The HyperTexts

Why I Am Not a Christian
by Michael R. Burch

I grew up in a family of devout Christians that included missionaries, pastors and preachers, a deacon, and Sunday school teachers, including my mother.

I was a devout Christian myself, up until age eleven, praying diligently for my salvation on a daily basis, if not quite so good at fasting.

What the hell happened, pardon the pun?

I was a reading prodigy. When I was in the fifth grade my standardized tests were off the charts and my school created a special reading class for me. A class of one. While the other students were reading normal fifth grade fare, I was reading the classics at an accelerated rate: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, et al.

I would go the library, check out eight books (the max), read them in a few days, then repeat, repeat, repeat.

My parents were delighted. Being devout Christians, they suggested that I read the Holy Bible from beginning to end, ten chapters per day. So I did.

Ironically, the main reason that I am not a Christian today is that I read the Bible from cover to cover, twice, and studied it intensively, reading hundreds of books by Christian authors, including famous ones like John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Dante, Billy Graham, C. S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, John Milton and Watchman Nee.

None of them were a bit convincing. They all made the Christian "god" seem infinitely worse than the Devil. After all, Jesus Christ was able to save the thief on the cross with a nod of his head, but if your beloved mother or grandfather ends up in an infinitely cruel, purposeless hell, it was Jesus who made the decision, not the Devil. Why doesn't Jesus just nod his head at everyone, no skin off his nose, especially considering the terrible world he created, if he is the Creator as the Christian Bible claims?

Furthermore, regardless of what Christian apologists say, deceptively, about the biblical "god" being "good," the Bible itself accuses Yahweh/Jehovah of being the greatest monster the world has ever seen, unless he's a myth like Zeus and Odin.

After reading the Bible from cover to cover at age eleven, and being a very good and very honest reader, I came up with this epigram to express my conclusion:

If God
is good,
half the Bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch

That was my first poem, or at least the first one that I can remember writing, penned sometime between age eleven and thirteen.

Many years later, as an adult in my forties, I read the Bible from cover to cover again, and came up with exactly the same conclusion. The biblical "god" was a monster, far worse than the Devil, who was only permitted to do evil because Jehovah allowed it. That's like a judge allowing a serial murderer to run loose, committing more and more crimes, rather than having him thrown in jail to protect the public.

Take the book of Job. In the first chapter Satan traipses into heaven. So much for Satan being cast out of heaven by my namesake the Archangel Michael; he was as welcome as all the goody-two-shoes angels. Satan talks Jehovah into murdering Job's children in order to "test" his faith. Satan has no power to commit the murders; he has to get Jehovah's permission. Now according to Christian theology, God is all-knowing and can perfectly foresee the future. So Jehovah could have peered into his crystal ball and said, "Nice try, Ol' Nick, but I can see that my servant Job will remain faithful, so there's no need to murder his kids. Please find some more productive use of your time!"

But alas, Jehovah lacked the wisdom of Solomon or even your average dunce, and he stupidly and evilly agreed to let Job's children be murdered. He also allowed Job's servants and sheep to be burned alive. Such a lovely chap, that Jehovah. With friends like him, who needs to worry about demons?

Thus all Job's children were killed, and all his servants and hundreds of innocent sheep burned alive, for no reason at all. How many servants were burned alive? We don't know but Job had "a very great household." I will guess at least a hundred, since we know the writers of the "inerrant" Bible never fudged or exaggerated.

In fact, the Bible makes it sound as if Jehovah did the killing himself, since the barbecue was produced by "fire from heaven." And why not, since he drowned all the children, infants, babies, unborns and animals during the Great Flood? What difference do ten children, a hundred servants and five hundred sheep make, when you have slaughtered trillions of living creatures for no reason at all, since Noah immediately got drunk, was involved in some sort of perversion with his son, and the world went on exactly as before?

But things got worse for poor Job, if that is possible...

Next, Satan persuaded Jehovah that, rather than peering into his crystal ball, he ought to let Satan smite Job "with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown."

So of course Jehovah agreed.

After torturing Job needlessly, God finally shows up to swagger around talking about how he created this and that, as if that justified him killing ten children and frying a hundred servants and five hundred sheep alive for no reason at all.

God then gave Job ten replacement children and everyone was happy again.

Are you beginning to see why I am not a Christian?

THE BIBLE'S SATANIC VERSES

How can we explain the Bible's satanic verses? Where did the Bible's evil verses originate―the ones that command and/or condone slavery, sex slavery, infanticide, matricide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the stoning of children to death for misdemeanors, and the coldblooded murder of rape victims and of child brides for not bleeding on their wedding nights? These are the most evil and grotesque crimes known to mankind. Is this the "wisdom of God" or the ravings of primitive witch doctors who pretended to speak with divine authority? Christianity is based on the credibility and authority of the Bible, and yet the Bible is far worse than Hitler’s Mein Kampf in numerous passages.

