Well, maybe not you specifically, but some people. Like those folks who read the poetry of Genesis and count the begats in the Gospels and come up with the notion that the world is only 10,000 years old and evolution is a crock, and anybody who buys it is already halfway to hell, just for example.

Speaking of plagues, the God of what we Christians call the Old Testament seemed to hand them out like they were free samples of a new chewing gum, along with floods, famine, earthquakes and other sundry catastrophes.

And, in a striking departure from current American foreign policy, God didn't seem to make any distinction between punishing, say, the corrupt regime of Pharaoh and the rest of the Egyptians, who presumably, were just trying to get from sunup to sundown. They all got the wrath of God.

There are believers today who think plagues are still God's standard operating procedure, a punishment God metes out to individuals who don't toe the line, and to Sodom and Gomorrah nations that coddle sinners. Somehow these individuals usually turn out to be gay. This leads me to believe some Christians have even more interest in the anatomy and geography of sex than God does.

Of course, according to Scripture, sometimes God kicks back and lets his chosen people do the dirty work. Joshua and the Hebrew wanderers were ordered by God to march into certain Canaanite cities and kill every man, woman and child they found.

You have to look at the big picture in holy books, and find a way past the ugly to the mercy and love of God written down and written in the heart and the world.

Only Human appears Mondays. Michael Riley, who grew up in West Deptford, is a Gannett New Jersey writer and an ordained Baptist minister whose first pastoral assignment was in Paulsboro. Reach him at mri ley@app.com .

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