Death by prayer.

Prayer works. Right, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Sorry, folks, but I grew up around the faith-healing hacks and know what charlatans they are and how so many believers take that stuff seriously. They are, in fact, often deadly serious.

Neil Beagley, 16, was one of those believers. So were his parents. All three belonged to the Followers of Christ cult. Neil had a urinary tract blockage. It is easily treatable. But Neil didn’t see a doctor. Nor did his parents want him to. Instead they gathered around and prayed for him.

Well, that didn’t work and Neil got even worse. So of course they did more of the same thing. Remember the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. As Neil got more ill they got more church members over to pray for him.

In this sense I guess God is supposedly like a politician who ignores one person but pays attention to a petition with 1 million signatures.

When the urinary tract is blocked starts to build up in the blood and that begins to poison the body. In this case the heart failed. So a 16-year-old boy is now dead because he trusted in prayer. He is dead because his parents trusted in prayer. He had a whole group of people around him who truly didn’t lack faith in the matter. They were real believers. And Neil is really dead.

Neil was 16 so he was old enough to make his own decision, even a stupid decision to commit faithicide -- death by faith. His faithicidal tendencies were encouraged by his fanatical parents and the cult they belonged to.

The really absurd thing is that these God addicts never learn. In the case of this family a 15-month old cousin, Ava Worthington, had recently died as well. That infant, who clearly wasn’t old enough to make a decision, had bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection.

Baby Ava died because her parents, Carl and Raylene Worthington (the sister of Neil's father) refused any treatment for the child except mumbling to their imaginary friend in the sky. They claim that their defense is “freedom of religion”. I don’t care if the parents pray to they are blue in the face. I don’t care if they pray for themselves and die as a result -- it just cleans up the gene pool and wipes out another pocket of stupid. But when they refuse care for their baby, resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo instead they they are guilty of neglecting their infant.

I don’t really care if they believe God tells them that is okay to let a baby die to prove their faith. They choose to have that child and they are responsible for giving it decent care. To neglect the medical care of a sick infant merely because they have theological delusions is no defense.

Christian theologian unhappy with atheist books.

John Haught is a very unhappy theologian. He is particularly unhappy about the “outbreak of provocative atheistic treatises” by people like Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins. I would assume he means Dennett as well though he didn’t mention him.

To be fair we should note that these books are atheist treatises in one sense but not another. They are treatises by atheists but not necessarily treatises on atheism. For instance the book by Sam Harris does explore why atheism is logical as much as he explores the destructive nature of religion in the world. The same is true for the book by Dawkins.

Haught is disappointed because he finds the works “unchallenging theologically”. He says this puts it on the same lefel “of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature.” Let us be clear about something, that is the exact level at which most Christians understand their beliefs. Believers in America are not like Haught and Haught is unhappy about that. There is little reason to respond to the Haught’s of the world because they have almost no influence. They are almost as irrelevent in Christianity as they are in the world at large.

Nor is it the purpose of these books to discuss the elitist ideas of a gaggle of ignored theologians. These books were addressing the impact of religion in the world today. And theologians like Haught simply have no impact. Churches that don’t take the consistently irrational view of the fundamentalists have been losing members for the most part. Churches that are literalists grow. Why? Because people yearn for a consistency. And liberal theologians make no more sense to their fellow Christians than they do to the typical atheist.

We s should note that the views of theologians like Haught have been debunked in the past. George Smith’s book Atheism: The Case Against God ($15.95, available from Laissez Faire Books, 1 800 326 0996) has dealth with the nonsense of theologians rather thoroughly. Books that deal with the religion at this level have limited impact because most people don’t think at that level. Smith’s books has been around for years and is an excellent discussion on the irrationality of the concepts of a deity. And while many atheists attribute their non-belief to Mr. Smith’s excellent work it has never been a best seller. It wasn’t a best seller for the same reason that Mr. Haught has almost no influence within Christianity -- it doesn’t address religion the way most people see it.

Very few theists are conviced of theism. That is, they don’t come to theism from a logical perspective. They were not reasoned into believing and won’t be reasoned out of it. Most people just accepted it because they were taught it and they thought it was good. As religion has become more consistent, by ignoring the theologians like Haught and embracing the preachers like Robertson, people have become more dismayed. People tend to cling to religion because they think it has utility. They are religious because they think it is “good” not because they think it is true. They have rarely considered the “true” aspect.

