I recently ran across this blog, which I found quite engaging. The author (named Tracy as I will refer to her in this post) claims to promote a state of being “radically free”, and generally, I would say she is on a good path towards that goal.

But she still continues to engage in one (in my opinion) form of delusion: She continues to maintain that the bible is the Word of God, or “revealed truth” as I like to call it. This particular Christian dogma takes many forms. In its most extreme fundamentalist form (which Tracy obviously rejects), the bible is to be read literally, as a historical document.

While Tracy certainly does not hold to that view, she does tend to quote the bible in support of her position. I call this “bible bashing”.

Bible bashing occurs when a person regards the bible as authoritative for human living, and the expression of divine will. I no longer hold that view, and I believe a careful and systematic study of the bible will reveal what I have discovered: The bible as we know it is a work of human culture. A collection of literature, nothing more.

How do I know this? Easy. First, I look at the 85% of the bible that almost all Christians (and Jews for that matter) tend to ignore. I call these the “dark verses” (hence the title of this post). These are the verses that show the character and nature of the god described in the bible. Which is a pretty poor character in my view, and I think most reasonable folks would agree.

Take a story that Christians love: The story of the flood, Noah, and so forth, which is contained in Genesis 6-9. This is a story which I personally taught to my children as  a bedtime story. My wife and I even decorated our children’s bedrooms with pictures of the ark, animals, and so forth.

Let’s get real. This is a terrible story. In this story, the god of the universe, the creator of all the stars, galaxies, and so forth, decides that he is annoyed with mankind, because they are engaging in all sorts of behavior of which he disapproves. (No explanation is ever given as to why this particular god has an opinion about things like foods, sexuality, what day we should rest, etc.) Anyway, because mankind has failed to measure up to his standard, he has a simple solution: Wipe them all out.

Imagine the young mother at that moment, holding her newborn infant in her arms while god causes the waters to rise. She struggles to keep her baby above the surface of the waters. Eventually, she is overwhelmed, and her baby falls into the water and is drowned as well.

Now, several questions are patently obvious:

• Would you worship a god who would kill an innocent infant in cold blood for the purported crimes or his or her mother, or other adults in his or her culture? I mean come on here! Supposedly, one of the basic tenets of Christianity is redemption which is a beautiful idea. The gist is that all humans are capable of being fundamentally good, if simply given a chance. Everyone has the potential to be redeemed. Not this baby apparently. At least not in god’s eyes. He or she never gets a chance to prove what kind of life he or she would have had. In my mind that god is a monster, a genocidal maniac who makes Hitler look like an alter boy.
• What are the crimes of which this culture is guilty, and which is connotated to justify mass genocide? Homosexual practices for one. Does anyone in our current culture maintain that because of homosexuality that our culture deserves to be wiped out? (If so, I would suggest that you are a bit out of step with modern values.)
• Oh and the other crime: Worshipping the detestable gods of their religion. Which I have pointed out before is simply code: Religious documents of all stripes invariably refer to the practitioners of another religion as wicked idolaters. That’s right before they decide that these folks deserve to be killed.

Many other examples could be chosen. I have pointed out all of the incredibly cruel, misogynistic, bigoted and just plain stupid things in the Old Testament law. And the New Testament (especially the later books like the Pastoral Epistles and the Book of Revelation) are little better. Even the gospels do not escape from the issue of dark verses.

I will not belabor the point further. My real purpose in this blog post is to beseech all of my fellow humans: For the sake of the planet, for the sake of human suffering, please, please, pretty please, drop the silly pretension that your particular religious text (whether it is the bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Gita, or whatever) is the revealed truth. It is simply not possible for all of these books to be faxed from heaven: They are wildly inconsistent, after all. (The bible is even internally inconsistent, which is also true of many of the other texts which claim the status of revealed truth).

As long as there are millions of believers who maintain that their particular book is the revealed truth, and yours is the work of demons, we are all going to remain stuck in a persistent state of being assholes who bash each other over the head with these books. Can we stop doing this now, please?