How can the Bible be "infallible" when from Genesis to Revelation slavery is commanded and condoned, but never condemned? — Michael R. Burch

What follows are just a few terrible examples, out of many I could cite:

• Moses, the first and greatest prophet of the Hebrew Bible, and the lawgiver who claimed to have received his instructions directly from God, commanded his warriors to slaughter captured mothers and their male "little ones" (i.e., babies and toddlers) while keeping only the virgin girls alive, obviously as sex slaves. (Numbers 31:9-18)

• Moses said "men of God" could sell their own daughters as sex slaves, with the option to buy them back if they failed to "please" their new masters! (Exodus 21:7-8)

• Moses commanded that girls who had been raped should either be stoned to death (a grotesquely brutal method of execution) or sold to their rapists, meaning they would become sex slaves who could then be raped "legally" for the rest of their lives! According to the highly dubious "wisdom" of Jehovah and Moses, only girls who were raped in fields where no one could hear their cries for help, were to be spared. Any girl raped in a populated area was to be considered guilty without a trial and was to be either murdered or sexually enslaved, with the cash payoff going to the "real victim"―the raped girl's father! (Deuteronomy 22:23-29)

• Is the New Testament really any "better" when Revelation says Jesus Christ himself will murder children: "I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins (kidneys) and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works." (Revelation 2:20-23) This passage of the New Testament clearly rejects the idea that Christians are saved by grace and says Jesus will judge and destroy the children of Christian families for their mothers' sins! Jesus will search a mother's kidneys (?) and if he doesn't like what he finds, he will kill her children―rather redundantly―"with death"! Does this sound like "the wisdom of God" or satanically evil nonsense?

• Revelation also says human beings will be tortured with fire and brimstone "in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels." (So much for hell being "separation from God.") According to John of Patmos, the fire-breathing author of Revelation, there will apparently be a torture chamber in heaven, at the foot of the throne of God. Forget the evils of Nazi torture chambers here on earth―there will be eternal torture in the afterlife! That would make God worse than the Devil if it were true, especially when he has the ability to save but chooses not to do so. Would any of us choose to torture our enemies for a second, much less all eternity? Will Jesus reject his own parable of the Good Samaritan and cause or allow the saints of other religions to be tortured incessantly? Is that the "good news" of the gospel? If these thoughts trouble you, please take the time to read There is no "hell" in the Bible! (Revelation 14:10)

I agree with Mark Twain, perhaps the most prominent American critic of the Bible, when he said it wasn't the Bible verses he didn't understand that bothered him ... it was the horrific verses that he understood all too well!

Christian theologians would have us believe the Bible is the "word of God" and that a God who is perfect in love, compassion, wisdom and justice authored it. But surely no sane person can believe the verses above came from a loving, compassionate, wise, just being. And there are many more where those came from.

In my opinion, the ten most satanic ideas found in the Bible are: (1) hell/eternal damnation/eternal torture, (2) predestination with an all-powerful, all-controlling God determining who would be "saved" and who would be "damned" long before they were created, (3) genocide of entire nations and cities including women, children, infants and babies, (4) ethnic cleansing, (5) the stoning to death of boys for misdemeanors and girls for being raped or not bleeding on their wedding nights, (6) sex slavery including fathers selling their own daughters as sex slaves, (7) slavery, (8) women being labeled "witches" and murdered for supernatural "crimes" that did not occur and could not have been proved if they did, (9) the brainwashing required to persuade billions of people to believe such evil nonsense is the "wisdom of God," (10) the enforcement of this bizarre religion on innocent children by their parents and other adults they trust.

Is the Bible the "infallible" and "inerrant" word of God, as many Christians claim? No, it is easy to prove that the Bible is far from "infallible" or "inerrant." According to the Bible, Jesus Christ said a good tree cannot bear bad fruit (Matthew 7:18). If Jesus was wrong, the Bible contains an error. If Jesus was correct, and if God is perfectly loving, wise and just (as Christians claim), and if the Bible is God's inerrant word, then obviously the Bible cannot contain palpably evil commandments issued by its Author. But the Bible does contain many palpably evil commandments that are directly attributed to its god, Jehovah. The Bible says Moses spoke to God face-to-face, as a man speaks to a friend, and that God gave Moses the commandments that are now enshrined in the Bible. Bible literalists will often try to worm around the Bible's evil commandments by claiming they were directed at people other than the Israelites. This is NOT true. The opening verses of Deuteronomy clearly explain that Moses is speaking “unto ALL Israel” and that the commandments were given to him by Jehovah for ALL Israel:

"These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness ... Moses spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the Lord had given him in commandment unto them." (Deuteronomy 1:1-3)

So according to Deuteronomy, Moses was speaking to ALL Israel and he told them everything he had been given in commandment by Jehovah. But the book of Deuteronomy does not pass the "bad fruit" test of Jesus Christ. The evil commandments given by someone pretending to speak for Jehovah include:

Stoning children to death for misdemeanors, a ghastly form of execution (Deuteronomy 21:18–21). Children can be murdered in this grotesquely cruel way for being stubborn and eating or drinking too much. That would include most children in any era, especially ours today.

