Sir, – A couple of letter writers (November 1st) come out in defence of the Bible, and the god of the Bible.
The trouble with quoting the Bible is that you can subjectively find everything from teachings of love and mercy to divine justification for genocide, ethnic cleansing, murder, slavery, homophobia, among other terrible things.
Moral injunctions are mixed with immoral ones. The god of the Bible is (allegedly) an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god, yet the Bible is replete with divine and divinely commanded slaughter and cruelty, for example, the injunction to slaughter the Amalekites, which Binyamin Netanyahu recently cited.
In Samuel 15:3, the Lord gives the order to: “Smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.”
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It has been estimated that there are about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing in the Bible.
Another major problem is the biblical concept of “the chosen people”, selected to be in a covenant with God. According to Deuteronomy, when the Lord delivers the Israelites “into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee ... 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”.
To deny that religion and the Bible have a case to answer here is to deny reality. – Yours, etc,
ROB SADLIER,
Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.