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

If this doesn't reek of ironic truth, I don't know what does.

AAARRRRGGGGGG!!!!!! @#^$Q$%&#%!!!

Goddamn it people, there are times I really question my intelligence. Do you have any idea how many times I have started on this post? Four! This is my fourth pathetic attempt to bring some degree of sense to the end of Exodus. The others, needless to say, were less than inspiring. Dross would be a polite word to describe them; shit would be more accurate if less socially acceptable. In general, I prefer accuracy to social conventions so shit they were. This is it! Last Chance! One more failed attempt and I’m taking my Bible out back and burying the goddamned thing in the backyard.

Sigh! Writing is always unpredictable. Sometimes what you are writing is golden. Words come easily and fine. Sentences gush forth and perfect images form on each page. Writing, at those time, is effortless. Let me tell you that is a beautiful feeling, a feeling every writer loves to have. But then… then… sometimes I do everything I can: scream, bang my head, type, delete, retype, concentrate until a stroke seems imminent and what the hell do I get as a result? A herculean exertion and on the page is some foul and rancid literary vomit, disgusting tripe. Is this really what the interior of my mind looks like, a slowly congealing mass of uninspired and limp mediocrity? I’m pretty sure that If I were intelligently designed, my brain’s output wouldn’t resemble the chunks off the bottom of the Cat box. Jesus Christ, now in cracker form, it wearies me. What I need is an upgrade, Bundy 2.0 had better come soon, or I’m doomed. This first adopter prototype mind I have several serious bugs.

Truth be told, I think the problem lies with the ungodly, pardon the pun, level of detail in Exodus. There’s no story, no people, nothing of interest what-so-ever. Let me tell you the majority of this bitch is one vast and complicated formula to please God and you all know how fascinating I find that. Put this bauble there, this robe like that, cut the bull’s throat, spray its blood here, here and, of course, here. It’s like some ancient form of Super Mario Brothers. You jump three times, hit a block with your head and leap on top of a huge green pot while pressing down and you’re transported to a magical world where princesses need rescuing from dangerous walking mushrooms. It’s just like that only without the fun… or the action… or the princess. Well… actually it’s nothing like that, but I just couldn’t think of another analogy that even came close. If you think you can do one better knock yourself out.

My point remains valid. This part of Exodus is all Moses on the mountain getting instructions from God on how to please God. And we all know the only thing God likes more than being pleased is being displeased and knocking shit down. This is Yahweh’s own self masturbatory ejaculation. As background, we should remind you that Moses is up there for a long time, 40 days to be precise. He has supposedly received the ten Commandments and other rules in this time and is now getting the lowdown on making the people God’s bitches. He has instructions for building the temple, ark, altar and lampstand and is now taking down all the things that God wants his priests to do to make God happy.

But when the temple is built and the Ark and altars and lampstands are in place, what could be left for the glorification of the Lord? What the hell else could God possibly want? What indeed, but the consecration of his priests. Holy shit people, (which I guess would be the point!) God can’t have unholy shitbags, AKA ordinary people, touching his altars? Do you even know what they wiped with back then? Charmin, it wasn’t. They live in a desert, for a lack of Christ’s sake! Even leaves were in short supply, so who the hell knows where those dirty bastards have been. Well, God would know and that’s why he gave them the formula for soap.

Naw, I’m just shitting you. Of course God didn’t give us soap. Soap would have had a function not to mention a real benefit for humanity, and as everyone knows that actual ideas for workable inventions appear to be forbidden in this midden heap of literature. No, God only allows the dreck of vague arcana and mystical voodoo to pervade his most sacred tome. All that practical stuff like atomic structure and the Germ Theory of Disease were left out, strictly unnecessary. And of course, soap. What possible good would those have done us? As a people struggling our way through ignorance and death… Death by disease… Because we weren’t clean enough… Yeah, useless!

Oh? Do I sound bitter? I’ll tell you what, you slog through the effort of trying to shovel through the gory details of bull sacrifice and the bloody anointing of priests four separate times desperately searching for threads to tie it all together. I feel like I’ve had my head up my ass for weeks now… No! Actually I feel like I’ve had my head up Moses’ ass for weeks now. Moses… A guy who had never used soap. You try it and we’ll see just how bitter you get.

Ok, no soap. Making his priests worthy of touching him (let’s not go there) involved a dark and mysterious purification process to sanctify them. The rites are dark for they deal with sacrifice and blood splattered everywhere. They’re mysterious because, well frankly, who the hell could possibly figure out why spraying blood here or there has any effect on anything, but especially how does it help in making people more alluring. Think about this. What kind of jackass god would think that this butchery somehow makes people cleaner and more appealing? Doesn’t every civilized god — an oxymoron, I know — love their followers even more when the reek of the slaughter house hangs over them? I’m sure it sure gives Yahweh a chubby, but why would this be so? Do you really find your friends more trustworthy if they’re dripping in blood? Do you find your sexual partner hotter when they look as if they have come from butchering an ox? Well, I don’t, but maybe that might be someone’s kink but in a God we worship? What does this say about him?

These few chapters could best be described as a bunch of shit so we’ll dip into this section gingerly and briefly. There is simply too much nonsense here to linger for long , and I don’t want to become any more bogged down here than I already have. Take my word on it. Moses’ ass is not a place you want to spend much time. Trust me! But something of the flavor needs to be tasted, pardon the expression, so here are a few lines of Exodus 29 just some of the many involved in this purification ritual.

