Cain and Abel — Christianity’s First Dysfunctional Family.
Ah, the magnificent story of Cain and Abel. Jealousy, rejection, murder, incest, banishment, a curse from an invisible being, sex, drugs and Rock and Roll. O.K. not drugs and Rock and Roll. But dudes, this story has almost everything else! Nearly every conflict that humans can engage in, and all in about 25 lines. The Bible is often long on action but a bit short on details.
So let’s look at humanity’s first sex, first murder, first incest, and second banishment. Cain and Abel set the bar so high!
Adam had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.”
Once again, I find it more enlightening to assume the Bible true as written and then look at the logical inconsistencies from the inside. It’s harder to find holes in your tent while it’s still lying on the ground. Set it up. Crawl in. Look around. Live there a bit. The flaws become more apparent after an hour or two. Just be sure to get the hell out before you become too used to flaws and fail to see them any longer. That’s a doom I would wish on no free thinker. So let’s explore a bit.
You have to wonder about those first relations. Was there a manual? Did God have that awkward rednecky birds and the bees talk with Adam? Was it instinct? Trial and Error? Sigh! Poor Eve! It’s always the women who suffer! Well, she did say she had the help of the lord. Hmmm! I’ll just stay away from that entirely. And don’t you get all offended. Look what happened to Mary with the help of the Lord!!
Then Abel was born, and he grew to become a shepherd, while Cain grew into a farmer. God, unbeknownst to Cain, was a carnivore and looked with disfavor on an offer of veggies and fruit, while smiling on Abel’s MegaMeat offering. Hey, we were created in his image and what man wouldn’t favor a bit of tender lamb chop? Damn vegetarians! Anyway, God doesn’t like Cain’s offering and Cain doesn’t like God not liking his offering. As anyone who has even the slightest intimacy with the human race knows, this will lead to no good. So in typical human fashion and not being able to harm the one who truly wronged him, Cain takes out his shame of rejection on his brother and kills Abel. Problem solved, right? Well, not so much.
As with so much in this book, When we look with modern eyes on these decisions of God, they come up lacking in both compassion and common sense. Even at a glance, I feel uneasy with offerings to an all-powerful being. What does an all-powerful god need with offerings, anyway? I mean, he can create shit out of nothing! He’s the ultimate “guy who has everything”. What does he get out of it? A sense of satisfaction? An enjoyment of the gift? An opportunity to meddle? Oh yeah, baby! I think we found us a winner! Old Jehovah is no different than Brother Zeus, always looking for an excuse to descend and tinker with human lives. Am I being too hard on the old guy? I think not. This is a theme that we will be returning too over and over. An all-seeing and all-knowing God cannot but know what the consequences of his actions will be. He knew Cain would kill Abel before Cain was even born. He knew the why and the when. This is the direct logical conclusion of being all-knowing and all-seeing.
When Cain is crestfallen because of the rejected offering, God does nothing to calm his spirit, nothing to stop the terrible sin. If you knew someone was going to kill his brother but did nothing to stop it, would you not share in the blame. People who witness a rape but do nothing to stop it, are they not partly responsible? With a deity, the blame magnifies. He created the world. He created Cain. He made the whole human race in the view of the literalists. How can he escape the blame for what we do? Let’s say I made a very advanced robot capable of making decisions on it own. It runs into the street one day and starts mowing people down. I do not believe that blaming the robot for the error would be a valid legal defense. In the infinite wisdom of Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s sad when Peter Parker show a higher morality that the Lord God.
Here is what God actually says when he sees a very sad Cain “Why are you so resentful and crestfallen? If you do well you can hold your head up, but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door: his urge is towards you, yet you can be his master.” Is this what Cain needed? Assuredly not, because Abel’s soon bleeding into a field. He tells Cain, and I paraphrase here, “Do better. Please me more!” What the….
During the murder, does God reach down and block the blade? No, he doesn’t even know it has happened until he hears Abel’s blood calling out from the ground. For an omniscient God, he is peculiarly blind at times. And it’s not like he had too much to attend to. There were only four people on earth at this time for god’s sake (irony intended).
