The problem with the Religious "right" and their embrace of violence and Trumpian philosophy:
Here's a few stories from the Bible that show how violent the book is, and how God condones Murder etc.Therefore...The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.....would believing in this God and his examples make you less prone to violence?
- In Genesis 7:21-23, God drowns the entire population of the earth: men, women, children, fetuses, and perhaps unicorns. Only a single family survives.
- In Matthew 24:37-42, gentle Jesus approves of this genocide and plans to repeat it when he returns.
- In Exodus 12:29, God the baby-killer slaughters all Egyptian firstborn children and cattle because their king was stubborn.
- In Numbers 16:41-49, the Israelites complain that God is killing too many of them. So, God sends a plague that kills 14,000 more of them.
- In Joshua 6:20-21, God helps the Israelites destroy Jericho, killing “men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.”
- In Deuteronomy 2:32-35, God has the Israelites kill everyone in Heshbon, including children.
- In Deuteronomy 3:3-7, God has the Israelites do the same to the people of Bashan.
- In Numbers 31:7-18, the Israelites kill all the Midianites except for the virgins, whom they take as spoils of war.
- In 1 Samuel 15:1-9, God tells the Israelites to kill all the Amalekites... men, women, children, infants, and their cattle.... for something the Amalekites’ ancestors had done 400 years earlier.
- In Exodus 32, Moses has climbed Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments. The Israelites are bored, so they invent a golden calf god. Moses comes back and God commands him: “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.”
- In Genesis 19:24, God kills everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from the sky. Then God kills Lot’s wife for looking back at her burning home.
- In Judges 19:22-29, a mob demands to rape a godly master’s guest. The master offers his daughter and a concubine to them instead. They take the concubine and gang-rape her all night. The master finds her on his doorstep in the morning, cuts her into 12 pieces, and ships the pieces around the country.
- In Judges 11:30-39, Jephthah burns his daughter alive as a sacrificial offering for God’s favor in killing the Ammonites.
The same pretty much goes for most religions...people cherry pick passages to condone whatever evil it is they are doing...the point is that religion is hardly a cause for peace, nor is it a guide to morality...it is what it is....a form of control and a justification for just about anything...take a look at ISIS, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition. How about what Hitler, a Christian, did to the Jews....
Trevor Llewellyn Evans is with Michael Sellers and 6 others