I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.
After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.
I remember being terribly confused by the murderous Samson when I was a boy ....
I am reminded of the offensive e-mail I rec'd over and over and over again in the wake of 9/11 which offered the proposition that, as we had 'asked God to go away from our civic life, his response was to randomly murder 3000 innocent New Yorkers.
Matthew Kramer, ahead of GT12 by about 12 years :
I became an atheist at the age of eight. After one of my Hebrew-school teachers devoted a 90-minute class to recounting her experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War, I went home and read a lengthy encyclopedia article on Nazi Germany. Within four hours of reading that article, I had irretrievably lost my belief in God. Over the years, my disbelief in God has become even more robust than my disbelief in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
How is any of this remotely acceptable as a basis for belief?
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