Archive for the ‘ Myth ’ Category

Sodom and Gomorrah, Countdown to a Massacre


In our story today, Abraham tries to save Sodom from the wrath of God.  He fails, but he does try.  His bargaining with God over the fate of a city he doesn’t live in, is his personal moral high point.  This one act easily outshines his earlier life.  It is,in fact,the sole high point of this entire myth, for there is little other mercy, care or love.  It’s all downhill, baby.  The annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah is another of those biblical passages so difficult to take with modern moral sensibilities. With this atrocity, God continues his fall from whatever grace man created him with.  His reputation, severely tarnished by the genocide of the flood, dropped yet another notch.  Divinity or not, this was murder most foul.  Damn that righteous bastard. If I get up there he has a lot to answer for.

Anyway, let’s get literal!

One day Abraham was lounging in the shade of his tent when he spied three men. His finely honed sycophantic instincts told him that these boys were important, damned important.  Sure enough, it was God and two angels  on their way to Sodom to see what the hell was actually going on there.  Apparently, Abraham’s tent lay on the way and they decided to stop by. The servants killed a steer, baked some bread and rounded up a bit of cheese, and Abraham waited on the three as they relaxed under a tree.

Yahweh debated with himself  over whether he should tell Abraham that as God he  was going to check out Sodom and probably obliterate it.  Deciding in the affirmative, he says to Abraham “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave,that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out.”  To put it succinctly, they are screwed!

I still find it fascinating when God doesn’t just know stuff.  Evangelicals strenuously teach (and I know, for I used to be one) God’s perfection, omnipotence, and omniscience .  Yet, here is another case where God doesn’t know what any all-knowing being should. He heard an outcry about the city on the prayer hotline and had to go and check on it?  WTF?  In addition, he even debates with himself about whether to tell Abraham his intentions. He’s not even sure what he himself thinks? Come on dude!  All-knowing means you know shit, all the shit, all the time.  It’s in the definition.  There is a frightfully large amount of not knowing here.  My suspicion grows.

Then Abraham starts bargaining for Sodom saying “Would you destroy the city if there were just fifty good men there.  What about forty-five? ”  All the way down to just ten people. At every question God answers “No, for the sake of X number of innocent people I would not destroy it.”  At ten good men God quickly leaves before old Abraham could get it down to a single decent dog.

Now, the way I understand this passage is that God and Abraham have an agreement here.  If there are ten innocent people the city will not be destroyed.  But I ask, who really looked?  Abraham isn’t mentioned any further in relation to Sodom and Gomorrah, The two angels don’t look when they get into the city, and Lot doesn’t have a chance.  Did anyone?  Was that covenant ignored?

A common answer to this is that since all the townspeople turned out to rape the angels there could have been no innocents left. Really?  None at all?  As with the genocide of the flood, were there no children?  No babes in arms?  No unborn? Anywhere in the entire city?  Did these people spring fully grown and sinful right from the ground like the orcs or cylons.  In a time when children were born at  tremendous rates to make up for all who died (yet, another difficulty I have with the old man upstairs) even a small city should have been packed with them.  How could anyone include them with the guilty?  Oh, I am well aware of the potential for divine punishment to the seventh generation.  But is this truly right?  In emulating God’s law should we kill the grandchildren of murderers, rape the grandchildren of rapists.  Fornicate with the grandchildren of fornicators?  Uh… Well, if they’re of age, that one’s not too bad. But the rest, I think not.  Seriously though, this very notion of Biblical justice makes me shudder in horror.  This is not a moral example because all things considered, we can safely infer two facts here. There were innocents in Sodom, and God murdered them with the rest.

Which of course brings us to the next point.  Why does a supposedly all-powerful god have to use such grandiose weapons of mass destruction?  A world-wide flood?  City razing beams of light?   A god who cares for every hair on my head should not have to use the equivalent of a thermonuclear weapon.  It’s like using a howitzer to target jaywalkers, effective, but hell on the guiltless, and a bit of an over reaction.  Doesn’t he have anything a little more selective.  Couldn’t he just stop the hearts of the guilty, sparing the others. Obviously, these divine extravaganzas are more about putting on a show than protecting the innocent.   But even if he wanted a gruesome show why destroy the innocent?  Why not have the guilty burst into flame or explode.  Oooh! Oooh! How about having them implode, pulling into themselves by degrees until all that is left is a rather large bloodshot blinking eye.  Now that would teach a real lesson… and, of course, be cool!

