Theology Readings
How others see us
If we want to know why people kill in the name of God, and why they have been doing so for thousands of years, we must face one simple and obvious fact that almost nobody wants to confront. The fact is this: the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the God of monotheism—is a terrorist. In fact, he’s the ultimate terrorist. It is an undeniable fact that the God described in the pages of the Holy Bible and Holy Koran is a bloodthirsty, ruthless, destructive terrorist.
This is not mere hyperbole on my part; it is an easily verifiable fact. By every definition of the word terrorist, God qualifies. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense defines terrorism as “the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”
When we look at an event like the conquest of Canaan, the huge massacres of millions of women and children, we must not lose sight of the fact that these actions were carried out in response to orders from God. The Bible makes that absolutely clear. When we read the brutal Law of Moses, where people’s brains are being bashed in with rocks for breaking the Sabbath, for having sex with the wrong people, for believing the wrong things: all of these atrocious laws can be traced back to God. And when we read in scripture about hell, about billons of unbelievers being tortured in fire for all eternity—this is God who is orchestrating all of this.
God, by any stretch of the imagination, is a terrorist. God employs the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to inculcate fear—and he does it for religious reasons. In anybody’s book, that’s terrorism.
So long as the Bible is seen as the sole, accurate source of our images and understandings of the divine, it should come as no surprise that a thousand people a day are walking away from evangelical churches, that liberal churches are shrinking even faster, and that the ranks of atheists and secularists are swelling. Read on >>>>