Onan spilled it on the ground (so the Lord killed him, too)

Chapter 6 in Drunk with Blood: God's killings in the Bible.

Genesis 38:9-10

Number killed: 1

Onan

Table of God's killings

Who has killed more Satan or God?

God's next killing

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Much more information about God's killings, with a chapter on each of the 135 killing events, can be found int the book:

Drunk With Blood: God's killings in the Bible

Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord (so the Lord slew him)

Chapter 5 in Drunk With Blood: God's killings in the Bible.

Genesis 38:7

Number killed: 1

Er

Table of God's killings

Who has killed more Satan or God?

God's next killing

---

More information about God's killings, with a chapter on each of the 135 killing events, can be found int the book:

Drunk With Blood: God's killings in the Bible

The Bible and the Quran agree: Lot was a just and righteous man

Before going on the God's fourth killing, I thought I'd mention something about Lot, since he played such a large role in God's second and third killings.

I don't know how anyone could read the story about Lot in Genesis 19 and still believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God.

Lot offers his daughters to a crowd of angel rapers and then gets drunk and impregnates them. That's all the Bible says about him.

And yet Lot is one of God's special heroes in both the Bible and the Quran. It is one of the things they agree on.

Here's what the Bible says:

God ... delivered just Lot ... that righteous man. 2 Peter 2:4-8

And here's the Quran:

And unto Lot we gave judgment and knowledge... And We brought him in unto Our mercy. Lo! he was of the righteous. Quran 21:74-75

Lot ... did We prefer above (Our) creatures ... We chose them and guided them unto a straight path. Quran 6:86-87

God preferred the just and righteous Lot above all his creatures. You can't get sicker than that.

Remember Lot's Wife (Forget Jesus)

Chapter 4 in Drunk with Blood: God's killings in the Bible.

Genesis 19:26

Number killed: 1

Lot's wife

Table of God's killings

Who has killed more Satan or God?

God's next killing

---

More information about God's killings, with a chapter on each of the 135 killing events, can be found int the book:

Drunk With Blood: God's killings in the Bible

Did God create the Ichneumonidae?

OK, I missed Darwin's birthday, but it's still Darwin Week. So I thought I'd post one of my favorite Darwin quotes. Here it is:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. -- From a letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860

The ichneumonidae is a family of wasps. A very big family. It is, in fact, one of the largest families in the largest class of animals, the insects. There are over 60,000 species of ichneumonid wasps, each one, according to creationists, specially designed by God. My question for them is the same as Charles Darwin's: Why? Why would a beneficent and omnipotent God do such a thing?

To understand the question, it is necessary to know a bit about the ichneumonids. First of all, most are parasitoids, which means that their larvae develop inside the body of a living host, which they slowly eat alive. Eventually, when the wasp larvae pupate, they erupt out of the body of the host that they have gradually consumed, tormented, and destroyed as larvae.

It is easy to see how such a thing could exist from an evolutionary standpoint. The body of a caterpillar is good food for larvae. It's not surprising that some organisms have evolved to take advantage of it. But what kind of a God would purposefully design it to be that way?

I have heard five different answers:

1. God originally made everything good; there was no suffering or death until the fall of Adam. Then all hell broke loose. Animals immediately began to kill and eat each other, and predators, parasites, parasitoids, and pathogens roamed the earth. (Answers in Genesis)

2. God made things nasty right from the start just to show us how important we are to him. He knew that Adam would sin, so he made nature cruel to show us the serious nature of sin. (Dembski's Defective Design Inference)

3. God made everything good and then Satan messed everything up. (Satanic Insects)

4. God likes it just fine the way it is. He created it that way for is own pleasure. He likes to watch things suffer. (David Snoke)

5. God couldn't help it and had nothing to do with it. He would have liked to create a kind and peaceful world, but he had to let things play out according to the laws of nature, over which he had no control. So the ichneumonid wasps just evolved, along with everything else, over millions of years while God sadly watched from a distance, unable to affect the outcome. (Ken Miller)

For each of these answers, though, I have a question.

1. How did things change so quickly? Were the 60,000 ichneumonid species specially created by God the moment Adam sinned? Or did God magically turn 60,000 butterfly species into parasitic wasps? Or did they all evolve (super)naturally in a few thousand years?

2. How do the ichneumonids teach us about sin? Until about the time of Darwin no one (except God) even knew they existed? Yet God created them just for us, just to teach us a lesson?

3. So Satan created the Ichneumonids? Along with scorpions, spiders, snakes, and sharks? He must have been a busy guy!

4. How could a kind and loving God create things just to watch them suffer?

5. A God who can't create or control anything isn't a God at all.

Here are some cool videos about the Ichneumonids.

The first one is from David Attenborough's marvelous "Life in the Undergrowth."

And here's one showing a Ichneumonid wasp (Megarhyssa sp.) drilling through the bark of an oak tree to deposit an egg in the tunnel of the siricid wood wasp, whose larva the Maegarhyssa lava will eat alive from the inside in the traditional Ichneumonid fashion (just like God intended it to be).

A Damnable Doctrine

Hell is the core of Christianity; it is what Jesus came to save us from. We all deserve to go there, and there is only one way to escape: believe the right things. (Just what those things are depends on who you talk to.) And if for whatever (and however good a) reason you should die without that belief, you will be tormented forever in Hell by the God who loves you. It is as simple, cruel and absurd as that.

Here is what Charles Darwin said about it in his autobiography:

I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

It was Hell that did me in as a Christian. I, like Darwin, couldn't believe that my family and friends and billions of other nonbelievers (and religiously incorrect believers) would be tormented forever in Hell for their honest disbelief. It amazes me that anyone could.

Hell is indeed a damnable doctrine. Darwin, as usual, had it exactly right.