The following is a guest submission by Will Tew, my colleague at Students For Liberty and president of UF Libertarians at the University of Florida:
I became a libertarian after reading some economics. I became an atheist after reading the Bible. I rejected the Methodism of my upbringing, not out of any profound conviction that God was incompatible with science, but because I concluded that the God of the Bible was an essentially despotic being with all the pettiness of a child. If the God of the Bible existed, he would not deserve my worship.
Thomas Paine said that the Bible “is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” And while many parts of the Bible are cruel, I do not detest it. Few written works have the range of emotion and depth of thought that the Bible at its best presents. Its place in the western canon is established, but that does not mean that we should accept its precepts. In fact, any libertarian reading through the Bible should be disturbed by it. Much of the Bible approvingly tells of killings, tortures, intolerance, and brute force. I have no doubt that many Christians explain away these episodes, but I could not. I hope that the few examples I present below will encourage both believers and non-believers to revisit the Bible; to think honestly about the problems in it. An atheist may leave more knowledgeable, and a Christian’s faith may be strengthened by grappling with these issues. After all, wrestling with God has a biblical base.

Is this our "loving" God?
I suppose it would do well to start at the beginning. What should trouble libertarians about God’s behavior in Genesis? God makes a contract with a party unable to consent. Adam and Eve, because they have no knowledge of good and evil, because they are ignorant of what might be the most important aspects of human life, cannot consent. Even children are more aware of the implications of their actions than Adam and Eve were. Now, I know that some might say that, since God created Adam and Eve, he had total control over them. That doesn’t seem right, and if it were, it wouldn’t be very fair. Most of us accept that parents do not have absolute control of their children. It’s wrong to be children, it’s wrong to belittle them, and it’s wrong to tell them you’ll kill them if they eat the fruit from a certain tree.
God’s reactions to man’s first disobedience are hardly any better. He curses Eve with the horrible pain of childbirth, and commands that she will be in her husband’s power. God curses the earth so that Adam must toil endlessly for food—sweating day-in and day-out for a crop of thorns and thistles. I’ve been told that this evidence of God’s mercy because, hey, he coulda killed ‘em right there! It’s also telling that it is God who first introduces the sword, a weapon only ever intended for slaying men. Maybe I just don’t get it, but God’s arbitrary imposition of rules and punishment seems rather un-libertarian to me.
Genesis is filled with other examples of disturbingly brutal and deceptive behavior condoned or perpetrated by God, but I’m skipping these. I’m also moving past hallucinogenic encounters with a talking plant, the forced march through Sinai, and the rape and genocide of Moses’ God-willed leadership. We move briefly into Judges, where the redactor, a dedicated monarchist, blames the chaos of the period on the absence of a king in Israel, saying “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Statelessness, apparently, was not highly thought of.
From Judges we begin 1 Samuel, which contains what is probably the most referenced passage of Christian libertarians: 1 Samuel 8. The chapter really is an amazing statement on the evils of kings and of governments. Even if you cynically think that Samuel is just trying to protect his own power, a libertarian can’t help but cheer as Samuel implores the people of Israel not to establish a king. The passage is so powerful partly because it is so anomalous. It’s hard to find similar passages—most of the Bible is pretty clear about accepting kings. 1 Samuel 8 is even different from the rest of 1 Samuel, which describes God’s selection of Saul (and later David) as king, the early building of the Hebrew state, and David’s relentless campaign to wrest his promised crown and scepter from Saul. David’s ruthlessness is praised throughout 1 Samuel. The chant that haunts Saul goes, “Saul has struck down thousands, but David tens of thousands,” and one of Saul’s chief “sins” is his failure to kill absolutely everything in an Amalekite camp. David, of course, as a man after God’s own heart, does not make the same mistake. Once again, we’re forced to question just how reconcilable this is with the value libertarians place on all human life.
Anti-libertarian themes aren’t exclusive to the Old Testament. Usually, atheist libertarians criticize the Gospels’ degradation of the rich, its spurning of material goods, and the idea that this world doesn’t matter. But I’d like to look at a more concrete example of the Lord’s behavior which should unsettle any libertarian. The Expulsion of the Money-Changers, or the Cleansing of the Temple, is a well known story that appears in all four canonical Gospels. In the story, Jesus goes to the temple (a building intimately tied to kingship and empire) after entering Jerusalem. In the courtyard, Jesus sees men transacting. Some are changing local coinage for the temple’s Tyrian shekels, others buy small sacrificial pigeons from vendors. No one is forcing these individuals to interact with each other, and no one is interfering. No one, that is, until Jesus arrives.

Did Jesus Condone Coercion?
Upon witnessing such an unholy sight, Jesus begins flipping over stalls, chasing animal and man alike from the temple. He drives the merchants from the courtyard, stopping all business. The Gospel of John relates an even more damning detail: Jesus makes a whip to lash the money-changers with. Even if we grant that Jesus had some right to do what he did (and there’s no reason to assume he had that right), his method is still wrong. He doesn’t ask the merchants to leave. He doesn’t hire a lawyer to sue them. That would be rational and respectful. Instead, he immediately falls upon them, like David upon Amalekites, whipping and beating his way to victory. He doesn’t just hurt the merchants though; he hurts every pilgrim who couldn’t go about their business in the temple that day. He hurts the temple itself, now unable to collect its expected income. Such a flagrant disregard for property rights, such an assault on individual rights, cannot be reconciled with libertarianism. The Gospels laud Jesus’ violent act, but libertarians should not.
I hope that so far I have not offended (too much), and that I have not bored (too much). I tried to stick to closely to the Bible, but I read it without a believer’s credulity. Constrained by a desire for brevity, I left out many germane passages, some of which will hopefully be addressed as the debate series continues. Specifically, the Book of Job probably deserves its own post, and I recommend that every libertarian, Christian or not, read it and digest it. Rarely has an ancient text so subtly explored the confusing, and sometimes frustrating, relationship between justice and power; man and god.