Beautiful Balls Of Biblical Bullshit ©
I saw these and just couldn't resist. Now we can finally determine who would win the final battle.
Exodus 34
I’m not bragging or anything, but people, this next part is going to be great. As a Biblical critic working my way systematically through the damnable book I am stuck with whatever dull and meaningless material the particular section I’m going through has to offer. Far too often useless Bible babble goes on incessantly as with God’s never-ending instruction on how to build his temple. It’s not that I can’t make fun of it, but when the same bullshit goes on for pages I feel I am telling the same joke over and over with increasingly unsettling results like a child constantly screaming “Knock! Knock!” This can get tedious. Painfully Tedious!
Now don’t get me wrong. Many other times the Bible is interesting even fascinating; that is not to say I find it a great moral guide with impeccable logic and perfect ethics. Whoo… Yeah. Damn, just thinking about that made me laugh so hard I hurt myself. Whoo! Let me catch my breath… OK. What I mean to say is that it is often interesting in that I can poke its flaccid and limp logic with a sharp stick and watch it squirm apathetically out of the way. These are the good parts, the parts I enjoy. Nothing I like better than the Bible and a sharp stick. But now and then come the parts that I live for. These are the chapters and verses that are so laden with irony and contradiction that I do not understand how anyone not suffering from either congenital idiocy or a traumatic brain injury cannot realize how absurd it is. These are the parts I love.
And people, here we are at one of those Beautiful Balls of Biblical Bullshit. (© 2011 KKBundy)
Moses, having smashed the original copy of the Ten Commandments in a huge hissy-fit over a certain Golden Calf affair, now desperately finds himself in need of a new set of tablets. Personally, I understand this for what society could survive long without constantly gazing upon admonishments to not kill each other or to not sleep with your neighbor’s wife. Myself, I simply can recount all the times I’ve held a huge rock high over the head of my fellow human ready to smash his or her brains to pudding when, suddenly, I glanced up and saw the Ten Commandments. Every time this happens I’m like “Shit! What the hell was I thinking? This is just wrong!” At times of these ethical temptations, I find it most relaxing to go over and satisfy myself on all the slave women I kidnapped after slaughtering their husbands and family. Damned if I don’t love being righteous!
At any rate Moses needs to find the bronze age version of Kinkos and run off another copy of that fantastically valuable set of rules. So God tells him to carve out another set of blank tablets and meet him, again, on the mountain and, again, don’t bring anyone. So Moses takes his two stone tablets up the mountain to meet the Lord. This is where it gets good.
The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of the Lord. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”
If there is a more fucked up sentence in the Bible, I have yet to run across it, and to me, this sums up all nutless douchebaggery that is the Great Lord Genocide. How do we know God is loving and compassionate? Why he tells us so right here. And if your have the temerity to think otherwise, he will bust a cap in your ass… And your children’s asses… and your grandchildren…, and possibly one or two other generations depending how he’s feeling that day. In the words of the kind and gracious Ming the Merciless, ”All creatures shall make merry…Under pain of Death!”
I particularly like the “slow to anger” part. This is a guy who just condoned the killing of three thousand people for the terrible crime of… making a statue. Making a fucking statue! Thank Baal none of the Hebrews took up oil painting or he would have wiped them all out. And how can any being possibly forgive “iniquity, transgression and sin” but leave no guilty parties unmolested? Isn’t the nature of forgiveness that you do not seek retribution? If I publicly forgive someone for their crimes against me but then gut shoot them with a 12-gauge, people are going to justifiably doubt my sincerity. Does he forgive them after he butchers them but before sending them to hell? Oh wait… Hell hasn’t been invented yet. I guess not.
And someone please tell me what the children and grandchildren could possibly have to do with this so-called crime? And don’t give that shitball of an argument that I can’t possibly understand perfect justice and therefore, have no right to judge God. Think about this for a minute. If someone kills my wife and I ask myself that common ethical question, “What would Jesus do?” the answer would not only be to hunt the bastard down and kill him, but Jesus (Remember that he and God are one and the same) would then slaughter the man’s kids and grandkids. What a dickhead. This jackass has all the graciousness of an acid enema.
When theists wonder why atheists find the God of the Old Testament such a sociopathic bastard, we should quote them this passage. I am sure it would do no good. Their ability to spin doctor every irony and contradiction by cherry picking their way around the Bible is legendary.
Then Moses does what he does best.
Remember last time God said this to Moses, “Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; for I will not go up in your midst, because you are an obstinate people, and I might destroy you on the way.” Now Moses hastens to bow low toward the earth and worship. He said, “If now I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, I pray, let the Lord go along in our midst, even though the people are so obstinate, and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your own possession.”
