Can it be that an infinite intelligence takes delight in scaring
savages, and that he is happy only when somebody trembles? Is it
reasonable to suppose that God surrounded himself with thunderings and
lightnings and thick darkness to tell the priests that they should not
make altars of hewn stones, nor with stairs? And that this God at the
same time he gave the Ten Commandments ordered the Jews to break the
most of them? According to the Bible these infamous words came from the
mouth of God while he was wrapped and clothed in darkness and clouds
upon the Mount of Sinai:
If thou buy an Hebrew servant six years he shall serve: and in the
seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself he
shall go out by himself; if he were married, then his wife shall go out
with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have borne him
sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's, and
he shall go out by himself. And if the servant shall plainly say, I love
my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his
master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the
door or unto the doorpost; and his master shall bore his ear through
with an awl; and he shall serve him forever.2 And if a man smite his
servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand, he shall be
surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall
not be punished; for he is his money.3
Do you really think that a man will be eternally damned for endeavoring
to wipe from the record of God those barbaric words?
Thirty-sixth. Is it because of total depravity that some people refuse
to believe that God went into partnership with insects and granted
letters of marque and reprisal to hornets;4 that he wasted forty
days and nights furnishing Moses with plans and specifications for a
tabernacle, an ark, a mercy seat and two cherubs of gold, a table,
four rings, some dishes and spoons, one candlestick, three bowls, seven
lamps, a pair of tongs, some snuff dishes (for all of which God had
patterns), ten curtains with fifty loops, a roof for the tabernacle of
rams' skins dyed red, a lot of boards, an altar with horns, ash pans,
basins, and flesh hooks, and fillets of silver and pins of brass; that
he told Moses to speak unto all the wise-hearted that he had filled with
wisdom, that they might make a suit of clothes for Aaron, and that
God actually gave directions that an ephod "shall have the two
shoulder-pieces thereof joined at the two edges thereof."