Murdering girls by stoning them to death if they failed to prove their virginity by bleeding on their wedding nights (Deuteronomy 22:13–21). When women are stoned to death in Muslim nations, many Christians call Islam a false religion. But here the author of Deuteronomy commands the same evil in the name and authority of Jehovah. However the real Creator would have known that all girls don’t bleed the first time they have sex. So this is clearly someone pretending to speak for Jehovah because the real Creator could not have made this mistake. And even if the girls had had sex, it was still evil to murder them, since none of their stoners were without sin. Jesus made this clear in the New Testament, so how could he have endorsed the evil commandments as a member of the Trinity?

If a girl is raped, either murder her or sell her to her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:22–31). If she is raped in a town, assume she didn’t cry out and murder her. If she was raped in a field, assume she did cry out and no one heard her, so let her live. If she is not engaged, instead of murdering the girl she can be sold to her rapist with the money going to her father. Is this the “word of God” or the cruel, barbaric insanity of primitive men? This commandment would allow any rapist with money to assemble a harem of sex slaves!

As we will see below, the Bible clearly commands and/or condones the worst crimes known to humankind: slavery, sex slavery, matricide, infanticide, ethnic cleansing and genocide ...

In the third of my top ten biblical evils above, if a girl was raped within earshot of a city or town, it was to be presumed that she had "encouraged" her rapist, by not crying out for help. No thought was to given to any possibility that her rapist may have held his hand over her mouth, or a knife to her throat, or that she was simply too terrified to scream. But even if the girl had deliberately chosen not to scream, why should she be murdered or forced to become a sex slave? Even if she had consensual sex, she should not be murdered or forced into sexual slavery! You can read the passages above and form your own conclusions, but they seem incredibly barbaric, cruel and unjust to me. And these passages are only the tip of the iceberg, as the Bible contains many other grotesque commandments attributed to prophets like Moses, to Jesus and the apostles, and to a supposedly all-wise, compassionate, loving, just God.

How are such things possible? There is a simple (albeit horrifying) explanation for the sex slave verses. Like many primitive tribes, the ancient Hebrews prized boys over girls. Boys were seen as boons because they could farm and hunt, helping to produce food and support their parents as they aged. But girls were "valuable" only if they were virgins, in which case their fathers could marry them off in return for dowries (a form of sex slavery). But when a girl was raped, she lost her primary "value" and because her father risked having to support her for the rest of his life, Moses' macabre "solution" was either to kill her, or have her rapist buy her from her father for cold cash. According to this bizarre "logic," a rich man could acquire a harem of sex slaves by raping girls, then buying them when they were no longer virgins and had lost their monetary value. But how can this possibly be the "wisdom of God" unless God is the Devil?

Many Christians call Islam a "false religion" because Muslim girls have been stoned to death for being raped. But the same barbaric thinking is enshrined in the Bible. Should the pot call the kettle black?

There are many satanic verses in the Bible. Here are 17 incredibly evil verses, taken from a single chapter:

Deuteronomy 22

13-21: If a man takes a wife but begins to "hate" her, he can claim that she was not a virgin on her wedding night. If she cannot prove her virginity by producing blood-stained "tokens" of her virginity, her husband can have her stoned to death, a truly horrible method of execution! Of course not all girls bleed the first time they have sex, so this is not only evil, but wildly unjust and sheer barbaric folly.

22: Murder people for having sex.

23-24: If a girl or woman is raped anywhere except in a field, assume that she could have cried out for help but didn't, then stone her to death on this bizarre and wildly unjust assumption.

25-27: If a girl or woman is raped in a field, assume that no one could have heard her, so let her live. In other words, rape victims are guilty if they can possibly be heard, taking no thought for the fact that the rapists might have gagged them, or knocked them unconscious, or held knives to their throats, or terrified them into silence.

