The Evil Foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Henry Lindner, MD
The author demonstrates that the Jewish Torah, the first five
books of the Christian Old Testament and the foundation of Islam, presents a
perverse view of human nature and society. Instead of a loving God who
cherishes his created humans as a human mother cherishes her children, it
describes a vicious Dictator who wants nothing from mankind except
obedience, worship, and burnt animal sacrifice. Its foundational premise
is that all humans are innately prone to disobey God the Father
, and are therefore flawed--they are born evil and must redeem
themselves by unquestioning obedience to God and his priests and
prophets. The Torah teaches that sex is dirty, that women are inferior to
men, and that human life consists of following rigid, arbitrary rules whose
violation is punishable by death. The Torah is a blueprint for a totalitarian,
militaristic society based upon the conquest and exploitation of the rest
of humanity. It advocates tribal/racial/national supremacism and explicitly
condones mass murder, slavery, and rape.
In trying to understand the social problems and violence in the world, we
must look at the documents and ideas that form the basis of our mentality and
our society. Our minds and actions are not the product of genes, but of
ideas. We differ from other animals by having a linguistic mind that is
controlled by linguistic formulas by ideas. We cannot live without
theories to make sense of the world around us, so we must have ideas. Good
ideas that are consistent with Cosmic reality lead to
good thoughts and actions. Bad ideas lead to suffering and destruction. In order to cleanse our minds of false and destructive ideas
we have to be philosophers we have to learn to judge the truth or
falsehood of the ideas that inhabit our minds. We have to
become expert at identifying bad ideas and replacing them with better
ideas. If we don't control our ideas, they control us. Let us look at a
set of ideas that has been controlling our minds for far too long, with
disastrous consequences.
Consider the ideas about God and human beings presented in the
Torah or Pentateuch, the scriptural basis of Judaism, and therefore of
Christianity and Islam, which are essentially reformed versions of Judaism. We
are presented with Supreme Being who is intelligent, like us, and decides to
create the Cosmos and to create Man in his image. We read that God created
man and woman in a state of ignorance and innocence so that he could test them.
He wanted to see whether we would obey a simple command: not to eat of the Tree
of Knowledge of Good and Evil.[[1]] The
story is complicated by the existence of another
intelligent being called Satan a troublemaker whom God allows to exist for
some reason perhaps because He wants to see whether the humans will choose to
obey Him or Satan.
So the humans were tempted by Satan to do something God forbade
them to do to obtain knowledge by eating of the Tree of Knowledge. The message
of this story is clear: Humans should simply obey God and should not
seek knowledge or think for themselves. What a strange creator who doesn t want his creatures to use the extraordinary brain
he has given them! Doesn’t every loving mother want her children to grow and
learn and develop their potential? Adam and Eve chose knowledge,
for which they are banished from the Garden of Eden and forced to learn how to
survive and to bear all the difficulties of life. We humans should have chosen,
it appears, to remain comfortable, ignorant, and totally dependent in the
Garden. After the expulsion, we find that humans constantly choose to do
exactly what God tells them not to
do to the point that God decides to kill almost all human beings in a worldwide
flood, sparing only one man, Noah, and his family. One man and his
family? The only humans on Earth
worth saving? Really?
Why did God create mankind if he knew that man s ability to think and
chose would naturally cause almost all humans to disobey His commandments so He
would have to kill them? Why did he create humans to be so naturally
disobedient and bad? The message is clear: Humans must not use the mind
that God gave them but should mindlessly obey God s
arbitrary commandments even when they are completely contrary to their
nature! What kind of insane creature is this God? Why didn’t He just
create humans beings and leave them alone to live
and learn independently? Why did he tolerate Satan s existence and his meddling
with the human race?
