God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (40 page)

Jesus shows shades of his father’s wrath, fury and jealousy in his parable of the ‘tree and its fruit’, when he warned:

Jesus apologists will defend this statement as purely a metaphor for the choice of wisdom, but don’t be fooled. This is soft-spoken Jesus calling for non-believers to be, “cut down and thrown into the fire” and for the death of those that try to sway you away from his side. How many pagans, Jews, heretics and witches were cruelly burnt at the stake during the Inquisitions because of this quote? The human suffering that has been inflicted by one religious denomination or sect on another because of this careless and wicked edict is incalculable. You cannot defend this as just something that man has taken out of context and thus misinterpreted Jesus’ meaning because Jesus doesn’t talk to us anymore, and naturally it is left to man to decipher. But again further evidence that shows a lack of measurable foresight that one might hope for in a loving human-god, with super-human intellect.

That’s a pretty fucking ordinary explanation given the fact that people are struggling to understand you the first time around and now you are making it more difficult by speaking in riddles. Now, before I admonish the anointed one for speaking in a manner so ridiculous, this is once again another effort of the author to match Old Testament prophecy to Jesus biography:

If you are looking for a little more Jesus-fueled fire and brimstone, then you might like this one:

Now, there’s some wholesome bedtime reading for the kiddies. And what is with the ‘gnashing of teeth’? Is that some kind of homo-erotic Freudian slip on behalf of the author? Buddha or Socrates, who preceded Jesus’ time, never said anything as remotely vindictive and indignant as this. What are we to make of a man that speaks in such a manner to those that dare challenge his preachings?

It is doubtful that we would anoint such a person with the honor of ‘enlightened’. Furthermore, if the action of a sin is a finite action i.e. cheating on your wife, then how is infinite torture a just punishment? Isn’t this perverted injustice wicked in itself?

Looking beyond the parable psycho-babble of Jesus, a stand out piece of narrative in this chapter is one which entails the people of Jesus’ hometown to question his Messianic legitimacy. Although his fellow locals were undoubtedly impressed by tales of his travelling magic show, they still harbored doubts in regards to claims that he was anything more than an ordinary man:

How did Jesus react to this rejection by his own town folk? Well he gave the school yard equivalent of, “I am so the Messiah and you aren’t, so there!” then trudged off, as it is written:

Not only a form of ‘you will see when you believe it’, but also an ass-backwards strategy to convert as many Jews as possible to the holy path. It would make logical sense that if God wanted all of mankind to be saved and thus remove the possibility of man murdering each other in religious conflict, it would be more sensible for the Son of God, or God himself, to come before
all
of us and put the record straight once and for all. Why leave it to the oratory and argumentative skills of a few Middle Eastern farmers and one guy named Jesus to do all the convincing on his behalf? Therefore, we have one more charge to add to the growing litany of character flaws that God doth have – Idiot!

The parable of the prodigal son is told in chapter fifteen, in which Jesus tells the story of a father who has two sons. The youngest son demands that his father pay him his share of his inheritance whilst his father is still alive and kicking. His father agrees to the request and divides his net worth between the youngest and eldest son. The youngest son takes his share and heads off to foreign lands, to party like a rockstar. Squandering his money on booze and prostitutes until all cash is spent. Out of funds, he has to work as a pig farmer to survive, but decides to travel home to throw himself at the mercy of his father. His father welcomes him home with open arms and says:

The eldest son who stayed devoted to his father, working tirelessly for him and asking of nothing gets the shits for this favored treatment bestowed on his younger, party animal brother and lets his displeasure be known:

To which the father replies,

Is this not another mindless message courtesy of ole Jesus? Effectively, it says do what you want, but as long as you say you’re sorry then all is forgiven. People should be held accountable for their actions in life, a principle this parable is not in synch with. This is an implication that we are free to hurt others, hurt ourselves, squander all, but as long as we repent when we have had our fun then all is good. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with forgiveness, but punishment must follow crimes that involve a victim. In this parable, the victim was the father and the bad son had to pay no penalty for his wrong-doing because ‘sorry’ redeemed his actions. Having read this why on earth would you want to be the good son? The bad son got to spend all the money on drugs and hookers and was rewarded for it, whilst the good son got no such reward for living a righteous life.

Certainly one of the most well-known lovey kumbayah messages attributed to Jesus is the ‘Love thy neighbor’ philosophy:

What a majority of Christians are unaware of, is the fact this is a passage taken directly from the mundane and barbaric book of Leviticus:

Still, this is unarguably Jesus’ most quoted remark and one that is often promoted by Christian evangelicals on bumper stickers. I am sure an overwhelming majority of believers are acutely unaware that Jesus makes a mockery of this teaching, when he says, according to Luke:

Whilst this passage further shatters the myth of mild, peace-loving Jesus, it may offer some comfort to believers as it does at the very least show that he shared the same genetic predisposition for blood lust as his Biblically alleged father – God.

Most of us are already familiar with the more virtuous teachings of Jesus, including ‘love thy neighbor’; ‘turn the other cheek’; ‘do unto others’; ‘blessed are the meek’; ‘return good for evil’. These are what I call the Christian sound-bites that appeal to those seeking some sort of external guidance. These are the equivalent of the World War One recruitment posters that played heavy on emotion such as, ‘What did your daddy do during the Great War?’, or ‘Uncle Sam needs YOU’. Sound-bites sell because most people don’t have time to drill deep into the heart of the issues. But Christians will have you believe that Jesus has some sort of trademark ownership on these moral or ethical principles when as a matter of fact they were written many hundreds of years before Jesus’ time and by non-Jews too. It was Buddha that said the following almost seven hundred years before Jesus’ time:

Likewise, others had said similar earlier:

Further, the Gospels contradict one another wildly on a number of occasions in instances where they are allegedly quoting Jesus. A standout contradiction that utterly makes a confusion of who Jesus really was, is recorded in the gospel of John whereby he writes Jesus saying:

This declaration by Jesus, according to John, is not contradicted by Matthew, Mark or Luke, but by John himself. What hope have we of uncovering the truth of Jesus’ life if not only do the biographers of him contradict one another, but they also contradict their own writings? A mere three chapters later, John walks into his own trap of fiction, when he has Jesus declaring:

Other than self-contradictions, there are a number of irresponsible and unwise teachings of Jesus that include recommendations for fasting, love for enemies, choice between God and money and the stupendously ridiculous advice to his followers that they should not worry about anything during their earthly existence as Jesus says:

If ever there was a teaching to discourage human endeavour and individual achievement then this may be the one. In effect, Jesus has told me that I can just sit on my arse, do nothing, and all will be provided for by the heavenly father. Life is good for the believer!

In Matthew’s repeated attempts to create the fictitious life of Jesus with alignment to prophecy, he makes the error of stretching the 21
^st
century reader’s intolerance for bullshit, in confirming the story of the Prophet Jonah, in which Jesus is written to have said:

The Son of God has verified the ludicrous writings of a rambling 5
^th
Century BC prophet that indeed a man can survive inside the belly of a fish for three days. Even if Jesus was ever a real person and claimed to be the son of the universal creator, this quote here would be adequate enough for me to dismiss him as mentally unsound. To then believe that it is only through him that I can enter the kingdom of heaven makes that a giant leap of faith.