28-29: If a girl or woman is not betrothed to anyone and is raped, her rapist can buy her as a sex slave by making a cash payment to her father. If he does this, he is responsible for "taking care of her" from that point on. In another passage the Bible makes it clear that a female sex slave could only be kept as a slave if she was repeatedly raped! If her master failed to repeatedly rape her, she had to be set free! (Exodus 21:7-11)

The passages from Deuteronomy and Exodus that I have quoted on this page make it clear that female sex slaves had to "please" their masters sexually, and that male masters were required to repeatedly rape their sex slaves or else the slaves had to be freed. Can anyone believe this is the wisdom of an all-wise, all-just God?

No one with any human compassion or sense of justice can read chapter 22 of Deuteronomy without blanching. How did such a grotesquely evil book come to be in the Bible? The Bible itself explains how, in the account of the boy-king Josiah and the Levites who "discovered" a "lost book of Moses." The book was surely Deuteronomy. The Levites used the "book of Moses" to go on a murderous spree, killing anyone who disagreed with their bloody cult.

How anyone can read such evil madness and claim the Bible is "the word of God" is beyond me. Perhaps parts of the Bible are inspired: that is a matter of faith. But Jesus said a good tree cannot produce bad fruit. If he spoke for God, then God cannot produce evil commandments. If Jesus was wrong, the Bible is not "infallible." In any case, the Bible's satanic passages can only be explained as the product of evil, twisted minds. Good people and enlightened beings do not command such horrors. As the old saw goes, "The proof is in the pudding." Chapter 22 of Deuteronomy and other similar passages of the Bible prove that its pudding is often rancid.

The Bible repeatedly commands or condones racism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia, slavery, sex slavery, matricide, infanticide, ethnic cleansing and genocide. While Christians often try to gloss over horrendous Old Testament verses by claiming that the New Testament is "better," in reality the New Testament is worse, because it says human beings will be eternally tortured in "hell" for having sex. If you had to choose, would you prefer eternal torture to being stoned to death? And yet no civilized court or judge would consider either death or torture for any sort of consensual sex, and even rapists are not tortured for their crimes in civilized nations. So if the Bible is the "word of God," it seems God has a lot to learn about justice, or else he has no ability to keep human beings from pretending to speak for him.

But if the Bible is "inerrant" or "infallible," things get much worse because Jesus said just thinking about sex (i.e., "lust") is the same as committing adultery. Since another New Testament verse says all adulterers will go to the Lake of Fire, it seems every human being is condemned to hell, since everyone thinks about sex once they reach puberty. What a horrible religion to teach to young, highly impressionable children! What happens when they reach puberty and start thinking about sex? If they believe the Bible is the "word of God," they may feel all the weight of God and hell resting on their slender shoulders. I know I did as a young boy.

Teaching children about "hell" is child abuse, pure and simple. We don't allow priests and pastors to abuse children physically, so why do we allow them to abuse children emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, with the grotesque dogma of "hell"?

It seems completely obvious to me that the Bible's satanic verses could not have originated with a God who is loving, wise, compassionate and just. Thus the claims of Christian theologians, popes, priests and pastors that the Bible is the "inerrant" and/or "infallible" word of God are patently ludicrous. No one can "prove" that any verse in the Bible came from God, but we can easily prove that many Bible verses could not have come from a loving, wise, compassionate, just God. After all, no one would call a man loving, wise, compassionate or just if he murdered or tortured girls for being raped, or having consensual sex. But how many girls were murdered or enslaved, thanks to the commandments of Moses? And how many children (and adults) have been terrified because they thought about sex, and believed their thoughts condemned them to "hell"? One shudders to wonder.

And "Bible believing" Christians are obviously lying to themselves, and to the world, when they claim to "know" that homosexuality and sex before marriage are "sins," based on the evidence of the Bible. According to the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, slavery is "the will of God," as Jefferson Davis pointed out to Congress before the Civil War. Four of the seceding Southern states used the Bible to "prove" the "godliness" of slavery, in their formal declarations of their reasons for leaving the Union. We also know from Mark Twain and other anti-slavery writers that the Bible was used to justify slavery in churches and schools throughout the antebellum South. But if not a single one of the writers of the Bible knew that slavery was an abomination, how can we possibly credit what they said about homosexuality and extramarital sex?

So why not be honest, and admit that the writers of the Bible who called extramarital sex "evil" and sex slavery "the will of God" were primitive barbarians with no sense of justice? Even Jesus and Paul deserve criticism, because according to the Bible they spent a great deal of time debating matters of diet and Sabbath observance, while never saying a clear word against the practice of slavery, even though they ministered to slaves and their masters. Hell, Paul even returned an escaped Christian slave, Onesimus, to his Christian master, Philemon! The book of Philemon would later be used by American slavemasters to "prove" they had the right to demand that other Christians return escaped slaves to them. Was it "wise" for Jesus and Paul to make it seem slavery was kosher with God, by failing to denounce it?

