The HyperTexts

Footnote to 1 Corinthians 13
by Michael R. Burch

I found God
in a mother’s love,
not the biblical "god"
who massacred mothers.

Ah!-men

In the Bible’s most inspired passage, the apostle Paul says Divine Love thinks no evil, holds no record of wrongs, never gives up, and never fails.

An infinitely cruel, purposeless "hell" would be an infinite failure of love.

No good mother would torture her children for a second, much less all eternity. A good mother would only allow her children to suffer, temporarily, if she knew it was for their ultimate good. For instance, a vaccination or tonsillectomy. Even then, a good mother would suffer with her children until they were pain-free.

A "god" able to soak up praise in heaven while billions of his children are suffering in hell would be infinitely inferior morally to a good mother.

If one screams below,
what the hell is "above"?
—Michael R. Burch

What would good mothers do, if their children were excluded from heaven? All the good mothers would leave heaven, to find their children. The good fathers too. And what sort of heaven would it be, then?

Furthermore, a God who wants to save everyone but is unable to do so, is not all-powerful and should have never created anything to begin with, not being sure of the outcome.

It bears noting that "hell" or any possibility of suffering after death was never once mentioned in Bible passages covering 4,000 years from Adam and Eve to the last prophet, Malachi. Whether we believe every word, or not a single word of it, there was no "hell" in the Old Testament. This has been confirmed by the world's greatest bible scholars, since the word "hell" has been removed entirely from the Old Testaments of all the more accurate Bible translations. This includes the HCSB commissioned by the famously literal and conservative Southern Baptist Convention, and the NABRE, produced by more than a hundred bible scholars for the Roman Catholic Church.

Nor was the creation of "hell" ever mentioned in the New Testament. "Hell" pops up in the New Testament like the weasel in the silly song. Why? Because after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the center of the fledgling Christian church moved to Greece and Rome, where gullible people believed in the pagan "hell" and would accept it without question. Thus no explanation was needed. But if Jesus had preached "hell" to the Jews of his day, they would have asked, "How can there be a ‘hell’ if God and the prophets never mentioned it? Blasphemer!"

There are no such discussions mentioned in the Bible, so it seems obvious that "hell" was added later, when the gospels were written in Greek for a Gentile audience, long after Jesus's death.

It also bears noting that Paul said, in effect, that if God is not Divine Love, he is nothing, and that all the words of the Bible are meaningless noise: clanging gongs and tinkling cymbals.

I will close by observing that most of the Bible falls far short of 1 Corinthians 13, including depictions of the biblical god:

If god
is good
half the bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch

I wrote the epigram above in my preteens after reading the Bible from cover to cover at age eleven and wondering how anyone could call the biblical god "good." It seemed to me that the authors of the Bible were into character assassination, or that they made the whole thing up.

If God exists, and is good, things are played close to the vest, the trail is wonderfully well disguised, and the ways are indeed mysterious.

Where would we find God, then? In a good mother’s love, and not just the love of human mothers, but of mothers of many species.

One reason I could never believe in the child- and baby-killing biblical "god" is that I had a good mother and she set far too good example of love, for me to be deceived and settle for something far inferior.

Christians should either remove 1 Corinthians 13 from their Bibles, as an embarrassment to their inferior "god," or they should accept the fact that most of the Bible could not possibly have been inspired by a being of Divine Love and stop brainwashing billions of children with evil nonsense about bloody sacrifices, about making love being "evil," about homosexuality being a "sin," etc.

The HyperTexts