| 
  The Holy Hebrew Wars or Jihads of Moses' God By Larry Brian Radka It is time for Jews and Christians to take another look at the history of the wars recorded in the Bible. Is there much difference between its ancient atrocities attributed to Moses and his God and the terrorism of Allah's Jihads in the Koran, which Muslims still carry on today? Two honorable war veterans in American history, Thomas Paine and Colonel Robert Ingersoll were inspired enough to make some pertinent comments about some extraordinarily cruel scriptures in the Old Testament that would allow a child to realize the answer.  Thomas Paine (1737—1809) was one of America's founding fathers. His highly influential forty-seven-page pamphlet, titled "Common Sense," published on January 10, 1776, inspired the Declaration of Independence and provoked the Revolutionary War. His reasoning had rekindled democracy and created a new nation—the United States of America. To Thomas Paine and his freethinking contributions, all democratic people still owe a great debt of gratitude. One of his last manifested itself in The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology.* In Part II of that wonderful work, under Chapter I, titled "The Old Testament," he pointed out: “The character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation.** Of which I will state only one instance: “When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): ‘And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, ‘Have ye saved all the women alive?’ behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves.’ “Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses,*** if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.  “Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? It is in vain that we attempt to impose upon nature, for nature will have her course, and the religion that tortures all her social ties is a false religion.  “After this detestable order, follows an account of the plunder taken, and the manner of dividing it; and here it is that the profaneness of priestly hypocrisy increases the catalogue of crimes. Verse 37, ‘And the Lord’s tribute of the sheep was six hundred and threescore and fifteen; and the beeves were thirty and six thousand, of which the Lord’s tribute was threescore and twelve; and the asses were thirty thousand, of which the Lord's tribute was threescore and one; and the persons were sixteen thousand, of which the Lord’s tribute was thirty and two.’ In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear; for it appears, from the 35th verse of this chapter, that the number of women-children consigned to debauchery by the order of Moses was thirty-two thousand. “People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority.  Good heavens! It is quite another thing, it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy, than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty!” Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll wholeheartedly agreed with this man who "did more than any man to convince the people of America not only that they ought to separate from Great Britain, but that they ought to found a representative government." He also picked up Paine's fallen banner announcing the unholiness of the Bible and joined Abraham Lincoln's war against slavery, one of the institutions, like incest and polygamy, that the so-called "Word of God" taught then and still teaches today.**** Such immoral practices are what moved him to become a passionate lecturer and writer against the Bible's holiness and the widespread belief that it is the divinely inspired word of God. Among his works producing proofs against its sanctity are The Gods and Other Lectures; Some Mistakes of Moses; Why I am an Agnostic; Superstition; Debates with the Clergy; Arguments in Support of Suicide; What We Must Do to be Saved; Christ and the Colonel, The Wisdom of Jesus and the Wisdom of Ingersoll Compared; The Enemies of Individuality and Mental Freedom; A Christmas Sermon, and many other lectures—some are of book length. In one particular lecture, titled Inspired War, the combat veteran dealt with a bloody institution in which both he and Paine were well acquainted. Therein, like his passionate predecessor, he condemned the atrocities sanctioned by Moses, and the following extract shows his familiarity with the Bible and passionate stance against the apparent lies told therein:
"IF the Bible be true, God commanded his chosen people to destroy men simply for the crime of defending their native land. They were not allowed to spare trembling and white-haired age, nor dimpled babes clasped in the mothers' arms. They were ordered to kill women, and to pierce, with the sword of war, the unborn child. ‘ Our heavenly Father’ commanded the Hebrews to kill the men and women, the fathers, sons and brothers, but to preserve the girls alive. Why were not the maidens also killed? Why were they spared? Read the thirty-first chapter of Numbers, and you will find that the maidens where given to the soldiers and the priests. Is there, in all the history of war, a more infamous thing than this? Is it possible that God permitted the violets of modesty, that grow and shed their perfume in the maiden's heart, to be trampled beneath the brutal feet of lust? If this was the order of God, what, under the same circumstances, would have been the command of a devil?
"When, in this age of the world, a woman, a wife, a mother, reads this record, she should, with scorn and loathing, throw the book away. A general, who now should make such an order, giving over to massacre and rapine a conquered people, would be held in execration by the whole civilized world. Yet, if the bible be true, the supreme and infinite God was once a savage.
"A little while ago, out upon the western plains, in a little path leading to a cabin, were found the bodies of two children and their mother. Her breast was filled with wounds received in the defense of her darlings. They had been murdered by the savages. Suppose when looking at their lifeless forms, some one had said, “This was done by the command of God!” In Canaan there were countless scenes like this. There was no pity in inspired war. God raised the black flag, and commanded his soldiers to kill even the smiling infant in its mother's arms. Who is the blasphemer; the man who denies the existence of God, or he who covers the robes of the Infinite with innocent blood?
