The Logical Atheist

In an earlier incarnation many, many years ago, I would be getting ready to celebrate Passover . This is the holiday that commemorates Yahweh's liberation of the children of Israel from enslavement in Egypt (long before the Arabs got there). Yahweh did this, according to the Good Book, by inflicting collective punishments on the Egyptian people -- ranging from turning the Nile River and other water sources into blood, to sending swarms of frogs, gnats, flies, and locusts throughout the land, to killing all first-born persons and cattle, even those of slaves (non-Israelites, presumably) -- 10 "plagues" in all. As unjust as that collective punishment seems, it was Yahweh's response to the recalcitrance of Egypt's absolute ruler, the Pharaoh. According to the story, he repeatedly changed his mind about "letting [the Israelite] people go" after promising Moses he would do so. That's why Egypt, that is, all Egyptians, kept getting hit with plagues.  Howe...

It's more than plausible that the Five Books of Moses and the rest of the Hebrew Bible are about political domination and submission. (The other bibles may well be that too, but I haven't read them.) It's reasonable to think that the authors wrote them on behalf of, or to curry favor with, their rulers in an attempt to make the masses afraid to think for themselves and perhaps defy the ruling elite. (They may have had more than one motivation, of course.)  There were 12 tribes that a ruling class wished to hold together through anticipation of divine rewards and fear of divine punishment. The objective was to promote allegiance. (I can imagine an honorable but misguided motive for this -- group survival in a violent world.) The scriptures were a warning: do what we say your god commands or Yahweh will be so angry he will do some or all the horrible things that are threatened and in some cases perpetrated throughout these books. Follow his commands to a T (as conveyed by us)...

Leaving aside all of the logical problems with a supernatural being, how can the Hebrew Bible be the basis for a religion that claims to be about justice, righteousness, and goodness?

And [the prophet Elisha ] went up from there to Bethel, and he was going up on the road and some little boys came out of the city and jeered him, and said to him, "Go away, baldy; go away, baldy!" And he turned around and saw them, and he cursed them in the name of God. And two she-bears came out of the forest and tore apart forty-two boys of them. --2 Kings 2:23-24

Who are the antisemites who wrote the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)? Those books are most unflattering to the Children of Israel and their god, Yahweh. The authors and editors make the Protocols' scribes look like pikers.

  If you want to know what a leading Israeli archaeologist has to say about the stories told in the Hebrew Bible, you can make a good start by listing to a 26-part conversation with Israel Finkelstein, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa. These half-hour conversations, conducted by Matthew J. Adams of the W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, are directed at interested laymen, and I highly recommend them. Finkelstein's book, The Bible Unearthed:  Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts , written with Neil Asher Silberman, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. You already realize that the biblical stories are fiction (with a smattering of historical references), but these conversations will fill out your understanding in eye-opening ways. The important matters -- such as the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest o...

You cannot read the Book of Numbers without realizing that Yahweh is the Donald Trump of deities: a petty, self-absorbed, vain, vindictive, and cruel god. Who'd want to worship that?

Why does Yahweh act like a psychopath on virtually every page of the Old Testament?

The more closely I read the Tanakh (the Pentateuch, Hebrew Bible, or Five Books of Moses), the more clearly I see the power agenda behind it. (Let's remember that these books are the foundation of the three Abrahamic religions.) Without this perspective, it is hard to understand what these books are really about; the catalog of stories, divine punishments, and commandments simply makes no sense. Why would a perfect, all-powerful, and benevolent deity do such horrible things while making such unreasonable demands on a group of "chosen" people? In fact, why is there a chosen people at all? Why is the message, whatever it is, not intended for a universal audience? We can arrive at a better answer if we think of the Israelites as a cult in which most people are subservient and from which a minority, an elite or priestly class, benefits. Cults are always vulnerable to defection and disintegration as members of the subservient majority, especially in a rising generation, begin ...

This morning I enjoyed watching Robert Mayhew's lecture "Ayn Rand's Intransigent Atheism," which was given at last summer's Objectivist Conference, or OCON. In this examination of the cosmological argument, he says much of what I've tried to say on this blog. Mayhew, a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University, points out that Ayn Rand called herself an "intransigent" but not a "militant" atheist. Her objective was not, in a primary sense, to argue against or reject belief in God, but to affirm reason as the only method of obtaining knowledge about what exists. One who is fully committed to reason is necessarily an atheist because no room is left for what people mean by God . Her use of the word intransigence indicated that the claims of theism could simply be dismissed as empty nonsense because they misuse the language by ignoring basic metaphysical truths that cannot be escaped without self-contradiction. Rand's orientation i...