1 reply »

1. IS THIS YOUR GOD?
   What a thrice-doubled dupe was I
   To take this Ogre for a God
   And worship this foul fiend!”

   THE ORIGIN OF THE JEWISH GOD
   According to the biblical paradigm, the Creator of the Universe became the God of Israel when he chose the Hebrews. But according to biblical scholarship, the historical process was the reverse: it is the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. This process, which was only completed during the Persian period, was not so much due to a progress in metaphysical thought as to a political cunning. The book of Ezra betrays a calculated effort from the Levites to confuse, in the mind of the Persians, “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15) with the “God of heaven” whom the Persians also called Ahura Mazda, with the aim of obtaining the support of the Persian king for their theocratic project in Palestine. In Ezra, only the kings of Persia, in the various edicts attributed to them, recognize Yahweh as “the God of Heaven,” while in the rest of the text, Yahweh is merely “the god of Israel”. The same can be observed in the book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by the gifts of Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47).

   Such passages give away, for those willing to see it, the deepest secret of Judaism, which is the key to understanding the relationship of Judaism to universalism:
   Yahweh is really the god of the Jews, while Gentiles are led to believe that he is the supreme and only God.
   “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” confirms Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924). (1) This secret is not a fully conscious thought for most Jews; it is more like a family secret running unconsciously through generations. Nevertheless, it is the binding force of the Jewish people, and I am reminded of Carl Jung’s remark that secrets: “are of vital importance on the primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute a helpful compensation for lack of cohesion in the individual personality.”(2)

   As he usurped the majesty of the Heavenly Father of all mankind, Yahweh in no way lost his character as a military god bent on looting and slaughtering the enemies of his only chosen people. Against the Babylonians, his sword is expected to “devour until gorged, until drunk with their blood” (Jeremiah 46:10). Against the Edomites, “it is greasy with fat” (Isaiah 34:6).
   If Yahweh had remained a tribal god from the desert, he would simply be recognized as particularly primitive and cruel; perhaps a demon escaped from hell through an Arabian volcano. But his successful claim to be honored as the true and only God is the biggest sham in human history, and a civilizational disaster of incomparable magnitude. It is ultimately responsible for the spread of atheism in the West. As long as Christians were discouraged from reading the Old Testament, they were not much disturbed by it. As soon as it became widely available, it started corroding Christianity. Philosophers like Voltaire had an easy job denigrating Christianity by quoting the Old Testament: “Never was common sense attacked with so much indecency and fury” (Sermon of the Fifty). Rather without God than with such a God, became the logical and morally decent thinking. “The finest trick of the devil, Charles Baudelaire wrote, is to persuade you that he does not exist” (Paris Spleen). Perhaps he was mistaken. His finest trick, I believe, is to convince the world that he is Yahweh.
   NOTES:
   (1)Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75. (2)Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflexions, Pantheon Books, 1963, p.

   CANNIBALISM AND HUMAN SACRIFICES
   The most execrable and diabolic of the divine laws of Yahweh are the repeated enactments condemning his Chosen to cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, and ordaining and sanctioning living human sacrifices to appease the fierce wrath of the holy God. These infernal cases consign the Heavenly Father of Jew and Christian to eternal loathing, as well as the inspired book which enshrines them. Text after text of the inspired word of God relates to the custom of burning children as living human sacrifices to this Hebrao-Christian Moloch.

   True, some texts forbid the practice, but they are very late in Hebrew history, and testify by their iteration to the inveterate cult of human sacrifice. The instance of the God’s command to Abraham to murder his God-engendered Isaac to the whim of the Monster of Hebrew mythology is too well known to need narrating; it is no palliation of the barbarity that a billy-goat was substituted just as the deluded votary of Yahweh “stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son” (Gen.esis xxii, 10); the god who would command a father to do such a thing and the poor obsessed fool who would obey are alike beneath contempt.