Well, it gets much worse. The Torah is blatantly
racist! The descendants of Ham, a son of Noah, are condemned to be
slaves, simply because Ham happened to see Noah naked when Noah was drunk. (Christian Europeans later assuaged their guilt over
their murder and enslavement of Indians and Africans by rationalizing that they
were descendents of Ham!) All Semites are descendents of Noah s son Shem. The descendants of Ham
(Canaan) are supposed to serve (be slaves for) the descendents
of Shem, and the descendents of Japheth (Europeans
and Asians?) are to be enlarged and dwell in the tents of Shem (house slaves or
employees?).[[2]]
Choosing from the descendents of Shem, God
decides to enter into a special relationship with one
man, Abraham, and his descendants to whom he promises a certain region of the
Earth a place already filled with people who apparently deserve to be
exterminated for no other reason than they are not the chosen ones. God
specifies that the descendents of Jacob, Abraham s
grandson who lied and stole his brother s birthright, will be his chosen
people and promises that they will rule not only Canaan but eventually the
entire world! Notice that this story is all bloodlines and race
and world domination!
God makes his chosen people suffer slavery in Egypt before bringing
them to the promised land . As they travel there, he
is their constant companion protecting them, feeding them, and appearing as a
cloud in the day and a column of fire at night. Today we would say that they
had an encounter with an extra-terrestrial! He gives them ten major
commandments to follow in their relationships to one another, and innumerable
lesser commandments about how they are to worship him. He tells them that
whenever they break his rules, they must kill animals and burn them, which
they end up doing continuously because the rules are contrary to human nature
and society.
He tells them that they must worship him in very specific ways within
very strict guidelines and gives them plans for building the Ark of the
Covenant and the tabernacle for his worship where he will dwell among them.
(Such petty narcissism in the Creator of the Cosmos?) He gives the
Israelites a long list of unclean foods that they are not to eat including
rabbits, pigs, lobster, octopus, clams, snails, frogs, etc.[[3]] All
animals must be killed and butchered according to certain rules. These dietary
and other types of laws are obviously intended to make the Israelites feel
special, to look upon people who do not follow such rules as unclean and
inferior, and to practically prevent any social interaction and therefore any
blood-line contamination.
Why would the Supreme Being who created this magnificent Cosmos and all
life on this Earth want to play this commandment-sin-sacrifice game with one
small group of human beings? Is he playing with humans as we might play with our
pets? Would we ever be so cruel to our pets, let alone our
children? Why does the Creator of everything want to be obeyed and
worshipped at all? Does he have an ego problem or other neurotic
imbalance? Why choose to experiment with one man s descendants and command
them to kill and conquer other humans? Why would he put this one group
of humans into conflict with all the rest? Why not reveal Himself to and give
His commandments to the entire human species? Is He doing some kind of experiment? Does He want to leave the rest
of the human race as a control group to see what
theories and religions they will develop without His special intervention and
to see how they react to His chosen people?
Now let us look at the moral/social/political regime that God invents for
His pet people. Is it a wonderful celebration of nature and of human
life? Does it bring out the best in man in accordance with his
nature? Does it promote rationality, love, and the pursuit of
truth? Does it promote peace and brotherhood among all human
beings? The answer to all these questions is a resounding "No". This
God is not interested in humans knowing anything beyond what He tells them. He
wants complete obedience and ritualistic worship on penalty of death. He
fails the parenthood test. Let s look a close look at
the moral and social aspects of this eternal covenant that He makes with the
Israelites.
God s Plan for his chosen people is a control regime based on rigid rules
and physical punishments, with almost all infractions punishable by
death. That s
right death for breaking the rules. No actual society has ever been
more unnatural, murderous, and cruel than the society outlined in the Torah.
Let s start with the seemingly reasonable part, the Ten Commandments from
Exodus 20. It is clear from their context that these commandments apply only to Israelite-God and Israelite-Israelite
relationships, and not at all to the Israelites' relationships to other
humans whom they will murder, rape, and enslave. Some of the internal
rules are necessary for any human society, since people cannot live together in
peace if they unrestrictedly kill, steal, and lie. However, the
implication that people have to be commanded to
treat each other with such minimal respect says volumes about the negative view
of mankind offered here.
Children are commanded to love and honor their parents, but not
parents to love and honor their children. Won't children naturally love and honor their parents
if their parents have given them the love and respect that they deserve? Only
if the parents are tyrants will they need the threat of God s wrath
to induce their children honor them. Four of the Ten Commandments require
that humans recognize and worship this one God and show Him special respect
failure to do so is punishable by death. We must ask, Why? What
kind of sick, egomaniacal creature has to command
humans to worship him, in specific ways or die? If the Creator of the Cosmos
were sane, loving and kind, could humans do anything but admire and worship
Him?
