Is the Bible really the Word of God?
I find it almost impossible for someone to read the Bible and not notice that it contains incoherences and contradictions and teaches perversities. Why, then, do the followers of the book with the black cover justify, that is, excuse everything that is wrong and bad in it? Because they are afraid. Note, dear reader, that those who are afraid of criticizing the Holy Bible are not afraid of criticizing, for example, the Holy Koran, even though it too claims to be of divine origin. After being (through child indoctrination) led or (through persuasion) induced to accept the Bible as the Word of God, its followers are (through threats of punishment) inhibited by itself from criticizing it: to doubt the book with the black cover is to doubt God himself — and to reserve a place in the lake of fire and brimstone.
To scrutinize the Bible rationally, it’s necessary to lose fear, and to lose fear, it’s necessary to interrupt the brainwashing to which the believers are subjected and the autosuggestion to which they submit themselves. When faced with the absurdities of the Bible, many Christians have doubts about whether it’s of divine origin. Remembering, however, the threats of punishment, they stifle the doubt. Those who allow it gradually distance themselves from the church, the main source of brainwashing. This distancing enables them to lose their fear and acknowledge that the Bible contains incoherences and contradictions and teaches perversities.
Numbers 25 is an excellent example of a bunch of wrong things coming together in a single chapter of the Bible: prejudices, primitivenesses, intolerance, absurdities, perversities, fanaticism, violence, genocide, revenge and contradictions. Only brainwashing and inducing of fear are capable of making someone excuse these things. The story begins by saying:
While the people of Israel were still camped at Acacia, the men began sinning sexually with Moabite women. The women invited them to their sacrifices to their gods, and the Israelites ate food there and worshiped these gods. So the Israelites began to worship Baal of Peor, and the Lord was very angry with them.
As Vinicius de Moraes said, in the song Testamento, “women are very strange, very strange”. In Numbers 25, the negative way in which the female sex is generally portrayed in the Bible leaps to the eye and is confirmed. In it, women are usually cunning, seductive, lascivious. The book of Proverbs contains dozens of warnings to men not to fall for women’s smooth talk. One of them says: “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion”. Any similarity between the women in Numbers 25 and Eve, who caused Adam to fall into sin, is not a mere coincidence. In 1 Timothy 2, apostle Paul states that the world’s disasters are entirely the woman’s fault. She is the one who was weak and listened to the talking snake, not the man, who, despite knowing that the woman was committing a tremendous act of imbecility, only followed her out of love. In chapter 25 of Numbers, the men of Israel sacrificed to other gods out of love for the women who seduced them.
Note, dear reader, that the god of the book with the black cover had nothing against animal sacrifices. Quite the opposite: he even demanded them. The Bible says that Yahweh loved the aroma of the barbecues that were offered to him on altars. Try to imagine: the creator of two trillion galaxies needed and liked the smell of burned meat. If that isn’t proof that Yahweh is a primitive god, just like any other god of any polytheistic religion, I don’t know what it is.
By the way, if Yahweh is the only god, why did he fume in rage when the Israelites worshiped other gods, that is, false gods? Here, we have a deity who is so sure of himself, so sure of himself, that he is jealous of deities that don’t even exist.
Another detail: the women who seduced Israel’s men were foreigners. In the Bible, there are plenty of stories in which the other peoples are portrayed as primitive, barbaric and immoral, so much so that Yahweh ordered them to be exterminated. Another part of the book of Numbers relates that God commanded the Israelites to put to the sword all the inhabitants of Midian, a country southeast of Israel. After the massacre, Moses was told that the soldiers had shown mercy on the women and children. That infuriated the man of God, who cried out: “Why have you let all the women live? […] They are the cause of the plague that destroyed us” (referring to the epidemic in Numbers 25, sent by God). Moses then ordered that “all the boys and all the women” be killed. The warriors were to spare only the virgin girls. The virgin girls they could take for themselves. Remember, dear reader: this monstrous story is written not in the Koran, but in the so-called Word of God.
Back to Numbers 25, the account continues:
God was furious, his anger blazing out against Israel. God said to Moses: “Take all the leaders of Israel and kill them by hanging, leaving them publicly exposed in order to turn God’s anger away from Israel”.
Here, further proof that there is no difference between the god of the Bible and the gods of the polytheistic religions, labeled as primitive, who sent punishments, plagues, pestilences, floods, etc., which were only placated through human sacrifice. Just like the pagan deities, Yahweh conditioned the cessation of fuming in rage to the killing of people. Numbers 25 says that, after 24,000 people (who were innocent, since the men who bowed to the gods of their foreign girlfriends had been hanged) had already been decimated by the epidemic, Yahweh stopped killing only when Phinehas sacrificed to him the last heretical Israelite still alive. Moses’ brother’s grandson took a spear, entered a tent and, with one blow, pierced a couple through the belly.