The Bible contains many satanic verses. Revelation is an especially grotesque book which prophesied that Jesus Christ himself would murder the children of a woman who was having extramarital sex: "I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins (kidneys) and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works." (Revelation 2:20-23)

Are these the words of a loving, wise, just, enlightened being? What happened to love, compassion, forgiveness, and the message of Saint Paul that salvation is by grace? What sort of ogre kills children for their mother’s actions? Where is there any justice in killing people (much less their children) for having sex? And what on earth do the kidneys have to do with morality?

Revelation 14:10, one of the most horrendous verses in the Bible, or any book, says that human beings will be tortured with fire and brimstone "in the presence of the Lamb and Holy Angels." So much for hell being "separation from God." According to John of Patmos, the fire-breathing author of Revelation, there will be a torture chamber in heaven, at the foot of the throne of God, and the "saints" will scream for vengeance and blood, rather than call for love, forgiveness, compassion and mercy.

The Jesus of Revelation is an inhuman monster slated to become the greatest mass murderer in the history of the Earth, if the prophecies of John of Patmos come to pass. According to Revelation, after all earth’s innocent creatures have sung the praises of God, Jesus and the Angels will proceed to torture and destroy them. But how can loving, compassionate, wise, just, enlightened beings do such terrible things to innocent creatures?

The Hebrew Bible is full of atrocities committed in the name of God. But with the introduction of "hell" in the New Testament, God and Jesus became infinitely more savage than even the mass-murdering, women- and child-killing "heroes" of the Old Testament, such as Moses, Joshua, Caleb and King David.

Was David "the man after God’s own heart," really? According to the Bible, David killed every woman when he "smote the land" and he ordered the slaughter of the lame and blind when Jerusalem was taken from the Jebusites. David never repented, because with his dying breath he commanded the assassination of Joab, ostensibly for having shed innocent blood. But it was David who had awarded Joab the command of his armies for slaughtering the lame and the blind!

Isn’t it time to be honest about the Bible and its Satanic verses, and stop giving such a dreadful book to young, innocent, highly impressionable children, telling them it’s "the word of God"? How can Christians say it’s a "sin" to lie when they’re dishonest about the Bible and its human origins? (Assuming that God isn’t really the Devil, and didn’t actually command the slaughter of rape victims, mothers, babies and the handicapped.)

Is the Bible "infallible"? The idea is patently ridiculous. I read the Bible from cover to cover as a young boy and was horrified time and time again by what it said about "men of God" like Moses, Joshua, Caleb and David. I agree with Mark Twain: it wasn’t the verses I failed to understand that bothered me ... it was the verses that I understood all too well.

A God who is good cannot command sex slavery and the murder of rape victims. A God who is good cannot command the stoning to death of boys for being "stubborn." And yet the Bible repeatedly commands such terrible things. So the obvious problem for Christians is that the Bible contains what Salman Rushdie called "Satanic verses" when he wrote about highly dubious verses in the Koran.

Orthodox Christianity seems to have no sense of justice. A good human doctor who is able to save a patient doesn’t allow the patient to die because he's an atheist, an agnostic, a Muslim, or a homosexual. But according to orthodox Christianity, even though Jesus Christ was able to save the thief on the cross with a nod of his head, he won’t bother to nod his head at billions of other people, simply because they didn’t "believe" in him. But of course Jesus never bothered to introduce himself to them personally. And if Jesus is such a cruel, unjust, petty being, why should anyone believe in him?

Shouldn’t believing in Jesus involve believing something good about him? If Jesus is good, wouldn’t it be blasphemy to say that he would send people to hell for not believing in him, when he was either unable or unwilling to speak to them personally?

If I had a son and refused to ever speak to him, what right would I have to demand that he "believe" in me? Christians insist that I need to "believe" in Jesus, but that insistence is wildly unjust. If Jesus wants me to believe in him, he should use his superpowerswhich presumably include the ability to speakto communicate with me. If he is unable or unwilling to communicate with me, he has no right to punish me for concluding that he either doesn’t exist or lacks the ability to communicate with me directly. And it makes absolutely no sense for him to expect me to believe things about him based on what the Bible says, because certain verses in the Bible turn him into a monster. The only way I can believe anything good about Jesus is to not believe the main tenet of orthodox Christianity: that he will only save the "chosen few." What a ghastly thing to believe about anyone! What sort of monster would I be if I sent Einstein and Gandhi to hell for not "believing" in me, when I had deliberately chosen never to speak to them, or lacked the ability to speak to them?

