The End of Christianity Read Online Free PDF Page A

and a great king over all the gods” (Ps. 95:3).
    “All the gods bow down before him” (Ps. 97:7).
    “Then he will act, with the aid of a foreign god” (Dan. 11:39).
    These texts make sense only on the assumption that they (in contrast to other texts) assume there are other gods. It is no credit to Yahweh if he is fighting against, king of, jealous of, judging, or greater than entities that do not exist. Of course, many reinterpretations of these passages are available in apologetic literature, but these are motivated by dogma more than the need to accept the Bible on its own terms.
    In the Old Testament taken as a whole, not only Yahweh but other national gods are called gods. Also, spirits of the dead, heavenly messengers or counselors, kings, and even demons can be called a “god” (see 1 Sam. 28; Deut. 32; Ps. 45; etc.). Add to the capitalization of the generic term the fact that the highly specific Hebrew(!) personal name for this god—“Yahweh”—is recast with the generic term “Lord” (following the Jewish tradition), and you avoid the scandal of peculiarity altogether. “The Lord your God” sounds somewhat more respectable and intimidating than “Yahweh your god.” So what is often overlooked in debating the existence of “God,” if by “God” is understood anything with any relation to biblical theism, is the fact that the entity as known today is in fact the product of a complex conceptual evolution from the variable conceptions of the god Yahweh to “God,” a panel-beaten hybrid that can be made into what can seem like philosophically respectable proportions.
    So what? Well, this little bit of information is more atheologically potent and philosophically significant than it seems at first sight. For it means that, in trying to prove “God” does not exist, so long as “God” is in any way related to the entity worshipped in modern (or postmodern) biblically derived forms of theism (no matter how sophisticated), the only thing needed is to show that representations of Yahweh in ancient Israelite religion do not refer to any ultimate reality outside the text. It's not unlike trying to prove there is no Zeus. Not even Christians can do it, but you can demonstrate belief in Zeus to be absurd by pointing out the ridiculously superstitious nature of the representations of the entity in question (i.e., his human appearance, his less than scientifically informed mind, and his nonexistent divine world), thus exposing his artificial origins. Well, the same can be done with “God,” aka Yahweh.
    TAKING THE NATURE OF THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY
    The Bible is a text, a literary artefact. The question is the relation between Yahweh as depicted therein and the world outside the text in which we live. On this matter, many biblical scholars are still theists of sorts.
    First, there are still some fundamentalists (naive realists). This is your average committed conservative (often “evangelical”) Christian scholar who thinks one is warranted to believe in a correspondence between representations of Yahweh in the biblical text and an alleged extratextual reality to which they supposedly refer. The text and language are assumed to function like a window through which you see reality as it really is. The Bible is literally the Word of God.
    Second, the majority of mainstream biblical scholars are theists but critical realists. They believe the Old Testament contains Israel's fallible human perspectives on God in their beliefs about Yahweh, who is assumed, nevertheless, as really existing. According to this view, the biblical text is like a painting , an attempted semirealist representation of the reality it seeks to describe. The text is God's Word in human speech or human words about God.
    Third, there are those of us who realize that what we have in the text is the character Yahweh who, as depicted, can for various reasons not possibly exist outside the stories in which he acts. Yahweh is like Donald Duck, who