Monday School: The Bible & Child Sacrifice

Human Sacrifice has been a part of biblical history as long as there has been a biblical history to document. Killing people in the name of God (despite it being against a certain Commandment) seems perfectly all right if it pleases your Lord. The Bible has many such cases of it, especially within the Old Testament that has numerious stories of animal and human sacrifice. Within the book itself, it describes how God likes the aroma of burning flesh. Animal sacrifice occurs more often than human, but both occur all in the name of a God who supposedly loves you and is all good. (Huh?)

The most well known example of this comes from the first book, when Abraham is asked to sacrifice his own son by God Himself:

“Take your son, your only son – yes, Isaac, whom you love so much – and go to the land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will point out to you.” (Genesis 22:1-18)

So now only is Abraham asked to kill his only child, who even God knows he loves likely more than he loves himself, he is asked to do so in the most cruel and inhumane way possible: burned alive.

I don’t know about you, but this is seriously fucked up.

As a father of two boys, I have a seriously problem with this story as it clearly contradicts with the whole idea of an all loving God. If such an all loving being existed, that entity would value all live and the love someone has for their son. Not here, God asks Abraham to not only kill his only son, but to make sure he suffers before his passing. No clean, painless death. He must suffer to the extreme. I’m sorry but when I think of this request, all loving is the last thing that comes to mind.

So what does Abraham do? He does as he is told and takes his own son up on a mountain and builds an altar upon which to burn him. He even lies to his son and has him help build the altar. Abraham then ties his son to the altar and prepares to complete his duty. At the very last possible moment, God tells him this was just a test of his faith and that he is to abort.

This is the part that apologists of the Bible try to use to convince themselves that God is all loving. Bullshit. Making Abraham go 90% of the way and stop him at the last minute was in itself cruel.

Another sick part of this story was that God still wanted to smell some burnt flesh so he tells Abraham to burn a ram, which he did without question. I wonder how many members of PETA are aware of these passages?

Even though Abraham didn’t kill his son, it is still an incredibly cruel and evil thing to do. Just the idea of setting everything up must have been torture to the old man, and how about his son? Being strapped to the altar and nearly killed in the name of God. Coming that close to death traumatizes someone, and do you think his son would ever help his old man set any alter up ever again after that incident? Would you?

An all loving God would not have forced neither Abraham or his son to go through what was a very cruel exercise just to test faith. According to the same book, God was all knowing as well. If this entity was capable of knowing everything as well, why was such a test even necessary to begin with? Another unexplainable contradiction.

Could you imagine if Abraham did that today? What do you think the police or the ‘good Christians’ have responded of someone tied their own son to an alter to sacrifice his child to God? I know how society would react, his son would be sent to a foster home by child services and Abraham would spend the next ten to twenty years in prison being someone’s bitch.

It amazes me how Christians see this story as a sign of God’s love. There is no love here, just pure unadulterated evil.

Then again, this is not the only time God makes someone kill their own child. Unlike Abraham, Jephthah is not let off the hook as he burns his own daughter to death for God as detailed in Judges 11:29-40 NLT:

“So Jephthah led his army against the Ammonites, and the LORD gave him victory. He thoroughly defeated the Ammonites from Aroer to an area near Minnith – twenty towns – and as far away as Abel-keramim. Thus Israel subdued the Ammonites. When Jephthah returned home to Mizpah, his daughter – his only child – ran out to meet him, playing on a tambourine and dancing for joy. When he saw her, he tore his clothes in anguish. “My daughter!” he cried out. “My heart is breaking! What a tragedy that you came out to greet me. For I have made a vow to the LORD and cannot take it back.” And she said, “Father, you have made a promise to the LORD. You must do to me what you have promised, for the LORD has given you a great victory over your enemies, the Ammonites. But first let me go up and roam in the hills and weep with my friends for two months, because I will die a virgin.” “You may go,” Jephthah said. And he let her go away for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never have children. When she returned home, her father kept his vow, and she died a virgin. So it has become a custom in Israel for young Israelite women to go away for four days each year to lament the fate of Jephthah’s daughter.”

So even though God backed out for Abraham’s son, he didn’t show Jephtahah’s daughter the same love this time around. Could you imagine the anger and hostility if someone did that today, killing their child and saying it was done in the name of God?

