The Freedom From Religion Foundation presents
The ABC's of the Bible
Compiled by Ruth Hurmence Green
Independent reading of the bible is a traumatic experience for someone taught from childhood that the bible is a "book about love." Side by side with some morally defensible admonishments, one finds repeated instructions to hate and to kill. The Mosaic law, that commands the reader to kill the child who curses its father and mother and to stone the woman not a virgin when she marries, was upheld by Jesus, "every jot and tittle."
The "loving" gods of both the Old and New Testaments emerge as mean and vengeful, possessed, as Bertrand Russell said, of "an uneasy vanity."
The apologist for the bible, who insists that it is just an occasional passage that is a problem, overlooks the avalanche of mass murders commanded and perpetrated by the biblical Lord. Live burials, beatings, burnings, cannibalism, buying and selling of human beings, and the chopping off of heads, hands, feet, ears and plucking out of eyes all fill the pages of the "Good Book."
Here is a listing of bible images. When you read it you will know why Thomas Paine called the bible "a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize." You will know why kind and discerning individuals in our society object to the bible's use in public ceremonies. You will understand why educational organizations such as the Freedom From Religion Foundation are endeavoring to work for the absolute separation of state and church.
Anne Nicol Gaylor
Freedom From Religion Foundation
| A |
A delicate woman doing evil to her children and eating them
A fair woman without discretion resembling a jewel of gold in a swine's snout
A human body wallowing in blood on the highway
Abandoning orphans
An angel killing 185,000 warriors in one night
Angels consorting with women of earth
Asking your neighbors to help you stone a stubborn son to death
|
| B |
Bears devouring 42 children
Beating slaves to death in stages
Beating your child black and blue
Boiling and eating your son
Breaking and chopping up human bones and seasoning human flesh, flaying flesh off bones
Burning books, denouncing science, closing mouths, becoming fools
Burning women accused of witchcraft and men accused of wizardry
Burning your only daughter alive to fulfill a promise
Burning your son as a sacrifice
Burning 250 princes alive
Burying a criminal's wife and children alive
Buying a wife with 200 male foreskins
Buying your brother to be your slave
Buying your rape victim for your wife
|
| C |
Castrating men for the Lord
Chopping off heads, hands, feet, ears and plucking out eyes
Circumcising a child with a sharp stone
Circumcising thousands at one time
Circumcising yourselves to the Lord and taking away the foreskins of your heart
Cursing a tree and three cities
Cursing children and animals
Cursing people with blindness, leprosy, hemorrhoids, consumption, madness, sickness, starvation, thirst, pestilence
Cutting up a woman's body and distributing the pieces
|
| D |
Dashing little ones against the stones
Delivering people up to the torturer
Designing an eternal torture chamber for most people of the world and describing their screams
Devils tearing peoples' bodies to get out, jumping into pigs, talking and walking about, turning into snakes
Discovering women's secret parts
Dividing the prey, to every man a damsel or two
Drinking poison, handling snakes, jabbering nonsense
Drinking the blood of the slain
Drinking your own urine and eating your own excrement. Urinating on public walls
Drowning women, men, children, embryos and and animals by inches
|
| E |
Eating human flesh and drinking human blood
Eating the flesh of your own arm, the flesh of your children and of a friend
Eyes consuming away in their holes and tongues consuming away in their mouths
Exorcising devils from people's bodies
|
| F |
Fastening human beings to trees
Filling the altars and courtyards with blood of sacrificial animals
Filling the courts with the slain
Filling the sword of the Lord with blood
Forbidding men to touch the bodies of women and the dead
Forbidding women to learn, adorn themselves, speak in church, teach or visit friends
Forcing a woman to marry seven brothers
|
| G |
Giving your children away
Gods impregnating human beings
|
| H |
Hacking a man to death
Hanging up heads against the sun. Putting children's heads in baskets. Nailing a head to the ground
Hating, abandoning and delivering your family up to authorities. Being rude to your mother and sisters
Hating this life and this world to gain the next. Despising your body
Having repeated sexual intercourse in public view with your neighbor's wives and your fathers' wives
Having sexual relations with your wife and her mother
Healing with spit and magic and oil and laying on of hands, faith, a brass snake, aprons, handkerchiefs, prayer, by dipping into a pool, a garment hem, a lump of figs, and shadow.
