No Need for God

By Peter William Clement

Because Catholic Theologians consciously fail to revise and rebuild the intellectual architecture of their faith -- and because they deliberately refuse to accommodate the discoveries of science over the 3000 years since their God was invented by a tribe of unenlightened shepherds and farmers , they are forced to maintain an inflexible policy of deliberate "obscurantism."

I use arguments from science (in layman's terms)- evolutionary biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology- to demonstrate the validity of this proposition.

I have been a student (and victim) of Catholic Theology for more than 65 years. Over the last seven years (since my retirement) I have devoted nearly all of my time to learning and understanding the revelations of modem science - and to recognizing how incompatible they are with the "infallible" dogmas of the Pope and his minions.

I have a Ph.D. in English, and I have completed 42 years of teaching on the college level. I am now Professor emeritus of English at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

My book is devoted to the questions which all peoples have tried to answer since the dawn of civilization: "Where do we come from? Where are we going to? What are we here for? What the hell's it all about?" The findings of modem neuroscience prove- with carloads of experimental and observational data -- that, without the material substrate of the brain, there can be no consciousness: that is, there can be no soul that survives the death of the body. The correlative point is that we now have empirical proof that "God" did not magically inject a supernatural soul into a single-celled zygote at the precise moment of its conception- because there is no such entity. Catholic Theologians cannot recognize the truth empirically demonstrated by modem neuroscience -- the fact that there is no such entity as a supernatural soul. Their only recourse is to maintain a policy of inflexible obscurantism - in plainer words, a ''theology" of systematic prevarication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493123841

Peter William Clement

Because Catholic Th eologians consciously fail to revise and rebuild the intellectual architecture of their faith -- and because they deliberately refuse to accommodate the discoveries of science over the 3000 years since their God was invented by a tribe of unenlightened shepherds and farmers , they are forced to maintain an infl exible policy of deliberate “obscurantism.” I use arguments from science (in layman’s terms)- evolutionary biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, particle physics, astronomy, and cosmology- to demonstrate the validity of this proposition. I have been a student (and victim) of Catholic Th eology for more than 65 years. Over the last seven years (since my retirement) I have devoted nearly all of my time to learning and understanding the revelations of modem science - and to recognizing how incompatible they are with the “infallible” dogmas of the Pope and his minions. I have a Ph.D. in English, and I have completed 42 years of teaching on the college level. I am now Professor emeritus of English at Elms College in Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Peter William Clement.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/10/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

141934

Dedication

For my Patron Saints: Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould—Requiescat in pace—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael Shermer, and Victor J. Stenger—Ora pro nobis !

For

 . . . all freethinkers, past and present, whose independence of mind isolates them from the sympathy and understanding of their community, but whose courageous and unwavering devotion to the scientific method has liberated their community from the Dark Ages.—David Mills, The Atheist Universe

For

In memoriam: Christopher Hitchens—There are, after all, atheists who say they wish the fable were true but are unable to suspend the requisite disbelief, or who have relinquished belief only with regret. To this I reply: who wishes that there was a permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to continual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded us as its private property even after we died? How happy we ought to be, at the reflection that there exists not a shred of respectable evidence to support such a horrible hypothesis.

And For

My Sweet Lady: Of endless forms most beautiful… the sine qua non

SECTION ONE

WHY CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS MUST RESIST THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE AND MODERN CIVILIZATION*

[*This title is adapted from a speech given by Thomas Henry Huxley at Liverpool, England, in 1869]

CATHOLIC THEOLOGY: DOGMATIC OBSCURANTISM, SEMINAL LIES, AND THE INTELLECTUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN

A KIND OF PREFACE, ADDRESSED TO CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS

First, a couple of questions: Do you honestly believe that the Creator of 400 billion galaxies and hundreds of octillions of suns cares whether or not a man is circumcised? Do you honestly believe that He who created the sun and its planetary system 4.56 billion years ago cares about two people who lived in a magic garden 6000 years ago? Do you honestly believe that He who created the dinosaurs 170 million years before the K-T extinction cares about a man who got swallowed by a fish 2500 years ago? Do you honestly believe that He who created all the major modern phyla during the Cambrian explosion between 488 million and 542 million years ago cares about a man who built an ark during a flooding of the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers 3000 years ago? Do you honestly believe that the Creator of the trilobites—who survived and reproduced for nearly 300 million years—cares about the dietary laws enumerated ad nauseam in Leviticus? Do you honestly believe that He who created the genus Homo 2 million years ago personally cares about a certain John Smith who was born two years ago? Do you honestly believe that the Creator of a quasar—more luminous than 60 trillion sons, powered by a seven-billion solar-mass black hole—cares about whether or not John Smith uses artificial contraception when he sleeps with his own wife? Do you honestly believe that such a Creator would command a heterosexual mammal to stone a homosexual mammal to death? Do you honestly believe that the Creator of a supernova—more luminous than a hundred-billion suns—would command that a John Smith should be stoned to death for picking up a few sticks on a Saturday afternoon? Or that Jane Doe should be likewise stoned if her husband discovers on their wedding-night that she is not a virgin? Do you honestly believe that Homo sapiens sapiens—who begins to appear in the fossil record 100,000 years ago—reached its evolutionary pinnacle in one human mammal who died on a cross 2000 years ago? Do you honestly believe that the Creator who ignited our local part of the universe with a Big Bang 13.82 billion light-years ago really cares whether John Smith today is a Catholic rather than a Protestant? Do you honestly believe that such a Creator has anything but contempt for a Catholic Priest who claims to be able to create Him out of a wafer? Personally, I don’t think that you have even the remotest understanding of the Creator about whom you talk so glibly.

The whole purpose of every man’s life, you say, is the salvation of his immortal soul for an afterlife in heaven with this Creator.  But modern neuroscientists have definitively proven that there is no such entity as a soul; and there is not an iota of empirical evidence for a second life after death.  In point of fact, THE ENTIRE METAPHYSICAL STRUCTURE OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGY CAN BE DEMOLISHED BY A ONE LINE QUOTATION FROM MARK TWAIN:  I HAVE NEVER SEEN WHAT TO ME SEEMED AN ATOM OF PROOF THAT THERE IS A FUTURE LIFE.  (Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain:  A Biography)  NO SOUL! NO SECOND LIFE!  NO REASON FOR CATHOLIC THEOLOGY OR FOR YOU THEOLOGIANS!  YOU MIGHT DO WELL TO JUST DRY UP AND BLOW AWAY!

My personal feelings, and those of many other people who are unwilling to delude themselves with comforting illusions are reflected in the following lines from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World:  I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.  But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.

It is not a small pillar here or there, but the whole 2000-year-old edifice of Catholic theology that comes tumbling down with the scientific realization that there is no soul to spring out of the pineal gland or the heart, sprout wings, and fly off to any second life after death. (Note that this oxymoronic phrase contains its own contradiction.) When this scientific understanding gains wide currency, all of God’s popes and all of God’s priests will never put Humpty Dumpty together again. (Apologies to Lewis Carroll)

Even if there were a soul and an afterlife, however, they would only edify the most feeble, the most spiritually impoverished, the poorest in spirit—that is, the Catholic theologians—as Albert Einstein suggests in the last sentence of the following insightful passage: It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously.  I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere … Science has been charged with undermining morality but the charge is unjust.  A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.—ALBERT EINSTEIN, Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine

Your Credo was invented in the 4th century by a group of your predecessors sitting around a table. These bishops were, by any objective standard, maximally unenlightened men. They knew nothing about Newton’s law of gravity, for example, and they had never heard of a telescope. So, for them, the idea of Christ’s ascension into heaven must have seemed plausible. But you’ve been repeating this credo now for 1700 years (to what effect, one might ask?). Does your systemic policy of dogmatic obscurantism blind you to all of the cosmological discoveries made since the Council of Nicaea? Can’t you see that the idea of Christ’s ascension is now—in the 21st century—unambiguously silly and unequivocally irrelevant?