Here is one of those inconsistencies that shine so brightly. God then curses Cain to restlessly wander the earth,never living off the soil again. Cain whines that his fate is too terrible, that with this curse anyone he meets can kill him. God then places the Mark of Cain protecting him from harm by threatening seven fold retribution on anyone who kills Cain. Death would be the easy way out, and God seems to want him to suffer for the murder of Abel. Here’s the problem. Who in the hell is there to kill Cain? According to literal biblical interpretation there were only two other people on earth at this time, Cain’s parents. Is this who he was afraid of? Who else could there have possibly have been? At the very most, there may have been a few unmentioned brothers or sisters about, but remember Cain was the third person on Earth and the first one born of woman. How many could there have been?
Cain then moves to the land of Nod, has relations with his wife and founds a city. Wife? Who? City? With who? Scarecrows? Lego people? Weird little Blair Witch Project stick people? Again, there was no one else around.
A few months ago a letter to the editor in a local paper stated quite boldly that we atheists were sinful to even ask this question. In the time of Adam there was no prohibition against incest. God made it OK, initially, and only forbade it later. Talk about relative morality. Therefore, Cain’s wife was merely an unmentioned daughter of Eve, a sister. Eww! This is troubling on so many fronts, the incest and cities populated with hordes of nearly genetically identical people. Not to mention that a sister marries a brother who murdered another brother. After this, is it any wonder humanity has such a taste for soap operas?
On the other hand, metaphorically, this myth does have a beauty. Was there a small seed of truth here? Did Cain screw up and have to live with his fratricide. Could he have forgiven himself? Could his parents? Banished from his tribe he was forced to wander forlorn and alone. Screwing up and being banished or shunned is a very human theme from the playground to the workplace. We have all felt this many times, if not to this degree. This myth does show how terribly we are flawed, how we are weak and hateful, jealous and petty. How we long for some explanation of why we are as broken as we are. This story tells us oodles about who we are, good and bad, and what it really means to be human.
It just doesn’t have much good to say about God.
You made the following comment: >Cain then moves to the land of Nod, has relations with his wife and founds a city. Wife? Who? City? With who? Scarecrows? Lego people? Weird little Blair Witch Project stick people? Again, there was no one else around.>
I once made a similar comment on the Bible Errancy News Group. A former Baptist Preacher, turned Atheist, who was one of the most knowledgeable on this board, informed me that if I had made this comment to his former congregation, they would have laughed me out the door because, in the Old Testament, daughters being born were not mentioned. Therefore, the most likely answer is that Cain married one of his sisters.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Epicurus (341-270)
In my opinion, AND I MIGHT BE WRONG, it doesn’t make sense for God to prevent evil. I think (I can’t verify this to be true) everyone has different definitions of what’s evil and what isn’t. Obviously the Taliban and other terrorists, including the guy who flew his plane into the building with IRS workers, feel that bombing citizens are fair game, while a majority of the world doesn’t. So, if God were to prevent “evil”, how different would the world be? It is impossible to please everyone, so it’s best to please none at all, and not mess with this.
See you are looking at it all wrong. You’re thinking God can’t prevent evil. What you are not including is that all people are sinners (sin is evil) so if He were to abolish evil, me and you would be wiped away in less than a split second. Be happy that God is just and not fair. If He was fair, me and you wouldn’t exist. I know your next argument would be “I’m not evil, I’ve never killed anyone”. But can you really say you had never had an evil thought, or have you ever lied, cheated, cursed, hated someone. The list goes on. If you ever lied than that makes you a liar, if you ever cheated then you are a cheater. I’m sure you catch my drift. You might say evil is defined differently by other people but we know lying is bad, we need that if you cheat on a test it’s bad or if you cheat on your wife it’s bad. And if you don’t thinking cheating on your wife is bad just ask her.LOL You know what I mean. I respect your opinion, but I’m no crazy person. God is real and my life proves it. My life story proves it. God isn’t an old man with a beard and ugly sandals. He is the only God that would pay a ransom for his people, HIs creation. I don’t know of any other god’s trying to help me out. Only JESUS, and no one can ever say he didn’t exist. By the way look up Josephus a non christian historian.
