The Bible is Not Rated G

The Old Testament terrorized me as a child

I was born into a Southern Baptist household. Both my mother and maternal grandmother were Sunday School teachers, and my mother read a Bible story to me every night before I went to sleep. My mother would sit on the edge of my bed, holding one of three different children’s illustrated Bibles, and read a story before leading me in my nightly prayer.

To many people, reading the Bible to your child certainly sounds like a harmless — indeed, helpful — thing to do. However, you have to consider what the Bible actually says. In many spots, it reads like a horror movie script. What was worse, Mom preferred to read me the Old Testament because it consists of several “short stories,” as it were — reasonably brief stories, especially when condensed into a children’s Bible, about a particular person or event.

So what wonderful stories did Mom read to me before I went to sleep?

Let’s consider a partial tally.

The Story of Adam and Eve

A walking, talking snake shows up and asks a naked woman why she won’t eat the fruit off two of the trees that, for some bizarre reason, God has put right in the center of the Garden of Eden. Eve explains that although God put the trees right there in plain sight, neither she nor Adam are allowed to eat from them. If they do, they’ll die.

The walking, talking snake insists eating the fruit won’t kill her, and Eve, apparently not finding a talking snake the least bit odd, concedes the point and eats the fruit from one of the trees, which has been named The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Or, as a textual critic would note, it could be named The Tree of God’s Knowledge.) Adam shows up and eats the fruit as soon as Eve offers it, apparently not asking any questions or noticing that his wife is acting differently in any way.

God shows up and wants to know why Adam and Eve are now hiding. “Because we’re naked,” they reply. At this, God deduces they ate from one of the two forbidden trees, the other being The Tree of Eternal Life. For this crime, God sentences Eve, along with every woman to be born on planet Earth until the end of time, with pain in childbirth and subjugation by men.

Adam is sentenced, along with not only every man to be born on planet Earth but also every woman, with toil in his labor. The walking, talking snake and all its offspring are sentenced to be legless and slither on the ground. Then God murders some animals in order to give Adam and Eve clothes and casts them out of the garden, lest they eat of the other tree as well.

I heard this story again and again — at ages four, five, six, seven, eight, and onward. What did this story teach me? Firstly, it taught me that a woman is the cause of humanity’s “fall from grace” and is the perpetrator of “original sin.” Although some preachers I have heard insist that the blame falls more on Adam than Eve, most preachers, priests, and (male) theologians are all too happy to lay the blame at Eve’s feet: Woman, the real evil. (Convenient, huh?)

Secondly, it taught me that God is willing to dole out exceptional punishments for one sin — punishments that will not only render the rest of the sinner’s life painful and miserable but also will torture millions of generations of unborn children yet to come.

Seeing as how many Christians teach that the Bible is a literal and factual account of history and not a collection of the ancient Jewish people’s myths, folktales, poetry, songs, sermons, and letters, I grew up believing that the story of Adam and Eve was an historical account of cold, hard truth, not a mythological origin story. In fact, the obsessive rumination on Adam and Eve’s sin is the foundation of the Christian claim that all humans are lowly sinners, born “fallen.”

No child can develop a healthy sense of self-esteem while convinced that their innate self was born evil. Or I sure didn’t. As I learned later, self-hatred, low self-esteem, and thought-flagellation are common among adherents of the three major Abrahamic religions. In short, the Abrahamic religions acculturate their children with a worldview that leads to one overwhelming conclusion: All humans are innately evil, and therefore the child is inherently bad. I, like other such children, felt dogged by shame, and I developed Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS).

The Ten Plagues of Egypt

By far the creepiest story that was read to me when I was a child was the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. In the story, Moses is selected by God to walk right into the Pharaoh’s throne room, face down the most powerful man in the known world, and demand that the Pharaoh give up his enormous collection of slaves. And why should this powerful Pharaoh give up slaves whom he sees as nothing more than chattel?