Christians find it terrible for children to read a book with a picture of two men kissing, but find it perfectly natural for children to read a book full of savagery, such as nailing people to the ground. Next to the Bible, the most horrifying horror movie is a comedy.
Few people know that the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” comes not from the New, but from the Old Testament. In Leviticus 19, it’s written:
Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly […]. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself.
Anyone who knows the Bible knows that this commandment has never been obeyed, not even by its own creator. When Yahweh was replaced with other gods, no time was wasted in “rebuking frankly”: God demanded immediate execution. In Deuteronomy 13, the same god who, with his own finger, wrote on a stone tablet the law “Thou shalt not kill” orders his worshipers to kill their own parents, siblings and children who convert to another religion. Precisely for this reason, Christians had no problem spending centuries persecuting, torturing, hanging, crushing, drowning and burning followers of other religions and even of Jesus. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, written in 1562 and, as its own introduction admits, based on the Word of God, still today constitute the official doctrines of the Church of England, which is Protestant. Article 37 says: “It is lawful for Christians to wear weapons and serve in the wars” and “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christians with death”.
Note, dear reader, that God didn’t tell Phinehas to take the spear, enter the tent and thrust it through the heretical couple. Yahweh had ordered that the executions, in the form of hangings, be public. Aaron’s grandson did that because he wanted to, motivated by love for God. In the story, Phinehas’ action is highlighted as heroic. He went the extra mile, that is, beyond what was expected. Through that additional effort, Phinehas stood out from the rest. If eliminating pagans were a sin, God would have punished, at the very least reprimanded, Moses’ great-nephew. What happened was exactly the opposite. Driving a spear through a couple made Phinehas the darling of Yahweh, who exalted him as Savior of the Nation, by saying:
I was so angry with the Israelites that I wanted to kill them. But Phinehas has saved them from my anger. He did this by showing that he feels strongly, just as I do, that my people must worship only me.
Later, the belly piercer was awarded the rank of high priest. In other words: barbarity was what qualified Phinehas to become the most honorable man of God, the ultimate example of morality and holiness for the entire nation. Proving that Christians think it’s normal to kill heretics, the Orthodox Catholic Church has Phineas as a saint and commemorates him on September 2nd. Amen?
The story ends with Yahweh, thirsting for revenge, demanding more bloodshed, this time an indiscriminate one. The god of the Bible made no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. His punishments ravaged always the entire population of a region or country, which obviously is made up also of the elderly, children and the sick. The greatest example of that is the Flood. Instead of simply making the wicked men have a massive heart attack and drop dead, the most intelligent — and loving — being in the Universe drowned all nonaquatic living beings on the entire planet. Because of some seductive women, in Numbers 25 God ordered the neighboring nation to be completely destroyed. As usual, also innocent men and women, the elderly, children and the sick were put to the sword.
Biblical stories like this embarrass many modern Christians. After all, one must be barbaric to approve of barbarities. Forced to justify the barbarities of the deity they worship (otherwise, they would lose their faith), they come up with the most varied evasions, which usually range from “Oh, that was back then!” to “Who are we to criticize God?”. One of the most harebrained and which I recently heard is: “But Paulo, these accounts do not portray God as he really is”. Clearly, this believer is trying to distance himself from the horrors committed and ordered by the god of the Bible, by separating what is beautiful from what is ugly in it. The passages in which God blows smoke from his nostrils aren’t, therefore, divinely inspired, but the fruit of the imagination of primitive minds. Inspired by God are only the parts in which he is portrayed as a peaceful and calm big daddy. It’s hilarious, because until the 17th century, a Christian who said that would be considered a heretic and burned in the public square by other Christians. Well, if stories like the one in Numbers 25 distort God, then they lie about him, and if they lie about him, why are they in his Word? It’s precisely because of accounts like that that Christians spent centuries seeing themselves as having the right and even the duty to commit the atrocities they committed.
The simplest explanation is the most likely. In view of everything that is wrong with the Bible (immoralities, cruelties, contradictions, etc.), of the total absence in it of revelations that are really useful to Humanity, of the countless wars that have been fought because of it, with millions of deaths, of the divisions it causes, with thousands of Christian denominations ridiculing and even fighting each other, of the hostility it generates against Afro-Brazilian religions and of the prejudice and even hatred that it provokes in many of its followers, to the point that, due to the interruption of a pregnancy, they call a ten-year-old girl, who had been raped since she was six (an event that occurred in Espírito Santo, Brazil, in 2020), a murderess, the simplest explanation is: this pile of copies of copies of more copies of rags of fragments of parchments from the Iron Age with little stories also from the Bronze Age, better known as Bible, is not the Word of God — unless the creator of two trillion galaxies is incompetent and sadistic.
“Religion is the best form of domination. The biblical accounts about God’s wrath are so cruel that it doesn’t take a genius to realize they were invented for the purpose of frightening. A frightened people is easily controlled.”