Yahweh, The Embarrassment Of Christianity

Anyone who has done an honest critical analysis of the Bible has to be shocked at the portrayal of God in the form of Yahweh. Thomas Paine called it blasphemy to attribute to the Creator the behavior found in the Bible's god Yahweh. 19th century deist, Elihu Palmer observed that there are commands "which are said to come from God, which would disgrace the character of any honest man, and make him a candidate for prison." (Principles of Nature--1801). 

I plan to give some examples of this "behavior" by the god of Christianity in the coming weeks.

"A Sense Of Awe...Reverence...And...Great Mystery"

"I am very much a scientist, and so I naturally have thought about religion also through the eyes of a scientist. When I do that, I see religion not denominationally, but in a more, let us say, deistic sense. I have been influenced in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force. I feel very much the same. There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery."

--Walter Kohn (1923-), American theoretical physicist, awarded Nobel Prize in 1998

"...Something Incredible..."

 "Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known."
 ~ Carl Sagan

DNA, the internal combustion engine, aerodynamics, radio, television, computers, artificial hearts, radar, atomic particles, sub-atomic particles, electricity, the light bulb, photography, motion pictures, antibiotics, space exploration, etc., etc. The intelligence behind this amazing universe no doubt has many more astonishingly wonderful surprises waiting for us to discover.

The Petulant God Of Flattery

The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. ~ Lazarus Long

"Pardon Me, My Maker..."

God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe.... He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable forever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one.... Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my maker, for these awful questions.

~ John Adams (1735-1826), founding father and second U.S. president.

"Coded Chemistry"

How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self replication capabilities, and coded chemistry?
~Antony Flew--an atheist who evolved into a deist

An Answer To A Friend

The following is a letter Thomas Paine sent to a friend in response to a letter his friend had sent to him concerning Paine's book The Age of Reason. From, The Online Library of Liberty:

AN ANSWER TO A FRIEND.

Paris,

May 12, 1797.

In your letter of the 20th of March, you give me several quotations from the Bible, which you call the word of God, to shew me that my opinions on religion are wrong, and I could give you as many, from the same book to shew that yours are not right; consequently, then, the Bible decides nothing, because it decides any way, and every way, one chooses to make it.

Biblical Blasphemy

The following is an article by one of our country's greatest Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine:

The church tells us that the books of the Old and New testament are divine revelation, and without this revelation we could not have true ideas of God.

The Deist, on the contrary, says, that those books are not divine revelation, and that were it not for the light of reason, and the religion of Deism, those books, instead of teaching us true ideas of God, would teach us not only false but blasphemous ideas of him.