If you were able to save other people from a terrible fate with a nod of your head, would you save them, or turn your back on them in a fit of pique? Many Christians try to evade what their "faith" has done to Jesus by asking what a human judge would do with a rapist or murderer: "Should people who are guilty go unpunished?" But the purpose of a prison sentence is to protect the innocent and rehabilitate the criminal, not to cause mindless, unremitting pain because the judge's ego wasn't gratified. And human judges are not able to "save" in the way that Jesus has been said to be able to save people who are seemingly beyond hope, such as the thief on the cross and murderers on their deathbeds. If Jesus is able to save by grace, as the Bible claims, then he is obviously not in the same predicament as human judges who sometimes have no choice but to lock people up for extended periods of time.

If Jesus is able to save Christians at the last minute despite the fact that they’re far from perfect, why would he fail to save everyone? If he plans to save Christians who acted as if he was a petty egomaniac, would it make any sense whatsoever for him to send Einstein and Gandhi to hell, when they never blasphemed his good name? (And isn’t it ironic that non-Christians like Einstein and Gandhi have more faith in the goodness of Jesus than most Christians?)

Does Jesus continue to exist? I have no way of knowing, but what I do know is that I prayed to Jesus as a small boy, in tears of despair, and he never answered me. When he failed to answer me, while Bible-befuddled adults turned my life into hell on earth, in his name, by convincing me that I was in danger of hell every time I sneezed, he forfeited any possible right to my belief. Why didn’t Jesus appear and tell me not to believe that he was the petty, unjust monster everyone painted him to be? There seem to be three possibilities: (1) Jesus was unable to speak to me, or (2) Jesus declined to speak to me even though he could have, or (3) Jesus no longer exists. If the first case is true, then Jesus is not the all-powerful being Christians claim him to be. If the second case is true, then Jesus obviously doesn’t care what I believe about him. If the third case is true, Christianity is a false religion. But in any case, why are Christian adults making their children’s lives hell, here on earth?

If God ever spoke to human beings, it seems he’s given up the enterprise as a lost cause. Why didn’t God speak to me when I was a boy, and spare me the untender ministrations of his religion-addled disciples? Why does he allow his name to be continually blasphemed from morning to night by people who claim to "love" him while insisting he's the most petty being imaginable? Why have Jews and Christians killed women and children in the name of God, and taken slaves in the name of God, and burned "witches" and "heretics" in the name of God, and practiced bigotry and intolerance in the name of God, for thousands of years? Why didn’t God ever bother to tell his disciples clearly that there were no witches, and that they were the heretics and blasphemers?

From cover to cover, the Bible is wrong about slavery. From cover to cover, the Bible is wrong about sex (what are the odds that two people will be happier if they both enter marriage as virgins, rather than testing the waters first to see whether they’re sexually compatible and can live together?). So who’s to say that from cover to cover the Bible isn’t also wrong about homosexuality and other subjects as well?

Unless God is the Devil, the Bible's satanic verses cannot be the word of God. Since the Bible is far from "inerrant" or "infallible," it is past time for Christians to stop telling highly impressionable children that the Bible is "the word of God." And perhaps most importantly, Christian churches need to end the abuse they inflict on children when they say, "Only Jesus can save BUT." That's a huge, terrifying "but." Children aren't stupid, and they'll quickly figure out that this means "only people who believe what we believe have any chance of heaven, and everyone else is eternally out of luck." That's a terrible form of brainwashing which denies children the ability to think independently. I know, because I suffered the abuse of the Christian dogma of hell, and it took me more than forty years to finally and fully escape it. I hope, pray and believe that one day such child abusers will have their children taken from them, just as children are taken from adults who physically abuse them.

Why did God and Jesus never act to defend billions of innocent children who grew up under the dark cloud of "hell", as I did? That's a matter of personal faith, or doubt. But I, for one, certainly see no reason to believe in "gods" and "saviors" who either don't exist, or who don't care about the suffering of children, or who are so lacking in ability that, after thousands of years, they still can't communicate simple ideas to their disciples clearly. Nowhere in the Bible can we find such simple, sensible ideas as "it is best to see if you are sexually and otherwise compatible with a potential mate before you marry" and "slavery is an abomination that ruins the lives of slaves and corrupts masters." And rather than spending so much time debating matters of diet, dress, Sabbath observance, etc., why didn't God and Jesus say something really useful that would have saved untold suffering and hundreds of millions of lives, such as "You can prevent the Black Plague with rat control and better hygiene" and "there are naturally occurring wonder drugs in tree bark and a green mold"? Why were God, Jesus, the apostles and Hebrew prophets incapable of such small gems of wisdom?

It seems obvious that the God of the Bible, if he exists, never knew anything more about science or nature than the men who gave us the Bible ... and his "ethics" still leave a lot to be desired.

