Michael Parenti

Cross-dressing is another deviancy that greatly upsets the Lord—though one would think he might have more important things with which to occupy himself.

Rape, like murder, is one of those acts that really is an abomination in my mind. But in the Bible, rape, like murder, seems to be not all that abominable when the victims are plucked from enemy populations. Earlier we noted how the Almighty instructed Moses to “keep alive for yourselves” all the virginal Midian “women children.”39 Elsewhere God lays down a general mandate on how to handle “a beautiful woman” taken in war. Drag her away from her family and her people and make her your captive, strip her of her alien garments, shave her head, pare her nails, lock her in your house for a full month while she weeps and wails for her parents, then rape her into matrimonial submission. But if, after you have forcefully taken her as your wife, you find that you “have no delight in her,” you can “let her go whither she will” rather than sell her for money

In sum, were we to live literally by God's eternal and unchanging word as recorded in the Bible, we would have to execute homosexuals, adulterers, fornicators, and masturbators. We would have to stone to death those offspring who are given to drink or gluttony, or who disrespect their parents. We would have to kill rape victims who fail to cry out loud enough and exterminate people who violate the Sabbath. We would be obliged to execute those who take the Lord's name in vain or who proselytize for other deities or who have been labeled a witch. We would need to slice and tear the foreskins off all male infants; assassinate family members if they take up with false gods; suppress all other religions because they are ipso facto erroneous; instruct the millions held in involuntary servitude around the world to serve their enslavers faithfully because all authority stems from God; and launch genocidal military attacks against heathen nations that do not honor the one true deity of the West.

Only when it comes to safeguarding the obscene profits of their corporate campaign contributors do certain lawmakers suddenly become proponents of secular pluralism

What would we say of a man who was known among his co-workers and neighbors to have a kindly side but who also turned out to be a mass murderer? Would we decide that his occasional words of love and mercy and his charity work for the indigent made up for the time he spent dismembering people in his basement? Surely such criminal violence would weigh more heavily in our minds than his sympathetic utterances about peace and poverty. If true of an ordinary mortal, all the more so for a god who purportedly lights our way. Sad to say, too much in the Bible leans toward autocracy, violence, cruelty, and mayhem

Beware of those who act in the name of such a god. Were we to encounter these vicious traits in an ordinary man, we would judge him to be in need of lifelong incarceration at a maximum-security facility. At the very least, we would not prattle on about how he works his wonders in mysterious ways.

Man is the only animal that has the true religion—several of them.

—MARK TWAIN

Along with an eternal afterlife, Jesus promises the faithful that they will develop supernatural powers in this life. “In my name shall they cast out devils” and “speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and [the sick] shall recover.”24 If they “have faith and doubt not” they shall be able to remove a mountain and cast it into the sea; “nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

Most certainly Jesus was not a family man. In his demands for personal loyalty and dedication, he sometimes sounds more like a cult leader who wages war against the competing loyalties posed by the families of his followers.

It can be argued that Jesus was a product of his day; he shared the male supremacist convictions of ancient times, hence we should not judge him by anachronistic modern standards. This would be a strange defense to erect for the Christ whose divinely inspired wisdom is supposedly timeless and universal, transcending the historic limitations of place and culture. In any case, his attitude toward women is not all that outdated. To this day every major religion is still run mostly by men, from a male-driven perspective, in service to godheads that are almost always male