"Sometimes I'm afraid of God."

“Sometimes I’m afraid of God when I read the Bible.”

The statement came from my son after he had spent a bit of time wandering around in the delights of Genesis 19 for an assignment. It’s quite the passage. You have a guy voluntarily sending out his daughters to get raped in order to avoid the apparently more odious prospect of having the men of his town sodomize a couple of angels who had paid him a visit, you have people being struck blind and being turned into salt, you have God raining down sulfur and fire in judgment of the Sodom and Gomorrah, you have two young women getting their dad plastered in order to have sex with him and produce children, and generally an overall scene of depravity and sex and violence that would make Quentin Tarantino blush.  Well, maybe not.  But still, it’s not exactly PG material.

“Why do stories like this make you afraid,” I asked, with no small amount of trepidation.  “Well, God seems so angry… He tells them not to look back at Sodom, but we have our own brains and we’re curious, right?  I would look back.  But then they get turned to salt.  And why would those girls want to have sex with their dad?!”