Geoff Mather’s Blog

Whether you are male or female, your life has been affected by the culture of macho-supremacy that fills the pages of the Bible. Every battle of the Feminist movement was made necessary because of the culture that has been gifted us by millennia of religion.  Over-lenient male judges are still prone to valuing property higher than women, when it comes to sentencing rapists, precisely because of our religious past.  Every suffragette’s struggle was made necessary by our culture of “women as property” inherited from the Bible.

“The Bible teaches that women are male property, buyable, saleable, abductable… and rapeable.” (A.L. Gaylor)

You may disagree with me based on your current knowledge – so read on.

Numbers 31:15-18
Moses said to them, ‘Have you allowed all the women to live? …. Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.’

What is your reaction?
Let’s not play games here. There is really only one interpretation of “keeping them alive for yourselves” that we can allow. The enemy were worthy only of death, and the virgins (not the mothers) were worthy only to be enslaved and used for sex. 

We can deduce this from other passages too.   How do we know they were to be used for sex? Because the mothers would have made equally good, if not better, servants.  These girls were obviously to be raped and owned.  Of course that is what happened.  The scribe was just writing down the 800 year old myth, and justifying it by saying that god had ordered it (via Moses).

In this chapter, the young virgins are listed way down the list of the plunder – after the sheep and the asses. It may interest you to realise that we are talking about 32,000 girls here. Thirty-two of these were given as an offering to the priests – to do as they wished with. Sixteen thousand were given out to the soldiers. The rest were used by the rest of the population.

Imagine the feelings in your mind as the mother of one of these girls. Your village was a peaceful one until today. Now your husband and sons have been butchered in battle by an invading religious horde. You know you are about to be murdered, and you know your daughter will then be enslaved and raped, possibly by elderly Hebrew priests.

Maybe you say: “But these were primitive times. That’s how people behaved!”

Well, they were supposedly under the command of the all-wise, all-loving unchanging God. If He was making the rules, the Jews should have been as ethically advanced, or more so, than we are today.  Christians who say “God was leading the people out of their pagan, primitive pasts” are refusing to see that god’s commands are horrific.  A 21st century street-kid from the Bronx could write more ethical commands than these.

Judges 21:11-12

‘This is what you shall do; you shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that has lain with a male.” And they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man and brought them to the camp. 

Deuteronomy 21:11-14
“Suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house: she shall shave her head, pare her nails, discard her captive’s garb, and shall remain in your house for a full month, mourning for her father and mother; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. “

No-one enquired whether she wanted to marry her captor. This was rape. It goes on to say that the woman could be turned out (in the middle of the desert) if she didn’t please the man.

Zechariah 14:2 (God speaking)
“The city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped.”

Do you really want yourself or your children exposed to these Bronze Age texts?

Isaiah 13:16 (God speaking)

“Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes;
their houses will be plundered, and their wives ravished.”)

Have you ever noticed the complete absence of humour in God’s manner? It is anti-life.  The effect of religion is sometimes to make good people do appalling things, feeling fully justified by their beliefs.

To sum up:
What we have seen is direct evidence that the Bible is not the word of a compassionate God. It is the wearisome record of a male-dominated religious dictatorship in the Bronze Age, who thought, like every other nation did (and still does), that a god was on their side.

That’s all.

I always get stuck at the 4th word in the Bible: “In the beginning GOD… “.
At that point I always think  “In the beginning, er… What?”

What is a god? There is no definition given, no information about this new word. It is a huge assumption made by whoever wrote this passage. What exactly is a god anyway? What is it made of?

It could quite easily read: “In the beginning a Blurg created the world.” Or “In the beginning fairies created the world.” (Or a Flying Spaghetti Monster, or an Invisible Pink Unicorn)

That’s the trouble with the supernatural. It is mere words: misty imaginings that disperse and fade when you try to define them.

We imagine things and it is very hard to unimagine them, to make them go away.

Here is a little anecdote that shows the huge power of Belief.

The other day I was enjoying a meal with my 13-year old daughter. She is intelligent and quite street-wise. During our meal she accidentally struck a glass with her knife and made it ring like a bell.

“Everytime you ring a bell, a fairy gets its wings,” I said, vaguely remembering that I had been told this during my childhood.

She smiled.

Then I added: “And if you ever say you don’t believe in fairies, a fairy dies.”

She smiled again. But, to her dismay, I continued: “I don’t believe in fairies, I don’t believe in fairies, I don’t believe in fairies…”

Suddenly she frowned, agitated by what I was doing. “Stop!” she cried. “Don’t, dad!”

Think for a moment exactly what I had done. I had taken her, in a matter of three sentences, to a state of emotional attachment to a non-existent being. She was genuinely disturbed by my murdering of the fairies – even though she knew it was a non-rational feeling. I had taught her a “taboo”. Even while I was pronouncing my disbelief in fairies, I too felt some emotion. And I am a skeptical adult. It wasn’t strong emotion, but I felt some guilt, some disgust at what I was saying. Their deaths were my responsibility!

