God's Idea of a Righteous Man, part 2

In part 2, we'll get a look at some more of God's best friends. First up: Jacob.

His story begins in chapter 25 of Genesis. Esau comes home from work one day, famished, and asks for some stew. Jacob refuses to give it to him unless he sells his birthright. Esau is too thick-headed to say, "Screw you! I'll get my own food." Instead, he agrees, and thus Jacob acquires all the rights of the first-born son--a very big deal in those days. Jacob, a favorite of God's, is revealed as a trickster (and Esau as an idiot).

This trait is reinforced in chapter 27, when Isaac is on his deathbed and requests that Esau bring him a meal and receive his blessings. Jacob disguises himself as Esau, and Isaac, who is blind, is fooled; Jacob receives the blessings meant for Esau. The rest of his story relates the various ways in which God blesses Jacob, essentially rewarding him for being a cheating, conniving, duplicitous liar. (I could write a whole blog on this dysfunctional family, and may do so in the future.)

By the time we get down to the Hebrews as a nation, we are faced with people who bitch and moan the whole time they are being rescued from their captors. The more power they gain, the more cruel they become, wreaking destruction and bloodshed upon everyone around them--exactly the sort of behavior one expects from godly people, right? Moses, in Numbers 31, commands the genocide of the entire Midianite race. He commands that all the men, boys, and married women be killed and the virgin girls kept as concubines and wives for the Israelite men. This is the man of whom the Bible says, "Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth." (Num. 12:3) Do humble people generally go around slaughtering children, babies, and pregnant women? If you were a god, and had the power to choose one person upon whom to bestow your blessings, would you choose a man like Moses? No, because you have higher moral standards than the God of the Bible. A guy like Moses you would put in the psych ward of the nearest maximum-security prison.

David is another man held up as an example of someone you'd want your daughter to marry. Christians just can't get enough of him, mainly because Jesus supposedly was descended from him (impossible since the line of David died out in the Babylonian captivity). He is proclaimed to have been a wonderful, great, and righteous man--a reputation he fails to live up to.

2 Samuel 11 relates the famous story of David and Bathsheba. David lusted after this beautiful woman, but she just happened to be married to Uriah. But kings could do as they wished, and so he had Bathsheba brought to him. As the result of their liaison, she became pregnant, at which point David tried his utmost to cover his tracks. He urged Uriah to go home to her, but Uriah refused, preferring to stay with his soldiers on the battlefield. So David did what any decent, upstanding man of God would do--he ordered that Uriah be sent to the front of the battle, where fighting was fiercest; his soldiers were then to withdraw, leaving him exposed so he would be killed. This is exactly what happened, and in such manner David acquired Bathsheba. We are told, in verse 27, that what David had done displeased the Lord. It would have been nice if he had said so before all this went down. BibleGod is not exactly Johnny-on-the-spot, is he? At any rate, chapter 12 relates how God is very cross, indeed, and decides to punish David.... Well, sort of. He punishes David by killing his infant son, while Nathan assures him that "God has put away your sin; you shall not die." Does anyone in their right mind think it is fair to kill a baby for his father's criminal behavior?

Elisha the prophet was another of God's chosen ones. When a group of children made fun of his bald head, he cursed them in the name of God, whereupon two bears came out of the woods and shredded them to bits. (2 Kings 2:23) I'm pretty sure that if someone set their pet bear on a group of children, he'd be put in prison, not praised as a wonderful man of God. As usual, Christians have it all backwards.

All of these stories raise the question of why God is so hopeless when it comes to hand-picking people to carry out his will and be his earthly representatives. Being omniscient and all, he would have known ahead of time that these guys were jerks. Out of all the people in the entire human race, could he not find anyone better than these people? Yet, despite their crimes against humanity, they have been deemed as "righteous men of God" by generations of Christians. I posit that God must not know right from wrong, or good from evil, or he would not have tolerated these men's behavior any more than we would. In fact, the more one compares the behavior of these storybook heroes to the behavior of the god they worshiped, the more it becomes obvious that the god was simply invented by people to look, think, and behave exactly as they did. The only difference between him and them is that he had super powers and they didn't. Too bad he lacked the power to tell good guys from bad guys.