Hell, we could blow up an entire city 65 years ago.  Big deal!  Today, we have smart weapons that are far more selective.   Where are God’s smart weapons? Where are his laser guided sin destroyers? Is it simply that he’s a shitty aim?  Can’t hit the broad side of a sinner with a lightning bolt? Or does he not care?  Precisely targeting the guiltiest would have the added benefit of warning those on the edge of sinning.  You’d straighten your act up a bit if a booming voice spoke out from the clouds and the guy next to you turned inside out. But did God do anything like that ?  Nope!  Just slaughtered them all, and it’s a little understood fact that when you kill everyone there’s no one left to learn any lessons.

So what’s the lesson we are supposed to learn here?   Damn! Again, I don’t know.  How about this. All you innocents out there better remember that if you happen to be  in the same city as guilty people when that big old invisible guy in the sky decides to whack ‘em. He’s probably going to get you too.  Your mom always warned you that the people you hung out with would get you in trouble.  Now it’s biblical!

God’s definitely into collateral damage.  Hmm. I almost called it friendly fire, but friendly, it certainly isn’t.

2010
02/03
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
18 comments

Abraham and Sarah, Love Biblical Style.


Next up, Abraham , the great patriarch of three of the world’s largest religions. Most of humanity  places him at the very root of their theology, and he is the most interesting person the Bible has yet offered, likely because he is the most detailed. Where Noah was constrained to only two major stories, Abraham covers most of eleven plus pages in my Bible.  He also may be the most sympathetic character thus far, the one recognizable as a real human.  He has virtues and vices.  He’s generous and selfish, kind and cruel. His story is a mythical soap opera offering sex, violence, action and drama.  It’s kind of a “Desperate Patriarchs ” for the ancient set.  But it’s a human life, and an interesting life. But a good life?  Well…

I have read the account of Abraham six times now.  There is much there, but I feel it would be counter-productive, not to mention dull, to cover every event. We will stick to the interesting and pertinent parts.  The travels here and there, the numerous altars built, places named etc., are irrelevant in our battle against biblical literalism.  As a note Abraham and Sarah’s original names were Abram and Sarai.  I will refer to them  by there more common, post circumcision names to avoid unnecessary confusion.  Yahweh knows, there will be enough confusion anyway.

Throughout this section, God makes numerous covenants with Abraham.  They are given with numbing and repetitious detail, over and over.  The only truly interesting part in this is the question of why Abraham is actually the one chosen.  It’s not that he was perfect, far from it.  As we will discuss, he commits sins aplenty, and he has a meanness about him. Apparently, God just liked him, a lot. In fact, God likes him considerably more than he likes anyone else.  If I for a moment crawl out of our literalist tent and view God as the typical flawed being, I can actually understand this.  I mean, I have great friends who are jackasses and I’m pretty sure I fulfill the same role for others.  I guess sometimes you just like some people better.   So Abraham is told numerous times that he is the chosen one and destined to become  the patriarch of a vast  people, and to given vast stretches of land. Truly this happens far to often for my liking.  Seems like every time Abraham squats down to shit, Yahweh is telling him his descendants will be like “the dust on the ground”.  Jesus Christ on a popsickle stick!  Shut up about that already and pass the toilet paper!

Slipping back into literalist divine perfection, I’m puzzled that a perfectly just being could select one person from his whole “flock” and pour such generosity upon them to the exclusion of the others. Why is this one person God created better than the others? Didn’t God create them all?  Was he more “Righteous” in the sense that Noah was?  As before, the definition of righteousness is a bit skewed from what we think. Righteousness simply means doing what God tells you to.  It does not have much in common with “good.”  There are righteous people all through this book who are bastards… As there are in the world today.   If anyone out there can explain why this should be so, I’d like to here from them.

