Nine years ago today we watched in horror as a series of carefully planned attacks were carried out against innocent victims who had no idea they would be targets of such savagery. It's hard for most people to imagine how anyone can be so inhuman as to deliberately cause maximum suffering and loss of innocent life. Perversely though not surprisingly, this was yet another atrocity done in the name of God, or as Muslims call Him, Allah. Speaking of God, one of His self-appointed press secretaries down in Florida dominated the news this week, as we paid far too much attention to this inconsequential flyspeck of a man who overextended his 15 minutes of fame by threatening to make a big show of burning the Koran. This would have served no purpose whatsoever except to inject a booster shot of hatred into a few already hate-poisoned souls.
Religion has enriched humanity by inspiring charity, compassion and other virtues, but religious fundamentalism and fanaticism have led to some horrendous things. Right now Muslims may be more likely than others to commit acts of terror explicitly in the name of their faith, but we should not, by any stretch of the imagination, conclude that the Koran is a book of violence while the Bible is a book of peace. Both of these sacred texts can be horrifying if read a certain way. We see in our Bible, particularly the Old Testament, a prime example of the God as bogeyman paradigm, a ghost story designed to terrify the masses and cow them into submission. You needn't go through the Bible with a fine-tooth comb to see some very disturbing things. Let's just look at a couple of the Bible's greatest hits, the Ten Commandments and the great flood/Noah's Ark.
There are variations of the Ten Commandments but in every case the first several involve playing to the ego of a needy and insecure God who even admits He's jealous and will punish descendants of those who reject Him to the third and fourth generation (Deut. 5:9). The Bible thus paints God as not only petty but also savagely vindictive, attacking generation after generation of innocent victims if someone in their lineage wouldn't invite Him to sit at the cool kids' table. The Bible also orders us to commit acts of heinous brutality if the Ten Commandments are violated. If anyone fails to speak of God with awe and reverence he is guilty of blasphemy and we must throw rocks at him until he's dead (Lev. 24:13-16). People are also to be killed for working on the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2) and the punishment for being a disobedient son? Yup, we must throw rocks at him until he's dead (Deut 21:18-21).
The tale of Noah's Ark shows our God at his most bloodthirsty. He got angry and decided he would spare eight people (one couple, their three sons and their wives) and the bare minimum number of creatures necessary for repopulation, then He would drown every other living thing. God's sociopathic overreaction makes Vlad the Impaler look like the Dalai Lama, yet we would condemn the whole of Islam as brutally savage based on a news story about one jagoff blowing up a pizzeria.
I'm not insulting God. I would be if and only if I believed the Bible to be a direct dictation from God to an infallible stenographer, which I most assuredly do not. For one thing the story of Noah's Ark doesn't pass the laugh test. Rain falling at a rate that would cover the mountains in a few weeks would sink the USS Nimitz let alone a wooden boat laden with elephants, hippos, etc. Plus, though Bible defenders try to explain this away, a great many of the animals aboard this floating food chain would not be on the passenger list so much as the menu. Somebody just made it up. If you seek spiritual enlightenment to be the best person you can be I applaud you, but don't adopt fanaticism; nothing good comes of it no matter what Moses claims the talking shrubbery told him.
