A Bible Study by the only people truly qualified to study the bible — those who don't believe.

This is KKBundy, The Blessed Atheist from the Blessed Atheist Bible Study, and today we are going to perform a bit of harmless surgery.

This’ll only hurt a bit.  Just insert your brain here. Now, you’ll feel a bit of pressure. Stop whining, please!  And now one really sharp pain while I slice out a good chunk of your cerebrum, fill this created space with dogshit and, presto, you are now a Young Earth Creationist.  See!  That wasn’t hard!  Oh yeah, the bleeding and pain may eventually stop. Not likely, but it may. I hope not. Stupidity must have a price!

Sigh! How do you squeeze a discussion of The Flood with all it’s young Earth interpretations into a simple blog post.  The sheer foolishness of a literal view of these three chapters lends itself to a book length argument rather than a mere essay.  So much to say.  So little time.  Baby steps, Bundy. Baby steps.

My modern moralistic eyes finds this story hatefully appalling.  At it’s most basic,  the flood is the ultimate crime of genocide, complete and utter, total and without mercy.  It’s the purposeful murder of an entire planet.  These chapters positively drip with a supernatural evil.  Satan has nothing on any jackass who would do this.   Here, God is a malignancy dripping with venom, a tumor waiting to kill us, wanting to kill us. He is the boogieman lurking in the dark waiting to kill us all.   Sagas like this put monsters like Stalin in a different perspective.  Creationists, like my mother, are constantly harping on how bad the world has gotten and how the end times are coming.  For proof of her prophecy, she often holds up people like Hitler and Stalin.  It’s a “see how bad the world has gotten without God.” kind of statement. Now it’s not that I’m excusing these people’s evil.  I’m just saying such evil has been here longer than they will admit.   According to the Bible, we were created in God’s image, but one look at this story show’s you a glimpse of the reality is that we created God in ours.  Is the story of Stalin in the Purges and Hitler in the Holocaust really worse than the Great Flood.  Not even close.  Absolute power in anyone’s hands leads to terrible crimes.  The biggest differences here is that we worship god for the atrocities we condemn others for.  Ain’t that a bitch!

The story of Noah proves to me that, if taken literally, God is certainly not on our side.

Again, let’s plunge in with a literal view and view the flaws both technical and moral.  From the very first, we run into inconsistencies with our all-knowing God.

Genesis 6, 5-8

“5 And Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And it repented Jehovah that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.  7 And Jehovah said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the ground; both man, and beast, and creeping things, and birds of the heavens; for it  me that I have made them.  8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of Jehovah.”

You see, God was sorry.  He was sorry he had ever made mankind, and sorry that his mangled creation was such a screw up. But how can this be?  Understand please that this is a point we will be returning to over and over.  A perfect being creates shit and then regrets it?  How so?  There are two related illogical ideas hiding so innocuously here.  The first is that of perfect creating flawed.  The only way a perfect being can create a flawed construct is to do it on purpose because creating it any other way negates perfection. Perfect beings don’t have accidents.  Tremendous  implications follow this line of reasoning.   Are we not the way our perfect creator made us?   Are we perfect with our flaws?  If he made us with flaws then obviously these flaws are acceptable, even desirable.   For how can any perfect being create a flawed creature and then blame that creature for the flaws?   If I build a bookshelf that tilts and falls down every so often, it is hardly logical to blame the shelf.  It is the craftsman that is to blame. Either I am a poor craftsman or I wanted it that way.  By all the evidence, God likes his bookshelves to fall down a lot.

Or another, more logical assumption is that we truly were made in his image, warts and all.  Any reasoned look at the discrepancies here would conclude that God must be as fucked up as his creation?  More powerful? Sure, but still mangled.  If we were created in him image, then God is one messed up, batshit crazy, dickhead. A warped and broken God creates his moral equals.  Why?   Because he is lonely?    Now that would garner some sympathy from me and be more in line with logic.  Perhaps, he just needed someone to pick on.

But all this is not to be.  Christians believe that the perfection of their God is his primary attribute.  Accepting this forces a unbiased thinker to accept the only logical conclusion, he messed us up intentionally.  To what purpose? Because he was bored?  Wanted the excitement of humanity falling down continually?  There are too many equally poor answers to this question.  This could easily be another topic for a book length discussion.

The second of the logical defects in the regret itself in creating man.  Regretting something implies a mistake. Perfection, by definition, has no error.  This difference is irreconcilable.  By this one paragraph, the concept of all-powerful is disproved.  Additionally, you may add the all-seeing and all-knowing elements.  Omniscient beings have to know the consequences of their actions.  It’s in the definition, people.  He made something that he absolutely knew was going to be a mistake and that he would later regret?  Hello?  Why? And why isn’t this a WTF? moment for all those worshippers, I don’t know what could be.  How can you be sorry you made something that you knew was going to be the way you made it?  And you knew you were going to be sorry for making it.  That’s senseless.

The Christians standby line is always “God works in mysterious ways.” or “How can you presume to understand the mind of God?”  Personally, I don’t think it’s that hard. The evidence is there and logic shows us the way.   The God of the flood is either imperfect and evil or greatly flawed and merely petty.  Assuming God is real, reason leads down no other path.   God is a butt-plug, the first butt-plug on the planet and the prototype for every hitleresque butt-plug to come.   So look out!  He’s watching, and he is cruel and jealous… And a dick!

Of course, reason also leads us to the most likely conclusion of all, that the inconsistencies just cancel each other out like variables in algebra.  That the tale of the flood is a people’s desperate attempt to understand their chaotic world, an attempt to bring a sense of order to the chaos.  Just look at the cruel world they lived in with death disease and pain around every corner.  If you lived then wouldn’t it seem like someone was fucking with you too?

But today knowing far more than they did, our reason tells us this story is a myth.