Abraham and Sarah’s relationship is loose by todays standards, an “open” marriage, so to speak.   Twice during travels Abraham begs Sarah to tell everyone they meet that she is his sister not his wife.  His stated reason is that he is afraid they will find her beautiful and kill him to take her.  The first time is in Egypt.  Sure enough, the men of that country find Sarah very beautiful.  Word rises to the Pharaoh, and he sees that she is truly one hot babe and takes her for a wife.  What does Abraham do?  Nothing!  You see, the Pharaoh rewards him mightily because he still thinks that Abraham is her brother.  I quote “On her account it went very well with Abram, and he received flocks and herds, male and female slaves, male and female asses, and camels.”  It appears that the Pharaoh had paid Abraham a sort of bride price for his “sister”, still not understanding that she and Abraham were man and wife.  Abraham just sat back and took all the wealth while the Pharaoh banged his wife??? What a douchebag!

Something is wrong here.  Mischief has been done, but ask yourself who actually sinned?  Who should the great Lord of Justice punish?  Let’s look at the evidence.  Abraham told Sarah to lie for his sake.  Secondly, he then allowed the Pharaoh to take her as wife without out trying to set the record straight. Third, he benefitted greatly from his lies with the gifts from the Egyptian, becoming quite rich.  Next, we look at Sarah. She, although instructed by her husband, still told the lie and allowed the Pharaoh to take her as wife. Not as much at fault as Abraham, but she still has some guilt here.  Now the Pharaoh, on the pother hand, paid what was likely a fair bride price for a woman he was told was unattached.  His guilt = 0. This may be the only story I know where the Pharaoh’s actually innocent.

The levels of guilt in this example seem pretty plain to me, but who do you think Yahweh punished?  The Pharaoh, of course.  God isn’t about to strike down his home boy or said boys’ babe, but dammit, someone has to be punished.  So Yahweh strikes the Pharaoh with “severe plagues”.  Why?  I sure as hell don’t know!  By a bizarre combination of sacrifices and altar construction, Abraham seems to have hacked into God’s justice system.  The innocent party suffers while the ones who screwed up are rewarded.  I’ll be a son of a bitch if it isn’t almost like real life.

When the Pharaoh finds out why the curses are aimed at him, Abraham gets to leave unmolested with Sarah and all his newly acquired property.  I most certainly wouldn’t call this justice.  Strangely, this story is repeated in greater detail much later, but this time in the land of Gerar with the king Abimelech.  Abraham tricks two kings into taking his wife as their own.  This time, however, it is made clear that Sarah was not “used”, but still the king is cursed and that curse is not lifted until Sarah is returned with many gifts, of course.  ”God had tightly closed every womb in Abimelech’s household on account of Abraham’s wife Sarah.”  Well…It’s not justice, but you must admit, it is a cool sounding curse.  In addition, there are so many ways to read that.  Did he close the wombs as in no babies, or did he CLOSE THE WOMB as in no sex?  At any rate, the Pharaoh relented, and off goes Abraham a thousand Gerarian shekels richer than before.  What a couple of con artists these two are!

But… Sarah is infertile.  Now, I don’t know why God would make his right-hand-man’s wife barren. Maybe, he had a different plan.  Perhaps, he’s a bit peeved at  Abraham’s handing her over to anyone he can put the squeeze on.  Maybe she caught some kind of archaic venereal disease.  No matter the reason, she cannot bear children.  Frustrated, she gives her maid Hagar to Abraham so there will be some children for her to raise.   I love this typical male response.   ” Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.”  Yeah, I’ll just bet he did.  Hubba, Hubba, Hubba.  But, when Hagar gets pregnant, she starts acting above her station, treating the barren Sarah with disdain.   Sarah, annoyed at this treatment, goes to Abraham and complains, blaming him for the trouble.  He responds “Your maid is in your power. Do what you please.”  So Sarah does.  Ouch!  Poor Hagar is so abused she runs away.  Seems a fairly cruel of both Abraham and Sarah, but so very human. Sex screws everything up.

Hagar only returns when the Lord’s messenger tells her to “Go back to your mistress and submit to her abusive treatment.”  Does he promise to intercede for her?  Does he offer to protect her?.  Nope, just get back there and get the hell beat out of you.  He does however promise her that her descendants will also be numerous.  That’s it.   Nothing more. Though, it must have been worth it, because she did return.

