This is dedicated to the people who have endeavored to read the Bible but were left shocked or wary of the content therein. Maybe you were not expecting the ancient text to be so “heavy-handed” in both tone and the nature of humans of the day. None the less I would commend a person who attempted to at least read the text, it shows initiative and bravery to confront something you are not familiar with, especially something as deep, sometimes mysterious and ancient as the Old Testament. I will try to critique the idea that the Old Testament is just a wild text with harshness and cruelness by rebutting one of the most famous philosophers ever and his critique of the Holy Bible. I hope you extrapolate a new view of the Bible from this, if ever so slightly. I do this because I love you and I was commanded to love and preach. I am nothing and no one but I do have a shrewd mind, and I do know the truth. This is done with love and admiration to you reading this.

Sir Thomas Paine’s assertions:

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” – Sir Thomas Paine

 “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” – Sir Thomas Paine

“’It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief of a cruel God makes a cruel man.’”- Sir Thomas Paine

My Rebuttal:

Sir Thomas Paine was a great thinker, a dynamic philosophizer and yet even he misses the mark on the nature of God and the context needed to be applied to ancient humanity. I suspect Paine like many are quite taken back by the often harsh, strong handed scriptures of the Old Testament. The analysis of how God Almighty handles his creation, and the apparent brutality of man being stemmed from the brutality accounted for in the Bible, is misguided. Sir Thomas Paine, like many other people who hold vast amounts of worldly wisdom think these brutal accounts are corruptive, but this is where he and others like him, IMMEDIATELY fail. For as “enlightened”, or intelligent this famous thinker was, he did not have the depth to contend with the Bible’s extremely profound and expansive message. “For the wisdom of this world is folly with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). Paine’s reliance on human reasoning, divorced from the humility required to understand divine truths, leads him to dismiss the Bible based on a shallow reading.  I can immediately retort his main argument with the simple fact that Paine has attributed the attributes and qualities of human beings to belong uniquely to humans when it clearly says in the Bible, Genesis 1:27, that Man, as it were, was created in GODS IMAGE. This is clear and very simple to grasp and rather well known even amongst those who never read the Bible.

So, furthermore, if Man was created in GODS IMAGE it is not purely human qualities or outright “cruelness” he sees in the Biblical accounts of Gods actions, but it is instead him unwittingly attributing the deeper more nuanced qualities of Man to this thing many call “human nature”. These qualities he attributes to being “demonic” or “cruel” only belong to us because we are made in Gods image, but as it were, we are flawed, and these qualities often manifest in us in incomplete or deeply flawed ways. The Bible is honest in its depiction of humanity’s flaws, recording both the righteous and the wicked for the purpose of instruction (Romans 15:4). By contrast, the Bible also contains profound teachings on love, mercy, forgiveness, and humility, these are qualities Paine fails to acknowledge in his critique. For example, passages like the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), the vast majority of the message in the Gospels and the Psalms overflow with divine wisdom and compassion, offering a counterbalance to the stories of human failure. These narratives highlight the consequences of sin and the necessity of God’s guidance, rather than serving as a “history of wickedness.” You see emotions like anger are not “evil” or bad in and of themselves as Ecclesiastes chapter 3 states, there is time for everything. There is a time when anger is JUSTIFIED and when action upon anger must be taken. Judgment leading to punishment is not evil in and of itself, in fact well placed judgement to punishment is often called JUSTICE even in our modern world.

 Paine seems to attribute the fact that God does things like get angry and judges his creation to punishment as indicative of “human nature” or a “cruel God”, but it is not human nature by itself because we are made in the image of God, therefore, we have the qualities of God unlike other living creations. It is not outright “cruelty” because God can get angry, so can animals, the difference is, if an animal gets angry it will behave erratically and not need any justification or moral judgement to dictate its actions, it’s only about instinct and survival for them once their limited understanding is spent. God however uses judgment with his anger, and his judgment is perfect and often made after long, drawn out opportunities given, and/or compassionate forgiveness over time. God gets angry but uses powers of judgment to make decisions about punishments. Humans can do this as well, but our judgement is flawed and can often even be animalistic in nature, in that we can act rashly or are blinded by emotion and judge too harshly, or inefficiently. It is a central theme in the Bible that men need Gods guidance. To explain, this very well known theme of the Bible is that God knows man cannot rule itself due to its flawed ways. We are an image of God but not God, our powers of judgment, discernment and conscious decision making ARE this “image of God” the Bible speaks of, not physical characteristics but the inner processes that make us hyper intelligent and aware beings. These mental abilities are what make us Gods children , created in his image. So Paine confuses our greater faculties that only we, the Angels and God possess as something along the lines of “human nature” and outright “cruelty”, when in reality Gods actions are perfect and righteous in nature. While Gods ways are similar to human ways, they are different in their level of execution. God judges empathetically and perfectly, man on the other hand has judgment that is prone to error, yet he claims this similar nature as proof of God being man-made,  I discern that is wrong because he simply observes divine processes being used by flawed humans and discounts the way God often operates with these qualities in a more efficient and an empathetic way.

If you read the Bible thoroughly, you’ll see that the humans, cities, peoples’ etc. that God judged for harsh punishment were often given multiple opportunities to turn away from their sinful ways, some were even warned by God himself or via a prophet of God or a messenger of God. It’s not until it was found in them no remorse or repentance that they were dealt with. Also, men like Paine see being put to death as a “brutal” punishment, and as mortal beings I can see how we could view this as such. If a human kills a human or human(s) it IS brutal because a human has no power to reverse death or resurrect. So here is the crux of worldly thinking, if it is human it’s murder because a human can only kill, HOWEVER, if it is God dealing death to those judged deserving of it, it is something different entirely because unlike humans God Almighty has POWER over death, God can resurrect and give another chance. The Bible repeatedly emphasizes that God is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34:6). His punishments are always preceded by warnings, opportunities for repentance, and long-suffering patience, as seen in the cases of Nineveh (Jonah 3) and Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18–19). Paine fails to account for the moral and spiritual degradation of the societies God judged. For instance:

• The Canaanites were judged after centuries of abominable practices, including child sacrifice (Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 12:31).

• The flood during Noah’s time was preceded by widespread violence and corruption (Genesis 6:5–13

These judgments, far from being vindictive, demonstrate God’s refusal to allow unchecked evil to destroy His creation. They also foreshadow the ultimate justice to come, where evil will be permanently eradicated (Revelation 20:11–15). So those he punished in the past to death, were not punished overly harshly because God in his benevolence told us via his word in Acts 24:15, that some of those even those who died being wicked will be resurrected and given another chance. This shows something beyond wanton murder of creation, this shows a parent , disciplining his children and then bringing them out of the punishment of death to give them another chance, ALL OF THIS, is unnecessary for a being who is Almighty, God does not need to do this at all, yet he did give his only begotten son so this could be fulfilled among other things. Thus proving God is not a flawed human like creation or cruel punisher, but a perfect, all powerful, mesmerizing being who can use something as powerful as death as a simple temporary punishment if he wants to. Hebrews 12:6 states, “for those whom Jehovah loves he disciplines, in fact, he scourges everyone whom he receives…”

Thank you for reading.

Written By: Marcos A. Lopez II, 12/23/2024