Moses is again offering the Hebrews to God as his bitches and this makes God happy because he wants everyone to be his bitch. Nothing God likes better than his people submitting and humiliating themselves. Moses, by his own admission, appears to be the only person who can calm the Lord Genocide down and stop him from killing everyone, and the only way he can do this is by enslaving the entire nation, but hey, what’s a guy to do? Yahweh is undeniably a psycho killing machine that needs his ego stroked and Moses is the only one that can do that and, therefore, the only person who can save the Jews from their loving Lord.
Yeah, I know. I know! As I have pointed out before there is another way of looking at this. Much of the writing in Exodus is simply Moses convincing all his people that he is the only man who can save them, and for him to do that they will have to obey his every whim utterly. Moses spends so much of his energy not persuading Yahweh to spare his chosen people but persuading those people that he, Moses, is the only one who has that power. Moses becomes invaluable because he has forced people to believe that he is invaluable. It’s a great trick.
This is how all cult leaders work. It’s an easy path to a great deal of power. When one speaks for God, believers must listen, must obey. It’s the only path to salvation.
My answer to this is a simple equation. Bear with me. Moses = God’s best friend, and God will do as Moses asks. God = God + great power over believers because they believe. Moses as the only person that can control God is thereby powerful. But… God is imaginary. The only easy way to use imaginary numbers is to cancel them out.
Moses + God = Power. God = 0
Moses = Power
Although not strictly mathematical, it follows that Moses = God. Moses was nothing if not innovative.
It’s kind of a Pythagorean Theorem for cult leaders, or perhaps, a recipe for being a jack off.
I report. You decide.
Not only that, but it is the fundamental algorithm of operation for all churches. Every church is a HUMAN organization, having nothing whatever to do with any God that might (or might not) exist. The churches claim to speak for God, but everything they teach flatly contradicts whatever the Bible says about spiritual matters. And when we look closely at the matter, there seems to be no distinctions in the spiritual world (whatever that means). In truth, whether Jesus Christ was the incarnate divine spirit, it seems clear to me that every newborn infant is an incarnation of the spirit of holiness. It is this realization that the churches of mankind have done their best to bury under mountains of bullshit.
With love under will,
Bob, Adastra,
The Wizzard of Jacksonville
I was going to say something about that babies and holiness drivel, but I just clicked on the link in your name and realized that’s one pile of crazy I’d rather not touch. I’ll leave it for a braver man (Daz maybe
). Have a nice day Mr Wizzard.
Wow, Rincewind. (You don’t mind if I call you Rincewind?) That’s some serious screwed up shit there.
Tell us, pray, how do a few cardboard rectangles tell the future, read people’s psyches, or whatever the hell it is you claim they do?
Our enquiring minds are quivering in anticipation of enlightenment! Possibly.
Or are you just a profiteering bastard who preys on the emotionally gullible? Surely not.
Forgive me quoting my own words, but I can’t help but make, and point out, the comparison to Moses…
Somewhat off-topic, I know, but – what about that bit at the end of chapter 33 when Moses gets a glimpse of his god, but only from the rear? I’ve been wondering what you’d make of that.
I think what Rusti’s asking here, what we would all really like to know, does god have a nice arse? Personally, I’m just not into any god who doesn’t have buns o’ steel.
See, I’d think he’d be rather…unfit.. being that he’s constantly sitting on his ass making everyone do all the work for him. Well, excepting the occasional kill the world flood.
After reading my other favorite line, it pushed the rest of the book out of my mind for awhile. Yeah, I have to write something about that. It’s comic gold.
Oooh! I got the title already. The junk in God’s trunk.
Damn, now I have to write something.
God’s Original Deal with Noah (and ALL of his descendants)
1. Be fruitful and multiply
2. Animals are now on the menu, but kill them before you eat them.
4. Don’t murder.
5. Be fruitful and multiply (see #1)
God’s First Top Ten
1. Don’t worship other gods
2. Don’t make graven images
3. Don’t misuse God’s name
4. Don’t work on the Sabbath
5. Honor your parents
6. Don’t murder
7. Don’t commit adultery
8. Don’t steal
9. Don’t give false testimony
10. Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, servants, livestock, or bling
God’s New Top Ten
1. Don’t worship any other gods
2. Don’t make any idols
3. Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread
4. Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck.
5. Redeem all your firstborn sons.
6. Don’t work on the Sabbath
7. Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the year. Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign LORD, the God of Israel.
8. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast, and do not let any of the sacrifice from the Passover Festival remain until morning.
9. Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God.
10. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.
Seems Moses was making this stuff up as he went along (no doubt because of all that ‘holy smoke’ he was inhaling).
Slightly off topic. I’m currently reading Nicholas Wade’s book ‘the Faith Instinct’, which deals with the evolution of religion. Recommended but nothing much new, but quite nicely packaged.
One chapter deals with King Josiah deciding to exploit the weakness of the Assyrian Empire but setting up a state religion for Judah by having at least the first 5 books considerably rewritten to strengthen his claims over Palestine and also in later books boosting the power and glory of Saul, David and Solomon.
