Indeed. This also reminds me of Julia Sweeney and what she said:
Quote:The next day we visited an island where the Blue-footed Boobies were tending to their new babies. The Blue-footed Booby babies are the cutest animals in the world, almost to the level of absurdity. They have this bright, white, longhaired fur that sticks out all over, and these blue beaks and feet, and these huge plaintive eyes.
Usually the Blue-footed Boobies have just one baby per pregnancy, but every once in awhile they have two. And when they do the stronger sibling usually pecks the brains out of the weaker one.
So we were looking at all these adorable Blue-footed Booby babies and then we found one pecking the brains out of its weaker sibling. And the naturalist was telling us that this was routine. That now the frigate bird would probably come soon and carry the dead baby off to feed its family. That's the way it went.
And I looked at this poor doomed Blue-footed Booby baby, with its brains hanging out of its head. And we sort of looked at each other in the eye for a moment. He looked at me like, "What are you going to do? I'm the weaker Blue-footed Booby baby."
I thought, "Oh. God... is not nature. God is not nature. I mean, nature is floods and famines and earthquakes and viruses and little Blue-footed Booby babies getting their brains pecked out by their stronger sibling. God, I mean, the God I know, the God of love and compassion, that isn't exactly found in nature.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
