The Bible: Why Nothing Makes Murder More Moral Than Religion

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Nothing makes murder more moral than religion. Indeed, nothing sanctifies, romanticizes, or sensationalizes, murder more than the belief that by killing for God in holy war - an idea that started with the Hebrews of the Old Testament, only to be carried on equally by Jews, Christians and Muslims until the present day - and dying for God as an act of holy martyrdom, one has reached the highest virtue of all in the sight of God; and by doing so, secured their place firmly in Heaven and avoided the eternal tortures of hell.  

In fact, the morality fostered by religion has done so much harm tha tit prompted the Roman poet Lucretius to pen that famous phrase, "tantum religio potuit suadere malroum" in 50 B.C.E, "to such height of evil are men driven by religion." Blaise Pascal agreed, centuries later, when he wrote “People never commit evil so fully and joyfully, as when they do it for religious convictions."  And David Hume likewise concluded that, 

"The greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion; Hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere."

Because of this, the claim that people are made moral by a belief in Religion and God is not only false, but completely backwards. People are not more moral when they believe in God, in short, but are clearly made far, far more immoral by such a belief. And when you consider that the entire belief lies from the start, by fooling "believers" into accepting that its "beliefs" are absolutely and unquestionably identical with "facts" (held in faith, of course), this should not be surprising. 

Christians and "believers" always try to argue that humanity can only ever have an objective sense of morality, with absolute right's and wrongs where murder is always "wrong," if there is a God and we collectively believe in him. And the eternal punishment for failing to accept this "belief" as absolutely "true," is unending tortures in Hell.

 This, then, is far worse than the devil offering Christ the whole world if he would but kneel before him,  because it means that religion offers people an unbridled lust for heaven, and the eternal threat of hell, but only if they accept that the Church is basically God, more or less. But of the Christian Bible, Thomas Paine pointed out that:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God.

What Paine was referring to were commands by the "Moral God" like this one...

. As it says in Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 20:16-18:

“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.” [ii]

And this..


“[I]n the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the LORD your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 20:16-18

Christians naturally deny all of this, and insist that these passages have absolutely no bearing at all on God's moral law, even though it is God himself that is "commanding" is holy people to commit unbridled genocide for his glory. But not even their own Bible can ever convince a Christian that they are not infallible in their claims. 

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[i]. http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/201004/201004_138_canannites.cfm

[ii].Read more: http://www.gotquestions.org/Canaanites-extermination.html#ixzz2coS1YR7l