If Christ did ascend into heaven in 33 CE, as you keep insisting, he had a 2000 year head-start on the Voyager I Satellite, which was launched in 1977. With that in mind, consider the following report from the latest issue of Science News magazine (19 October, 2013): Spacecraft’s journey to interstellar space helps put the solar system in perspective.

It’s finally official: Voyager I [not Jesus Christ] has become the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, mission scientists report September 12 in Science. On August 25, 2012, the scientists say, Voyager I exited a giant invisible bubble called the heliosphere that is inflated by a torrent of subatomic particles spewing from the sun. Now the probe is surrounded almost exclusively by particles produced by other stars. But whether it’s correct to say that the probe has left the solar system depends on how you define the solar system. From my perspective, Voyager is nowhere near the edge of the solar system. says planetary scientist Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The sun continues to exert gravitational dominance out to hundreds of times the distance of Voyager I from the sun, where trillions of icy pebbles, boulders and comets orbit. For the last 36 years, Voyager has traveled an impressive 25.4 billion kilometers, but it still has a long way to go to unambiguously depart the solar system.—Andrew Grant

Voyager, over 15 billion miles from the Sun, has now cleared the Kuiper Belt. It is travelling at a velocity of 38,000 miles-an-hour, but it will need another 40,000 years to get through the Oort Cloud, which extends about one light year (or six trillion miles), and finally get unambiguously free of the Solar System. Do you theologians honestly believe that Christ has ascended beyond the Oort Cloud, at which point He would still be orders of magnitude less than an octillionth of a millimeter into what you call heaven? [And, tangentially, do you honestly believe that the story of Jonah is a divinely inspired factual account of a real historical event? If so, you are idiots! If not, you should stop abusing children by presenting it to them as God’s inerrant and infallible Word.]

Seriously, theologians, does it make any sense at all to keep on repeating an idea that is demonstrably invalid? Even if you repeat it a hundred-trillion more times over the coming centuries, will it ever do anyone any good? Why not jettison this scientifically falsified notion of a 4th century ascension and accommodate yourselves to a theology that makes at least a modicum of sense in the 21st century? Then, instead of misguiding your believers, you’d be directing them along the way to an objectively verifiable truth.

THIS BOOK IS DIVIDED INTO TWO ROUGHLY EQUAL SECTIONS:

PART ONE shows how Catholic theology renders itself extinct and irrelevant by refusing to accommodate or even to recognize the revelations of modern science. For instance, here is what scientists now know with a fair degree of certainty about our evolutionary history on earth. First and foremost: LIFE HAPPENED JUST ONCE. It cannot be said too often: All life is One! That is, and I suspect forever will be, the most profound true statement there is (Bill Bryson). It is now definitively proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the genetic code is universal: every living organism—every amoeba, every paramecium, every yeast, every slime mold, every pond scum, every fruit, every vegetable, every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree, every bacterium, every beetle, every blue whale, every mosquito, every mushroom, every man, every maggot—all are made by the ‘Quantum of Life"—the DNA molecule: the same 4 letter alphabet, the same 64 word dictionary, the same 20 amino acids.

LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor) was something less complex than a single cell—perhaps the first self-replicating, autocatalytic RNA molecule swimming in the primeval ocean nearly four billion years ago; the evolution of a permeable cellular membrane (allowing vital nutrients in and keeping harmful predators out) was a major advance in the history of life; the prokaryotes (unicellular organisms with no kernel or nucleus) were the only living things on earth for over two billion years; the evolution of the eukaryotes (unicellular organisms with a true kernel or true nucleus) between 1.5 and 2 billion years BP (Before the Present) was one of the most important events in the story, because every multicellular organism that ever lived (or is living now)—every fungus, every plant, every animal (including Jesus Christ) is constructed by the eukaryotic cell.

