Why should the same God kill a man for eating the fat of an ox, a sheep,
or a goat?
Forty-second. Could it be a consolation to a man when dying to think
that he had always believed that God told Aaron to take two goats and
draw cuts to see which goat should be killed and which should be a
scapegoat?1 And that upon the head of the scapegoat Aaron should lay
both his hands and confess over him all the iniquities of the children
of Israel, and all their transgressions, and put them all on the head
of the goat, and send him away by the hand of a fit man into the
wilderness; and that the goat should bear upon him all the iniquities
of the people into a land not inhabited?2 How could a goat carry away
a load of iniquities and transgressions? Why should he carry them to a
land uninhabited? Were these sins contagious? About how many sins
could an average goat carry? Could a man meet such a goat now without
laughing?
Forty-third. Why should God object to a man wearing a garment made of
woolen and linen? Why should he care whether a man rounded the corners
of his beard?3 Why should God prevent a man from offering the sacred
bread merely because he had a flat nose, or was lame, or had five
fingers on one hand, or had a broken foot, or was a dwarf? If he
objected to such people, why did he make them?4
Forty-fourth. Why should we believe that God insisted upon the sacrifice
of human beings? Is it a sin to deny this, and to deny the inspiration
of a book that teaches it? Read the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth
verses of the last chapter of Leviticus, a book in which there is more
folly and cruelty, more stupidity and tyranny, than in any other book in
this world except some others in the same Bible. Read the thirty-second
chapter of Exodus and you will see how by the most infamous of crimes
man becomes reconciled to this God.