(July 9, 2014 at 4:43 am)smax Wrote: I was once a believer. And before I stopped believing in God, I first started to think that he was evil. This happened while I was studying in seminary. I was doing expositional studies of several old testament books, and I was shocked at the lack of regard for human life and basic morality.
God promises his people a land flowing with milk and honey. Later it is revealed that this is someone else's fucking land, and God isn't giving it away at all, he's telling his people to conquer it and slaughter and enslave it's people.
How do you read something like this and still feel good about the morality of god? I couldn't do it, and it only got worse after that.
The God character in the Bible is simply the series of Assyrian and Babylonian Emperors who ruled the Middle East for centuries. The invisible celestial and desert mountain dwelling deities are mentioned only a couple of times in the Old Testament. The God character doing all of the yakking in the Bible was nothing but a man who had the power of life and death over his subjects, which was everyone in his empire. The Israelites/Hebrews/Jews were some of his flunkies. The God character died when the last Babylonian Emperor bit the dust with the collapse of the Babylonian Empire.