The Ediacarana fauna, who survived and reproduced for some 30 million years, are the first signs of multicellular life to appear in the fossil record (between 542 million and 575 million years BP). During the 50 million years of the Cambrian Explosion (488 million to 542 million BP), every major modern phylum makes its debut. The first signs of the Homo genus appear about 2 million years BP; Homo sapiens turns up about 200,000 years BP; and Homo sapiens sapiens about 100,000 years BP.

Paleogeneticists are now certain that we cannot trace our lineage to any single individual or group—but rather to 20 to 25 hominid populations, each with a complex network of sub-groups, the members of which routinely intermixed and interbred. Our direct Homo ancestors interbred with Neandertal and Denisovan populations. We can trace 2.5% of our genome (including a gene that is crucial for the proper functioning of our immune system) to our Neandertal brothers and sisters.

Catholic theologians not only obscure all this hard-won scientific knowledge: they repress and even deny it. They are still teaching vulnerable kindergartners (and even pre-schoolers) that God created man (in His own image and likeness) on one day in his present, fixed form. In the light of what we now know of our evolutionary history, this is not only an invalidated hypothesis: it is a bold-faced lie and therefore constitutes intellectual child-abuse of the greatest magnitude. There should be governmental legislation prohibiting such abuse!

[BREAKING NEWS: "Fossil could prune human family tree—Early members of Homo line may have belonged to one species."

I read this article on the very day that I submitted the final manuscript of this book. At the risk of repetition later in the text, I include the following remarks as a brief précis of my argument.

"A remarkably complete roughly 1.8-million-year-old fossil skull … adds key evidence to the controversial idea that early members of the Homo genus [our human ancestors] evolved as one species living in both western Asia and Africa." A 1.8-million-year-old-skull and other hominid fossils unearthed at a site called Dmanisi, in the nation of Georgia, indicate that a single species of early Homo lived in Africa and Asia at that time. (From an article in Science News Magazine [16 November 2013] summarizing the results of research reported in the October 18 Science).

Rather than accommodate the incontestable fact of evolution, Catholic theologians continue to argue (in 2013) that God the Father Almighty – through His Word, Jesus Christ — created a man and a woman on one day in their present forms: the man, out of a handful of dust (Presto!) and the woman (Abracadabra!) out of a rib in the man’s side. This argument, in the light of the fossil finds at Dmanisi (and literally millions of others), is not only prodigiously silly; but, when it is coercively programmed into the minds of a captive audience of kindergartners (and even preschoolers) as infallible truth, it is also prodigiously venomous and prodigiously abusive.]

Skip just one generation of Hitlerian propaganda and the Catholic religion will be as dead as a doornail. That’s why its theologians will never keep their hands off the children!

ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES (2012-2013)

