Celsus
“The God of both Jews and Christians is a busy, interfering deity. He created this world less than ten thousand years ago. It is all done for the sole benefit of an elect few quite arbitrarily chosen, while everyone else will be consumed by fire in an equally arbitrary destruction of the world. The Christian belief in the Incarnation presupposes that after an immense period of inactivity God suddenly wakes up to send his Spirit down to a single individual in one small corner of the earth, a scandalous particularity which is fatal to any claim for universality. The very notion of an elect people of God is worse than irrational: it also leads Jews and Christians to imagine that their myths are superior to everyone else’s and that their religion is true and all others false. The Jews’ belief that they are God’s elect is a mere reflection of inflated national pride. The idea that God suddenly decides to make a world and then no less suddenly destroys it is childish and blasphemous. Moreover, thought out the process of history in the Biblical God is irrationally intervening. He has to check the evil in the world he has made (evidently very incompetently) by drastic interventions like the episode of the tower of Babel or the Flood or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Biblical God is apparently impelled to this strangely capricious behavior by the feeling that he is neglected by his creatures; he wants a reluctant humanity to recognize his dignity, ‘a very mortal ambition.’” –Celsus
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