The preceding five posts of this blog concern the Judeo-Christian Bible. Perhaps that is too much, given the global existence of other religious and spiritual traditions. The time I’ve spent on these posts reflects my own background as a Christian and the importance of the Bible in American culture. The Bible itself is often cited by Christians as the ultimate authority on questions of religion, behavior and government without noticing the circular reasoning. I concentrated on this topic, because, if the Bible is shown to be without moral or divine authority, then the religious conclusions drawn from Bible study are also void.
My posts on the Bible discussed various aspects of Biblical injustice: genocide; tribalism; divine extortion and intimidation; misogyny and sexism. Indeed, these topics have barely scratched the surface of divinely administered injustice in the Bible. There is the slaughter of innocent Egyptian children (Exodus), the slaughter of innocents in Sodom & Gomorrah and Noah’s Flood (Genesis), the disproportionate punishment of Lot’s wife, and disproportionate punishment of those condemned to eternal suffering in Hell (Matthew, Mark, Thessalonians, and Revelations). The book of Job anticipates the plot of the movie “Trading Places”, where God and Satan have a wager about the consequences of ruining Job’s life. The consequences of the wager include collateral damage: the death of Job’s children, servants and livestock. Is there any regard for the lives of the innocents when God is punishing opponents or playing a game with Satan?
Saint Paul writes in 2nd Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” How can we say that the Bible is divinely inspired if it contains a single example of such injustice? Indeed, the injustice is ubiquitous, spread throughout the Old and New Testaments, though, to be fair, the New Testament is generally less objectionable than the Old Testament. To make sense of the Bible in terms of justice, we are forced to cherry-pick the best passages: justice for the down-trodden (Beatitudes, Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:20-22), love, (1st Corinthians 13), balance in life, (Ecclesiastes 3), and caring for the least of Jesus brothers (Matthew 25: 35-40). But nearby or adjacent to these verses, we find some deep injustices. If we hold the value of justice, we have to reject a divine origin for the Biblical texts. The bad parts are flawed human injustice and the good parts are human wisdom.
You may have noticed that I did not list Psalm 23 or similar texts in my short list of “good verses”. If you google “favorite bible verses”, you will find many, many verses promising God’s protection and comfort. If these are comforting to people, why do I not consider them good verses? It is because they aren’t true. An earlier post on this site is called “Regarding the Power of Prayer, or Did the People on the Titanic Forget to Pray?” Simply looking at the lives and deaths of other humans around us, it’s clear that there is no protection by God in this world. Thus, the promises of God’s protection in the Bible are simply untrue, offering false complacency about the hazards of life.
The Bible contains its own refutation as divinely inspired guidance for life.
Previous Posts on the Bible
Sexism in the New Testament
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2023/08/sexism-in-new-testament.html
Misogyny in the Old Testament; Deuteronomy 20 - 22, Numbers 5
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/11/old-testament-rarely-heard-bible-verses.html
Tribalism in The Old Testament; Deuteronomy 7, 20, 21
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-old-testament-rarely-heard-bible.html
The Protection Racket in the Old Testament; Leviticus 26
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-old-testament-rarely-heard-bible.html
Religious Genocide in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 13
https://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-old-testament-rarely-heard-bible_29.html
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