Ungodly Passover

“Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man.” Thomas Paine

The above quote from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition, strongly applies to the Jewish god of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. This “holy” book of Judaism is dripping with religious violence either ordered by the god of Judaism or actually carried out by that barbaric entity. The particular grotesque and unnecessarily brutal actions committed by the cruel Jewish god which have been celebrated by Judaism for well over 3,000 years, and still are today, as Passover, help us to see the religiously induced profound and insane religious violence that is the bedrock of Judaism and which permeates the other three Abrahamic “revealed”/hearsay religions of Christianity, Islam and Mormonism.

One thing all people of good will have to be deeply thankful for is that the bulk of claims made in the Bible are false. You can say they are myths or lies, the choice is yours.

Regarding the bloody Passover story in which millions of Jews/Hebrews are being held as slaves by the Egyptians until the Hebrew/Jewish god sets them free could not be true based not only on common sense and our innate God-given reason, but also on the historical evidence.

The Los Angeles Times ran an article about this sensitive subject back on April 13, 2001 titled Doubting the Story of Exodus in which it is stated, “After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua's leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua's fabled military campaigns never occurred--archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible.” (A very important and interesting book which does a great job of documenting that the Passover and Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament is nothing but a myth is The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts

by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.)

This realization that the religious violence based stories in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament never really happened and that God is not a reckless, egotistical and insecure violent tyrant who favors the Hebrews/Jews/Israel over all other peoples and nations as is claimed in the Bible should be greeted with profound thanks and celebration not only by all Gentiles, but also by all Jews of good will! It should become common knowledge which will serve to free the minds of people stuck in the muck of the Abrahamic “revealed”/hearsay religions.

When we look at one of the cornerstones of Judaism found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, ungodly Passover, we see such torturous brutality attributed to God/The Supreme Intelligence and Designer and Creator of the Universe, that we can’t help but to take issue with it out of our love and respect for our Friend, The Supreme Intelligence/God. As Thomas Paine asked and pointed out in The Age of Reason,

"Is it because you are sunk in the cruelty of superstition, or feel no interest in the honor of your Creator, that you listen to the horrid tales of the Bible, or hear them with callous indifference?"

"It is a duty incumbent on every true Deist, that he vindicate the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible."

Examining the Hebrew Bible’s/Old Testament’s Passover story, which, as noted above, is proven to be pure fiction and nothing more than slander and libel against our Designer, we quickly realize the purposes of this story were: to give the Hebrews/Jews a sense of superiority over their Gentile neighbors based on the false belief that they are God’s favorite people; to put fear in the minds and hearts of the Gentile people; to give the Hebrew/Jewish clergy more power and control over their own people.

The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is overflowing with Jewish/Hebrew superiority put there, not by God, but by the Hebrews/Jews themselves. This mental illness is to the point of God ordering the Hebrews/Jews to keep themselves pure by not mixing with their Gentile neighbors and to actually slaughter all of their Gentile neighbors. An example of this Biblical Judeo brutality that is erroneously pinned on God is found at Deuteronomy 7:1-6 which states:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

Objectively and honestly looking at these Bible passages we see it is alleged that God promised the Hebrews/Jews that he would defeat their enemies and present them to the Hebrews/Jews and that the Hebrews/Jews were not to show any kindness or mercy to them but were to kill them all.

What is the reason for “God” ordering the Hebrews/Jews, the people God allegedly chose “above all people that are upon the face of the earth”, to slaughter their Gentile neighbors without mercy? It is God’s fear that the religious beliefs of the victims of the Hebrews/Jews will influence the rank and file Hebrews/Jews to the point of no longer believing in God, but, instead, chasing after the gods of their Gentile neighbors. In reality, when the Jewish/Hebrew clergy wrote that God said, “For they will turn away thy son from following me”, they really meant from following the Jewish/Hebrew clergymen.

The Hebrew/Jewish clergymen wrote that the Jews/Hebrews were chosen by God to infuse in them a sense of superiority over Gentiles, probably with the hope it would give them an advantage in warfare against the Gentiles as the Jews/Hebrews took their lands which the Hebrew/Jewish clergymen claimed was given to them as a gift from God. This Biblical idea of the Jews being selected by God as a “chosen people” turned Thomas Paine’s stomach. He addressed this Biblical claim when he wrote in The Age of Reason, The Complete Edition about the Bible story of a king of Israel by the name of Menahem who, according to II Kings 15:16, butchered everyone in the city of Tiphsah, even ripping the unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs. After mentioning this grotesque account of the Jewish war criminals, Paine wrote,

Could we permit ourselves to suppose that the Almighty would distinguish any nation of people by the name of His chosen people, we must suppose that people to have been an example to all the rest of the world of the purest piety and humanity, and not such a nation of ruffians and cut-throats as the ancient Jews were; a people who, corrupted by and copying after such monsters and imposters as Moses and Aaron, Joshua, Samuel and David, had distinguished themselves above all others on the face of the known earth for barbarity and wickedness.