In all this “giving” her to Abraham, I have to wonder if Hagar was a slave?  Some Biblical versions say yes, others use the word servant.   But did she really have a choice? I just don’t know, but it doesn’t seem likely.  Whoever believes that morality is an absolute, needs to explain why Biblical morality sounds so much nastier than that which we follow today. Especially when we see what is eventually done to Hagar and her son Ishmael.  These are not acts of kindness.

Sarah eventually gives birth and is ecstatic… right until the point she sees her son, Isaac playing with Hagar’s boy, Ishmael.  This pisses her off something fierce and she demands of Abraham, “Drive out that slave and her son! No son of that slave is going to share the inheritance with my son Isaac!”  Abraham is distressed but is reassured by Yahweh to do what Sarah asks because, get this,  it’s through Isaac that Abraham will get many descendants.  Because he has another son it’s OK for him to abandon this one.  He is also told ,”As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a great nation of him also, since he too is your offspring.”  So the next morning with a little water and bread, Abraham sends her into the wilderness.

Cruelty, plain and simple.  Even if you know they’d be fine, it is a vicious act.  Poor Hagar, she is shoved into Abraham’s bed, gets pregnant, acts a little proud, gets beaten, and eventually driven into the wilderness.  Again, an example of God preselecting the blessed and no matter what they do they retain those blessings, while the innocents bleed.  Justice is not served.  The weak are not helped. (And don’t give me that crap about Yahweh helping Hagar in the wilderness.  He’s the one who told Abraham to banish her there.  On any scale you want to use that will not approach breaking even.)

Sarah, selfish and human, dies.  The entire 23rd chapter of Genesis deals with Abraham’s Purchase of a burial plot. I’m not kidding.

What to really think about Abraham?  One one hand he does the nastiness I just listed, but on the other, he gives Lot, his nephew vast amounts of land to graze his cattle.  When Lot is captured Abraham takes every man he  has and rescues him. Finally, when Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed, Abraham tries to intercede with Yahweh, though unsuccessfully.

Neither he nor Sarah are all that terrible by their own standards, but by ours, they leave much to be desired.  Judging them historically, one must use their own standards for we are all just products of out times and societies.  With that, they were likely no different that their contemporaries.  But if you subscribe to the literalist point-of-view, then morality is absolute and unchanging.  Right and wrong have always been and will always be the same.  Good is not relative.  With this we must judge them much more harshly.  If alive today, they would be terrible people.  Can’t you see this story on Jerry Springer.  ”And then he gave me a piece of bread and shoved me and my baby into the wilderness.  Oh the bastard!”  Sarah and Abraham would be lucky to make it out of the  studio alive. And that “She’s my sister, go ahead and marry her” con would, certainly, net them a few years in prison.

And let’s not even bring up the psychotic break involving Isaac on the altar. That incident lies like a cold hard nail in the softness of the rest of Abraham’s flaws. Even if you could understand him before,  sympathy will be a bit harder to come by after that.

2010
02/02
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
Uncategorized
11 comments

Tower of Babel. Immaturity of God.


Some time after the flood, when the earth had been repopulated by the descendants of Noah, a curious thing happened.  God saw some people making life better for themselves, creating beauty, building wonders, that sort of thing.  This upset God greatly.  Why you ask?  Well, in truth, that’s a bit vague. It smacks of contempt and jealousy of humanity, for these people of Babel were building something great, a tall tower in a great city so they would not be scattered across the world.  They wanted to remain united, and really, who doesn’t.  But if Yahweh wants you scattered, scattered  you will be.  On a continually repeating theme, the big felony here seems to be not listening to God’s every random whisper and not carrying that whisper out to the fullest extent. After the fall of mankind from paradise and the great flood, you all should understand this.  No thinking on your own!  Righteousness means submitting yourself to slavery for all time.  Damn it people.  When will you listen?

Let’s carry on with the lesson of the day, (also of the week, month and millennium). That lesson is subservience, absolute, complete , abject subservience.

