god is not Great
Christopher Hitchens.

An anthology of author’s viewpoints
By Hormoz Mansouri

Page 7

What the Ten Commandments DO NOT say:

• There is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty.

• Nothing about rape.

• Nothing about slavery

• Nothing about genocide.

o In fact, some of these very offenses are positively recommended.
o “God tells Moses to instruct his followers about the conditions under which they may buy or sell slaves and the rules governing the sale of their daughters.”
o Then there is the notorious verses forfeiting “life for life, eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.
o “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Verse (22:18). This was, for centuries, the warrant for the Christian torture and burning of women who did not conform.

• Israeli archaeologists are among the most professional in the world. Since the establishment of Israel, extensive archaeological work has been done, under the orders by David Ben-Gurion, sifting through the sands of Sinai and Canaan, to prove that the “covenant” between the god and Moses actually existed. Nothing has been found.
• Much more extensive work by archaeologists such as Israel Finkelstein and his colleague Neil Asher Silberman from Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University has been done. There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert (let alone four-decade length of time mentioned in the Pentateuch), no dramatic conquest of the Promised Land. It was all quite simply made up at a later date.
• No Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode either.
• Archaeology does confirm the presence of Jewish communities in Palestine from many thousands of years ago. It does show that there was a “Kingdom of David”, albeit rather a modest one.
• In The future of an illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death.
• Thomas Paine, has never been refuted since he wrote “These books are spurious, and that Moses is not the author of them. They were not written in the time of Moses, nor till several hundred years afterwards.”
• In Deuteronomy Moses gives orders for parents to have their children stoned to death for indiscipline. And commands his generals to kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him. But all the women-children that hath
  Christopher Hitchens god is not Great
  not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves. Thomas Paine said this was “an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters.”