God loves you. But there sure are a lot of others he just can't stand.
Or so it would seem if you believe those haters who claim to speak for him. The loathsome Westboro Baptist Church has been peddling its "God Hates Fags" line for so long that even its cretinous congregation gets bored with it. So, for variety's sake, they recently rolled out a new theme in San Francisco: "God Hates Jews."
Not so new, after all, is it? Meantime, halfway around the world, a couple of West Bank settler rabbis claim that God hates everybody but the Jews. Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur have published a new exegesis of the Torah in which, according to the Forward:
The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder'" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew," write the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."
Killing babies and children? That's God's will?
Not to be outdone in the Hatred Olympics, Muslim clerics are keeping busy. Not long ago one Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub went on Egyptian TV to assure viewers that:
The Jews are our enemies. Allah will annihilate them at our hands. This is something we know for certain. We know this for certain - not because I say so, but because Allah said so. 'You shall find that the people strongest in enmity to the believers are the Jews and the polytheists.' That is a quotation from the Qur'an (5:82).
God keeps especially busy in the Middle East, where besides hating both Arabs and Jews, he also divides his time between hating Shi'ites and Sunnis and getting in a little hate-time for the Copts and other Christians when he can.
Don't get the mistaken notion that God hates only broad categories of people. He can get mighty particular when the mood strikes. Take President Obama, for example. Listen to the sermons of preacher Steven Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church, and you'll soon learn that God hates, I mean really hates, Barack Obama. It's in the Bible, the Rev says. You could look it up.
Religion is a complex human phenomenon, and I'd be the last person to say it's all about hatred. It's clearly not. But religious expressions of hatred, which not long ago were confined to the fringe -- odd little bookstores, low-power radio stations, that kind of thing -- increasingly fill the mainstream channels of communication, like the mindless zebra mussels clogging up our waterways.
If you suspect, as I do, that religion evolved as a human trait that conferred advantage on groups by increasing solidarity in the competition against other groups, then it's all too easy to see how hatred would become an enduring feature of religion. Of course, we must bear in mind that hatred is not unique to religion. (After all, the Hutus not long ago massacred a million Tutsis in Rwanda without invoking God.) But at this historical moment it is in religion that hatred finds its most powerful and all-consuming expression.
Can anything be done to counter this trend? Of course. Hatred relies on dehumanizing "the other." We can speak out loud and strong against any claim that one group of people or another is deserving of hatred. Our instincts may urge us to an us-and-them mentality, but what Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature" can overcome those instincts.
Even if we cannot extinguish hatred, we can, as we have with racism, repudiate it. We can reach across ideological boundaries to join hands and declare, "God is love." Here is my hand.
Follow Clay Farris Naff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/claynaff
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Who is like unto that Beast, who maketh fire come down from heaven upon the earth!" Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? "Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!" will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee--a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel; and though its building be left unfinished, as was that of the first one, yet the fact will remain recorded that Thou couldst, but wouldst not, prevent the attempt to build that new tower by accepting the offer, and thus saving mankind a millennium of useless suffering on earth.
And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth?
Dostoevsky – The Grand Inquisitor
But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass. It is that instinctive need of having a worship in common that is the chief suffering of every man, the chief concern of mankind from the beginning of times.
It is for that universality of religious worship that people destroyed each other by sword. Creating gods unto themselves, they for with began appealing to each other: "Abandon your deities, come and bow down to ours, or death to ye and your idols!" And so will they do till the end of this world; they will do so even then, when all the gods themselves have disappeared, for then men will prostrate themselves before and worship some idea.
Dostoevsky – The Grand Inquisitor
Under our rule and sway all will be happy, and will neither rebel nor destroy each other as they did while under Thy free banner. Oh, we will take good care to prove to them that they will become absolutely free only when they have abjured their freedom in our favor and submit to us absolutely. Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable chasms, place them face to face before such wonders and insoluble mysteries, that some of them--more rebellious and ferocious than the rest--will destroy themselves; others--rebellious but weak--will destroy each other; while the remainder, weak, helpless and miserable, will crawl back to our feet and cry: "'Yes; right were ye, oh Fathers of Jesus; ye alone are in possession of His mystery, and we return to you, praying that ye save us from ourselves!" Receiving their bread from us, they will clearly see that we take the bread from them, the bread made by their own hands, but to give it back to them in equal shares and that without any miracle;
Dostoevsky – The Grand Inquisitor
"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. (1st Sam 15:2-3)"
This is just one of many excerpts where God tells the Israelites to kill. Often they are supposed to kill those who worship the wrong God or disobey one of God's laws, other times as in this example they are to kill whole peoples including women and children. This is your God of peace?
I know this is a fraught discussion, but it is worth putting these ideas out there.