The current spate of books by atheist are popular because they address the real issue of religion for most people. They address they question of whether or not religion is good. That is bound to disappoint the inconsequential theologians like Mr. Haught but that is why they are popular.

Haught whines that these authors “debate with these extremists rather than with any major theologians.” Well, the extremists, as Haught puts it, are the bulk of American Christiandom and America is the last major Christian nation in the world. The major theologians were debunked long ago so it would be unproductive to do it again. What these “new atheists” did was address Christianity as it really is today, not as irrelevent theologians would wish it to be.

There are two arguments that one can make in this field. One is to discuss the logic of theism and the other is to discuss the results of theism. That these books conver the later doesn’t mean that no books on the former exist. Mr. Haught just chooses to ignore them.

Haught laughs at Hitchens for discussing the “factually irreconcilable accounts of Jesus’ birth”. Haught admits the Bible has contradictions. He wants Hitchens to ignore the contradictions and concentrate on the ramblings of theologians. Yet the typical Christian gets his ideas of such things from the Bible not from individuals like Haught. Haught’s real complaint is not with the “new atheists” but with the old Christians. It is the Christians who take literalist interpretations seriously. That the members of his own faith are extremists who believe contradictory things is Haught’s problem not the problem of the new atheists.

In the end it would be absurd to write a book that address the theology of Mr. Haught. Mr. Haught might read it but very other people would. Mr. Haught’s liberal version of Christianity is a dying theology believed by fewer and fewer Christians. The reason is that it is as irrational as fundamentalist Christianity but far less consistent. Mr. Haught tries to reconcile primative theism with rationality and reason. That can’t be done.

In any conflict between individuals holding similar premises the one who is more consistent will win the rational debate. Fundamentalist Christians and liberal theologians both hold similar premises about God. But the fundamentalists is more consistent with his premises than the liberal theologian. Hence fundamentalism has become the predominate Christian view and liberal denominations have imploded.

The liberal theologian who embraces reason sometimes and theology sometimes is trapped. He can’t apply either consistently. If he applies reason consistently he ends up having less and less religion as he goes along. His god shrinks. If he is entirely consistent his god disappears altogether. The god talk of liberal theologians borders on nothingness. The god who can’t be comprehended is a god who barely exists for the human mind. And the god who barely exists is not about to inspire faith. The fundamentalists present the traditional view of God. It might be irrational but it is something that people can het ahold of of and cling to. The god of liberalism is a brief, barely visible whisp of smoke. You can’t cling to it. You can’t believe it. It has no appeal.

Mr. Haught's real dispute is not with atheists but with his fellow believers. Atheists don't address Mr. Haught's theology because, for the most party, Christians have rejected it. If one is to rebutt Christianity you need to rebutt the Christianity that is believed not the wishful thinking of a few old men. Haught is ignored by atheists because Christians ignored him long ago.

Did God kill six young students and their teacher?

My first intention was not to blog about this tragedy. But I have changed my mind. The tragedy in question was the deaths of students and a teacher from the Elim Christian school in New Zealand.

The students and teacher were hiking through a canyon when they were trapped by a flash flood. Six high school aged students were killed along with the teacher.

One is tempted to point out that the fervent faith of these fundamentalist Christians didn’t save them from an “act of God”. But I thought it would be rather tasteless to make comments like that.

But of course our Christian friends are utterly tasteless and have no moral compulsion against using such tragedies for their own ends.

One student survived. And like most fundamentalists he immediately attributed his survival to God. Newspaper reports said he was “lying in a Taupo Hospital bed thanking the Lord after his ‘supernatural’ experience.” This poor, misguided boy said: “All I can say is this is my story and this is what happened to me and God saved me.” No doubt he will go around telling this story to others over and over again.

According to this boy he was “gasping for air” as the water took hold of him and he begged God to save him. “I just felt it was God tell me, ‘You have to get up and go, otherwise you’re going to die’, because water just kept coming and was getting higher.”

The principle of the school had to announce the deaths to the student body and told them: “If your faith means anything at all, it must mean everything now.” The father of a dead girl said she had gone to “a better place” and that this was a “test of his belief in God”

When I first heard of these tragic deaths I was saddened for the young lives that were snuffed out. I still am. But this sort of stupidity is sickening. Think about what is being said here.

The young boy who survived attributes his survival to prayer. Are we to believe that in the more than half hour that the students sat hung onto to a canyon wall that none of them prayed? Should we assume that these fundamentalist Christians were without faith and never once asked God to save them the same way this one boy did?