You don’t have to, because it happened several years ago… in Texas. When she was first arrested, word leaked that Andrea Yates claimed to have killed her five children because she claimed that God had told her to do it. Looking at the examples listed above, God apparently has a history of asking this of people, but how did society respond to this woman who had drowned her five children (Noah, John, Paul, Luke, and Mary) in the bathtub of her Clearlake area home in Houston, Texas, on June 20, 2001. They declared her insane and had her sentenced to remain locked up for decades.

This is not the only time this has happened:

– Sherry Marie Delker murdered her six year old daughter Samantha on March 29, 2002 in Austintown, Ohio. Mrs. Delker admitted to running her daughter down with her car outside a church. Police said she wanted to send her daughter to a “better place.” Sherry Delker is now serving twenty years to life in prison.

– Magdalena Lopez murdered her two sons Antonio and Erik on July 19, 2005 in Dyer, Indiana. Police reported that she beat her two sons to death with a ten-pound dumbbell because she thought they’d be better off in heaven. Both deaths were caused by massive skull fractures. Mrs. Lopez was quoted as saying, “They’re in a much better place now.”

– Marilyn Lemak murdered her three children on March 4, 1999 in their Naperville, Illinois home. Mrs. Lemak feed the children peanut butter laced with antidepressants, laid them down to sleep, then smothered them with her hands. She wanted to kill the children and herself so they could be reunited in a happier place. “She perceived herself as a loving mother tenderly taking her children into another existence,” stated psychiatrist Philip Resnick.

– On September 3, 1998, Khoua Her strangled her six children in St. Paul, Minnesota. She then hanged herselfin a failed suicide attempt. Khoua had become a Christian after immigrating to the United States, and thought she would be reunited with the children in the afterlife. Prosecuter Chris Wilton stated, “I know that she did this for religious reasons.” Khoua Her was sentenced to fifty years in prison.

– Christina Marie Riggs smothered her two children Justin and Shelby with a pillow in Sherwood, Arkansas. She then attempted suicide by swallowing twenty-eight Elavil tablets and injecting enough potassium chloride to kill five people. Incredibly, she survived. Although the motivation for this crime appears to be the unhappy circumstances of Mrs. Riggs life, there is evidence that her religious beliefs as a minimum made the crime easier to commit. She requested and received the death penalty, then fought for her right to die. From death row, she told an interviewer, “I’ll be with my children and with God. I’ll be where there’s no more pain. Maybe I’ll find some peace.” She was executed by lethal injection outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on May 3rd of 2000. In her last statement she proclaimed, “Now I can be with my babies, as I always intended.”

There are countless other examples of people who used their ‘faith’ as the primary motivation to execute their children. In these examples listed above, twenty-four children were murdered by people who assumed they were doing something they thought would please the Lord, just like Jephthah did to his daughter. How could an entity that people assume is all loving allow such carnage to go on in their name? The answer to this question is quite simple: because there is no all loving God to stop it. The entity in question does not exist.

These people killed innocent children, because they were spoon feed a delusion that led to their eventual snap with reality. While I do understand that people do need to accept responsibility for their own actions, one cannot stand back and truly claim that organized religion and the stories of child sacrifice didn’t play a hand in these tragic events. These people read stories about burning children and how it pleased their Lord (Ezekiel 21:33-37) then turn around and do their own act in an attempt to so something they assumed might be equally pleasing to their Lord.

As a father myself, I am horrified by this lack of respect for human life. I love my sons, more than I love myself, and I would never, ever consider harming them… let alone taking their lives. Just the idea of it makes me sick to my stomach.

On the first page of his new book titled ‘God, No! Signs you may already be an atheist and other magical tales’, Penn Jillette (from the famous duo Penn & Teller) states the following:

“If God (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child – would you do it?

If your answer is no, in my booklet you’re an atheist. There is doubt in your mind. Love and morality are more important to you than your faith.

If the answer is yes, please reconsider.”

I already know what my answer would be… but I want to hear from you. Would you consider killing your own child if God asked you to, or are you already the atheist Penn and I think you are, someone who puts love and morality before faith?

Peter