See you are looking at it all wrong. You’re thinking God can’t prevent evil. What you are not including is that all people are sinners (sin is evil) so if He were to abolish evil, me and you would be wiped away in less than a split second. Be happy that God is just and not fair. If He was fair, me and you wouldn’t exist. I know your next argument would be “I’m not evil, I’ve never killed anyone”. But can you really say you had never had an evil thought, or have you ever lied, cheated, cursed, hated someone. The list goes on. If you ever lied than that makes you a liar, if you ever cheated then you are a cheater. I’m sure you catch my drift. You might say evil is defined differently by other people but we know lying is bad, we need that if you cheat on a test it’s bad or if you cheat on your wife it’s bad. And if you don’t thinking cheating on your wife is bad just ask her.LOL You know what I mean. I respect your opinion, but I’m no crazy person. God is real and my life proves it. My life story proves it. God isn’t an old man with a beard and ugly sandals. He is the only God that would pay a ransom for his people, HIs creation. I don’t know of any other god’s trying to help me out. Only JESUS, and no one can ever say he didn’t exist. That’s it for now. Happy new year!
@James:
Well, thank you for stating the bleedin’ obvious.
So, in your ‘philosophy,’ there is no difference between, say, telling your neighbour that yes, her child is indeed the most beautiful baby ever, and, say, genocide? Both are equally punishable and deserving of equal punishment?
Somehow, I doubt it. Your life may well be proof that belief in your god is real, possibly even that some people will attribute credit to non-existent beings, but, ‘proof that they exist’? Nah!
What ransom? By your philosophy, he created everything, including evil, and can control everything, even people’s thoughts and actions. So the only person he paid any ransom to was himself, and it was paid to prevent an evil that he created in the first place and could easily prevent the spread of. And the only thing he wants in return is our unwavering fawning adulation. Can we all say ‘protection racket’?
James.
What you are saying is that since we are all sinners we need God’s grace to get into heaven, right? You don’t find it a bit odd that God created us all so flawed that we need to sell ourselves into slavery to become “saved”?
Ah, but you will say that God didn’t create us flawed. We are the ones who choose to sin so therefore the evil is in us and not in God. Tell me something James, how many people have you ever heard of who are without sin? I talking people, now now “sons of God” Have there been a million sinless people in the world? A thousand? One? No, not a single sinless human in all the time since creation.
So Ever since your perfect creator made us, without flaws of course, not one single person has passed this test of his. In all of the tens of billions of people who has existed everyone one of them has failed the exam the he set up and thereby deserve to go to hell. Therefore the only way to get into heaven is to become a slave.
What kind of jackass sets up a system like this? What kind of monster do you worship? He creates us flawed, demands we not sin the way he created us to and finally demands compete and utter obedience to overcome the fact the we, as creations of a perfect God, don’t live up to his expectations. How logical is that?
The idea that God killed himself as a sacrifice to himself to pay for sins that every person, created perfectly by himself, of course, does everyday and therefore don’t live up to the expectations he, himself, laid down.
A proof of a non divine creation is that we as a culture can still hold onto an idea as backwards as that. How is that any different than getting 72 virgins when you blow people up?
How can you worship such a bastard of a god?
James–you need to go look up what real biblical scholars have to say about Josephus. Here’s an even-handed account of the passages in Josephus you’re probably referring to. Let it be noted that there are a whole two passages in Josephus that mention Jesus…
I lol’d at “Damn vegetarians (I’m a vegan–what’s god’s problem with that!?). This part of the story sounds like an explanation of why they sacrificed meat rather than grain or veggies, although that probably came about because it was highly prized food (there could be other reasons, but I assume most would relate to limited resources, etc, not to mention the nomadic shepherding style of the Hebrews at some points).
In Genesis there are so many myths that explain how various parts of the world or of Hebrew/human culture came about, I have a hard time taking it as anything but myth–it’s so much like other origin stories.
And what have you got against Peter Parker? He’s a good guy!
Incredible. velssedatheist.com is kller.