If we will not stubbornly shut our eyes and steel our hearts, it is impossible not to see, in spite of all that long-established superstition imposes upon the mind, that the flattering appellation of His chosen people is no other than a lie which the priests and leaders of the Jews had invented to cover the baseness of their own characters, and which Christian priests, sometimes as corrupt and often as cruel, have professed to believe.

This anti-life brutality is front and center in the Passover story. However, it is profoundly worse, as instead of an Israeli king doing the slaughtering, it is God himself doing the slaughtering of the innocents.

We read at Exodus 4:21-23 that God conspired with Moses to ensure God the opportunity to slaughter the firstborn of all of the Egyptian people and the firstborn of their animals. It reads,

"And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go. And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn."

This is the first we read of God hardening Pharaoh's heart to guarantee the Egyptian holocaust of Passover. However, as Deists and most freethinkers know, the Bible is very ambiguous and self-contradictory about many of its claims. Regarding the hardening of Pharaoh's heart the Bible claims 11 different times that God hardened Pharaoh's heat and four times that the Pharaoh hardened his own heart.

Entwined in the Passover story is a brief account of God attempting to kill Moses but has his mind/will changed by Moses’ wife, Zipporah. This foolish story is found at Exodus 4:24-26 and claims,

"And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision."

Such ungodly foolishness is at the heart of the Abrahamic "revealed"/hearsay religions. There is no way to embrace both your innate God-given reason and the "revealed"/hearsay religions.

After Pharaoh has his heart hardened 11 times by the Jewish/Hebrew god and four times by himself, as the story goes, God told Moses to have the Hebrews/Jews slaughter a lamb or goat and to put its blood on their doorposts. The reason for this is so when God went around Egypt at midnight butchering all the first born of the Egyptian people and their animals, he would know by the blood on the doorposts that Jews/Hebrews lived there (it seems the Hebrew/Jewish god does not know all, he occasionally needs some help) and he would “pass over” their homes as he went about slaughtering all the Egyptian firstborn and their animals. (An interesting side note is that the firstborn is not limited to only infants, puppies, kittens, calves, etc., as there are very many toddlers, teens and adults who are firstborn as well as mature animals.)

Exodus 12:12 has God saying,

“For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.”

Verses 29-30 read,

“And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.”

If this Bible story was true, there would be literally between 350,000 - 400,00 dead people, not to mention the countless dead animals (Exodus 12:12 states “beast” will be killed while verse 29 seems to limit the animals targeted to only the cattle which would be impossible based on the Passover story itself since according to Exodus 9:3-6 the Bible god killed all the cattle of the Egyptians during the sixth plague), all being killed on the same night. However, there is no Egyptian record of any such devastating and unforgettable event ever taking place anywhere in ancient Egypt. Believers usually put the date of the Passover Egyptian holocaust at around 1446 BCE. There are ancient Egyptian records from around that time that still survive, such as the fascinating Edwin Smith Papyrus which contains detailed medical procedures for treating various injures and illnesses which dates to 1500 BCE, but NONE of them ever even mention the alleged genocide of Passover.

When we think of the ungodly and heartless brutality the Passover story is based on and the slander and libel it brings against The Supreme Intelligence/God, we can't help but realize that anyone who knows the horrific nature and teachings of the Passover story and who still celebrates it must have serious psychological problems and must have a very low opinion of The Supreme Intelligence/God. One person who celebrated Passover was Jesus. The famous last supper, with Jesus leading it and his 12 apostles in attendance, was a Passover meal in celebration of this ungodly story from the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament according to Matthew 26:18 among many other places. Of course, the Jews who created Christianity co-opted this "holy" meal from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Jews and transformed it into a Christian religious ritual. This is probably one of the reasons the Deist George Washington refused to take communion when, out of deference to his constituents, he attended Christian religious services.

Think of the true and natural progress people and society can make if we can once and for all finally let go of religious myths and stories like the Passover story which not only promotes religious violence, but paints such an awful image of The Supreme Intelligence/God. Deism is by far the very best road to take us to this new and evolved and evolving life and society. The more we embrace and promote Deism, the better life and society we will have.