Hiding in vineyards to capture girls as they dance
Hiring a hitman to kill your brother
Human entrails gushing out
|
| I |
Ignorance being elevated above wisdom. People being told to become as children
Incest: raping your sister; impregnating your daughers; marrying your sister; impregnating your daughter-in-law
Inflicting childbirth pain as punishment
|
| K |
Kidnapping virgins for sex partners
Killing a child to punish the father
Killing all your grandchildren and nephews
Killing all your servants
Killing a man's children and replacing them with another set
Killing everyone breathing
Killing man, woman, infant, suckling
Killing your brothers
Killing your enemies with swords, hailstones, slingshots, arrows, and by crushing, fiery serpents and hornet stings, flaying off their skin and whipping them to death with an animal bone and an ax goad
Killing 50,000 innocent persons because a few looked into a box
|
| L |
Letting your neighbors help you stone and burn your children alive
Lions breaking bones of husbands, wives and children
|
| M |
Making innocent pay for misdeeds of the guilty
Making people disobey so you can punish them
Making the sun stand still
Making wives barren, ravishing them and giving them to someone else, all to punish their husbands
Making your child "pass through the fire"
Mountains melting with blood; rivers and moon turning to blood; the sword of the Lord filled with blood; shedding of blood for redemption; pour out blood by the force of the sword
Mutliating the dead
|
| O |
Obtaining slaves by buying the heathen, taking captives, buying a brother
Offering your virgin daughters to perverts
One thousand women belonging to one man
|
| P |
Pimping for your wife
Plotting the death of your paramour's husband
Punishing a whole people for one person's sin
Purifying virgins with 12 months of perfume and oil
Putting a knife to your child's throat
Putting babies to the sword
Putting brothers, companions and neighbors to the sword
Putting the sword to all the firstborn of an entire country
Putting your feet on captives' necks
|
| R |
Refusing to heal a child because of its race
Refusing to share your children as food for friends
Revilling and abusing the sick, handicapped and deformed
Ripping up pregnant women
|
| S |
Sacrificing human beings to gods
Seducing your own father and kinsman
Selling your daughter into slavery
Selling a whole family to pay a debt
Selling yourself into slavery
Sending your wife and child into the desert alone
Separating oneself from those of another doctrine
Seven women taking hold of one man
Sexually abusing women to death
Shedding blood for atonement for the soul
Slaying old and young, maids and little children and women, but sparing the men
Slavishly obeying husbands, parents, masters, state, gods
Spreading excrement on human faces; spitting in your child's face; washing your feet in blood
Stoning and burning whole families
Stoning women for being rape victims
Stoning and burning women for not being virgins
Stoning your brothers, son, daughter, and wife for worshipping differently from yourself
Stoning a man for picking up sticks
Stoning a youth for blasphemy
Stripping women of their clothing and jewelry
|
| T |
Taking women and children as spoils of war and dividing up the virgins and babies
Tearing off women's breasts
Ten virgins awaiting one bridegroom
Throwing a woman from a window to be run over by horses and eaten by dogs
Throwing babies into a river
Thrusting people through and stabbing them in the belly with a concealed dagger
Torturing animals by hanging them, tying them together and setting their tails on fire, drowning them, and afflicting them with plagues
Torturing victims with briers, thorns, harrows, saws, passing through fire, the brick kiln, plagues, eternal fire, frogs, lice, flies, thirst, hunger, boils, and sores
"Trying out" virgins
Turning a used woman into the streets at will
|
| U |
Using a virgin to give an old man heat
|
| W |
Warning women not to become mothers
Wild beasts, fowl, dogs and swords devouring flesh
Wiping out whole cities with napalm or war
Women kissing men's feet and drying them with their hair
|
| Z |
Zapping innocents--throughout. |