Did God Die on the Way to Houston? a Queer Tale by David B. Myers

Author:David B. Myers [Myers, David B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781725259522
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2020-07-24T19:38:48+00:00

10

What about the View that Scripture Is God’s Word?

There is no sense in God writing a book for me and then making me in such a way that I cannot believe his book.

—Robert Green Ingersoll, Why I Am an Agnostic

Are you saying that God didn’t communicate the divine will in any of the scriptures of the world’s great religions?

There are many scriptures purporting to be God’s will, God’s words, God’s commandments. All of these so-called revelations are human creations. But some texts coincidentally express God’s actual intentions for humankind, such as the call to love others as you should love yourself, welcome the stranger, free those unjustly held captive, feed the hungry, protect the vulnerable, impartially apply the law, etc. There is, however, much that is wrong in the scriptures of many religions, including texts purporting to be divine that actually reveal what contradicts God’s will for humankind.

It is even reasonable to ask whether on balance the major world religions have brought the world more darkness than light. When I saw in Torah, Leviticus chapter 19, the command to love neighbor and the stranger as self, I wanted to shout: “Yes that’s a beautiful moral law for all to live by.” But I also saw in the Torah, in the same book, Leviticus (chapter 25), my Jewish friend, something that was mistakenly accepted as divine law: namely that Israelites are permitted to own non-Israelites permanently and pass them on to their children, and that Israelites may treat these non-Israelite slaves as ruthlessly as Israelites were treated in Egypt. I wanted to shout: “No, not so!” Slavery was never God’s will. There are scriptural apologists who say God was only giving these human beings what they could handle at that historical time. I don’t buy that. If those who originally received the Torah had seen in it an explicit divine condemnation of all slavery, do you think they would have ignored this, especially if the God of this text had threatened them with awful consequences for disobedience as He so often did? And even if these recently liberated slaves defied God’s prohibition of all slavery—paradoxically wanting others to suffer as they did in Egypt—God would at least be on record condemning all slavery as an unholy practice. After all, the biblical God is on record condemning the enslavement of Israelites and calling for their liberation. Why in the Torah is permanent slavery wrong for Jews but not for all other communities?

You will get no argument from me. This is a question I ask out loud every Passover.

The failure of both the Bible and the Quran to absolutely condemn slavery led to the legitimation of an institution that brought enormous pain and degradation to those who were literally owned as one owns a piece of property. If the Bible (both Jewish and Christian versions) and the Quran had really been authored by God, they would have contained an unambiguous prohibition of slavery. Of course, many Jews, Christians, and Muslims have argued that the condemnation of slavery is implicit in their scriptures.

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