The Most Horrible Story Ever.....?

Now we'll look at perhaps the sickest, most depraved thing I have ever read, in any book, anywhere (and I'm old enough and widely read enough to be able to say that with feeling).

It's incredible, but while I was a Christian I read this stuff without even noticing it. I truly was desensitized. Now that I'm free from it I can see the true horror of Religion, and ironically, that comes from reading these things as if they were true accounts of what people did!

This is what Christians give their beloved children to read.

You will now see a clear account, first, of God ordering someone to commit murder. Then God says "Well done" to the perpetrator. Then, later, God condemns that same perpetrator for that same murder.

How can that be? Well, the imaginary god is clearly being used by two different scribes, working for two different kings, to justify their butchery and bolster their claims to power.

The story is in five episodes:

First episode: 2 Kings 9
God uses Elisha the prophet to tell Jehu he is king and to arrange the massacre of an entire family:

God says "You are to destroy the house of Ahab your master and I will avenge the blood of my servants the prophets and the blood of all the Lord's servants shed by Jezebel. The whole house of Ahab will perish. I will cut off from Ahab every last male in Israel - slave or free".

Now tell me if I'm wrong, but as I read this, "God" is clearly telling Jehu to destroy the house of Ahab - the whole house. That looks pretty clear to me. I think it must have sounded that way to Jehu. (In reality, of course, this is just a scribe writing much later, invoking the imaginary god to justify a slaughter that has already happened.  If Hitler had won the war, we might have similar stories today, justifying his "noble deeds").

Second episode: 2 Kings 10
Seventy of Ahab's children (see verse 6) were butchered, massacred, murdered. How can anyone read this without feeling nausea and tears in equal measure? Seventy children's heads were collected in two baskets and sent across country to Jehu. They were left in 2 piles at the city gates overnight. Jehu goes on to kill the rest of Ahab's family. All this on the direct command of "god" remember.

vs 7: They took the king's sons, and slew them, seventy persons, and put their heads in baskets, and sent them to him at Jezreel.  When the messenger came and told him, "They have brought the heads of the king's sons," he said, "Lay them in two heaps at the entrance of the gate until the morning."

Third episode: 2 Kings 10:30

God congratulates Jehu on wiping out Ahab's family, sons and friends.

And the LORD said to Jehu, "Because you have done well in carrying out what is right in my eyes, and have done to the house of Ahab according to all that was in my heart, your sons of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel."

At this point, God seems very happy with all the bloodshed. (So far, all this has been written by a scribe in the pay of Jehu, we assume.)

Fourth episode: Hosea 1:4
God totally and mysteriously changes his mind. Apparently he now wants to punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel. (Reading between the lines, we can see that some later king or pretender wants to get rid of Jehu's family, so they again invoke the imaginary god to give them support.) How can anyone rely on this capricious, tyrant deity?

God says:  "For yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel."

Fifth episode:

So far we've four layers of disgust. The last episode is perhaps the sickest of the lot. It is written by the American authors of the NIV Study Notes, who take these four evil-smelling layers, cover them with a thin layer of icing sugar, and serve the whole thing up as a moral lesson for us:

NIV study note on 10:11: "In his zeal, Jehu went far beyond the Lord's command with this bloodbath." They seem to have missed verse 30 (see third episode above) where God congratulates Jehu on the massacre. The note continues: "Many times in history, religious people have mixed faith with personal ambition, power or cruelty, without God's consent or blessing. To use God or the Bible to condone oppression is wrong".

This NIV note is complete drivel. When Christians killed thousands of innocent women, burning them as witches, why should we not blame the Bible? It says: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".  In the Bible, god commands that the Hebrews kill all unbelievers, homosexuals, rebellious teenagers, adulterers, people who work on the sabbath, rape victims (unless they cried out),  the list goes on and on.  All with god's consent and blessing. 
Oppression and cruelty is what most of the Bible is about. Ask the Canaanites… oh you can't, they're all dead, and with God's command, consent and blessing! 

NIV study note on Hosea 1:4: "Jehu went too far in carrying out God's command (to destroy Ahab's family)."

This is slippery nonsense.  God's supposed command was to destroy - and Jehu did exactly that.  Exactly what would God have been pleased with? Just one child's head in a basket? Just a small massacre? Exactly how many children was Jehu supposed to cut the heads off?

This is a horrid story. Why do Christians want the Bible taught to their children? The answer of course, is that most Christians (including me for 25 years) never read it themselves, and certainly don't study it. They let any evidence about God's horrible character or his non-existence slip over their heads. And for the same reason, few Christians will read websites like mine or other similar counter-arguments. It is taboo for religious people to open themselves to information. Hence the home-schooling movement. Hence Jehovah's Witnesses are actively discouraged from going to college. But the Internet is threatening religion, because it exposes young people to information - and information is the enemy of religion. The Christian's enemy is not Satan after all, just Information. It will destroy Christianity simply by showing Christians what is actually in their own holy book. And teenagers will respond to that, even if their parents are too entrenched to do so.

You know, if you think about it for a moment, that the following is true:

Take a baby, nurture him and educate him, bring him up without any reference at all to invisible, supernatural beings. No mention of gods, angels, demons, heaven or hell. Let him grow, and teach him to think as a man. Watch him mature to the fulness of manhood, fit to question and investigate the world and its mysteries. Then, on his 21st birthday - tell him about invisible beings. Tell him there are people who believe in such things without evidence.

You know, without too much doubt, that he will just laugh. He will find it comical that anyone could believe such nonsense.

The fact that you know he would laugh should tell you something. It tells you that society is permitting the mental abuse of its young people by exposing them to arrant nonsense, justified simply by tradition and by priests keen to maintain their livelihoods.

Geoff Mather 2007

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