"We are told in the Pentateuch [the first five books of the Bible], that God, the father of us all, gave thousands of maidens, after having killed their fathers, their mothers, and their brothers, to satisfy the brutal lusts of savage men. If there be a God, I pray him to write in his book, opposite my name, that I denied this lie for him."
NOTES * In the eighteenth century, The Age of Reason was not nearly as popular as Paine's previous works inspiring the American Revolution because it ruffled the feathers of superstitious priests, preachers, and Judeo-Christian friends who attacked it and defended their religious beliefs that assumed the Bible was the Word of God. Therefore, Paine was often obliged to defend his position to the contrary. One good example of his defense of the arguments set forth in this wonderful work was set forth on May 12, 1797, in a letter to a friend, where he wrote:
"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.
"But by what authority do you call the Bible the ‘word of God?’ for this is the first point to be settled. It is not your calling it so that makes it so, any more than the Mahometans calling the Koran the ‘word of God’ makes the Koran to be so. The Popish Councils of Nice and Laodicea, about 350 years after the time the person called Jesus Christ is said to have lived, voted the books that now compose what is called the New Testament to be the ‘word of God.’ This was done by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. The pharisees of the second Temple, after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon, did the same by the books that now compose the Old Testament, and this is all the authority there is, which to me is no authority at all. I am as capable of judging for myself as they were, and I think more so, because, as they made a living by their religion, they had a self-interest in the vote they gave.
"You may have an opinion that a man is inspired, but you cannot prove it, nor can you have any proof of it yourself, because you cannot see into his mind in order to know how he comes by his thoughts; and the same is the case with the word ‘revelation.’ There can be no evidence of such a thing, for you can no more prove revelation than you can prove what another man dreams of, neither can he prove it himself.
"It is often said in the Bible that God spake unto Moses, but how do you know that God spake unto Moses? Because, you will say, the Bible says so. The Koran says, that God spake unto Mahomet, do you believe that too? No. Why not? Because, you will say, you do not believe it; and so because you do, and because you don't is all the reason you can give for believing or disbelieving except that you will say that Mahomet was an impostor. And how do you know Moses was not an imposter? For my own part, I believe that all are impostors who pretend to hold verbal communication with the Deity. It is the way by which the world has been imposed upon; but if you think otherwise you have the same right to your opinion that I have to mine, and must answer for it in the same manner. But all this does not settle the point, whether the Bible be the ‘word of God,’ or not. It is therefore necessary to go a step further. The case then is:—
"You form your opinion of God from the account given of him in the Bible; and I form my opinion of the Bible from the wisdom and goodness of God manifested in the structure of the universe, and in all works of Creation. The result in these two cases will be, that you, by taking the Bible for your standard, will have a bad opinion of God; and I, by taking God for my standard, shall have a bad opinion of the Bible.
"The Bible represents God to be a changeable, passionate, vindictive Being; making a world and then drowning it, afterwards repenting of what he had done, and promising not to do so again. Setting one nation to cut the throats of another, and stopping the course of the sun till the butchery should be done. But the works of God in the Creation preach to us another doctrine. In that vast volume, we see nothing to give us the idea of a changeable, passionate, vindictive God; everything we there behold impresses us with a contrary idea;—that of unchangeableness and of eternal order, harmony, and goodness. The sun and the seasons return at their appointed time, and everything in the Creation proclaims that God is unchangeable. Now, which am I to believe, a book that any impostor might make and call the ‘word of God,’ or the Creation itself which none but an Almighty Power could make? For the Bible says one thing, and the Creation says the contrary. The Bible represents God with all the passions of a mortal, and the Creation proclaims him with all the attributes of a God.
"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man. That bloodthirsty man, called the prophet Samuel, makes God to say, (i Sam. xv. 3,) “Now go and smite Amaleck, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not, but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
"That Samuel or some other impostor might say this, is what, at this distance of time, can neither be proved nor disproved, but in my opinion it is blasphemy to say, or to believe, that God said it. All our ideas of the justice and goodness of God revolt at the impious cruelty of the Bible. It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.
 Cortés invading Mexico, after an Aztec drawing in the “Lienzo de Tlazcala”
"What makes this pretended order to destroy the Amalekites appear the worse, is the reason given for it. The Amalekites, four hundred years before, according to the account in Exodus xvii. (but which has the appearance of fable from the magical account it gives of Moses holding up his hands,) had opposed the Israelites coming into their country, and this the Amalekites had a right to do, because the Israelites were the invaders, as the Spaniards were the invaders of Mexico; and this opposition by the Amalekites, at that time, is given as a reason, that the men, women, infants and sucklings, sheep and oxen, camels and asses, that were born four hundred years afterwards, should be put to death; and to complete the horror. Samuel hewed Agag, the chief of the Amalekites, in pieces, as you would hew a stick of wood. I will bestow a few observations on this case.
