Before Jesus arrived and his divine father chilled out, the Old Testament God was, ironically, kind of a hellraiser. He was not a nice guy.

He really liked killing people. And he may have actually been insane, if his willingness to randomly murder devout worshippers like Moses was any indication. Here are the 12 craziest, most awful things God did in the Old Testament, back before that wacked-out hippie Jesus softened him up.

1) Sending Bears to Murder Children

So a guy named Eliseus was traveling to Bethel when a bunch of kids popped up and made fun of him for being bald. That had to suck, and you can’t blame Eliseus for being pissed and cursing them to God. But God had Eliseus’ back, by which I mean he sent two bears to maul 42 of these kids to death. For making fun of a bald dude. I have to think Eliseus was looking for something along the lines of a spanking, or maybe the poetic justice of having the kids go bald, but nope, God went straight for the bear murder. But on the plus side, that pile of 40+ children’s corpses never made fun of anybody again. (4 Kings 2:23-24)

2) Turning Lot’s Wife to Salt

Most folks know about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities of sin God decided to kill everyone in instead of, you know, making them not full of sin. But this was a town that, when two angels were staying at Lot’s place, gathered en masse and asked if they could rape them. I repeat: They wanted to rape angels. So they kind of had their destruction coming. Lot and his family were sent from the city before things went down, and Lot’s wife looked back, and God turned her into a pillar of salt. It’s generally understood that Lot’s wife was looking back in a wistful kind of way at her angel-raping hometown, but the fact is there’s nothing in the Bible to suggest this. Nor was Lot’s family warned about looking back. Maybe Lot’s wife wanted to see Sodom and Gomorrah get what was coming to it. Maybe she was thinking wistfully of the things she had to leave behind. Maybe she wondered if she left the oven on. We’ll never know, because God turned her into seasoning for breaking a rule she didn’t know existed. (Genesis19:26)

3) Hating Ugly People

In what should be good news for intolerant religious conservatives, God really does hate people who are different from the norm. Of course, God isn’t as worried about skin colour or sexual orientation as he is about whether you’re ugly or not. Because if you’re ugly, you can just go worship some other god, okay? (Even though God will punish you if you do and also they don’t exist.) Here’s the people God does not want coming into his churches: People with blemishes, blind people, the lame, those with flat noses, dwarves, people with scurvy, people with bad eyes, people with bad skin, and those that “hath their stones broken.” Given that God is technically responsible for giving people all of these afflictions in the first place, this is an enormous dick move. (Leviticus 21:17-24)

4) Trying to Kill Moses

In terms of people who God likes, you’d think Moses would be pretty high up on the list, right? I mean, God appointed him to lead the Jews out of Egypt, parted the Red Sea for him, and even picked him to receive the 10 Commandments, right? Yet this didn’t stop God from trying to kill Moses when he ran into him at “a lodging place.” There is literally no explanation given in the Bible for God’s decision to murder one of his chief supporters. The line is “At a lodging place on the way, the Lord met Moses and was about to kill him.” The only sensible explanation for this is that God was drunk out of his mind and looking for a bar fight, and you better hope that’s correct because the alternative is that God’s a psychopath. How was God stopped from murdering his #1 fan? “But [Moses' wife] Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it … So the Lord let him alone.” Either the sight of a very unexpected circumcision sobered God up quickly, or he didn’t want to touch a dude who just touched a severed foreskin. Still, it’s Moses’ son who’s the real victim here. (Exodus 4:24-26)

5) Committing So Much Genocide… 

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