Passover Nothing to Celebrate, Says American Atheists

For Release: 14 April 1995

Contacts: AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC. 
                Jon Murray or Robin Murray-O'Hair
          Telephone: (512) 458-1244 or (512) 458-1271

     
     American Atheists today issued a position statement on the feast
of the Seder and the Passover:

             THE PASSOVER: A HOLIDAY TO BE ABANDONED

     The single most heinous story in the Bible is that of the Jewish
god, Jahweh, inflicting plagues, mass misery, torture, and death upon
the ancient Egyptian nation. This serial genocide included Jahweh's
slaughter of the firstborn of every family. Not even infants were
spared.  

     The Biblical tale celebrated by Jews as the "Passover" is simply
a story of a religious holocaust slaughter of the inhabitants of
Egypt by a sadistic and nefarious god. As the benighted pharaoh of
the tale seeks to throw the Jews out of Egypt, Jahweh -- playing mind
games -- deliberately hardens the heart of the pharaoh in order to
lay -- again and again -- ruinous destructive acts on the land, its
vegetation, its grain and fruit crops, its cattle, its rivers, and
its people until the nation is completely destroyed. Even the skies
above Egypt are not spared (Exodus 4 through 12).

     Jon Murray, president of American Atheists, points out that
there is not one shred of actual history in Egypt that the Jews were
ever enslaved in that nation. The barbaric actions of the Jewish god
depicted in the tales simply, and happily, are not true. But the
mythological story is itself so full of horror that it should be
eradicated from folklore, not alone of the Jews but of all decent
people.

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