Bastards maligned by the Bible by James A Worrell

JAMES A. WORRELL

“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A bastard is a person born out of wedlock. A newborn person cannot choose the marital status of his or her parents.

A bastard is a person completely without fault. However, because of religious intolerance, bastards have been stigmatized for centuries.

There may be fault in the parents of a bastard, but the real fault lies with those who first condemned bastards.

The God of the Bible made the first condemnation of bastards as stated in Deut. 23:2, “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation.” Even the offspring of bastards were punished.

This wicked condemnation of innocent persons emanates from the God of the Christians. This can be expected since Yahweh stated in Isa. 47:5 that he created evil.

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”

The evil and hurt caused by believers of the Bible has continued to this day.

In England, Ecclesiastical courts handled the probating of estates. Roman Catholic clergy operated these religious courts. They attempted to control the personal lives of all English subjects.

One law of the Ecclesiastical courts was to bar bastards from inheriting property from their parents. This law had its pinning directly in the Book of Genesis.

Yahweh hardly punished bastards in biblical times. He sometimes favored them. Here are some of the Bible’s well-known biblical bastards.

One of God’s favorites, Abraham, sired the bastard Ishmael by his mistress Hagar. Gen. 16:4, 15.

The firstborn daughter of Lot bore a son by Lot. The bastard was named Moab and is the father of the Moabites to this day. See Gen. 19:37.

Jephthah was the bastard son of Gilead and a harlot. He made a deal with God to sacrifice his daughter in return for victory in battle. Jud. 11:1.

God’s favorite, David, sired a bastard son with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. Sam. 11:4-5.

And there is biblical babbling in Zec. 9:6 about a bastard dwelling in Ashdod as an affront to the Philistines.

With the advent of the Age of Enlightenment, civilization has gotten away from punishing innocent persons such as bastards. Today, many people are born out of wedlock and no one thinks anything about it. Further, many bastards attend church and are not banned from “the congregation of the Lord.”

The history of bastards proves that religion has no basis in morality. Interestingly, religionists believe they are the bedrock of morality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Religion belongs in the realm of superstition and ignorance.

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