In more recent times people have made up stories about God, heaven, hell and Jesus. Some people make a career out of describing what God thinks, what he has told him and so on. Preachers make out that they know why earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes happen, they attribute natural disasters to the whim of a god who while having literally all the time in the world and a justice system that is sure as hell nevertheless needs to do a bit of swift, blind and ill-aimed smiting. Why do people let them get away with it? Why do people allow mortal men to tell them what their god says, thinks or plans to do? All the pomp and bullshit of the Catholic Church, the robes, magic wands, magic amulets, magic tomes and silly hats are there to demonstrate a transparently absent authority. Benny darling, if you really were God's representative on Earth you wouldn't have to get the dressing up box out and walk about with funny sticks, people would be able to see your ju-ju powers just by looking at you.
If a police force treated innocent bystanders with the cavalier attitude of God the Smiter of Cities we would rightly call for them to be disbanded and prosecuted. Crack heads first, sort out the guilty and the innocent later is something that we would not expect a third world tyrant's death squads to regard as standard practice. For men of God to proclaim that earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis are punishments from God for tolerating homosexuality is surely blasphemous libel. While blasphemy is a victimless crime in the strict sense as no gods exist it is still a terribly wicked thing to say, to give people the impression that the creator of the universe would engage in acts of wanton carnage among the innocent that would cause even the Israeli Defence Forces sleepless nights. While I don't for a moment believe in a god of any kind I feel honour bound to speak in his defence here, painting him as a monster is a wicked thing to do.