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Heavenly Father not so heavenly

Father’s Day was yesterday, and the past few years it’s made me think of God as a father figure. I’m not the only one.

Here’s Dwindling in Unbelief’s Father’s Day post , updated from last year. One thing I’m going to endeavor to do on my site is not just post links, since links change or disappear, but also explain what’s there. Basically, DIU goes through a number of patriarchs in the Bible and gives some examples of bad things they’ve done. Noah, getting drunk and naked and cursing Ham’s son (who didn’t even see the guy in that state!) to slavery because of what Ham did and saw. Lot getting drunk and having sex with his two daughters. Abraham abandoning his first son and almost killing his second on God’s command, etc.

My favorite though, which got included in this year’s DIU post, is Yahweh towards Jesus. I brought this up (back when I was "Anon") last year. God sends Jesus down to suffer, die, and go to hell, just because he wanted a bloody sacrifice for humanity’s alleged sins.

Here’s a blog called Unreasonable Faith (linked to in DIU) which goes into greater detail about what a great Pop that Yahweh is. Some highlights (or lowlights, wonder if that word’s made the dictionary yet?) include:

• Setting up his creation to fail in the Garden of Eden
• Telling his chosen people it’s a good thing to slaughter entire cities, man, woman, and child, except for keeping the girl virgins alive for sex
• Getting Mary pregnant so that humanity could kill his son, as planned
• Sending plagues, death, and destruction when his son comes back to Earth again. I’ll have to read Revelation, but my understanding was that Jesus will do most of this on his own for the Second Coming, in which case it would mean Yahweh was a bad influence on his son. Like Father, like Son.
• And so on. Go read the post, it’s really well-written.

He ends the blog post by saying "If that’s not the worst, most abusive father ever imagined, I don’t know who is. Thankfully, it’s very unlikely he actually exists."

Agreed. I’m sure that most people haven’t thought about that side of their so-called Heavenly Father.   "Heavenly" is "sublime; delightful; enchanting," according to American Heritage Dictionary . Based on this definition, the Bible’s "heavenly" father is anything but.

Notes: "heavenly." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/heavenly (accessed: June 23, 2009).