Why do you hate us?
A woman asks God why He has been so hateful
I couldn’t sleep. Early in the morning of 19 November 2019, I engaged in a thought experiment, an empathy exercise to imagine what it might be like to read the Bible from a woman’s perspective. On 20 November 2019, I saw this message on Twitter.
You say that I must believe in the God of the Bible to avoid going to Hell for eternity, correct?
If this is the narrow door that I must enter, then I need answers to these questions.
If it is not okay to ask questions, why was it okay for Job?
If you don’t answer my questions, I suppose I can assume that it is easier for you if I go to Hell. Or we can do what your church always does when facing conflict or scandal: deny it and ignore it.
- Why does God hate women?
- Why are there only two books out of 66 books of the Bible that are named after women? Both of these stories involve women in desperate circumstances because they have no power and must find a powerful man to save themselves from death. Was domination of women always part of the design?
- Why does God command the killing of women and children?
- Why should a woman who is raped be forced to spend her life married to her rapist?
- Why should a woman be silent and obey her husband?
- Why are women sold as part of a marriage contract?
- Why is it God’s will for a woman to be forced to become part of a king’s harem to save her people from annihilation?
- Why is it necessary to cut a woman who was gang-raped into 12 pieces to distribute her mutilated body to the tribes of Israel?
- Why was it necessary to slaughter a town to find sex slaves for the remnant of the tribe of Benjamin after a senseless civil war?
- The line of Judah involves at least two instances of incest. Was that the plan?
- Why did the Israelites send away the foreign women they had married and their children? In such a culture, that certainly would have meant starvation.
- Why is God male?
- Why does God rape Mary? Can that be considered consent? Rape is always about power. There is a huge power difference between God and Mary.
- How is human life a choice? We are born into evil and brutality, into theft, greed, war, slavery, and genocide. Why would Christians have children if there might be the least probability that your children will spend eternity in conscious torment?
- Is that why Christians deny the reality of climate change and give their money to televangelists?
Either God is evil, or God had nothing to do with the things that men have attributed to him, or God does not exist.
What if these are all stories that men wrote about a god that looked like them? Then a Roman emperor convened a council of men to collect the writings of men about the stories of men. None of them were written by women.
Or was that the best that God could do? Does he hate women that much?