So descendants of Noah settled down in a valley.  They were proud and haughty men for they had the temerity to say “Let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

This was a terrible thing because, well…,  because God thought it was terrible (Isn’t that always how it works?).  Then God came down from Heaven to see this city and tower.  Apparently, his all-seeing power was on the fritz because he had to come for a closer look.  So the Lord looks around and says ““Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.”

Now this is a terrible crime that God seems to arbitrarily invent, that of people doing what they set their mind to and becoming great because of it.   That is truly awful. Isn’t it? Holy Shit, Batman, that could lead to dancing!   Obviously, God does not want them to accomplish great things for God has given them a world in which mud huts and manure cooking fires should be the very peak of existence. Goatherds! That’s what everyone should be, goatherds.  A city and a tower?  Bah!   To build great structures is sinful because of … um,  pride… and…,well,… because God said so!  Yes, he did!   And the same excuse that was good enough to justify the Great Genocide of the Flood, is good enough for this.  God knows, we shouldn’t think on our own.

So God said “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”  So God then scattered them to the ends of the earth after forcing them all to speak different tongues.

Isn’t that sweet.  God sees people thinking and acting independently and throws a shit fit.  According to a strict reading of this myth, not only should you be happy with the meager living he forces you to wrest from the world.  You should worship him for all your hard work, giving him all the credit for your paltry survival.  And if you ever start taking pride in said work, look out!  With great pleasure, God will knock you back down for presuming to rise above your lowly station.   You’re going to be God’s Bitch no matter how hard you work or plan or hope.  God wholeheartedly reserves the right to be a bastard for himself, and for a few select sycophantic followers (see previous post: Oh Damn! Noah’s Drunk and Naked Again.) Doesn’t this ancient Hebrew myth remind you strongly of the actions of Zeus or Odin?  Humankind rises up and the gods are forced to show them their place.

You may think I exaggerate.  To this I urge you to read the actual passage.  I’ve directly quoted most of it here already.  There really isn’t much more.  God thought humanity was on the path to no longer needing him, and that is the one horrendous crime against Him. He demands that we need him forever, even if he has to kill everyone on earth again to enforce that demand.  Remember, this is the Lord of Genocide we are discussing.  He will not be forgotten!

Stepping outside the box, let’s ask ourselves a few pertinent questions.  Is this how a divine being should act?  Isn’t there something wrong with someone who demands constant attention and obedience like this?  What kind of nut-less butt-plug thinks like this?  We see this kind of behavior in infants and toddlers, but in adults, we call it sociopathic.  In a Deity? Dangerously sociopathic.  What else can you call the mindset of a being who demands worship, and that everyone defer to his supreme almightiness.  Anyone who demands to be worshiped simply isn’t worthy of it.  If you demand people’s adoration,  you lose the moral high ground.

The people of Babel were doing something of which any benevolent creator should have been proud.  They were making great things out of what little was given them.  They were progressing, and isn’t this what any of us would want for our own children?  Do we really have the right to demand that our kids never approach the greatness of the parent?  Absolutely not!   It is a poor parent to make such a demand.  Any decent person wants their children to be better, to improve.  We want them to progress. It’s sad to hear a parent say “It was good enough for me.  It should be good enough for them.”  God takes it even a step further by demanding we never even approach his level, and he will take action to prevent us from getting there.

Again, anyone who thinks that a god capable of this is benevolent, just and merciful, needs to have their head examined.  God by his own words, is not the ethical powerhouse the theists believe.  By a literal reading, he fell from that grace long before Adam and Eve.  It’s just time the world realized it.  Once they do, it’s a very small step to admit that he doesn’t exist.

2010
02/01
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
Uncategorized
4 comments

Please Understand Why I Do What I Do.


