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

Famine Tests Humanity

At this point in the story, Joseph  is on top of the world.  He is charge of all of Egypt’s harvests in order to save enough food to survive the coming famine, and he does a bang up job of it too.  Husbanding the food for seven years until the grain was  ”in quantities like the sands of the sea, so vast that at last he stopped measuring it, for it was beyond measure.”  Now that’s a lot of grain.  The Pharaoh rewarded him richly and gave him a wife by the name of Asenath.  Yeah, I know, weird!  The Bible actually gives her name. Who’d have thought?   She has two sons.  True to form, we have no idea if they had any girls.

When the famine strikes, he has Egypt in such a state of readiness that when food runs low, Joseph has not only stored enough for every Egyptian for the seven years, but they are able to sell food to the surrounding people as well.  Life is good for Joseph.

Let’s look at what we have so far.  God wants to create a great famine in a sizable chunk of North Africa and the Middle East.  He doesn’t seem to want everyone to die from it so he sends a mysterious warning in the form of dreams to the Pharaoh.  These dreams can only be interpreted by Joseph who then takes the reins of Egypt and the surrounding areas and prepares everyone for the seven bad years by saving vast stores of food from the good seven ones.  Everyone with me so far?

Here’s my problem.  Why?  Why does he want to have a famine at all?  What purpose does it serve?  Why not just have fine weather and great crops?  He could do it.  This is great and all-powerful Yahweh, remember.  He controls everything.

Let’s look at the explanations.  The first possible is that he didn’t want the famine to come.  He simply didn’t have the power to stop it.  This opposes omnipotence.  And who wants a god who can’t stop a simple drought.  Second, the famine arose from other sources and he chose not to stop it.  Where would the famine have come from if not from him?  Satan?  The Bible doesn’t even mention him yet.  Believing the hard-core fundamentalist’s view of nature and God doesn’t leave many choices.  In the universe of an omnipotent and omniscient god to whom we are supposed to daily sing hosannas and give credit for the smallest of things, that same god cannot avoid responsibility for the disasters on his watch.  We can’t change the weather or well…, we didn’t then. By his own followers many recent statements, he’s in charge of that department.  He had to have wanted it. He demanded that people suffer.  And please don’t give that crap about him loving every one so much that he sent dreams to warn us.  Effin’ dreams?  Is he kidding?  If he wanted to protect human life why doesn’t he just NOT create a famine?  But no! He sends dreams! That’ll make it all better.    So it’d be fine if  I plant a few bombs in Chicago but send a couple of text messages explaining how to avoid them.  To make it interesting, I’d send them in Sanskrit to purely random people.  Hey, I warned ‘em.  Can’t touch me officer.  I got the Bible on my side!

All this begs an even bigger question of purpose.  Why would a benevolent creator want famine to rage across the land causing suffering and death?  What possible use could this have?  No matter how much I look at this, no kind and merciful answers spring forth.  None.  There are three shitty options.  Maybe he was testing humanity and weeding out the unworthy.  Or he was indifferent and just didn’t care.  Or he was being malicious and torturing us for the fun of it.  Let’s rephrase here.  God is either a bastard and putting us on trial, a bastard and doesn’t give a shit, or a bastard who’s hurting us bad!  I can see it no other way.

Personally, if I had to say he existed, I would have to tend toward the God who is a bastard just because he is a bastard camp. That seems to fit the evidence best But of all these answers, the believers will throw out all but the first.  God is testing the faithful. Therefore, this is the one in which we must look deeper.

Why does he test us?  Ah, this question has had many answers.  Unfortunately, they’re answers people have just pulled out of their ass.  How do I know?  Because that’s where shit comes from, damn it!   The explanation for the test usually goes something like this.  Heaven is a select club, and God just can’t let anyone in.  So he must test our faith to see if we are good enough.  To do so he sends bad things into our lives to see how we react.  Though I am never actually told this in so many words, I presume that those of us who react poorly to this constant abuse are tortured in the flames of hell for eternity.  Whew!  Did anyone else just get a chill?

Is he testing us today?  Although it’s a rare believer that admits it, do most evangelicals think that the famines of today are tests or punishments for sin?  Are those millions of starving children in North Africa being tested by the lord?  I

Do I even need to say that I think the very idea is trash.  Do we test our children with life threatening situations?  When they fail our malicious little tests, do we shove them in the basement to be tortured for eternity?  This is what goes for love in religion?  This is the great morality that the Bible preaches?  Who the hell called this “The Good Book” anyway. Someone needs to kick him in the balls.  And before you get on me, judging by how the Bible treats women, Biblical authors most certainly were men.

Let me explain how I see the idea of religion.  Let’s say the entire earth is a house, not just any house but a great big mother of a house, at once both beautiful and decrepit.  In this house live a vast number of children.  Where do they come from?  Um… let’s just skip that part, OK? We’ll assume new ones just appear here and there.   There is a father to these children but no mother.  Oh, hell no!  Girls have cooties, you know!  But this father isn’t like normal fathers.  He doesn’t come around and play with them or cuddle them or anything like that.  Can you believe he doesn’t even feed them.  No. No. No. But he does claim credit for every little scrap of food the kids find, rats, bugs, crumbs, whatever.

Now as a father it is his duty to direct his children, making sure they’re safe and protecting them from each other and themselves.  Right?  No, of course not.  He hides in the attic the whole time.  Can you believe the kids have never even seen him?  Well, most of them haven’t.  Some claim to hear his voice through the heat duct now and again, but the rest? Nothing! To guide the children he loves so much, he sends writings down.  Sacred writings like little treasure maps that they can follow and eventually find their way up to his attic paradise.  But wouldn’t you know it, he’d been heavy into the wine while pen was in hand.  Needless-to-say these scribblings rambled on and on in unimportant places and skipped seemingly essential passages all together.  He also seemed to be working on several different drafts at the same time and could never really decide which guidebook to send down.  I mean, one book had golden tablets, others had a story about a special son horribly murdered, and another had some angry prophet rampaging across a desert.  Even more were written. In the end, exhausted by his efforts, he just threw them all down the attic stairs and let the kids sort them out on their own.

Well, you can pretty much figure out what happened.  One group took one, while other groups grabbed completely different books.  Soon they were all fighting over which guidebook was right  and which were trash.  In an effort to “convince” the others that their book was the best they’d even go to war with the other children and force them to say their book is true, murdering and raping the any who objected.

In the meantime Dad is watching from his penthouse all the doings of his children who, of course, he loves so very much.  He had one hell of a surveillance system installed when he built the house (in just seven days). He watches and he measures which ones are being good and which one are failing his tests.  For, yes, it is all a big battery of tests.  He will see which children follow the “right” book and follow it well.  He will throw other tests at them such as plagues and famines and death and… suffering…  Ah, yes!  There’s nothing to test those children, who he loves so much, like pain.  And those that pass his myriad of random tests and follow the proper random guidebook will be brought into the attic paradise to live blissfully forever and anon  with their loving father.  And those children who fail the mentally and physically shattering tests?  Those who grabbed the wrong book?  Well, they will be carried down to the basement where their father, who of course, loves them so very much, will torture them for all eternity.

Does that sound about right?