Because the slaves’ god said so. Of course, being Christian, I knew even by the age of five that God was the only real god, and the gods of the Egyptians were all manmade, so that meant Paraoh was a fool for resisting. (This basic tenet of Christianity makes it all the odder for the adult Bible reader who comprehends there are many verses in which the Pagan gods are deemed to be real, only of lesser power and importance. For example, Exodus 33:4 states, “God executed judgments against their gods.”)

The Pharaoh, of course, says no.

For this offense, which is repeated ten times, we are told the Pharaoh is punished. However, not only the Pharaoh suffered, but also the entire nation of Egypt was tortured: thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent men, women, and children, along with livestock. This included men who were not slaveholders and women who had nothing to do with slaves at all and were probably all slaves themselves, either literally or in cultural practice.

Along with them were the children, who can be guilty of nothing, and the animals, which don’t even understand what’s happening. For one man’s choice, all these people and animals suffered ten plagues: water turned to blood, a swarm of frogs, a swarm of lice, a swarm of flies, a plague of diseased livestock, a plague of boils on humans and animals, a storm of hail and fire, a swarm of locusts, a plague of darkness for three days, and worst of all, the killing of all the firstborn (Exod. 7:14–12:36).

As a child, it was hard for me to imagine so much disease, death, and suffering. It struck me hard that not only did the humans suffer, but also the animals. No one and nothing was spared.

But most striking of all was the tenth plague:

This is what the LORD says: “About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt — worse than there has ever been or ever will be again.” (Exod. 11:4–6, NIV)

Thousands upon thousands of innocent children died that night, according to the Bible. Children. The most vulnerable of all humans. And these children ranged in age from newborn to whatever the Egyptians considered the age of majority. Notice also the details that even the firstborn sons of slaves were killed and so were the firstborn of all the cattle.

Every sane and healthy adult human on this planet will take measures to protect children — their own and others — in most situations, and we have abundant proof now that animals will protect not only their own young but also human children and the young of other animals, even when those offspring are from a different species. And yet Yahweh, the one and only supreme god of all creation, murders thousands of infants, children, and animals in a single night. And why? Because of the choice made by one man.

What did this story teach me as a child?

God kills kids.

I pointed out to my mom that it was unfair, and I also pointed out to my mom that the people and animals living in Egypt shouldn’t be punished for the choices made by their ruler — a man whom they could never persuade or stop. My mom, facing such logical objections, could only concede that God’s will was sometimes mysterious, but that as humans, we didn’t have the right to question God’s justice. Those excuses are, of course, standard ones among both Christian parents and Christian apologists.

Added to the stories of harsh punishments for Adam and Eve and the torture of Pharaoh and his subjects were many other stories: the killing of the world population via flood; the punishment of the entire Israelite people, who were forced to wander in the desert for forty years; the punishment of King David for adultery and murder (by not killing David himself but rather his firstborn son with Bathsheba); and other such accounts.

By the time my mother was finished reading the Old Testament to me, I had been inundated with repeated examples of God’s merciless punishments upon those who displeased him. Being God’s chosen people or not made no difference. (As a child I was understandably upset to hear that my own ancestors, the Celts, were the among the many “Gentiles” or “heathens” that God did not choose or favor).

Once a person or people displeased God, a terrifying punishment would follow. I grew increasingly terrified of committing even the smallest of sins and would beg God to forgive me, fearful of his wrath.

Takeaway

I’m not here to tell anyone what religion to be. Ever. Freedom of religion means, to me, freedom of religion. But I wish both my mom and my church had taken a hot minute to consider how terrifying God really sounds to kids so that I didn’t end up with RTS. If you’re going to talk about the God of Love, then talk about love. When you train children to be scared of God using stories like those in the Old Testament, all you’ve done is distort their early development and acculturate them into a world of fear.

The Bible is not rated G.

Citations:

The Holy Bible, NIV. https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/.