This truly shows the power of words and cultural traditions.

First I gave a “fact” about fairies, while completely assuming their existence. I spoke about them as though they existed. Then I gave the second, scarier “fact”. Then I exploited her imagination.

I didn’t need to define a fairy. There is a cultural knowledge already there; we all know roughly their size and appearance. There are even some who are famous, such as Tinkerbell and the Tooth-Fairy.

I didn’t need to explain how they died. She didn’t ask whether some other being was doing the killing or whether they just died automatically. No autopsy was necessary. It was enough that I spoke the words, and “magic” would then account for their deaths.

This goes some way to explaining the difficulty people have in saying “I don’t believe in God”.

Christians mentally abuse their children by teaching them about invisible beings – with absolutely no evidence that such beings exist. When you hear teachings from your parents, as a young child, it is very difficult to reject them. They become part of your personality and identity. It takes a strong person indeed to reject these beliefs later on in life.

Along with the beliefs come taboos: “You must pass these beliefs to other people – especially your own children.” “Disbelievers go to Hell, believers go to Heaven.” Again, the use of imaginary places and concepts, without evidence or justification beyond the religion’s own Iron Age writings.

So even those who are rational enough to see the huge problems and contradictions inherent in “the god concept”, will still find it difficult actively to come out of their childhood beliefs. It takes strength to do so. Much easier to drift along, unquestioning, going quietly to church and only experiencing the vague disquiet that many Christians shelter – knowing they are completely uncertain yet feigning certainty. And continuing to tell their children the myths as though they were true.

 Scooby Doo was one of the greatest TV programmes ever – from the point of view of teaching kids about the supernatural. If only more adult programmes could be like it!

Every episode followed a similar pattern, like this:

The gang would find some “evidence” of ghosts, ghouls, spirits at work, usually terrorising the locals in some way, whether it was in a creepy mansion, a circus or a theatre.

 The gang were usually genuinely scared by the prospect of bumping into these phantoms.  The locals were always convinced that the ghosts were, actually, ghosts.

Eventually, of course, those meddling kids would meet the spooks face to face; there would be a fight, a chase, and then our hero Scooby would save the day.  The ghost was invariably unmasked as the local “good guy” who wasn’t really so good after all – someone “respectable” who was trying to get their hands on the loot.

So why do I think this was good stuff?  Simply because Scooby Doo was one of the few programmes to unmask the supernatural for what it is: a mixture of ignorance, deceit, popular tradition, hysteria, and fear of investigating, facing up to the unknown.  Hollywood in particular, relies so much on the supernatural for its storylines.  To my mind, any plot that requires this unexplainable mystery to carry it along – is a WEAK plot.  It may be entertaining, but it is weak.

For untold thousands of years, mankind lived in great ignorance.  His knowledge came to him through stories passed down, generation to generation.  Explanations for natural phenomena were usually related to Personal Causes.  In other words, they would give a god or a demon the credit for making something happen.  People didn’t understand rain, so they thought there must be a rain-god.  They didn’t know how seeds grew, so there must be fertility gods.  They couldn’t understand why an arrow carried on moving after it left a bow – so there had to be a god who pushed it through the air! People actually believed these stories, because they were taught them by their elders and there was no science around to contradict them.

They believed blood was Life.  Not just something necessary for animal life, but Life itself.  They thought you could make the ground more fertile by spilling blood on it.  They thought they could become stronger by washing in the blood of sacrificed animals.  Today, we know that blood is just a liquid that circulates around the body, carrying oxygen and nutrients.  We have detailed understanding of how it evolved.  But in the Iron Age, people still thought that spilling blood could appease the gods, make the gods happy and bring better fortune to the people.

These primitive superstitions – and brutal murders – lie behind Christianity.  After all, the tidiest definition of Christianity is this: It is a Middle-Eastern, Iron Age Cult of Human Sacrifice. Next time you take your little child to a nativity play, so sweet, charming and safe, remember that it is a Cult of Human Sacrifice, with unoriginal ideas about love bolted on to it.  That’s all.

The gang in Scooby Doo were afraid, but they courageously investigated and took on such myths.  They unveiled the simple truths behind each one.  And they freed the locals from oppression.

As science progressed, we began to understand natural phenomena, one after another.  Religious superstitions have been retreating ever since, as each myth was unmasked.   It was always the same; the religious would scoff and talk their nonsense, until the evidence became overpowering. Then they would simply shrug and say “Oh, of course we accept that.”  And they would move on to the next myth.  Today, there are very few myths left for the religious to hide behind.  In a way, that is sad, because this kind of Myth is nice and comforting.  It is fun.  But it is more important to know truth than to know false stories. 

The “god of the gaps”, the god who can only lurk like a cockroach where there are gaps in our knowledge, is shrinking fast.  We may have fond memories of him – but he has few places to hide now.  He’s been exposed too many times by “those meddling scientists”.