Yet the one boy lived and all the others died horrible deaths. God gets the credit for saving the life of the one but none of the blame for killing the other seven. If God consented to save the one boy then God had to have ignored the other seven. They call this merciful and loving. That is just sick.

The one boy lived because the water crashed him into a pile of logs and he was able to pull himself up onto them and hold on. The others weren’t so lucky. It was luck. It was the pure randomness of falling in the water at the right spot at the right time so that he was pushed in one direction while the deceased were pushed in another direction.

If this was God acting then we have to assume that God was responsible for killing six students and the teacher.

The headmaster of the school implores the students to have faith. Did not the students clinging to the canyon wall also have faith?

And the one parent, no doubt in mourning but still thinking irrationally, said this was a “test” of his faith. Think about that as well. Who is administering that test? Surely it would have to be God.

What he is saying, or seeming to say, is that God drowned his daughter for the sole purpose of seeing if this man would still have faith in God. What kind of monstrous deity would do that?

I truly wish that all these young people had survived the unexpected flood that they encountered. That did not happen. They died because of a natural occurrence. The boy who was saved was saved because of a natural occurrence. It was not a divine being planning. No god picked one boy to live and cruelly sent the other seven to their deaths. I doubt they are in a better place. I tend to think they exist no more. Their life and their consciousness was snuffed out. They lost everything.

I can almost understand the desire to what to make this tragedy make sense. Certainly claiming that God was involved would do that. But the God and his actions which they imagine is so irrational that it makes no sense whatsoever. But I know fundamentalists well and I know that logic and reason play little role in their life.

So the one boy who lived will tell his story about how God saved him and other believers will praise God over it. They will give little thought to how that same God, if he existed, would have had to fill the lungs of other young students with life-denying water. They will have to ignore the pain and horror that those students experienced in their last minutes of existence. They will pretend that this was loving and good and kind and that God was being merciful. They will exhibit the most pronounced trait that I find in the religious -- the ability to twist reality in horrible ways in order to justify an irrational faith in a non-existent deity.

Comrade God.

The one reason that there is such widespread belief in “God” is that pollsters who ask the public if they believe don’t define the word. Christians in America like to pretend that something like 90% of the people are Christians. Of course many, many Christians don’t in fact believe that other Christians are really Christians. The fundamentalists, the anti-intellectuals of Christianity, don’t think that Catholics are Christians. They don’t believe that Christian Scientists are Christian or Jehovah’s Witnesses, nor most main stream Protestant denominations.

A large number of “believers” simply believe in “something” but can’t tell you what it is they believe. For some there is a “force”, for others it is simply “all that exists”. God believers, for the most part, don’t agree with each other what this entity is that they believe in. One of the greatest problems that theism faces is defining what it is that they believe. The moment they start defining it they lose the consensus they brag about and open themselves up to logical rebuttals.

When I speak of God in this article I want to concentrate on the relatively orthodox view of Jehovah. This view of God has been widespread in most Christian sects but is also similar to the monster worshipped by Islam. That concept basically has God as the perfect Stalinist. That is, if you take the actual traits of Stalin and then look at God you find that He/She/It shares those traits except more so. God out-Stalins Stalin.

Stalin had police spies everywhere. He wanted to put every Russian under surveillance. He had informers spread throughout the country. He had wiretaps so extensive that they make George Bush orgasmic. Yet none of Stalin’s surveillance could compare with what the theists claims for their deity. He literally sees everything you are doing.

Apparently God watches you on the toilet, watches you in the shower, watches you having sex, etc. Stalin allowed some privacy out of an inability to spy all the time. God, on the other hand, offers no privacy whatsoever. Stalin’s henchmen might hear some of what you said but God hears everything you say. And, unlike the Stalinist bureaucrats, he supposedly remembers all of it.

Stalin punished dissent. If you disagreed with his rule he could imprison you, torture you, perhaps execute you. And he did all of this -- in massive numbers. But as tyrannical as Stalin was he was unable to punish everyone. Apparently God has no such limits.

We are told he will sit in judgement on everyone who has ever lived. Stalin didn’t act as his own judge in his system. He needed help for his crimes. But apparently God can commit genocide entirely on his own. He supposedly will personally preside over the trial of every human being who has ever lived. And he will be ruthless.

First, if you disagreed with him, or didn’t believe in him, or questioned him, they you are open to punishment. God will also torture you and imprison you. But he won’t kill you because he is not as merciful as Stalin. God’s torture lasts for eternity. Orthodox Christians get moist over the concept of eternal damnation. They preach extensive sermons over how their deity will damn and torture anyone who wasn’t one of them.