There is, moreover, the abysmal ignorance of the god who Catholic theologians claim is the creator of the universe. Consider, by way of contrast, a few up-to-date indications of this ignorance: (1) Research published 14 December 2012 in Science describes how a black hole’s chaotic surroundings and entwined magnetic fields can launch jets of radiation and particles moving at nearly light-speed. (2) The Voyager I space-craft team announces that the satellite, having crossed the termination shock and the heliopause, is now in interstellar space; and that, at its current speed, it will take 28,000 years to clear the Oort Cloud. (3) NASA announces that their Van Allan Probes (launched in August, 2012) have measured a third radiation ring forming between the two main Van Allan Belts. This new ring – the first time scientists have witnessed a third radiation belt – lasted from September 3rd to October 1st. (4) In late 2011, astronomers with the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany announce that they have discovered an odd object (G2) with three times the mass of the earth approaching the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*. They calculate that G2 will reach its closest approach to Sagittarius A* starting in the summer of 2013. (5) NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft 6 March 2009 with the goal of finding earth-like planets. While operational, Kepler unveiled about 3,500 candidate planets around other suns; scientists have confirmed 156 worlds. (6) Russian astronomers announce that Comet ISON (C/2012S1) came within about 280 million miles of our sun. (7) A complex string of engineering techniques put the Curiosity Rover on the surface of Mars 6 August 2012. Landing on the Red Planet was itself an impressive feat, but what followed was even better. In a May (2013) Science article, Curiosity Project scientists made the following announcement: Chemical analysis identified all of the main elemental ingredients for life: sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and carbon. So, with its first drilled sample, Curiosity showed that Mars once harbored a habitable environment. (8) The European Agency’s Planck satellite was launched in May, 2009, and the team of scientists released its first all-sky CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) results in March 2013. According to the newest map of the CMB, the universe comprises nearly 5% normal matter (like stars, gas, planets, and people), nearly 27% dark matter (the cosmic glue), and a bit more than 68% dark energy (the mysterious force that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe). (9) Astronomers have long been puzzled about the source of cosmic rays. They knew that if you found gamma rays with a specific energy, then you’ve found cosmic rays. In February 2013, scientists reported in the journal Science that they have now discovered this energy signature – thus proving that supernovae are a source of cosmic rays. (10) At 9:22 on February 15, a meteoroid exploded when it was 14 miles above sea level, and the resulting shock wave broke windows, set off car alarms, and surprised hundreds of thousands of people on the ground. This meteoroid explosion reminds us that earth is not isolated from other objects and events in space. Rocky objects collide with our planet all the time, and sometimes – as in 2013 – they can cause significant damage. This fact is why NASA has a Near-Earth Object (NEO) program, the ultimate aim of which is to capture an NEO set to cross earth’s path and redirect it to a lunar orbit.

Does it make even a glimmer of sense to continue believing in a god who thought that the earth is flat and who was ignorant of the existence of the entire western hemisphere; but who (according to Catholic theologians) nevertheless created everything that astronomers now see in the universe (including 21-billion-solar-mass black holes) OUT OF NOTHING (ex nihilo) in six days 6000 years ago simply by saying Be? Do not the revelations of modern astronomy render belief in such a fantastic god unambiguously preposterous?

PART TWO describes what should be the extinction of Roman Catholicism: the whole of Catholic theology depends on the historicity of an Adam and Eve who actually lived in a Magic Garden 6000 years ago. Catholic theologians are still—in the 21st century—teaching kindergartners (and even preschoolers) that this Adam and Eve are the first parents of every human being who ever lived 200,000 years ago, of the seven billion people who are now living on every continent of the earth, and who ever will live 200,000 years from now. These first parents, the children are told, committed a sin and thus fell from God’s friendship. This Original Sin was transmitted by the semen during sexual intercourse to every single one of their descendants—that is, to every baby who is ever born anywhere on the planet. The consequence of this inheritance is eternal damnation in the fires of Hell. But God is not without mercy, the children are told. He will send a Savior (1/3rd of Himself) named Jesus Christ in 4004 years: He will shed his blood and thus atone for all the inherited original sins and all the personal sins of all human beings in all places at all times. He will thus redeem the entire human race and restore its friendship with God. Hallelujah!

Sometimes, however, as T.H. Huxley remarked, a beautiful theory is killed by a stubborn little fact. In this instance, the ineludible fact is the Darwinian theory of evolution—a theory now supported by a convergence of evidence from physics, chemistry, neuroscience, radiometric dating, mass extinction, the geographic distribution of species, geophysics, histology, cell biology, anatomy, physiology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, genetics, population genetics, molecular biology, DNA, and many other areas of science. Evolution proves beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt that there was NO historical Adam and Eve who committed an Original sin and passed it on to all their multitudinous offspring. There was no Fall and therefore no need for any Universal Redeemer—specifically, no need for Jesus Christ, the supposed incarnation of 1/3rd of a Hocus-Pocus Phantasm whose existence has never been demonstrated by a scintilla of empirical evidence. (This felicitous phrase is Thomas Jefferson’s.)

With no need for a Jesus Christ to redeem a humanity that never fell, the entire mythic structure of Catholicism collapses. The center cannot hold, things fall apart, and the Catholic religion expires, not with a bang, but a whimper. (Thanks to Yeats and Eliot for these phrases.)

