REJECTED by Cobourg Daily Star, May 20/08

Last Friday, May 16, Rev. Jeff Snow wrote; “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching...” Rev. Snow goes on to say that within the Bible “we find guidance and directions from the One who created us” and “tells stories of God’s love displayed to people throughout the centuries” and Rev. Snow asserts that God “wants us to read it over and over again, carefully going over every word, mining the depths of truth and love displayed on every page.”

This is just one example of a multitude that the privilege of religion imposes on our community. The news media charges mammon to used car sellers to publish their hucksterism, but the Goebbels of God get free column inches after inches for their pulpitganda.

Please open the Sacred Scripts (Deuterotomy 20, v15-18) and smell the malodorous breath of the Omniscient One’s explicit command to genocide:

“...thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth but thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Per'izzites, the Hivites, and the Jeb'usites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:”

This is wholesale slaughter. Note that the command was not to limit the slaughter to fighting age men, but to everything that breatheth, which includes every pregnant woman, every mother, every child, every baby, and all of the livestock.

This was not the command of a psychopathic mortal, but of the One & Only Omniscient God of love. Surely, there must have been a very good reason for such a genocidal command. Verse 18 asserts that the aforementioned nations were to be wiped off the face of the earth to prevent them from teaching “all their abominations, which they have done to their gods.” What abominations? Sacrificing their children on alters?

The renown patriarch, Abraham, was intent in his heart to do just such a thing, until an angel intervened at the last moment. This is touted as indicative of God’s love, but there is no mention of the trauma this had on the near-death experience of the sacrificial son.

Not only is the great One a self-centred jealous One with anger-mismanagement issues, but transfers the culpability of genocide onto other nations, instructing them, nay, commanding them to carry out the murder of women, children, babies, lest they contaminate the righteous with a diverse culture.

We already know that the God of justice and mercy took it upon itself to obliterate all the men, women, children and livestock in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, so why would this God of good grace not spare the righteous from all the bloody gore of genocide instead of making them complicit in such a crime against humanity?

So here in the Cobourg Daily Star we have a professional agent of this God instructing, not just Youth For Christ, but the entire community that "life runs more smoothly when we submit, as individuals and as a society, to a line of truth not of our own making.”

The privilege of religion has too long oppressed humankind with its theological totalitarianism ludicrously protected by blasphemy laws. It is not blasphemers like me that should be struck down and gagged, but this whole fraudulent ideology of religion that should be turned into an impotent pillar of historical salt.

And then there are all of the self-righteous pious practitioners of multiculturalism waxing apoplectic over the relatively mild stupidities of Gordon Gilchrist, who hypocritically turn a blind eye to the proselytizers of hate and calls for violence which can be found throughout the Scriptures.

-- Wally Keeler