God doesn’t stop with those ten commandments. In fact, the Torah includes
hundreds of commandments (613 according to orthodox Jews), most of them
punishable by death. God and his priests control human beings by fear!
God says that he will kill anyone who touches Mount Sinai or the ark of the covenant.[[4]] He
commands that any man who has sex with another man should be killed.[[5]] Any
human who has sex with an animal should be killed.[[6]] Why
is God so obsessed with human sexual conduct? Not only is sexual intercourse
outside male-female marriage punishable by death, even
permissible marital sex is unclean! After having sex, both the
man and woman must wash immediately and be considered unclean for
the rest of the day.[[7]]
Talk about giving human beings an inferiority complex! Such a
negative view of sex would certainly create confusion about this most wonderful
form of intimacy. Indeed, it would create perversion by encouraging the
splitting of sexual desire from the rest of the personality.
This society is not authoritarian, it
is totalitarian. A persistently disobedient child should be killed.[[8]] Any
witch, sorceress , or medium , or anyone who worships or sacrifices to any
other God should be killed.[[9]] Anyone
who doesn t perform a sacrifice just right should be
killed. Anyone who does any work on the Sabbath should be killed.[[10]] Anyone
who shows contempt for a priest or judge should be killed.[[11]] Anyone
who challenges the authority of the leaders or disobeys the leaders should be
killed. God himself kills Korah and his supporters when he dissents from
and denounces the dictatorship of Moses and Aaron and demands that the 250
council members have a greater say in the decisions affecting their lives.[[12]] Imagine it Death for demanding
democracy! This document is the foundation of the Western
Judeo-Christian democracies! Is it any wonder that our vaunted ideals of
freedom and democracy are just shams!
The Torah is profoundly anti-female. The fact that it was Eve who
succumbed to temptation in the garden of Eden and caused Adam to sin is
well-known and abused. In a similar instance, when Aaron and Miriam complained
about Moses, it was Miriam who was punished with leprosy, not Aaron![[13]] The Israelites were a patriarchal society
that viewed women as lesser human
beings, somewhere between men and livestock. There were many instances
where leading Israelite men slept with prostitutes. There is no commandment
against this nor any condemnation of it, as long as
the prostitute is not an Israelite. Virginity is required of Israelite wives
but not of husbands, which is logically impossible unless there is a group of
Israelite women who have sex but never marry or there are plenty of
non-Israelite woman available! Any Israelite girl who willingly has sex
with a man outside of marriage should be killed. If a man accuses his
wife of adultery, she has to undergo a bizarre test reminiscent of, and
probably productive of the Salem witchcraft tests.[[14]] No similar
test is mentioned for a man accused of adultery by his wife!
The punishment for a man who rapes an
Israelite virgin is not death, he simply has to pay the father a fine
and then marry her![[15]]
However, if a man marries a woman and then can prove that she was not a virgin
as she claimed (no blood on the sheets), then the new wife should be killed![[16]] Talk
about a sexual double standard! There are also many rules that make women
subservient to and less valuable than men. A father may nullify any vows made
by a daughter living within his house or any vows made by his wife.[[17]] A
woman is unclean and not to be touched for an entire week after her menstrual
bleeding begins.[[18]] A
woman is unclean for seven days after delivering a son, but for 14 days after
delivering a daughter.[[19]] The
value of a male compared to a female is set at a ratio of 5-to-3.[[20]]
So the Torah provides a blueprint for a cruel, patriarchal,
oppressive, fear- and guilt-ridden totalitarian society. Every person within it lives in constant
fear of transgressing one of the hundreds of commandments and thereby earning
an automatic death sentence. Imagine living in a society
where everyone knows that they deserve death! Even thinking about and
judging reality by oneself is a violation and could get one killed! Anyone
could accuse another person of a capital crime at any time
and they would probably be right! Two witnesses are enough to determine
guilt. This fear and guilt certainly make them more amenable to the
control of the leaders! Any persons who should exhibit the fatal
disease of thinking for themselves could be outed and killed by invoking any
number of laws they had broken. No effective resistance to the leadership
could ever develop.