Today—in the year 2013—Catholic theologians are still teaching 2nd graders that evolution is not an objectively verifiable fact, that Adam and Eve were an actual historical couple, and that the Genesis account of the direct creation of man in one day—in the image and likeness of God—is literally true. In short, they are lying and thus mentally abusing children. They should not be allowed to go on doing so! It is finally time for the Catholic God to die peacefully and fade away into the misty oblivion of all other man-made gods.

CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS: THE GREAT FOUNDATIONAL LIE WHICH SUPPORTS ALL THE OTHERS IS THE MIS-PRESENTATION OF YAHWEH-GOD-CHRIST:—THROUGH GROTESQUE SLANTING BY SELECTION, YOU MIS-PRESENT A CANNIBALISTIC, INFANTICIDAL, PATRICIDAL, MATRICIDAL, FILIACIDAL TRIBAL DEITY AS A GOD OF INFINITE PITY, LOVE, MERCY, AND COMPASSION

Far from being the God of Love and Mercy you Catholic theologians extol from the pulpit, the Tyrant of the Old Testament is a savage and Barbaric Slave-Monger. In Exodus, for example, the very next laws after the Decalogue establish His rules for slavery and murder: Now, says Yahweh/Christ to Moses, if the slave be married and have children, they may be torn apart and separated; if the slave loves his wife and children and does not want to be torn away from them, HIS MASTER SHALL BORE HIS EARS THROUGH WITH AN AWL, and hold him in perpetual slavery. A man may SELL HIS OWN DAUGHTER TO BE A SLAVE. (Exodus 21: 7) If a child of Yahweh kills his slave, he shall not be punished, FOR THE SLAVE IS HIS MONEY." (Exodus 21:21)

You theologians select an Old Testament reading for every mass you celebrate throughout the year and call it the word of God (verbum Domini); but you studiously and consistently omit any and all passages of such an execrable nature. Thus, as always, slanting by selection, you deliberately lie to your congregations.

Yahweh/Christ’s bloody code of law—"with its key-stone lex talionis—life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exodus 21:23-25)—is not the law of civilized justice, but that of primitive vengeance: The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meets him, he shall slay him. (Numbers 35:19) There is no civil or criminal court known among the barbarian children of a Barbarous God. Not surprisingly, He commands the murder of harmless old women: THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE! (Exodus 22:18) This one sentence alone totally discredits the whole Hebrew Bible as the Word of God.

In a passage from Europe and Elsewhere, Mark Twain provides an apposite commentary on the historically substantiated work of Catholic theologians and their God: During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such things as witches and never had been. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch—the priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything.

The most diabolic of Yahweh’s divine laws are those commanding His Chosen People to cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, and ordaining living human sacrifice. His command to Abraham to murder Isaac (or to be willing to murder Isaac) is too well-known to need further comment here. Suffice it to say that a God who would command a father to sacrifice his own son to prove his faith and the poor obsessed fool who would obey such a heathenish command are alike beneath contempt.

It is worth looking a bit more closely at the story of Jephthah’s sacrifice of his own daughter in Judges: 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. (Judges 21: 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.

Jephthah, in making this human sacrifice, "did with her according to his vow which he had vowed: . . . . and it was a custom [marginalia, ordinance] in Israel (11:39), thus testifying to the historical fact that human sacrifice was a customary thing in Israel, was established by divine ordinance," and was practiced for ages among these barbarian people.

Here is the ordinance which commands these sacrificial murders: "No devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto Yawheh of all that he hath, both of man and beast . . . . shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto Yawheh. None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death." (Leviticus 27: 2-29)

The editors of the Biblical Encyclopedia (New York, 1907) offer their exegetical wisdom: "Devoted—anything which by the law belonged to the Lord could neither be sold… nor be redeemed by the vower… . Surely death, in extreme cases, where death was proper and right, and there was no alternative."

