To the editor:

I had to rub my eyes in astonishment at a recent letter writer’s rationale for the gross cruelty committed by the Bible god (Mining Gazette, July 24, 2019).

The question was why did the Bible god command the Israelites to exterminate neighboring ethnic groups?

He writes: “The purpose was to eliminate the corrupting influences of the extremely evil paganism of those people.

Why didn’t God spare the children and tell the Israelites to adopt them?

The older Children were already corrupted by the paganism of their parents. They would have told the younger ones what the Israelites did. Hatred and vengeance would have been the result.”

Unbelievable! Because you are a pagan and have an “extremely evil religion” you need to be slaughtered along with all your children. Is this the best solution that the omnipotent, omniscient, and loving Bible god can envision? Isn’t this a contradiction in terms and hypocritical?

Paganism is not monolithic, nor is it any more evil than the Israelites, and certainly not extremely evil. This is an example of “my religion is the true religion” and therefore I’m going to kill you because of your evil religion. This “solution,” apparently by the Bible god, can be called extremely evil.

Most pagans were peaceful, lovers of nature and polytheistic. Any group of people that must kill other people in the name of their religion demonstrates that their religion is false.

He continues: “We are free to choose to be good or evil. We can reject God or worship and obey Him ….”

As to free will, he might check out recent research in neurology and brain science. With respect to worship, gods do not need worship, nor require humans to worship them, not any more than parents would need or require their children to worship them. Worship started as groveling before the fearful aspects of nature’s violence which was thought to be warnings and punishments from the angry gods. Over the millennia it has evolved to its present form in church, mosque, or synagogue worship services.

It is amazing how fundamentalists ignore, or dance and twirl with illogical rationalizations, all the cruelty and genocide committed and abetted by the Bible god that seems to have anger management problems. A plain reading of the Bible shows that this document does not come from some deity,