The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Welcome back to Monday School – still “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

I had planned on analyzing all the wise and wonderful responses your clergy people gave to my Saturday School question – but apparently there weren’t any. Ah, well. If you ever hear of any, be sure to pass ‘em along.

In the meantime -

The simple answer: It doesn’t!

Although the Roman Catholic Church and many Christian fundamentalists claim “Thou shalt not kill” applies to unborn fetuses, embryos, and even microscopic human ova fertilized a mere nanosecond ago, the fact is that the Bible itself does not.

And although Jesus doesn’t seem to have been shy about condemning a wide variety of people and practices, nowhere does he condemn either abortion or abortionists – or even hint that adoption agencies are a preferable alternative.

Is this because abortion is a modern evil which Jesus and the authors of the Bible knew nothing about? Not likely. Anthropologist George Devereux analyzed 350 primitive, ancient, and pre-industrial societies and concluded that “abortion is an absolutely universal phenomenon.” Seems both Jesus and the Bible’s authors must have known about it even if they didn’t have that oft alleged hotline to an omniscient God. Their silence on the subject is deafening.

In point of fact, judging from what the Bible does say – quite clearly and repeatedly – it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that its God thinks killing the unborn is pretty darn swell.

Consider:

1) When God sent the Flood, He sent it to drown pregnant women, infants, and children along with everyone else. No exceptions. And yet I’ve never seen anyone protest this horrid act of His by marching around outside one of His churches with an enlarged photo of the bloated body of a single fetus washed up on a beach.

2) When God told Moses, Joshua, David and others to invade the lands of other people, He quite often told them to kill every man, woman, and child (and often all the animals, too). God specifically told them through Moses to kill women who had “known a man” – and some of those women must have been pregnant. The only class He ever seems to have exempted from the mass slaughter seems to have been the virgins. These He told His People to rape. (See Numbers 31)

3) Hosea 13:16 says that – by God’s command – “Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed to pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.” (And you thought so-called “partial-birth abortions” were bad – just wait til you see the video of this.)

4) Isaiah 13:16-18 has this to say with regard to “evil” Babylon: “Their children shall also be dashed to pieces before their eyes, their houses spoiled, and their wives ravished. Behold, I [God] will stir up the Medes against them… Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”

As these verses show, the God of the Bible clearly doesn’t think that unborn humans have any absolute “right to life.” Indeed, unlike today’s abortion doctors whom many Christian fundamentalists have demonized as evil incarnate, this God not only appears to go about His bloody activities with glee – He also thinks it moral and appropriate to slaughter full-term, post-birth, obviously viable infants and children.

Besides the above passages which make this clear, consider these additional facts:

5) The God of the Bible allegedly killed all the firstborn Egyptians – and “there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Exodus 12:29-30).

6) When David committed adultery with Bathsheba, the Bible’s God allegedly punished David by killing the baby that resulted (2 Samuel 12:14-18). (Note that the Bible indicates David’s sin wasn’t adultery as much as it was that his adultery gave the Hebrews’s enemies a good reason to bad-mouth them and their God.)

7) When children make fun of God’s prophet, Elisha, for being bald, Elisha and God have 42 of them immediately devoured by bears (2 Kings 2:23-25).

8) Maybe those kids just caught God on a bad day? Not if Leviticus 26:22 is to be believed. It’s there that God specifically warns the Hebrews that He will send wild beasts to devour their kids if they (the parents) disobey Him. Those kids in 2 Kings ought to be thankful God waited until they themselves had done something wrong, however minor, eh?

9) In Exodus 21:17, God tells us that children who curse their parents ought to be put to death.

10) The “holy” author of Psalm 137 actually revels in the coming kiddie slaughter his God has promised: “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

How bizarre it was, for example, to hear former President George W. Bush take the Bible’s vague claim that humans were made in the image of God and try to turn that into a universal right-to-life while ignoring all of these much more relevant passages which indicate that God thinks virtually all varieties of human life can (and often ought to be) treated like shit.

How insane that self-described Right-To-Lifers have actually attempted to claim the moral high ground for almost 30 years while self-righteously clutching these very passages in their hands….