I’ve been pretty critical of Christianity in my blog, but let’s not just give the Jewish religion a free pass. This week, as Jews celebrate passover, let’s just look at this story a little bit.
The passover story is not a story of a loving and courageous God leading his people to freedom. It’s mostly the story of a cruel God who kept his people in bondage for longer than was necessary, and was unimaginably cruel to the Egyptians in the process of persuading them to let the Israelites go.
Consider the following:
- The Pharaoh was already ready to let the Israelis go about half-way through the ten plagues, but God “hardened his heart” so that he could get through all ten.
- If God could “harden” the Pharaoh’s heart, then clearly he could also have softened the Pharaoh’s heart. That would have been the loving thing to do.
- The citizens of Egypt whose firstborn sons were killed, hardly had any power to influence the Pharaoh in his decision making.
- God killed not only the first-born of the Egyptian families, but also the first-born of their livestock.
The first-born of their livestock? WTF!
I’m sorry people, this is no loving God.
I mean, I’m happy for the Israelis that they were released from bondage. But this God, he’s a bad mother, without any empathy for the enemies of his people or even their animals.
And that is just one of many, many stories that demonstrate how cruel the God of Abrham is, such as when the prophet Elisha is mocked by a group of youths for his baldness, and in response, God causes two bears to emerge from the nearby woods and maul the youths, resulting in the death of forty-two of them.
I’m not making this up. It’s in Book of 2 Kings, chapter 2, verses 23-25. Look it up.
Oh yeah, that’s a loving God.
