And The Good News Is…Genocide Is Okay, As Long As It’s Been Divinely Rubber-Stamped?

Cross-posted @ the Atheist Oasis
I’m sure we’ve all heard of the Good News Club – those purveyors of putrid purloined mythology. It’s enough to gag the more rational among us.

This week’s gem is about…advocating genocide

The Good News Club, an after-school club sponsored by a group called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), is offering bible lessons to public school children that include the biblical story of God telling Saul to kill the godless Amalekites.

In the bible, 1 Samuel (15:3) says: "Now go, attack the Amalekites, and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."

So it’s not enough to wipe out everyone down to the last infant, but their livestock is also under suspicion of…what? ‘Godlessness?’.

However, some people are concerned that this story will teach genocide to children, as various faiths have tried to use it to justify violent acts, reports the U.K. Guardian.

Insert ‘Abramanic’ in between ‘various’ and ‘faiths’. Oh, but wait: we can’t offend the little weirdoes, can we?

On their web site, the CEF says: "As with all CEF ministries, the purpose of Good News Club is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living."

Polluting their brains, you mean.

There over 3,000 clubs in public schools, since a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, which said that the Good News Clubs can meet in public schools in the United States after school hours on the same terms as other community groups. The kids are not required to go to the Good News Clubs and need parental permission to attend.

One can only hope that decent intelligent parents will say ‘no’.

Beyond the biblical teaching, are follow up questions that disturb critics.

‘Beyond the biblical teaching’? This is the problem with accommodating these throwbacks: the bible is a load of shit, plain and simple.

The CEF instruction manual reportedly states: "The Amalekites had heard about Israel's true and living God many years before, but they refused to believe in him. The Amalekites refused to believe in God and God had promised punishment."

Translation: the head priests made some shit up, and stoked up the rabble to go after the malcontents. The Amalekites were Semitic, after all.

"If you are asked to do something, how much of it do you need to do before you can say, 'I did it!'? If only Saul had been willing to seek God for strength to obey!"

Translation: if only old Saul had been a teeny weeny more psychotic!

A review question in the text adds: "How did King Saul only partly obey God when he attacked the Amalekites? [He did not completely destroy as God had commanded, he kept the king and some of the animals alive.]"

This is one of those items that I find truly frightening about religious people. Many many years ago (when I was studying the bible, and was giving some thought to actually ‘converting, another long story in and of itself), I started having some serious ethical doubts about the ‘holy’ book, specifically about the slaughter of the Canaanites. So I called my BAC buddy, and asked him. “Oh,” he tossed off casually, “that’s easy. The Canaanites were people of loose morality – they had too much sex with complete strangers.” (That’s not verbatim, loose paraphrase, but close enough.) I got off the phone, thought about it, and recoiled inwardly in horror. Because it’s a lousy excuse.

In the case of the Amalekites, the Talmud/Torah talks about this tribe constantly attacking and assaulting the Israelites on a regular basis. So this ‘hey gawd told us to’ is just a cover for exterminating the bad guys.

If they really were, that is. Historical analysis and comparisons between the facts and the fables show that the Talmud is a load of shit. Almost everything in it is wrong. It’s a chronicle of a bunch of barbarians patting themselves on their collective backs and making up a lot of fish stories.

Or to put it in context: it’s all mishegas.

Till the next post, then.