As anyone who watches Game of Thrones can tell you, life long ago was very brutal. People didn’t live long, and while they lived things were too great. The politics of the time were especially rough. One person (or at best a small handful of people) had all the power and any threat to this power was swiftly destroyed. This power was obtained and maintained by killing people so the best thing ordinary people could do was to stay out of their way and under no circumstances question or challenge them. These leaders didn’t care about the ordinary people and used their power to enrich themselves and their cronies. Everyone else was simply “the masses”, the hordes of commoners who got in the way, a nuisance that could be troublesome if it didn’t have enough bread.
You would think that a polity ruled by God would be different. Surely it would be a model of peace and understanding where all people prospered together as one? A place where all are free and equal citizens? The strange thing is that even in the Bible (which is written by the Israelites and therefore puts them in the best light) the Israelites seem the exact same as every other tribe of the time. Being directly lead in all they do by God doesn’t seem to make a society in any way better than how they would have acted without God. Moses and God act like petty despots rather than models of virtue that we should all follow. Continue reading “An Atheist Reads The Bible: Resistance Is Futile”