The Amalekites were a race of nomadic raiders who lived by killing and plundering the Negev area. Saul was carrying out a police action in the style of the day. And if God is as portrayed in the Bible, a highly advanced intelligence capable of creating worlds, but inclined to let humans suffer the consequences of their own actions, such a God would consequently have the ability to predict the outcome of letting these criminal groups carry on.
The worship of the other gods involved temple prostitutes and child sacrifice. God's laws - including the prohibition of worshiping these gods - are not arbitrary, but the minimum to guarantee the high level of moral performance that was required for the Israelites to contrast with the world around them and provide an example of a better way.
Kind of like the religion of nationalism was utilized to justify mass killing in Iraq.
For one thing religion is by definition not based on reason, but rather faith. When I have a disagreement with a fellow atheist we can talk things through. We may not agree on certain issues but we do agree that reason is the critical deciding factor. That's not the case with religion. When religious people disagree there is no possibility of rational debate. Muslims believe that Allah is the profit and Christians that salvation can only happen through Christ and neither can be argued with because their beliefs are based on faith rather than reason.
The other reason religion is so amenable to intolerance is that religion makes such extreme claims. Not just about what is important in this life but in the afterlife. If I sincerely believe that I am saving someone's soul from eternal torture than I am justified in doing just about anything, including murder and torture, here on earth. What are a few hours or days of torture compared to eternal torture? That logic has been used to justify a lot of atrocities such as the inquisition.
I would also argue that the atheist claims are just as extreme as the religious claims. Denying that there's an afterlife is just as extreme as affirming it; both have radical repercussions on how you live your life here and now. Richard Wurmbrand, in Tortured for Christ, detailed how the Soviet torturers specifically used the non-existence of God and the afterlife as a justification for their horrific actions. "There is no God, no absolute standard of right and wrong that we're violating, no hell that we're going to, so we can do whatever we want." I'm not suggesting that atheism necessarily leads to this, but that it can be used like this. My point is that this is the same case for religion: it doesn't necessarily lead to hatred, but it can be used as an excuse to justify it by those who were going to hate regardless.
Every Christian I know loves to debate and argue. Every church is in constant turmoil over "how many angels can dance onthe head of a pin" to use the old medaevel syllogism. Their belief in their belief might be mystifyingly unshakable to you, but yours in atheisms is mystifyingly unshakeable to them probably.
I'd argue that they are so annoying to atheists because they would like nothing better that to argue with you. Just because you can' t understand their arguments doesn't mean they are illogical. Since the "givens" in the equation for either, or presuppositions or whatever you want to call them they are usually experiential, before a theorem was ever proposed, the argument never gets to the underlying question.
Thus, God is obligated to confine those who have chosen self as their sole end to Hell, a place appropriate to their character. Since they love themselves supremely, God gives them an eternity to satisfy themselves. Since they love wickedness, He gives them wicked companions. Since they reject righteousness, God gives them a place devoid of righteousness. Since they love to mock the blessings of God and His love, God gives them a place devoid of His love.
You see, God even loves sinners and gives them exactly what they want most.
This is the most loving thing God can do for the unrepentant sinner.
God is love.
I've never understood the "God is Love" claim when applied to the Christian God. If you read the old testament that God routinely condones slaughter and murder of Israel's enemies. And the New Testament God is if anything worse since he will send people to eternal torture in Hell simply for using their reason (as I do) and coming to the wrong conclusion: that God doesn't exist or that Hinduism or Judiasm are the "right" religion.
"So these "sinners" (which I guess includes me since I'm an atheist)"
So........................being atheist equates with being wicked or a sinner (one of which (sins) I am aware is non-belief, but that is not wicked...to me)?
I found peace and love in the comment from GodIs; a reflection closer to the truth than maybe we know (at least that was the feeling). For surely, Madoff and Manson are in hell now by their actions -- right here on earth. ...and so it goes…by choice life is informed as well as by fate. As for life after death, that is a contradiction...or the unknown quantity (at least to those of us who use words to communicate, thought to think, and heart and mind to make decisions). I definitely believe in and conceive of God...but I also realize that “Iâ€, is a fleeting thing...and not necessarily a storehouse of certainty leading to eternal truth.
I believe religion is capable of similar transformation, and I'm working to promote it. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
He probably hates people who say things like that, but what can ya do?
Perfect explanation, yet it is practically heresy to say so in this country. I can remember as a child questioning such claptrap as virgin births and spirits in the sky as Father and having people move away from me in fear their benevolent God would send a thunderbolt down... and miss. If such actions aren't the very definition of superstition, then what is?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clay-naff/theres-no-hatred-like-fai_b_450661.html#
"Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
and the Catholics hate the Proestants,
The Moslems hate the Hindus,
and everybody hates the Jews,
But during National Brotherhood Week ... etc."
Cheers,
Clay
Crosby Stills and Nash