Anarchy!

"The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty - Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge." -Michael Bakunin

Bakunin seems to have a point here. God isn’t very kind to his followers, not at all, at least not at first. Later however the desert God of law and punishment suddenly becomes a god of forgiveness and compassion. The difference is astounding enough to suggest that the two are different people, which is exactly what I am suggesting, and I think this claim has literary merit, even with the Gnostic gospels aside.
Ive been spending allot of time on the heretical texts and the new testament, so I will return to Genesis. This time, Sodom and Gomorah.

To illustrate the strangeness of this story better, we have a video.
Please go to this link, before continuing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bar3GOzDNzg&NR=1 (It’s funny, trust me.)

Plotz has a problem with this story, much like mine. He says, “to my modern eyes, though perhaps not to the Bible’s authors, collective punishment is the great moral conundrum of the Torah… and God is always on the wrong side of the question” (Plotz 14). He even goes so far as to say, just as I am, that this makes God look like a villain. The whole story, at least when looking at it from a moral point of view, is actually quite ridiculous, because of a few reasons. 1) As Plotz says “what about the children” God kills them, he has no mercy, 2) the only “good” man in the city offers his daughter up to be raped because he believes homosexuality to be a pretty grevious afront to God, and 3) God, who’s widely refuted to be the cool headed guy who has planned everything since before creation, angers quickly enough that a mere mortal man has to remind him that there may be innocent people in the city, and God, the supposedly perfect diety, forgets to continue his search for righteous because of one mob of rapists –why doesn’t he destroy L.A.?

In fact, the God of the old testament is a god of cruelty, who doesn’t seem to be very benevolent or omnipresent. And this returns to the tenant of Gnosticism that the God who claimed to be creator has been trying to keep the knowledge of good and bad from us, bracketing our lives with the pains of birth and death, keeping the races from uniting in peace at the tower of Babel, aiding in the killing of entire races of people because they disagree with you or wont give you some crappy desert real estate. This God, therefore, is ultimately the evil one. The divine light I mentioned before, as being the light of all humanity is actually associated with knowledge, that which the serpent wanted to give us, denying any law that keeps us from spiritual understanding.

An interesting comparison can be done between the Devil, or ‘adversary’, of the new testament with the God of the Old testament. In one of the more moving moments of the New Testament, Jesus is tempted by the devil on a mountain. And what does the Devil offer him? Real estate! Power! Just like the God of Abraham, he offers that his seed be multiplied and he shall have dominion over his enemies, yada yada yada.
I realize that my insistence in this sort-of demonizes Jewish tradition, and for this I am sorry because I find many aspects of modern Judaism (not sexist orthodox Judaism) quite beautiful, and often quite more sensible than the zealous Christians who, under the misguidance of John, want to convert the world to their faith. I do not necessarily loathe Judaism, nor Christianity, not as philosophies anyway. Sure, I disagree with probably three quarters of the crap the God of the Old Testament does, and though I find Jesus to be a pretty righteous dude, am very disappointed with his homophobia in the book of Judas. The institutions, however, I deplore. I denounce and condemn the genocides, Inquisitions, and other atrocities committed by these fanatics, from BC to AD, and you should too, even if you are of these traditions. This is not to say that you have to abandon it, you just have to recognize the inhuman cruelties committed by those within your tradition as examples of someone taking what can often be quite beautiful metaphors about the human condition, and turning them into justifications for killing. These atrocities serve as reminders for what happens when one too readily accepts the decrees of their tradition, and those who hold power within it. Oh, and if your God comes to you and asks you to give up your only begotten son –get another god!