"In the first place, nobody knows who the author, or writer, of the book of Samuel was, and, therefore, the fact itself has no other proof than anonymous or hearsay evidence, which is no evidence at all. In the second place, this anonymous book says, that this slaughter was done by ‘the express command of God’: but all our ideas of the justice and goodness of God give the lie to the book, and as I never will believe any book that ascribes cruelty and injustice to God, I therefore reject the Bible as unworthy of credit.
"As I have now given you my reasons for believing that the Bible is not the word of God, that it is a falsehood, I have a right to ask you your reasons for believing the contrary; but I know you can give me none, except that you were educated to believe the Bible; and as the Turks give the same reason for believing the Koran, it is evident that education makes all the difference, and that reason and truth have nothing to do in the case. You believe in the Bible from the accident of birth, and the Turks believe in the Koran from the same accident, and each calls the other ‘infidel.’ But leaving the prejudice of education out of the case, the unprejudiced truth is that all are infidels who believe falsely of God, whether they draw their creed from the Bible, or from the Koran, from the Old Testament, or from the New.
"When you have examined the Bible with the attention that I have done, (for I do not think you know much about it,) and permit yourself to have just ideas of God, you will most probably believe as I do. But I wish you to know that this answer to your letter is not written for the purpose of changing your opinion. It is written to satisfy you, and some other friends whom I esteem, that my disbelief of the Bible is founded on a pure and religious belief in God; for in my opinion the Bible is a gross libel against the justice and goodness of God, in almost every part of it.
"THOMAS PAINE."
** Moses’ Hebrew terrorism makes Ben Laden’s Muslim version look like the work of a choirboy. Michael Angelo's image of Moses with horns A rally-photograph of Adolf Hitler *** Perhaps this was true up to Paine's time. However, more recently Hitler and his Nazi "superior race" came along, and they were even more ruthless than Moses and his Hebrew "chosen people," but both considered themselves "above all" people of the world. The Germans still sing it in their national anthem "Deutschland über alles," and the Jews still quote Moses' book of Deuteronmy that says the electric arc light god Yahweh's chosen people, are “above all people that are upon the face of the earth” and "above all the nations that are upon the earth" (De: 7:6 & 14:2). Click for more on Yahweh and his home in the Ark (Arc) of the Covenant Both the Germans and Jews are highly nationalistic races and both invaded other countries and carried out terrible atrocities. Hopefully, however, in the future, the remnants of these religious movements will settle for more harmless actions, like the crazy dance in the animation above. An image of auctioning off Uncle Tom A picture of Uncle Tom reading the Bible **** It is ironic that most blacks still revere the Bible, and even wave it high as they dance around in their churches today, despite the fact that the so-called "Word of God" sanctions their own ancestors’ enslavement! Wow! How this can persist in our computer-packed Information Age is beyond any reasonable comprehension.
Nevertheless, the blacks' cherishing of the Bible that sanctioned their own enslavement is not the only ironic aspect of its hold on the minds of naïve people. It contradicted the very creeds that nineteenth-century labor unions supported. However, their members still wholeheartedly upheld it. Holy Smoke! Mankind's stupidity is sometimes beyond comprehension!!  “Here, in our own country, millions of men were enslaved, and hundreds and thousands of ministers stood up in their pulpits, with their Bibles in front of them, and proceeded to show that slavery was about the only institution that they were absolutely certain was divine,” declared Colonel Ingersoll. “And they proved it by reading passages from this very Bible that the Knights of Labor in Indiana are anxious to have read in their meetings.”
“For their benefit,” added this famous orator, in an August 25, 1888 issue of Secular Thought, “let me call their attention to a few passages, and suggest that, hereafter, they read those passages at every meeting, for the purpose of convincing all the Knights that the Lord is on the side of those who work for a living:
‘Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
‘Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you of them shall ye buy, and of their families which are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
‘And ye shall take them as an inheritance, for your children after you to inherit them for a possession. They shall be your bondmen forever.’”
These despicable words of God? are set down in the Old Testament’s book of Leviticus (25:44-46). Yet, the naïve masses of blacks, union laborers, government officials, and a multitude of others in the United States of America still swear by the Bible! Moreover, the Bible is hardly the only holy book inspiring despicable and barbaric actions. The Koran does the same. Look at these pictures taken recently in Great Britain and decide if holy books and religion are for you: AN IMPORTANT NOTE ON BIBLE TRANSLATION
This page was last modified on Thursday, August 19, 2010 | |