Rambling Thoughts

Sometimes, I get a little concerned when my Christian friends quote the Bible as a source of morals. According to them, any atheist who denies the existing of God (their God in particular) is bound to be immoral as there is no moral compass to show the right true way. Furthermore, they argued, the absence of such morality would lead to humanity’s decadence and, ultimately, to the end of the human race- whether God chooses to end us by smiting us (remember, he IS all powerful, after all) or will cause us to perish from disasters, diseases or something worse.
 

But is God truly moral by today’s pluralistic standards of human morality? Of course, some would argue by saying that we do not really know what morality is because God is Morality and what God does is morality. There are some who argue that God defines the standards of morality and whatever action he does corresponds to those standards. There is some merit in the second argument as the Christian God has been known to set morality laws in the Bible. The Ten Commandments with its romanticized imagery (courtesy of a white bearded Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 movie of the same name) plays to the argument that God is a law giver and he is the ultimate police man who will punish us.
 

But is the Torah, Bible and Koran a good source of morals? Over the course of the following weeks, I shall highlight several “interesting” verses to highlight the morality of God. In this article, I shall focus on the most fundamental one of all- the taking of another human life.
 

Passages that discourages killing are commendable standards that almost all societies, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist, subscribe to. But there are passages too, especially in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim faith that show killing is allowed. As I am not familiar with the Judeo-Muslim scriptures, I shall quote from the Bible to illustrate my point:-
 

1Samuel 15:2-3
This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ “

When I read the passages quoted above, I feel quite disconcerted with my conjured mental image of God looking more like Saddam Hussein than the peaceful looking white bearded man in the sky as envisioned by Michelangelo in his Sistine Chapel ceiling painting. God commanded Saul, through Samuel, to go forth and “put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” What the cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys did to deserve this fate, only God knows! Dogs and cats lovers, rejoice, though, for they were spared and not in God’s hit list!
 

Saul did go forth and carried out God’s command. However, he returned with the captured the king of Amalekites, Agag and spared the best of the cattle and sheep for the solders and as offerings to God.
When God realized what happened, He was as pissed as hell! (Funny isn’t it, God always seem to be not in the know even though he all knowing). This evidenced by the following passages:-
 

1Samuel 15:20-26
“But I did obey the LORD,” Saul said. “I went on the mission the LORD assigned me. I completely destroyed the Amalekites and brought back Agag their king. The soldiers took sheep and cattle from the plunder, the best of what was devoted to God, in order to sacrifice them to the LORD your God at Gilgal.”
 

 But Samuel replied:
 “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
 as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD ?
 To obey is better than sacrifice,
 and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
 

 For rebellion is like the sin of divination,
 and arrogance like the evil of idolatry.
 Because you have rejected the word of the LORD,
 he has rejected you as king.”
 

Then Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned. I violated the LORD’s command and your instructions. I was afraid of the people and so I gave in to them. Now I beg you, forgive my sin and come back with me, so that I may worship the LORD.”
 

 But Samuel said to him, “I will not go back with you. You have rejected the word of the LORD, and the LORD has rejected you as king over Israel!”

Poor Saul…so, let me put this in context:- 

It really isn’t entirely clear what the Amalekites did but they sure did something that really, really pissed God off. And why couldn’t God, with his omnipotence and omniscience, solve the Amalekites problem himself? What kind of an omnipotent God is it that creates a being so flawed like us, expects us to do right all of the time and gets pissed off when we don’t do as He pleases?
 

God asked Saul to utterly annihilate the Amalekites (men, women and children) and their livestocks. The price of not following such an instruction is equivalent to a sin. Therefore, Saul has committed a sin, according to Samuel’s reasoning. Hmm…whatever happened to “Thou shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13), one of God’s own Ten Commandments?
 