One of the most famous sermons in Christian history is the tirade “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. Here are some excerpts which reveals how the God of Edwards is Stalin on steroids.

There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God." -- By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty,...

Sometimes an earthly prince meets with a great deal of difficulty to subdue a rebel, who has found means to fortify himself, and has made himself strong by the numbers of his followers. But it is not so with God. There is no fortress that is any defence from the power of God. Though hand join in hand, and vast multitudes of God's enemies combine and associate themselves, they are easily broken in pieces. They are as great heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind; or large quantities of dry stubble before devouring flames.

It is difficult to find one tyranny of Stalin which goes unsurpassed by the God of Christianity or Islam. Stalin ordered the executions of millions -- so has God, just more so. Stalin has tortured millions and God has tortured billions. Stalin’s torture was limited by the human body and time. God’s torture is unlimited and eternal. Compared to the God that many Christians believe in, Stalin was an amateur.

The paganism in Easter.

Well, it’s Easter again. Here we’re having a big ham covered with brown sugar and honey. Confused? We aren’t celebrating Easter, we’re celebrating ham! Easter is an odd holiday actually.

We are told by Christians that it is time of the crucifixion and alleged resurrection of their God-man. The odd thing about it is that his “resurrection” floats around.

Consider how you celebrate your birthday. If you were born on February 6th then every year on that day it would be the anniversary of your birth -- your birthday. It wouldn’t take place on a different date every year. Easter is supposed to celebrate the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the God-man yet it floats around. One year he resurrected on one day and another year on another day. That is really miraculous.

The reason it floats is that Easter is not based on the anniversary of the “resurrection” of this God-man. Instead the date is set by the cycles of the Moon. Did you know that? I bet you doughnuts that 90% of most Christians have no idea that this is the case. But the date of Easter is is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the full moon that is on, or after, the vernal equinox.

And what about the name for the holiday? Why isn’t it called “Resurrection Day” or something like that? Why this odd word: Easter? The name Easter, which virtually all Christians now hold sacred is an old pagan goddess. It comes from the goddess Eastre or Eostre. She was the goddess of fertility. If you wondered why Easter is celebrate with eggs and rabbits then think fertility.

Celebrating the Spring equinox was common in the pagan cults of the day just as pagan celebration of the Winter solstice, around the 25th of December, was common. And these pagans celebrated with painted eggs laid by rabbits. The reality is that Easter is largely an import from the pre-Christian pagan cults. The early Puritan settlers in New England were very much opposed to Easter celebrations, as they were to Christmas, considering it nothing more than the resurrection of paganism. When these fundamentalists ruled England, during the days of Oliver Cromwell, they actually banned Easter along with that other pagan holiday, Christmas.

Who is persecuting whom?

I want to take you through a little history. There are now organized groups of Christian’s whinging about how they are oppressed in America. In America! Of all places. This is a country where they hold power from the top to the bottom. But the fundamentalists among them have this persecution complex. It exhibits itself by two traits. One is the rabid desire to oppress others, quite literally. The other is to claim they are being victimized because people are free to criticize them.

So I want to take you on tour of American history since the days of the colonialists until today. Pre-colonial history is really not relevant since the Christian issue didn’t arise then.

Ever since the first Christian town was founded in North America there have been campaigns by Christians to ban books that they find tasteful. For much of American history they have succeeded at banning books, burning them and incarcerating authors they find distatseful. Even today the pro-censorship movement in the United States, except for a few radical feminists, is almost entirely made up orthodox Catholics and fundamentalist Christians.

In comparison there has never been an organized movement to ban the Bible. I should note that certain Christian materials have been subjected to the penalties of the law from time to time. But such campaigns have never been championed by secularists, atheists or agnostics. The prime movers in such attempts have always been one sect of Christians attempting to silence another sect.

Consider the so-called sabbath. Christian groups have repeatedly pushed through sabbath laws to force everyone to “honor the sabbath and keep it holy.” Various forms of amusement, activities or employment, have been banned over a period of a couple of hundred years. Individuals could be, and were, arrested for not honoring the Christian sabbath.

Over that same period of time there has never been a law forcing a Christian to violate the sabbath. While there were times that amusement on Sunday was banned by force of law there was never a time when Christians were dragged, kicking and screaming, into movie theaters, baseball games or out to the golf course.