Here are examples of 20 satanic passages in the Bible:

1. God drowns the whole earth. In Genesis 7:21-23 , God drowns the entire population of the earth: men, women, children, fetuses ... and perhaps unicorns. Only a single family survives. In Matthew 24:37-42, Jesus approves of this genocide and plans to repeat it when he returns!

2. God kills half a million people. In 2 Chronicles 13:15-18, God helps the men of Judah kill 500,000 of their fellow Israelites.

3. God slaughters all Egyptian firstborn. In Exodus 12:29, God the baby-killer slaughters all Egyptian firstborn children and cattle after hardening the Pharaoh's heart to make him want to keep the Hebrews as slaves, so that he can slaughter innocents in a grotesque pissing contest for alpha male supremacy.

4. In Numbers 16:41-49, the Israelites complain that God is killing too many of them. In response, God sends a plague that kills 14,000 more of them!

5. Genocide after genocide after genocide. In Joshua 6:20-21, God helps the Israelites destroy Jericho, killing “men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” In Deuteronomy 2:32-35, God has the Israelites kill everyone in Heshbon, including children. In Deuteronomy 3:3-7, God has the Israelites do the same to the people of Bashan. In Numbers 31:7-18, the Israelites kill all the Midianites except the virgin girls, whom they take as spoils of war and sex slaves. In 1 Samuel 15:1-9, God tells the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites – men, women, children, infants, and their cattle – for something the Amalekites’ ancestors had done 400 years earlier! What about God not letting the sun go down on his wrath, as he advised human beings to do? Jesus Christ sternly rebuked hypocrisy, but the greatest hypocrite of all was Jehovah.

6. God kills more than 50,000 people for exhibiting the curiosity he gave them. In 1 Samuel 6:19, God kills 50,000 men for peeking into the ark of the covenant. (Newer cosmetic translations count only 70 deaths, but their text notes admit that the best and earliest manuscripts put the number at 50,070.)

7. In Exodus 32, God commands Moses: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” Around 3,000 people died.

8. In Joshua 10:10-11, God helps the Israelites slaughter the Amorites by sword, then finishes them off with rocks from the sky.

9. In Genesis 19:24, God kills everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from the sky. Then God kills Lot's wife for looking back at her burning home. But Lot is called "righteous" even though he offered his daughters to a mob of racists, then committed incest with them himself, after getting drunk. Talk about male chauvinism!

10. In 2 Kings 2:23-24, some kids tease the prophet Elisha, and God sends bears to dismember 42 of them. (Newer cosmetic translations say the bears “maul” the children, but the original Hebrew baqa means “to tear apart.”)

11. In Judges 21:1-23, a tribe of Israelites misses roll call, so the other Israelites kill them all except for the virgins, whom they take for themselves. Still not happy, they hide in vineyards and pounce on dancing women from Shiloh.

12. In Judges 16:27-30, God gives Samson strength to bring down a building to crush 3,000 members of a rival tribe in an act of suicidal terrorism. Shades of ISIS!

13. In Judges 19:22-29, a mob demands to rape a "godly" master’s guest. The master offers his daughter and a concubine to them instead. They take the concubine and gang-rape her all night. The master finds her on his doorstep in the morning, cuts her into 12 pieces, and ships the pieces around the country.

14. Child sacrifice. In Judges 11:30-39, Jephthah burns his daughter alive as a sacrificial offering in return for God’s favor in killing the Ammonites. But later God would sacrifice his own son in another bloody offering, so it all works out in the end!

15. God helps Samson kill 30 men because he lost a bet. In Judges 14:11-19, Samson loses a bet for 30 sets of clothes. The spirit of God comes upon him and he kills 30 men to steal their clothes and pay off the debt. Samson has sex with prostitutes, but God favors him as long as he never cuts his hair. But another Bible verse says that it's a shame for a man to have long hair! God is apparently very "conflicted" about hair length!

16. God is murderously intolerant. In Deuteronomy 13:6-10, God commands that you must kill your wife, children, brother, and friend if they worship other gods. But he won't speak to them to keep you from having to murder them! This makes him "perfect" in every way!

17. In 2 Kings 1:9-10, Elijah gets God to burn 51 men to death with fire from heaven to prove that he is God.

18. In Genesis 38:9-10, God kills a man for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow.

19. God commands cannibalism. In Leviticus 26:27-29  and Jeremiah 19:9, God threatens to punish the Israelites by making them eat their own children.

20. The coming slaughter. According to Revelation 9:7-19, God’s got lots more evil coming. God will unleash horse-like locusts with human heads and scorpion tails, who will torture people for five months. Then angels will kill a third of the earth’s population. Today, that would be billions of people. But of course he is "perfect" in love, compassion, etc. But he will never speak to human beings personally so that they know which earthly religion to believe.