I’ve had a lot of traffic here these last few days.  So I feel a restating of why I am doing this may be in order.  As an atheist, complete and utter, I am willing to argue my points to anyone willing to argue theirs.  This is how ideas are spread.  This is how truth moves forward. I believe the Bible was one of humanity’s early attempts to explain the world around them.  Not understanding the nature of their world or their origin, humankind has always turned to myth, and some of these are wonderful with much beauty, but many have beauty mixed with cruelty, while others are simply squalid and mean.  Taken as allegories these stories tell us about what early people were like, so consequently, they show us things about ourselves, mainly where we have grown and where we have not.  This is crucial to understanding our species, our civilization and our history.  There are other myths that have fulfilled similar roles.  When you read Homer, some parts ring true such as the death of Patroclus.  Other chapters fill us with a kind of horror, like the slaughter by Achilles of hundreds, or the dragging of Hector’s corpse.  There is both beauty and ugliness here, and much we can learn.  But nobody alive swears that Homer wrote the literal truth and that everything he said should be taken as absolute fact.

Therefore, my problem is not with general run-of-the-mill Christianity but with their literalist cousins. Young Earth Creationists solemnly believe the infallibility of their particular bronze age novel. They believe this above fact, above evidence, above sense.  This pseudo-luddite trash must be exposed.  If you do not understand why, please read my Young Earth Creationism, a Rant.  I find the best way to fight literalism is to crawl inside their own stories as if they really were literal, and poke at all the absurdities. I will use humor or irony or sarcasm or anything I can find to drag these beliefs into the sunlight and show the world what they actually are. The only thing I will not knowingly use is a lie.   This may hurt some feelings, and I apologize in advance, but I think the survival of our civilization depends on science winning this battle.  We cannot succumb to total superstition.  There are too many dangers ahead, and the YEC’s continue to gain in strength.

I will continue with every truthful weapon at my disposal.  It’s too important.

2010
01/31
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
18 comments

Oh Damn! Noah’s Drunk and Naked Again.


As a last look, before we leave Noah in the dusty pages of Genesis, let’s have an in-depth look at his drinking problem and how his grandson suffered for it.  Personally, I find this chapter a fascinating study of the man who God considered righteous enough not to murder in the great genocide, the best man in the world, but as we shall see, God’s standards are a bit strange.
A mere eight people left the ark after the flood receded.  Eight! They were the only living humans on Earth, all the rest having been murdered by the Great Lord Genocide.  The leader of the survivors of Jehovah’s wrath was Noah, because he, by God’s standards, was a good and righteous man.  His three sons, Shem, Ham and Japeth, were also spared by the power of Noah’s righteousness along with their wives and Noah’s wife.   I’d give you their names but the Bible is often mum on wives’ and daughter’s names.  Ever notice how women seldom seem important enough in this vast patriarchy to even merit names.  You do have to wonder, if our “born again” sisters get a little weary of the perpetual lack of recognition of their sex?  Hmm?
The Bible says that Noah was a farmer and the first to plant a vineyard and, presumably, the first to get smashed.  So one day he gets mightily hammered on his own wine and passes out naked in his tent.  The Bible doesn’t say why he was naked, so I can only assume that it was not for a good cause. Having been through college, I can think of nothing honorable that leads a man to drunken nudity.    So while old Noah was lying insensible on the ground in all his pale glory, Ham strolls in.  Now young Ham was the family clown, and he finds this a bit funny. Doing what any young man would do, he tells his brothers.   That’s it.  Just tells them about it.  Pay attention here because this great felony will become very important soon.  The brothers attempt to cover old their father with a robe by entering the tent backwards so as not to lay eyes on Noah’s wiener lying in the dust. Whether this was to protect their fathers dignity, or to save themselves the horror of seeing a 600 plus year old body, the Bible does not relate.  Incidentally, it must have been a bit difficult to cover a sprawled out naked old man without actually looking at him and walking backwards.  For the record, if any of you find me passed out on the floor naked, please cover me up, but watch where you’re stepping.  Certain pieces and parts are rather sensitive and will not enjoy being stepped on.
When Noah comes to, he learns of Ham’s terrible crime and…. What do you think he does?  Rebukes him? Smacks him?  Banishment?  40 lashes?  Nay, nay, I say.  He curses Ham’s son Caanan to eternal slavery.  Got that?  He curses, not Ham, the perpetrator of this horrid crime, but Ham’s son to slavery.  Yeah, really righteous.  Now, using this section as a moral guide is a tad problematic.   When someone wrongs me, say, steals my car or torches my house or ,even (oh, the horror), sees me passed out naked, does God really think I should take it out on the innocent child of the felon.   Should I break the poor lad’s legs?  Maybe… Put him the stocks?  Perhaps…  Sell him and his children into eternal slavery?  Bingo!  We have a winner in the Biblical justice category.  For the mere price of your heart and soul, you too can be “righteous”!
Well… I’m going to have to say no.  I prefer having morals.
Why everyone can’t read this with the ethical horror it merits is simply beyond me.  God’s right hand man gets plastered, and instead of blaming himself for acting the fool, he punishes the son of the one who saw him act the fool.This is the moral pinnacle that we all should aspire to?  Not to stand up and take the blame for being a butt-plug jackass but to blame the children of those who witnessed your sin, this is God’s justice and mercy?  That God condoned this act of cruelty and selfishness would be hard to deny for Noah was the only righteous man on Earth, yet this is how he treats his grandson?   Now I understand that it was a bit disrespectful of Ham to mock his drunken father, but to enslave his son is abhorrent.
As an aside, this was the passage used for centuries to justify African slavery. Africans were the sons of Ham , or so the plantation owners claimed, which, of course, made it fine to enslave the entire race forever.  Convenient, yes?  But where is the justice in this?  Where is God’s great mercy? This is one of the great examples where Christians see in the Bible whatever will benefit them. Where is that mercy Christians speak of with such reverence?  You could say that the mercy and love of God is in the New Testament and that would be somewhat true.  The Gospels do contain a strong ethical core, but this is moral or just?  To extricate themselves from the horrific ethical burden of the Old Testament, there is no other recourse but to throw it all away.  Though you must see that if Christians toss out the Old Testament, they would deny themselves an array of ready-made excuses to do whatever the hell they wish.  The Old testament says that as long as you’re righteous it’s fine to hurt, it’s fine to enslave and it’s fine to kill.  And that’s too powerful a weapon for them to bury.
The truth is clear.  No religion that holds the lightest of claims to moral behavior could ever afford  to associate with this travesty of justice.   The Old Testament God is a bastard, and his human sycophants were truly created in his image. Bastards one, bastards all.
2010
01/30
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30 comments