Businesses have been forbidden to conduct their affairs on the sabbath in state after state. Never has a church been forced to close on Sunday. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find any restrictions on when Christians may worship. Some of the extreme sects are constantly in church. They meeting after meeting at their sanctuary and for the most part are entirely left to their own devices. A favor they have rarely returned to others around them.

If we look at how Christians today are acting they are the leading opponents to equal marriage rights for gay couples. You don’t have to go back very far and you’ll find that large numbers of Christians were opposing the right of cross-racial marriage as well. The fundamentalist states were the ones most likely to make it illegal for interracial couples to marry.

Never in the history of this country has there been a campaign to deny Christians the legal sanction of marriage. It just hasn’t happened.

Christians in America today have led campaigns to forbid, by force of law, any private company from giving health insurance to the partners of gay employees. Not only have they pushed such laws, but they passed them as well. Such laws are currently on the books in various states. No one has ever tried to deny Christians health benefits merely because they are Christians.

Around the country there are thousands of Christian radio stations and television stations. They preach their gospel 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. They have been given billions of dollars worth of air waves by the federal government to use as they wish. You can find such programs that bash people for being gay, for being Mormon, for being Catholic, for being secular humanists, etc. Their right to preach this material is enshrined by the First Amendment. And there has never been a concerted effort, of any import, to ban such material from the airwaves.

On the other hand, shows that offend Christians can be fined millions of the dollars by the Federal Communications Commission. Say “fuck” on television or the radio and the Christianists in the federal government will penalize the station that airs the word. Just witness the hysteria when Janet Jackson showed a little boob -- no nipple by the way, just some boob.

America has had a secular school system for a very long time. In addition there are tens of thousands of Christian schools that are, for the most part, left to their own teachings. There has been no campaign, that I know of, of any substance, to force Christian schools to teach evolution. But for decades this country had laws on the books in various states forbidding the teaching of evolution in the secular schools. And there have been numerous well-known efforts by fundamentalists to force their creationists theories onto the public schools.

Never, in this history of America, has there been an attempt to use tax moneys, tax-funded property or the powers of government to force individuals to deny the existence of the Christian deity.

On the other hand there have been millions of instances, literally millions, where non-Christians were required to acknowledge the Christian god either through mandatory prayer (in the past) in state schools, the pledge of allegiance, etc. No piece of government property has ever been used to promote images that deny the existence of a deity. Yet countless times Christians have used tax-funded property to set up their crosses, their Ten Commandments, or their statues. There has never been a public school that had students recite a pledge denying the existence of god. No teacher has ever led his students in a moment of god denial.

Now I can think of times where religious folk in America were persecuted. The Quakers were badly done by in colonial America, as was Roger Williams and other ministers. But the persecution in most those cases were done by the Calvinists, or by fundamentalist Christians. Certainly Catholic immigrants had a hard time and Catholic schools were often harassed by the state. Much of public education got its start as a campaign to inculcate Catholics with non-Catholic ideas. But the perpetrators of those campaigns were Protestants not secularists.

Mormons were badly treated in Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, forcing them to flee to Utah. But the people doing the persecution were other Christians. Then the Mormons retaliated by killing a lot of Christians at Mountain Meadows massacre. Jehovah’s Witnesses were treated terribly badly during World War I as were the pacifistic sects of Christians. But once again it was other Christians who led those campaigns.

I’m not saying that non-believers in the United States can’t be unpleasant and nasty or even intolerant. No doubt some can be. But such people have never led any campaigns of note to strip Christians of the same freedoms and rights that others enjoy. One simply can’t say the same for Christians.

The tribal morality of the Bible.

The morality of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, confuses people. They don’t understand how God could, on one hand command people not to murder and then order them to kill. He forbids fornication and adultery and then turns over young girls to the men of Israel for their pleasure. He says: “Thou shalt not steal” and then orders the wholesale plunder of entire communities.

The atheist has one simple answer. The Bible wasn’t written by a deity at all but by men and the morality of the Bible reflects the morality of the men of those days. That is one thing that escapes people. Never did the Bible make a giant leap in the realm of morality. It was never any better than the men who lived at the time it was written.

Throughout the world, during the period that the Bible was written, slavery was common. And nowhere does the Bible condemn it. On the contrary it is, in some cases, ordered by the alleged Deity behind the book. He sanctions slavery. The Bible is unusually silent about child rape. A point one minister in New Zealand used in his own defense when he admitted to attacking small girls sexually. He said the Bible never forbade what he did -- and it didn’t. At every point in its existence the Bible reflected the values of the society around it.