What I’d like to know is–what did Cain really say to Abel? The phrase inserted into the quotes about “Let us go out to the field” isn’t really there in the Hebrew (some bibles put it in brackets, others state in the fine print below “Heb lacks…”).
You really got me laughing on this one. Yes, God’s “relative morality” does indeed become a tired theme.
God told Cain at the dawn of mankind that it wasn’t okay to knock off Abel. Later, God calls to Abraham and asks him to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. Is God conflicted, or is it man?
Let’s be clear: killing in the form of a sacrifice to appease a jealous God is okay, thus killing in God’s name, is okay. If you kill because you’re mad at someone, it’s not okay. If, somehow, you can prove that God is mad at that same person and invoke His name on the deed, then you can (according to the Old Testament) kill another person with God’s blessing and without backlash from the community (justification of tribal wars and brutality).
If this sounds crazy to you, it should! But if you want to take a literal understanding of the Holy Bible, you’d better be aware of the obvious conflicts that exist in its pages.
Thanks for shedding some light on this subject – much needed!
comments to this type of thinking all have a common theme…they attempt to explain situations and reactions in terms already known to mankind…that doesn’t work…we have proof it doesn’t work…man by his own volition is no better off then he was 7000 years ago (approx time for recorded history)…if measured on the scale of human decency and respect. More insight is what will lead to individual freedoms and improved life. The question then is how to become more insightful. Those who read the bible with neither a critical nor accepting prejudice will be rewarded the most precious of gifts…INSIGHT.
Mankind struggels for generations with plagues and maladies because subjects were approached with prejudice. A simple one is the concept of a sterile environment for surgery…Louise Pasture has saved millions of lives with his simple non-prejudice approach to why people die after surgery…this list of non-prejudiced discovery would take several books to compile…
The “God” you refer to cannot be analysed…AT ALL…He cannot be measured then generalized…. In fact His word admits that that His ways cannot be determinded by mortal mankind…His ways are above ours…What He does offer is a personal relationship for those who ask and seek it. He does offer an inroad through which He can transcend His ways to mankind… Man will always be limited as to how to express and report just WHAT GOD IS LIKE…How arrogant to write an ATHESISTIC treatise…no matter how short or long. Such anecdotal trivia only serve to get responses like this one…
“His ways cannot be determinded(sic) by mortal mankind”
In which case, how do you presume to know what he wants?
“How arrogant to write an ATHESISTIC(sic) treatise”
How arrogant to claim to know the mind of the creator of the universe.
Memo to self: Fill The Damn Form In.
“See you are looking at it all wrong. You’re thinking God can’t prevent evil. What you are not including is that all people are sinners (sin is evil) so if He were to abolish evil, me and you would be wiped away in less than a split second. Be happy that God is just and not fair. If He was fair, me and you wouldn’t exist. ”
So, this perfect, all-loving, all-powerful, benevolent god can’t find a way to get rid of evil without killing you?
“God is real and my life proves it.”
God is NOT real and my life proves it.
“God is NOT real and my life proves it.”
(cheering for Nancy!)
)
Ughhh, I can’t believe I am even commenting on here, but ANY-WHO i am… i found your site because I am studying the bible as well as a nonsmart person can. I am aching to learn more about my savior… that being said I am human and I am questioning.. My question was the same as yours.. WHO THE HELL was there to Kill Cain!!?? Ok so then your questions only brought up more to me.. Who did they marry etc… Whatever.. It just leaves me with an even deeper longing to search and Know GOD. I am not athiest. I am a Christian. Yes i was born and rasied that way.. dated an athiest for 4 years…. so only recently have I become a NEW Christian for the right reasons, because I want to be, not because I was programmed to be.
Anyway none-the-less this article made me laugh… ooops sorry should I admit that, anyway …it did.
thanks.
The medication ran out?
I hate to break it to you, but all your questions about who they married and so forth mean nothing. The simple fact is that these people didn’t exist, so asking questions about such things is like asking where Mr Rochester went on his holidays.
Therefore, Cain’s wife was merely an unmentioned daughter of Eve, a sister. Eww!
Well of course the other possiblity would be of course that there was no SISTER to be Cain’s new wife . . .. . hrmmmm
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