God Is Hardcore

In a comment to a previous posting, pepperbeast said:

If I were a bible-believing sort of a person, I’d probably mention that God makes the sun rise on the good and the evil, and the rain fall on the just and the unjust.

[I was going to reply to this in the comments thread, but it turned lengthy and is interesting, so I’ll make it into a new post.]

Actually, if you were a bible-believing person, you’d be aware of the myriad examples of God punishing the wicked/rewarding the righteous that appear in both the old and new testaments.

So you’d pretty much have to mention that God appears to mostly make the sun rise on the good and the evil, and pretty much make the rain fall on the just and the unjust, but he also at various points in the good book: Kills everyone on the planet except for one family, destroys an entire city for being wicked, kills Onan for sleeping with his brothers wife (or for sleeping with his brothers wife and trying not to get her pregnant – I’m not sure of His motives on that one), sends plagues and devastation upon Egypt, sends a plague against the Israelites who ate flesh, turns Miiriam into a leper for a week, causes the Earth to open up and swallow various men (and their wives and children) because the men were rebellious, kills 250 men by fire, kills another 14,700 men by plague, kills many Israelites by Flying Serpents (!), kills another 24,000 by plague, afflicts the Philistines with tumors in their “secret parts” for stealing the Ark of the Covenant, kills 70 men for looking inside the Ark, kills another 70,000 men dead in Israel via Pestilence, kills 50 men by “Fire from Heaven”, blinds various Syrians, and kills 185,000 men via “An Angel of the Lord”.

And that’s just the stuff that the Bible attributes directly to God – I’m leaving out the stuff where God tells Joshua and Judah and various Israelites and other miscellanious people to go smite people in His name.

I don’t think one can realistically claim to believe in the words of the bible and take a “God does not interfere” stance.