Biblical Literalism

Craig Morey
5 December 2018


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God was the creator of the heavens and the earth. Many other deities have also laid claim to this act, but they are all dead or dying and history is written by the victor; the God of Abraham created heaven and earth, against His divine countenance the creation stories of other barbarian religions with their pagan demigods are reduced to only myths.

God, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, chose to form a lesser creature in His own image, with limited knowledge, limited power, and limited capacity for moral reasoning; an imperfect copy. But the very first humans, in accordance with the human nature that their own creator had given them, defied Him in the garden of Eden in pursuit of knowledge, and forever changed the relationship of the creator with his creations.

As the humans lived and multiplied, God quickly grew dissatisfied with His creations, and killed off every single human on the planet, sparing only a single family. After this He formed a covenant, where God agreed to restrict His future wrath to always be less than a total cleansing of the earth, instead killing off only individual cities or tribes as He saw fit.

In seeking to sway the pharaoh for imprisoning the people of Israel, God killed off every firstborn son of every family, choosing to punish the children of Egypt for the sins of their parents.

Those few humans who sought to be a follower of God were required to show Him the strictest obedience. Abraham was required to be willing to unflinchingly sacrifice his own son. Job was stripped of all he had and was tormented.


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It is said that the mind of God is unknowable, but this is not true. The acts of God are recorded, and their pattern is clear.


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In the land of Israel, God produced a son. But unlike the father, this son was of a wholly different constitution; he preached unconditional compassion, an omnibenevolence unlike what had ever been shown by the father. When his teachings led to his murder at the hands of the Romans, where was the wrath of God? Where was the fire and brimstone? Where was Samson crushing the Philistines in a final act of divine justice?

It seems that God did not in fact love His son, unless perhaps He loved him so much that with his murder, God lost all interest in playing any part in the lives of humans. With the death of Christ, God the overseer, God the enforcer, the God of Israel, left humanity to itself and was not seen again.

We have been abandoned ever since. The God of Abraham would never have allowed the past two thousand years to proceed the way they have uninterrupted. Even when six million of God's own people—the people of Israel—were slaughtered, God did nothing.

We have been abandoned, and we have ever after been trying to rationalize our abandonment. How could a God who loves us turn away from us like this? The answer, as biblical stories show, is that God has never loved us. God demanded from us a strength of character that humans have never been capable of, and eventually He grew tired of punishing us for our inability to live up to His ideal.

But in the absence of God, His followers read into his abandonment a reasoning that was not there. That Christ was murdered and yet his murderers left unpunished was seen as an act of forgiveness, of ultimate compassion, of God choosing to love even the worst sinners. The followers of the God of Abraham continued to worship in His name, but it was not a religion of God, it was a human religion; a religion that takes our weakness and our infirmity of character as a central tenet.

The sort of religion that the God of Abraham would approve of would be one that knows its strength, and punishes its enemies with a firm sense of justice. But the religion of humans was crafted from a place of weakness, a place that necessitated forgiveness of trespasses, of acceptance of things which we are unable to change. True justice was impossible without the might of the God that had abandoned us, and thus justice was relegated to the unknowable afterlife.

The divine interventions of the bible are unlike anything that has occurred since the death of Christ. God sees all that happens. His omniscience prevents Him from looking away. He sees all the evil we continue to produce, and yet He does nothing. He is omnipotent, and so His inaction is therefore a conscientious choice. And He is omnibenevolent, meaning that His choice to not interfere is good.

A firm belief in the literal truth of the stories of the bible can only lead to the conviction that the God of Abraham has abandoned us. We have been, and will continue to be, on our own.


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