Yet, you would think that a god, sending his word to man, could have done better than that. He didn’t forbid war but encouraged it. He didn’t recognize women as man’s equal but as his subordinate and property. Even the New Testament, written during a period when civilization, under the Greeks and then Romans had made some advances, is unable to surpass the common morality of the day. The best that it can offer in the way of slavery is to tell masters to treat their slaves well and to tell slaves to obey their masters. Apparently it never dawned on God, or his alleged son, to say: “Masters, free your slaves.”

For the most part the followers of Jesus saw nothing wrong with enslaving other human beings for centuries. Only as the culture began to change, following the unchristian Age of Enlightenment, did believers in any significant number become opponents of slavery. And even then it was the more orthodox believers who defended this crime and more liberal, or deistic, types who opposed it.

The morality of the Bible, and the church I think, rarely led humanity. It followed. As morality evolved the morality of the Bible changed. Ditto for the church.

The thing to understand about Biblical morality is the reason behind the double-standards of the Old Testament. The Hebrews were a tribe and they had a tribal mentality. So, of course, the deity that invented also had a tribal mentality. And that means there are rules for within the tribe and rules for outside the tribe.

Jehovah’s edict “thou shalt not kill” was a rule for within the tribe -- for the most part. He did make some exceptions which I will discuss momentarily. Where genocide was commanded it was against other tribes. The rules that the made-up god of the Hebrews spoke about were fundamentally rules for a people who had to live in relative close proximity to one another, who were related to one another, and who faced an existence of very limited resources in a harsh climate.

But when it came to other tribes then the rules were chucked out the window. That is typical tribal thinking. In the primitive economies of the day man produced very little and the region could be harsh and demanding. Every other tribe was a threat because their sheep or goats would eat the limited grass available and that means your sheep wouldn’t eat. If they drank the well dry you thirsted. Every other tribe was a threat merely because it existed. So the god of the Israelites was regularly ordering them to conquer, kill, plunder and spoil.

Even when this Jehovah fellow commanded the execution of Hebrews, for various sins, it was primarily to keep the peace within the tribe. In a world of tribal warfare each tribe must remain united or fact extinction. Life was a constant battle. There could be no tolerance for diversity in such primitive conditions. In addition to cohesion the tribe needed to remain strong and to outgrow competing tribes.

Jehovah wanted homosexuals within the tribe killed. Other than knowing nothing about sexual orientation, a relatively modern concept, the main reason to execute such people was because sexuality that didn’t lead to reproduction threatened the tribe. If it didn’t out-populate competing tribes in the region it could be wiped out.

Thou shalt not kill was necessary within the tribe for the tribe to survive. Killing others, outside the tribe, was seen as necessary for the same reason. Moral rules against adultery were necessary to keep harmony within the community. The men were the warriors who had to protect the tribe. If they hated one another, or wished to harm one another, it weakened the tribe and made them more vulnerable. Thou shalt not steal was a rule within the tribe so that there wouldn’t be divisions within the community. Again when it came to those outside the tribe, Jehovah was quick to recommend massive theft of the land, crops, and livestock of the tribes that his people slaughtered.

The Hebrews argued that they were a “chosen people”. And the moral code we see in the Ten Commandments (flawed though they may be) were a code for the tribe. Jehovah didn’t give a flying fuck about the other tribes. Kill them. Slaughter every man, woman and child, he said. In particularly vindictive moments he supposedly commanded that their livestock be killed as well -- though often he simple said to steal it.

If the Hebrews were “chosen” what does that say about everyone else? They were not chosen. In other words, they were rejected. They weren’t part of the tribe. And thus the moral codes of the tribe treated them differently than it treated tribe members.

Jehovah was the sock-puppet of the Hebrews of that day. He was a sad and rather pathetic god in that he had no moral grandeur at all. His morality was the morality of a backward, violent tribe.

In the New Testament man had moved somewhat beyond the tribal mentality. There were great trade routes and concepts of law established by the Greeks and the Romans. And these laws were seen as applying to all men equally. The ethics of Jesus reflected that reality. Instead of being as tribal as the Hebrews he spoke of treating others as you would be treated. This sort of reciprocity was necessary in a world of trade and exchange.

And while the Romans and the Greeks both moved humanity ahead in some important ways they also failed. They never saw the evil that is inherent in human slavery. And neither did Jesus. For once again, the New Testament, like the Old, never managed to go beyond the morality of the day. It didn’t do so because it was the work of the men of those days and not the writings of the some divine lawgiver.