“Now this is what you shall do to them to consecrate them to minister as priests to Me: take one young bull and two rams without blemish, and unleavened bread and unleavened cakes mixed with oil, and unleavened wafers spread with oil; you shall make them of fine wheat flour. “You shall put them in one basket, and present them in the basket along with the bull and the two rams. “Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons to the doorway of the tent of meeting and wash them with water. “You shall take the garments, and put on Aaron the tunic and the robe of the ephod and the ephod and the breastpiece, and gird him with the skillfully woven band of the ephod; and you shall set the turban on his head and put the holy crown on the turban. “Then you shall take the anointing oil and pour it on his head and anoint him. “You shall bring his sons and put tunics on them. “You shall gird them with sashes, Aaron and his sons, and bind caps on them, and they shall have the priesthood by a perpetual statute. So you shall ordain Aaron and his sons.

“Then you shall bring the bull before the tent of meeting, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on the head of the bull. “You shall slaughter the bull before the Lord at the doorway of the tent of meeting. “You shall take some of the blood of the bull and put it on the horns of the altar with your finger; and you shall pour out all the blood at the base of the altar. “You shall take all the fat that covers the entrails and the lobe of the liver, and the two kidneys and the fat that is on them, and offer them up in smoke on the altar.”

And skipping ahead a bit get this

“But the flesh of the bull and its hide and its refuse, you shall burn with fire outside the camp; it is a sin offering. You shall also take the one ram, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on the head of the ram; and you shall slaughter the ram and shall take its blood and sprinkle it around on the altar. “Then you shall cut the ram into its pieces, and wash its entrails and its legs, and put them with its pieces and its head. “You shall offer up in smoke the whole ram on the altar; it is a burnt offering to the Lord: it is a soothing aroma, an offering by fire to the Lord. “Then you shall take the other ram, and Aaron and his sons shall lay their hands on the head of the ram. “You shall slaughter the ram, and take some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear and on the lobes of his sons’ right ears and on the thumbs of their right hands and on the big toes of their right feet, and sprinkle the rest of the blood around on the altar. “Then you shall take some of the blood that is on the altar and some of the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and on his garments and on his sons and on his sons’ garments with him; so he and his garments shall be consecrated, as well as his sons and his sons’ garments with him.

Yeah, that’s what every God wants, right? Blood on the ear and the big toe. Yeah, I’m sure he’ll get really hot and bothered over that. Anyway, sorry for the long quote, but mind you as tedious as it is, this is but a small part of the entire ritual. There are more sacrifices, food for the priests, sin offerings, wave offerings, incense and altars for incense, anointing oils, and at last, the exact skilled craftsmen God wants to build and manufacture all his stuff. Whew!

Let’s just skip the rest and deal with the big question. What does all this remind you of? I mean really think about it for a minute. What does all this highly ritualized rubbish most resemble? It’s magic, of course! Every line of Exodus 25 – 31 is part of a complicated magical spell to appease the gods or in this case God. In fact, the whole temple and its furnishings sections belong to the same basic concept. Magic. Magic. Magic. As much as the Christians constantly harp on the occultism in today’s society from Harry Potter to Wicca, can they really say this is any different? This is an ancient ritual to get the forces of nature on our side using the mystical power of blood and fire and bizarre actions. There can be no other way of looking at this.

Let’s do an experiment. Let us take these chapters of Exodus and change nothing but God’s name. In fact let’s replace it with the name of Allah. Then let’s approach people and read our slightly altered version verbatim while claiming it was from the Koran. Tell me how many Christians would hold it up as evidence that Islam is evil and the religion of barbarians? How many believers in Christ would denounce Islam as a sect of blood and violence using our “Exodus” as evidence. Just imagine the looks of fury and disgust on their faces as they are told the insane demands of our Allah. Damn, I think I’m on to something! Maybe we should start it as one of those emails that makes the rounds where people are horrified at what is being taught in the name of Islam, the kind of email my mother used to send me.

After all the horrified responses, we could point out that it really is the Bible. Oh, just imagine the look on their faces then. Priceless! We gotta try that. All right, people, this is your homework assignment for BABS university next week. Your grade depends on it. I want a full report.

The reality here is that the world needs to face the fact that these are the same activities and beliefs as magic. They are just aimed at a different imaginary power. The Hebrews were appeasing the powers that they couldn’t understand yet affected their lives. As are the Wiccans. The difference here is that the modern Wiccans should know better… as should modern Christians. The time for magically controlling the universe is over. Is superstition in itself evil? No. Occultism isn’t any more evil than having an imaginary friend. It’s just something that we should have outgrown by now. So the question we need to ask our Fundamentalist brothers and sisters is why is Wicca superstitious nonsense while this mumbo jumbo from Exodus is simply logical relations with a divine being? There is no good answer to that.

Keeping in mind my earlier theory of Moses being a cult leader, another thing to remember is that Moses goes up to the mountain for 40 days, plenty of time to make up some quasi-magical horse manure. He had nearly six weeks to churn out some mystical rites along with a few of the practical rules we studied before. Did a perfect God really take that long to impart his sacred ideas into Moses bony skull, or did Moses use this time to invent a more complicated version of his religion to consolidate control over his people? Look at this closely and you can’t fail to come to the realization that this severely limits access to the sacred to just a few top people, top people who are to be treated like kings. First, only the top men could approach the mountain and now only a very select few will ever be allow to “interact” with God. The priest-kings are established. The shackles are set.

Can you see how convenient this is from a cult point of view? The apparatus for lasting control is in place, and Moses has the people just where he needs them, he and his cronies on top with all the power because God will only talk to them and everyone else at the bottom desperately eager to please the forces they cannot fathom.

But we now know that such rubbish changes nothing of the world. We now know better.

Or we should!