~~ It's Time to Intervene ~~
The late author Christopher Hitchens was fond of highlighting the absurdity of the timeline for the Christian faith with a short story that I believe both puts the faith into perspective while at the same time diminishing its plausibility. The scientific consensus is that our species (Homo Sapiens) has been on the planet for between 100,000 and 200,000 years49. If we use just the lower end of that estimate, this means that for the first 98,000 years of mankind's existence, our species struggled mightily with famine, war, and suffering. Many children died during childbirth and many people never saw life beyond 25 years of age. With all of this misery going on, Heaven does not deem it necessary to intervene but rather watches all of this misery with complete indifference. To be Christian is to believe that God then thinks to Himself, "well that's enough of that. It's time to intervene and have a revelation." So God decides that the best place to have this revelation is in the desert. He doesn't appear to the Chinese for example who have a more intellectually robust civilization but instead determines that the best way to deliver instructions for all of mankind is to appeal to men living in one of the less literate and most barbaric parts of the world. As Hitchens says, "This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person."
I think there is more that we can take away from Hitchens' story. Even if we go further back in time beyond Jesus to the revelation between God and Moses, we are still left with thousands of years of the Judeo-Christian God not finding it terribly worthwhile to deliver instructions to mankind on how to live righteously and attain eternal peace. Think for a moment how many generations of people lived and died without ever having had this kind of divine knowledge revealed to them. How many people had to die before God felt it important enough to reveal himself? An even bigger question lies with the people in which this god chose to reveal his message. If we are all God's children, why did He decide to only speak to one capricious and superstitious group of humans living in one of the most backward, desolate areas on the planet? Imagine the overwhelming religious case to be made about the plausibility of this god if He had appeared to every civilization at the same time and delivered identical instructions! It seems like a rather trivial thing for an omnipotent being to accomplish and yet a mere mortal like me can produce a more believable way to convince a planet of God's existence than God himself.
The coddling of the Jews and the later elevating of Christians and Muslims seems to be in stark contrast to the portrait of God as a loving father. No other civilization outside the desert was made aware of the Judeo-Christian god. Christianity for example wouldn't be known across the world for many centuries and was often spread by the sword. If the purpose of Christianity is to safeguard the souls of man, what loving father is willing to condemn the rest of his children to an eternity in Hell for the simplistic crime of disbelief - a disbelief they didn't even know they had! The morality of a God who would let his children perish under parameters He Himself established should rightly be called into question and yet this is the very essence of the Judeo-Christian god. Hitchens was absolutely correct. This is nonsense.