Here are a number of verses about the satanic doctrine of predestination, which would make God the Devil:

Does not the potter have the right to make from the same lump of clay one vessel for special occasions and another for common use? What if God, intending to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the vessels of His wrath, prepared for destruction? What if He did this to make the riches of His glory known to the vessels of His mercy, whom He prepared in advance for glory? [God created some human beings to be "vessels of glory" and others to be "vessels of wrath"!] – Romans 9:21-24

In Mark chapter 4, Jesus explains to his disciples that he speaks in parables in order mislead the common folk and make sure they are not saved: "And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." [So Jesus was deliberately damning the people who flocked after him!] – Mark 4:11-12

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. [God did ALL the work of salvation, so human faith and works don't matter and there is no free will.] – Romans 8:28-30

The Lord has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil. [God made the wicked that way on purpose, so it's not their fault.] – Proverbs 16:4

For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. – Romans 9:15-16

In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace. What then? What Israel is seeking, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened [i.e., God hardened their hearts so they could be damned]. – Romans 11:5-7

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth-in Him. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will... – Ephesians 1:3-11

But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth [God played favorites from the beginning of time -- his favorites to be saved and his non-favorites to not be saved]. – 2 Thessalonians 2:13

According to these incredibly evil verses, neither grace nor belief nor works matter. God predestined some human beings for "eternal glory" and others for eternal damnation or eternal destruction. If these verses are true, then God must be the Devil. If they are not true, then human beings obviously put their own evil opinions in what later became the Bible, claiming to speak for God.



IF HE COULD FORESEE THE FUTURE, WHY DID THE BIBLICAL GOD MAKE SO MANY MISTAKES?

The Bible makes little sense because it claims that its “god” was all-wise and knew the future before it happened, and yet he made mistakes. A “god” who knew the future could have foreseen, for instance, that Saul would be a terrible king. He could also have foreseen that David would be an even more terrible king. David was clearly not the "man after God’s own heart," if Jesus is the example. Rather, David was the Jewish Hitler. He killed every woman when he "smote the land." He ordered the slaughter of the lame and blind when Jerusalem was taken from the Jebusites because he "hated" the handicapped. Jesus, of course, had compassion for the handicapped. David tortured people in brick kilns (ovens), shades of the Nazis! And David never repented, because with his dying breath he commanded the assassination of Joab, ostensibly for having shed innocent blood. But it was David who had offered Joab the captaincy of his armies for murdering the handicapped. David was the Jewish Hitler, and the antithesis of Jesus.

1 Samuel 27:9 — "And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive..."

2 Samuel 5:8 — "And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter, and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind that are hated of David's soul, he shall be chief and captain. Wherefore they said, The blind and the lame shall not come into the house."

2 Samuel 12:31 — "And he [David] brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem."

1 Chronicles 20:3 — "And he [David] brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. Even so dealt David with all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the people returned to Jerusalem.

Another example can be found in the book of Job, where Satan persuades God to murder Job's children in order to "test" his faith. But a God who is all-wise and can foresee the future doesn't need to murder anyone, much less children, to know what will happen. The Bible is a collection of badly-told fairy tales, and in their telling of tall tales the authors of the Bible often made their "god" seem worse than the Devil. I read the Bible from cover to cover at age eleven, then wrote this  epigram to express my conclusion:

If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch

Later, as an adult, I read the Bible from cover to cover again. I also studied many books written by Christian authors like C. S. Lewis, Billy Graham and Watchman Nee. And I came to exactly the same conclusion. No one can make the biblical "god" seem in any way to be "good." The "god" of the Old Testament was diabolical, a serial murderer of multitudes of men, women, children, infants, babies, unborns and animals. But the "god" of the New Testament was infinitely worse, because he would either cause or allow billions of human beings to suffer for all eternity for the "sin" of failing to guess which earthly religion is the "correct" one.

Related Pages

Donald Trump: 666 Mark of the Beast

There is no "hell" in the Bible!
What did Jesus teach about Hell?
How many times is "hell" mentioned in the Bible?
Is there a word meaning "hell" in the Hebrew language?
Was "hell" in the Original Hebrew Bible?
Is "hell" mentioned in the Old Testament?
Is "hell" mentioned in the New Testament
Is the word "hell" in the Bible at all?
Why is "hell" not Biblical?
Hell is not in the Bible!

Is the Bible infallible, or the inerrant word of God?
Is the Bible the Word of God?, The Bible's Satanic Verses
Is the Garden of Eden story true?
Is the Bible an Extraordinary book?

John of Patmos: Boom or Bust?
Bible False Prophecies

www.thereisnohell.com
www.tentmaker.org

Why I Am Not A Christian


The HyperTexts