   Jephthah was himself the “goat” of his God, as well as “a son of a harlot” (Judges xi, 1), when “the Spirit of Yahweh came upon Jephthah” (xi, 29) to incite him to murder. “And Jephthah vowed a vow unto Yahweh … that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me … shall surely be Yahweh’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering” (xxi, 30, 31). The revolting murder of his own daughter as a burnt sacrifice to the Moloch of Israel, because “I have opened my mouth to Yahweh, and I cannot go back,” is a blasting infamy to the God who instigated and accepted the murder, and who intervened with none of his usual meddlesome conjuring tricks to prevent it. It is recorded that the murdered maiden’s father, in making this human sacrifice, “did with her according to his vow which be had vowed: … and it was a custom [margin, ordinance] in Israel” (xi, 39), thus testifying to the historical fact that human sacrifice was a customary thing in Israel, was established by divine “ordinance,” and was practised for ages among these barbarian people.

   Here is the ordinance, the divine law of Yahweh, which commanded these sacrificial murders:
   “When a man maketh a singular vow … he shall not alter it, nor change it, a good for a bad, or a bad for a good. … No devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto Yahweh of all that he hath, both of man and beast … shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto Yahweh. None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus. xxvii, 2, 10, 28, 29).

   Commenting on this abhorrent law of God, the pious editors of the Biblical Encyclopedia, [New York, George H. Doran Co., 1907. 5 vols. (This is not the Encyclopedia Biblica.)] betraying the prostitution of mind of bibliolaters seeking to “justify the ways of God to man,” far from venting their loathing, thus slavishly display their maudlin exegetical wit: “(28) Devoted anything which by the law belonged to the Lord could neither be sold … nor be redeemed by the vower. (29) surely … death, in extreme cases, where death was proper and right, there was no alternative” (Vol. I, p. 344).

   Yahweh vengefully sent one of his frequent famines upon his Holy Land, “flowing with milk and honey,” and it grievously afflicted his Chosen for three years, until the “man after Yahweh’s own heart,” David, “enquired of Yahweh” what it was all about. “And Yahweh answered, It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites” (2 Samuel. xxi, 1), heathen enemies whom Yahweh had ordered to be exterminated. David cast about for a form of sacrifice potent enough to conjure away the wrath of his benign God, and to this Yahweh divinely guided him. He took two sons of Saul by Rizpah, and five sons of Michal, Saul’s daughter and David’s own wife, “who loved him” and “they hanged them in the hill before Yahweh; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death. … And after that God was intreated for the land” (2 Samuel. xxi, 8, 9, 14); glutted with the butchery of human sacrifice to him, he graciously ended the famine. But what heart will not be wrung by the mother’s woe of Rizpah, who “took sack-cloth and spread it … upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night ” (xxi, 10); the heart-broken mother of the God’s victims despairingly lying over the rotting bodies of her loved sons for several months under the open skies, fighting off the scavenger birds and beasts from the poor carcasses of the human sacrifices to the Jewish/Christian’s loving Heavenly Father. Rizpah disobeyed her God’s repeated commands to eat her dead sons. The holy God of Israel, in his sacred Mosaic law, time and again imposes cannibalism, and of the most revolting kind:
   “Ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat” (Leviticus. xxvi, 29).
   “And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and thy daughters” (Deuteronomy. xxviii, 53-57)”the whole passage should be read for its refinements of gloating fiendishness.
   53 “You’ll eat your own children[a]—the flesh of your sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God gave you—on account of the siege and the distress with which your enemy will oppress you. 54 Even the compassionate man among you—the very sensitive one—will look with evil in his eyes toward his brother, his beloved wife, and his surviving sons, whom he spared. 55 He will withhold from each of them the flesh of his sons that he is eating—since there will be nothing left—on account of the siege and distress with which your enemy will oppress you in all your cities.
   Footnotes
   Deuteronomy 28:53 Lit. Eat the fruit of your womb

   And again the holy God ordains these delicate repasts:
   “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat everyone the flesh of his friend” (Jeremiah. xix, 9). And again:
   “The fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers” (Ezekiel. v, 10).