Now even though it squashed all dissent by execution, how could such a
sick, dysfunctional society go on existing? Wouldn
t the unfortunate victim-members want to escape at all costs? Why would
human beings continually submit to this horrible totalitarian
regime? There would have to be some obvious advantages of membership in
the tribe to outweigh these advantages and of course it would help if the rules
were not strictly enforced but would be invoked only when the rulers decided to
make an example of someone. In such a society, a guilt-ridden hypocrisy would
be the normal mentality.
So what were the advantages to being an Israelite? This brings us to the nature of the society s
relationship with outsiders. What about the non-Israelites? How are they
to be treated according to the Torah? We find that even before the captivity in
Egypt, Jacob s sons deceived the Hivites by promising to become their
allies. They told the Hivite men that they must be circumcised. When
the Hivite men were recovering from their circumcision, Jacob s sons killed all
the men, enslaved their women and children, and stole all their possessions as
booty. They claimed to be justified in committing these heinous crimes
because one Hivite man raped one of their daughters.
However, the Hivite man had offered to both pay the fine and marry the girl,
just as the later Levitical law commanded![[21]] Thus was established a principal of disproportionate
retaliation based upon race but it gets much uglier.
After leaving Egypt and coming into Canaan, God commands the Israelites to kill all non-Israelites within the
Promised Land, steal their land, houses, and livestock, and destroy all their
sacred sites. God tells them to make no covenants with them.[[22]] They
should kill all the men, boys, and women who are not virgins. The virgins
should be raped and then kept as
wives [[23]], oh, and the attractive non-virgin women too![[24]] Why do
all these different people in Canaan deserve extermination or rape?
Once, God claims it is because of their wickedness, but we have
to wonder. Were they really so wicked or
were they just living in the wrong place? Could they possibly have been
more wicked than the Israelites who were going around slaughtering entire
tribes, raping the women, and stealing everything in sight? No. This is just
all just God-sanctioned ethnic cleansing and genocide--the greatest
evils of all, right here in our most sacred text!
Notice that the Israelites genocidal license is not even limited to the
Promised Land! God also tells them
that they have the right to kill or enslave all people living outside of the
Promised Land the entire human species![[25]] Furthermore, God institutes a moral
double standard for the Israelites in their relationships with the
non-Israelites who do live among them and observe their laws. Gentiles can
be sold as slaves but not Israelites.[[26]] Gentiles
should be charged interest on loans, but not fellow Israelites.[[27]]. God
tells the Israelites to love their neighbor as themselves, but by neighbor He
clearly means only other Israelites.[[28]]
In one passage only, Israelites are told to not mistreat the aliens
living obediently among them, indeed that they should love them as they love
themselves.[[29]] However,
what force does this lone admonition of love towards a small subset of
aliens have when the double standard has been firmly established and all aliens
who don t serve them are free game for theft, murder, rape, and
enslavement? It is, in the final analysis, a case of us against them, and
they are to be treated well only if they serve our purposes!
The Torah is the constitution of a society designed for conquest,
plunder, and exploitation. The tribe is to exist perpetually by killing other
people and stealing their land, houses, and livestock. It enslaves all
outsiders that it doesn’t kill. Those it doesn’t happen to enslave, it exploits according to a moral double
standard. The Torah creates a chosen people who exploit all others,
thereby perpetuating war, theft, and slavery. It poisons the natural
potential for love and cooperation among all human beings. It is the
negation of all human values, connections, and affections.
In philosophy as in architecture, foundations are crucial. This
foundation of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is incorrigibly evil.
No religious reform, reinterpretation, or moderation can change the
essential evil of these scriptures. Jesus, Paul, Mohammed, Locke,
Jefferson and Karl Marx and many others tried and failed to fix
this problem. As human beings, we must consciously, completely reject
these ancient, evil writings as immoral. Any person who does not
consciously reject these scriptures is necessarily affected by them, even if
only unconsciously. Moderates who do not follow these scriptures but claim that
they are still "good for us" are protecting the scriptures from
criticism and are therefore part of the problem. There is no possibility of
being "moderate" in the face of such evil. These scriptures and the religions based upon them have caused and are
continuing to cause child abuse, abuse of women, psychopathology, exploitation,
and war. They must no longer be tolerated. We must all work together to expose these scriptures and
to eliminate them from our minds and from our children's minds,
forever. Only then can we begin to create a sane, peaceful
society on this Earth.