Contemplating A Meat Eating Deity

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, in 1965, I dearly loved one of my grandmothers, and greatly feared the other. Both women were born in 1890, both were devout Christians as only Victorian women could be, and both would have gladly indoctrinated me, but for the shield erected around me by my parents. Hands off the boy; he'll find his own way, his own faith. For that protection I am grateful. My grandmothers were probably disappointed in their children, but they left their grandchild alone, thank God. And so I started thinking about it. I couldn't understand then, and still can't, why the creator of the universe would require a blood sacrifice to redeem mankind. To whom was this sacrifice made, and by whose choice? Who made the rules? What other choices were available to an omnipotent God? It seemed to me then, as now, that God could have chosen any of a variety of methods of balancing the ledger of his own creation, without a torturous death which, three days later, became moot. I learned that ancient peoples all feared their environment, attributed everything in it to powerful super human beings, and assuming these beings to be hungry for human meat, offered them precisely that in the hope of placating them and gaining their approval. The God of the Old Testament upholds a long tradition of meat eating deities. For me the Christian faith became, and remains, a cult of bloody sacrifice, like many other ancient religions. The christian Bible is a book of many voices and personalities, the inspiration of a diverse God. To me it seems somewhat of an overreaction to put a child to death for insubordination, or to kill fifty thousand people because someone takes a quick peek at a boat under construction. and there can be no worse way, it seems to me, to convey truth, than in a book, which, as Goethe said of all books, are designed at best to give names to our errors. If God is God, God is not good. If God is good, God is not God, it goes. (Was it e e cummings?) Do we really wish to absolve ourselves of responsibility for our bad behavior by embracing torture and death? Seemingly so, in Christiandom. Our descendants will likely marvel that ever such a doctrine was popular.