I mean, God could have made his teachings consistent- “thou shall not kill” and asked that Saul imposed economic sanctions on Amalekites. But no, God, like George Bush commanding the invasion of Iraq, commanded Saul to carry out a very brutal ethnic (and inter-species) cleansing.  After all, Saul, had he subscribed to the “thou shall not kill” rule, would have been very, very confused when he was commanded by the God to do the very thing that the same God commanded against a few books back in the book of Exodus!
 

If God have omniscience (all knowing), wouldn’t he had known that in some future point that He would have to arrange for the elimination of the Amalekites? Couldn’t he have commanded Moses to convey to his followers that “thou shall not kill, except, in the case of the Amalekites and their cattle, sheep, camels and donkeys, which, I can foresee, will be pissing me off big time in the near future.”
 

Perhaps if God did do that, then the Bible is clearly consistent. But then again, why did God create Amalekites in the first place if HE can already see the end result?

 

I have been reading the works of Richard Dawkins lately and I’m glad that he was the final nudge that drove me back into being an atheist. Thank God Darwin!

The problem about the resurgence of religious extremism in the later part of the century had made this world a very ugly place to live. We have people from all sides who claimed that God demanded them to blow up the world back to the stone ages. I don’t know about you but if God asked His children to kill each other, it seem to me that Satan (if he exists) is the one who is probably doing the talking.

Furthermore, enterprising people are using religion as a vehicle to accumulate huge amounts of wealth. Whether this wealth is used to enrich the soul is another question altogether. I’ve seen a church in Malaysia that is so obsessed in building a big multiplex mega-church activity center that it has programs to continuously raise funds just so that The Holy Spirit can have a proper home. The congregation is asked to support this vision through “faith” pledges, building funds, etc.

I’m just thinking aloud but if the Holy Spirit exists- which I know he/she/it doesn’t- I think that he/she/it would have wanted the congregation to focus its energy to doing good and helping people. It is through this good work that gains them respect, not huge monuments that play to one’s ego. And what is this fixation about building the biggest church, temple, mosque, statue got to do with God anyway?

Some people would quote some Bible passages and said that somewhere it is there. God wants so-and-so to build a great monument as decreed in the scriptures so that …ya-da-di-ya-da-da…. And since God’s scripture is divinely inspired it is always taken as the truth. But this is not the case as the Bible has been reinterpreted more times than George Lucas has ever tinkered with his Star Wars trilogy (or sextology or whatever you call a 6 parter). 

Take for example, the passages relating to slavery. We don’t keep slaves anymore (see slavery passages in Matthew 10:25, Luke 12:45-48 and many more) and that puts the Christian text into a little bit of a quandary. To be politically correct in the 21st century, we have to interpret “servants” in these passages as servants and not slaves. However, the historical context of the era in which these texts were originally written in refer to “servants” as slaves, not the meek and mild definition of servants that we are familiar with today. It is a far cry for us to imagine that two thousand years ago, there were people who voluntarily seek a life of bondage (unless you are that kind of sexual deviant, but that’s another story). Jesus had a chance to make Abraham Lincoln redundant but he didn’t.

Of course, one can’t do that nowadays without being labeled a heretic. It’s convenient, isn’t it? When it comes to religious matters, one just need to invoke the divine nature of God and all contrary forms rational and logical arguments are summarily dismissed. It is as if our priests, pastors, imams and mediums have an exclusive inter-dimensional direct hotline to their gods. How can they interpret ancient stories and myth to come up with something that is relevant to today’s world? I have an answer but it is not something that most will agree with me with.

I believe that it has to do with an earlier point that I was trying to make: in the world of big business, the business of salvation is a pretty lucrative one. What more if I can entertain you with stories about the parting of a sea, the virgin birth of a foretold saviour and the eventual ufo-like lifting of believers into la-la land before the final uprising of machines against unbelievers. Err. Okay, so the last one was lifted from the Terminator and Matrix movies but Schwazenegger and Keanu Reeves did make hugely obscene bucket loads of money from them. And when money is involved we all know what happens as one thing that still rings true today as it did two thousand years ago is the old maxim: The love of money is the root of all evil.