The great Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the theorist of relativity in the science of physics – and not in moral ideas or opinions as some claim – is often used by those who claim that gods exist to endorse his own belief in them; one or the other according to the culture in which they were born by pure chance. If this genius dedicated to scientific work thought that there is a divine being, it must be true; an obvious fallacy of authority to feel supported in their efforts to swallow, for example, that the fight between God and Satan It is not a philosophy.
But, on the one hand, he said that he had always expressed without any ambiguity that he did not believe in any personal god and that, if something could be “called religious” in him, “it is the unlimited admiration for the structure of the world, as far as our science can. reveal it ”; and on the other, wrote the following to the philosopher Eric Gutkind (1877-1965) in a letter of January 1954: “The word God for me is nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness; the Bible it is an honorable but primitive collection of legends nonetheless quite childish ”.
However, Albert Einstein was about physics, not theological analysis. But that does not mean that he was necessarily wrong. One can know the lack of archaeological basis of the Judeo-Christian account in the study of The bible unearthed (Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, 2001). Or the 463 contradictions of “the word of God” in BibViz, and its unscientific and historical errors and the sheer amount of inhuman violence it contains. Which brings us to the puzzling question of who has killed more people, God or Satan.
Millions of murdered in the Bible by the will of God
To approach it, perhaps there is nothing better than to go to the work of Steve Wells, who has published the books Drunk with Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible (2010), The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (2013) and Strange Flesh: The Bible and Homosexuality (2014), about which some of us wonder why they do not have an edition in our language yet. The first of these essays aims to detail the deaths recorded in the Bible and for which God is responsible direct, that is, the murders of whom believers consider their loving father.
According the rigorous calculations of Steve Wells, without taking into account the massacres of the universal flood, Sodom and Gomorrah and the Egyptian firstborn, other plagues, famines and so on, but only those whose concrete numbers are in the Bible, God has charged 2,476,633 people in 135 different violent episodes, rising to 2,821,364 158 times with deuterocanonical texts, that is, the passages of the Old Testament accepted by the Catholic Church and that of the Orthodox Christians but not by the believers of the Protestant branches or by the Jews.
These episodes include the 3,000 Israelites, relatives and friends, who killed each other by order of the Judeo-Christian god after worshiping the golden calf on a ground ball (Ex 32: 26-28), the 12,000 inhabitants of Ai who were killed by Josué with the specific command to hang the lifeless body of their king on a tree (Jos 8: 1-25), the forty-two children who were eaten by two bears for calling the prophet Elisha bald (Re 2: 23-24) , and so on. But, with the appropriate estimates, the total amounts to 25 million human beings cured by the grace of God.
Is Satan the true great villain of the Bible?
This heap of murdered people would in itself place Jahvé in a good position among the perpetrators of the greatest genocides in history, shaking hands with Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong or Leopold II of Belgium. Not like this to satan, To who only ten dead are attributed to him: Job’s sons, seven males and three females, whom he shakes with a lethal wind; and for a bet with God to see if he would continue to worship him if they would take everything from him when he felt very unhappy (Job 1: 1-19), so that the responsibility is shared.
Not with a similar difference in the murder curriculum of God and the devil, but only because of the former, perhaps it would be necessary to wonder if it is not the great villain for that impressive display of criminal totalitarianism. “Contradictions and false prophecies show that the Bible it is not infallible; the cruelties, injustices and insults to women, which It is not [un libro] neither good nor fair”Says Steve Wells. Who could finish as Albert Einstein his own: “No interpretation, however subtle, can (for me) change something about this.”