In the Second Book of Samuel, Yahweh vengefully sends one of his frequent famines upon His Holy Land (flowing, we are told by the theologians, with milk and honey)—a three-year drought during which thousands of chosen babies starve to death. Finally, David inquires of his All-Merciful God, What is this famine all about? Yahweh replies that it is sent as a punishment for Saul, and for his bloody house. Thereupon, David searches about for a form of sacrifice to conjure away the wrath of his Omnibenevolent God. Struck with a flash of insight, David 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 entreated for the land" (2 Samuel 21:8-14). Glutted with the butchery of human sacrifice to him, Yahweh graciously ends the famine. [Note by the way, that the Great King David—whom God holds in his heart of hearts—is an infanticidal maniac. Catholic theologians have found ways to rationalize his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah—BUT THEY EXCLUDE ALTOGETHER ANY MENTION OF THE FACT THAT DAVID IS ALSO A SUB-HUMAN CHILD-KILLER—AND THUS AGAIN, SLANTING BY SELECTION, THEY CONSCIOUSLY LIE TO THEIR CONGREGATIONS.]

_Rizpah mourns over the rotting carcasses of her two sons for several months, fighting off the scavenger birds and beasts, and disobeying Yahweh’s repeated commands to EAT HER DEAD SONS.

Yahweh time and again imposes CANNIBALISM of the most revolting kind: "YOU SHALL EAT the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat (Leviticus, 36:29). AND YOU SHALL EAT the fruit of your own body, the flesh of your sons and your daughters (Deuteronomy 38:53-57). AND I WILL CAUSE THEM TO EAT the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they SHALL EAT every one the flesh of his friend (Jeremiah 19:9). And again: THE FATHERS SHALL EAT the sons in the midst of thee, and THE SONS SHALL EAT THEIR FATHERS." (Ezekiel 5:10)

The Bible exegetes mentioned above ratify this prediction: LITERALLY FULFILLED

Many other instances of cannibalism are related in verbum Domini: In Lamentations 4:10, for example, The hands of the pitiful women have sodden (boiled) their own children: they were their meat.

In the Second Book of Kings, the God who is Love sends another death-dealing famine upon his own Chosen People. Among a whole slew, there is one particularly shocking story. As a King of Israel is passing by upon the wall, he hears the complaint of a grief-stricken woman: This woman [indicating another woman beneath the wall] said unto me, Give me thy son, that we may eat him today, 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 your son, that we may eat him: and she has hidden her son 2 Kings 6:26-29).

After hearing this horrific story, the King says: Behold, this evil is of Yahweh! Perhaps no truer words were ever spoken!

You Catholic theologians, after reading these divine precepts and examples of God’s behavior, how can you avoid the query and response of Job’s wife: Do you still retain your integrity? CURSE GOD, AND DIE! How can you teach your congregations to pray: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Wouldn’t it be more truthful to teach them: Our Cannibal-Ogre, who art in hell, desecrated be thy name! Why, slanting by selection," do you continue to propagate LIES about your biblical God? Perhaps because HE STILL ENJOINS LITERAL CANNIBALISM UPON THOSE OF YOU WHO TAKE HIM AT HIS WORD: Except you eat of the flesh of the Son of man, you have no life in you. (John 6:53 and following)

FURTHER EVIDENCE OF HOW CATHOLIC THEOLOGIANS MIS-PRESENT AND MIS-CHARACTERIZE THEIR GOD OF MERCY, PITY, PEACE, AND LOVE

Merciful Yahweh massacres thousands of His own Chosen People—arbitrarily and capriciously. For instance, when the two sons of Aaron put the wrong kind of fire into their incense-burners, there comes forth fire from Yahweh and devours them. The compassionate Deity tells their father not to mourn for his murdered sons, lest you die, and lest wrath come upon all the people. (Leviticus 10:1-6) The son of a widow swears, and Yahweh orders the congregation to stone him to death. (Leviticus 24:11-14). The people murmur, saying: Who shall give us flesh to eat? When the loving Deity hears of this complaint, His anger is kindled, and the fire of Yahweh burns among them throughout the camp. (Numbers 11:1) And later, for a like offense, He smites His people with a very great plague.