At 5 am on Good Friday, The New York Times proudly posted a nasty "guest essay" titled "In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God." It was illustrated by a primitive scribble of God, holding a small lightning bolt in one hand and a helpless human in the other. The author was Shalom Auslander, a very bitter man who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. He should have probably changed his name from "Shalom" (or peace).
His memoir on his childhood is titled Foreskin's Lament, a "New York Times Notable Book," which recounts Auslander’s “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious” youth. His latest screed is about the story of Passover (which also begins today). God is a war criminal:
God, it seems, paints with a wide brush. He paints with a roller. In Egypt, said our rabbi, he even killed first-born cattle. He killed cows. If he were mortal, the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims would be dragged to The Hague. And yet we praise him. We emulate him. We implore our children to be like him.
Perhaps now, as missiles rain down and the dead are discovered in mass graves, is a good time to stop emulating this hateful God. Perhaps we can stop extolling his brutality. Perhaps now is a good time to teach our children to pass over God — to be as unlike him as possible.
“And so God killed them all,” the rabbis and priests and imams can preach to their classrooms. “That was wrong, children.”
“God threw Adam out of Eden for eating an apple,” they can caution their students. “That’s called being heavy-handed, children.”
Cursing all women for eternity because of Eve’s choices?
“That’s called collective punishment, children,” they can warn the young. “Don’t do that.”
“Boo!” the children will jeer.
This sounds like what the public-school teachers you see on social media might like to teach. Auslander said killing gods sounds like a great idea:
With plagues and floods, with fire and fury, on the young and old, the guilty and innocent.
And we humans, made in his image, do the same. With fixed-wing bombers and cluster bombs, with self-propelled mortars and thermobaric rocket launchers.
“Why did God kill the first-born cattle?” my rabbi said. “Because the Egyptians believed they were gods.”
Killing gods is an idea I can get behind.
This was not published in the Friday newspaper we received. Instead, they published a Passover thought piece by liberal Rabbi Sharon Brous and an interview with author and Presbyterian minister Timothy Keller, who is now dying of pancreatic cancer.
[Hat tip: Gabriel Hays, FoxNews.com]
