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.

Those who attempt to impose their autocratic beliefs upon the entire society with the force of law become the enemies of personal liberty and a danger to our prospects for an open society

In regard to organized religions, it has been impossible to deny the strong surges of incredulity that can drench one's mind when confronted with certain narratives, some of which are dealt with in the chapters immediately ahead. As bad as they are, however, the improbable stories and strictures are nothing as compared to the monstrosities of actual religious institutional practice or malpractice; the lies, hypocrisies, and dispiriting criminal abuses perpetrated by the purveyors of a pompous piety and pretended purity; the parading of a shallow “spirituality” that cloaks a rampant material greed; the endless talk of a loving god by unloving personages; the heartless exploitation of bedraggled populations; the undemocratic complicity with privileged elites; and the shameless zeal and homicidal intolerance shown toward other creeds and nonbelievers

As someone once said, “It's not God I have a problem with, it's his fan club.”

I am halfway through Genesis, and quite appalled by the disgraceful behavior of all the characters involved, including God.

—J. R. ACKERLEY

Many of the Bible's mind-boggling events, however, will be passed over: Adam's procreative rib, Cain finding a wife out of nowhere, Jonah spending a long weekend in a whale's digestive tract, Joshua lengthening the day by making the sun—not the earth—stand still, Moses being handed the tablets directly from the Big Guy in the Sky, Elijah taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, and so forth

Alexander Dumas fils once remarked that if God had to live in the misery that many humans endure, he would kill himself. Indeed, why would a purportedly just and loving deity create such a hurtful world? Think of all the suffering, death, and natural disasters. Consider human beings, purportedly Yahweh's “highest creation”; why are so many of them capable of the lowest deeds?

The religionists argue that humans themselves are culpable, for they choose to commit these wicked acts of their own free will. But if humans are God's creation, does he not bear some responsibility for what he has rendered? Why would an omnipotent, all-perfect divinity create such flawed creatures capable of conducting themselves in unspeakable ways? Aware of their dismally faulty design, why would he then endow them with free will so they might elect to afflict others?

He might have done better had he taken more than six days to put the universe together. As one wit put it, God is an underachiever