The OT and its legacy

Germany was a Christian nation, but anger, fear, uncertainty, and hunger combined to put Hitler on stage. People everywhere are trained to rally around the flag and heroic virtue. Many don't like to think and are willing to give their trust to leaders who do their thinking for them and promise simple, absolute, and miraculous answers. Hitler pressed the right buttons and took a nation of Christians to war against the Jews and neighboring nations. He promised Germans a thousand-year Reich akin to immortality, wholesome maidens and robust children working nobly towards a magnificent future culled of all the sickening Jews, Gypsies, and blacks.

Why do you think America is any different? It isn't. A terrorist event or hard economic times in America could easily trigger a similar transformation here. Witness the internment of Japanese Americans, the McCarthy era, the brutality used against Arab Americans after 9/11.

What does the OT promise if not what Hitler promised? Simple answers, ultimate virtue, immortality. The OT tells you what your targets should be and how to cleanse Israel of all that is bad. A fundamentalist doesn't have to think, just follow some simple rules.

What does Bush promise? He has a vision of himself and America as enforcing the rigid doctrine of the Old Testament. Simple rules for simple people. A grand future forged by ruthless adherence to absolute truth and overwhelming force. Action without doubt. Trust your instinct, not deliberation. Deliberation is a sign of weakness, he tells us. Echoes of Hitler.

Generation after generation, the illogic and immorality of the Old Testament persists because no one dares to question it aloud or expose it as the ancient and barbaric ritual of illiterate tribesmen. It is an expression of the worst of Man, not the best. When our leader trumpets certainty and vision, to many it has the ring of truth, for that is what they were taught in church. All the decadence of modern society must be due to deviation from the the word of God. How many times have they been told this? Surely, they think, it is not coincidence that homosexuality, promiscuity, pedophilia and all the other disgusting things that characterize modern society go hand in hand with the loss of faith in God. Science and thought, to them, do nothing but confuse, distract, and disillusion.

When I list various of the nastiest excerpts from the Old Testament, my point is to make it clear how barbaric they are and how clearly they contradict contemporary ethics. We let these fools go around pretending that what they do makes sense and never utter a word of objection. I would love to find some way to put them on the spot, to juxtapose the literal text with the implications of that text, and force them to think about it.














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