   There are other inspired passages of the same sort. The Bible commentators above cited reverently ratify the prediction with the comment, “Literally fulfilled” (Vol. I, p. 340), pleased to be able to make citations to support their God’s holy Word. Besides the testimony of the secular history of the Chosen People, concrete instances of cannibalism are related in God’s book for confirmation of our faith and of our love for Yahweh:
   “The hands of the pitiful women have sodden [boiled] their own children: they were their meat” (Lamentation. iv, 10).
   Again Yahweh sent a “great famine” upon his people. ”
   And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my Lord, O King. And he said, If Yahweh do not help thee, whence shall I help thee? … What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman said unto me, Give me thy son, that we may eat him to-day, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son” (2 Kings vi, 26-29).

   And the king, by his messenger to Elisha, truly said: “Behold, this evil is of Yahweh”; and he pertinently added: “What should I wait for Yahweh any longer?” (vi, 33) Why? Can, you Jews and Christians, read these divine precepts and examples of your holy Bible God, and remember the query of Job’s wife: “Dost thou still retain thine integrity?” Forgive her for her suggestion to poor Job: “Curse God, and die” (Job ii, 9). Then kneel with lifted face to this Ogre of Israel and pray: “Our Father who art in heaven: Hallowed be thy name.”

   Cannibalism and its abhorrent, though vicarious, practice are still enjoined by this God on the morons of his Son Jesus Christ: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John vi, 53 et seq.)!

   MOLOCH & THE JEWISH HOLOCAUSTS
   MISHNAH. HE WHO GIVES OF HIS SEED TO MOLECH INCURS NO PUNISHMENT UNLESS HE DELIVERS IT TO MOLECH AND CAUSES IT TO PASS THROUGH THE FIRE. IF HE GAVE IT TO MOLECH BUT DID NOT CAUSE IT TO PASS THROUGH THE FIRE, OR THE REVERSE, HE INCURS NO PENALTY, UNLESS HE DOES BOTH.
   Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 64a Soncino 1961 Edition, page 437 Following the Mishnah is a discussion among the sages. One of the Talmud Sages, Rabbi Ashi, comments as follows:
   GEMARA. R. Ashi propounded: What if one caused his blind or sleeping son to pass through, (3) or if he caused his grandson by his son or daughter to pass through?
   ” One at least of these you may solve. For it has been taught: [Any men … that giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall he put to death … And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people;] because he hath given of his seed unto Molech. Why is this stated? ” Because it is said, there shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire. From this I know it only of his son or daughter. Whence do I know that it applies to his son’s son or daughter’s son too? From the verse, [And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man] when he giveth of his seed unto Molech [and kill him not: Then I will … cut him off.]

   Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 64b Soncino 1961 Edition, page 439
   Rabbi Dr. Freedman, one of the translators of the Soncino Tractate Sanhedrin, clarifies the passage. In a footnote, Rabbi Dr. Freedman confirms that the Talmud Sages use “seed” to denote living children, in the same sense as the Biblical translators understand the term in the above Biblical quotes. In this footnote, Rabbi Dr. Freedman paraphrases the question from Rabbi Ashi: 3. Is ‘thou shalt not cause to pass’ applicable only to a son who can naturally pass through himself, but not to a blind or sleeping son, who must be led or carried, or does it apply to all? Rabbi Dr. Freedman

   Other footnotes within the same context clarify the fine point of distinction being drawn in the Mishnah and subsequent debates among the sages: 5. Leviticus. XVIII, 21. This proves that the offence consists of two parts; (I) formal delivery to the priests, and (2) causing the seed to pass through the fire. Rabbi Dr. Freedman (2) 5. As two separate offences, proving that giving one’s seed to Molech is not idolatry. The differences [sic] is, that if one sacrificed to Molech, or caused his son to pass through the fire to some other deity, he is not punished. Rabbi Dr. Freedman (3)

   Following the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 64a and 64b contain a rousing debate between the Sages concerning: * the circumstances under which worshipping an idol is idolatry, * which idols may be worshipped without indulging in idolatry, * which parts of child sacrifice in what combination are punishable, and * how children may be sacrificed without violating Leviticus.
   JEWS SHOULD READ 1 KINGS 11:1-11; AMOS 5:22-27!

   Reply