Michael Parenti

In the battle against the Midians, God instructs Moses to kill all the men and male children and every woman who was not a virgin. “But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves”17—an unsettling heavenly mandate if ever there was one from a god who ordains war, conquest, mass murder, enslavement, and child rape.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

—GALILEO GALILEI

There is the god of rational totality, immutable and cosmic, impersonal and without deliberate demands, a pure creative force with an evolving design: Hegel's “self-manifesting” spirit. Then there is the Judeo-Christian god, “the Lord our God,” also known as Yahweh or Jehovah, and other personalized godheads who act directly and anthropomorphically upon history with moods of love, jealousy, favoritism, and judgmental rage.