He fell at the first hurdle when he was killed by the Egyptians.
The one surprise I’ve had is the view that Mohammed didn’t actually exist (not as yet discussed by Islamists). The theory is that Islam started off a an Arab Christian sect, one that didn’t recognize the divinity of Jesus, so that explains the ‘there is only one god’. Mohammed is the messenger of god is actually mistranslated and should have read he who is to be praised is the messenger of god, and actually referred to Jesus. Islam started in Jerusalem and Syria, and when about a 100 years later the ruling dynasty changed the focus of the religion was shifted to Arabia to distance it from Christianity and the Koran was fashioned by the ruler, similar to Josiah, to justify the state religion.
I find it an intriguing theory.
Wayne. Do I sense the possibility of another book review?
Personally, I think this sounds fascinating, and I’d like to hear more. I am completely unfamiliar with the idea of Islam as a Christian Sect. Consider writing something up Wayne. I loved your last one, and would so happily publish another.
Between reading Union history and boiler technical book in trying to develope my cirriclum, and which believe it or not are fascinating, Reading with the family (We’re working our way through confederacy of Dunces.) and reading with my son alone (Dan simmon’s Hypoerion.) I don’t get a lot of time to read other books. I need to live vicariously through someone else!!
Feed Me!
Hey, how long’s this been here? At least a couple o’ days by the comment dates, and WordPress never notified me. Hmmm.
KK, that is indeed, to my way of thinking, ‘the most fucked up sentence in the Bible.’
They can argue all they like that homosexuality is a sin, I’m going to Hell for not believing, [insert nation here] is a Christian country and should stay that way, blah blah, and though I think they’re nuts, I wouldn’t argue if they’d just stop trying to force others to believe the same. But that one sentence, and their tacit acceptance of it, loses them any shred of respect I might have had for ‘em.
Side thought: How do fundies square their disavowal of most of the science of genetic inheritance with modification, with children being unlike their parents yet like them enough to ‘inherit’ their sins?
Daz, when I first published this piece I forgot to incluide a title so that may be the reason for the lack of notifcation. Yeah, I thought that one sentence summed upo every fucked up thing about the entire group.
And the aswer to your last question is what it always is in these cases — Magic! I love how the religion that is continually harping on the dangers of the occult isthe first to turn to it for explanations.
“Occult” — anything magical or supernatural that Christians haven’t managed to appropriate to prop up their own mythology.
I love those action figures. Somehow they bring Biblical characters down to the level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where they belong.
I was disappointed in their choice of figure for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, though.
Ha! That made me snicker, Daz. Well done.
Oh, Daz… (sniggering)…
Charles Darwin, in his autobiography, cites two reasons for concluding that the OT ‘was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.’ One was ‘its manifestly false history of the world’, the other ‘its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant’. This passage looks like a prime example of the latter.
I can’t give a page reference for those quotations, though; the version of the autobiography available on Project Gutenberg is the heavily-censored one edited by his son Francis, and I don’t have the later version to check. There’s a useful article, though, headed ‘Screwing with Darwin – the final chapter’ in Dale McGowan’s blog for 17th May 2011:
http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/blog/
Daz wrote:
“Side thought: How do fundies square their disavowal of most of the science of genetic inheritance with modification, with children being unlike their parents yet like them enough to ‘inherit’ their sins?”
Good one!
“I was disappointed in their choice of figure for the Sodom and Gomorrah story, though.”
LOL!
am very sure that some of you would convert to Christianity before you die… when God said he would punish the generation of those that hate him, well He was talking abou CURSE! (remember its a spiritual book).
the people moses was leading where NOT like you and I. a new ten commandment might include, don’t molest children, don’t watch pornography on the internet, don’t use nuclar boobs and so on. it was a LAW for just freed nation of desert slaves.
And once more, with feeling:
We don’t hate your god.
Hating a non-existent being would be pretty damn silly, don’t you think?
In what way were these people different from you and I? They didn’t have child-molester back then? And why are you bothering to defend this, as your previous post made it plain that you don’t consider the Old Testament to be Christian scripture anyway? Make your mind up!
it was and is still a f@$&ed up world
thank for that break down my stubbling block is filnaly removed. When i asked about deu 24;1 , i was told that that was done away with, that if my husband divorced me that i cant have another i would have to stay without a husband so i started to question and then i found this scripture i love my husband he is my ahdawanya, but ladies on my office question me on alot of topics since yahawah woke me up so i try to study as much to answer because women are the women liberated once. shalome
“don’t use nuclar boobs and so on.”
Trying to get my head round that one . . .
Yeah, you have to love the eloquence of the phrasing. Although, I admit to believing that they emanate rays of some sort. I get very stupid around them.
They’ve perfected the Zappo-Stupid™ It’s probably powered by a nuclar boob…