Young Earth Creationism, a Rant.


I’ve been a student of history for the last 20 years. I completely fell in love with the first history book I read: Thomas Costain’s The Conquering Family and close to 200 books or recorded lectures followed that first introduction.  From ancient Greece to Jared Diamond’s Collapse, from a study of the Roman Empire to the history of United States, I am hooked.   I’m not bragging, nor do I consider myself a scholar, but do I like to think I am, at least, passingly familiar with human history.  There are paths which humanity follows, patterns which stand out and lend me a certain viewpoint.

My view of history goes something like this.

Humanity is a shackled mass crawling out of the swamp of our own ignorance. The water swirls about our waist and the mud keeps sucking at our feet.  It holds us down, dragging at us like a ball and chain, slowing our march forward.  The going has been hard.  The steps we have taken were slow and often erratic, but we have progressed.   Most of us do little to help that progress.  We just live our lives,unable or unwilling to take a larger part.  So many of us are unable to even see that a larger part exists.  Though, most of us do not aid our advance much, neither do we hinder.  We simply allow the mass to drag us where it will.

But there are individuals within our jumble of humankind that strive to drag us out of ignorance.  Many of them have made small efforts, some have made large, but some have singlehandedly carried their brothers and sisters vast distances forward.  To these people we own a unending debt of gratitude. This cannot be understated.  These men and women of science have saved so many us from the lives of brutish squalor that we would surely have had in their absence.  Progress occurred because certain people of science strove to cut the webs of superstition and understand the world as it really is, not how we would wish it to be.  The very best of these people have entirely redirected our course through history.  They have trashed our decaying world-view and presented us with a better, more beautiful one which we have wrapped our future around. They have shown us the elegant complexity that comprises the natural world. They have shown us such wonders, and standing on their shoulders, we see so much.   Standing atop the life work of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, our children no longer drop like leaves in the fall.  Our elderly live long and productive lives.  Education in science and art has lifted us out of the slime and wiped us off and shown us the beauty that surrounds us.  The world is now a brighter place.   Life is good.

This is a direct result of science, not superstition.  This situation has been brought about by humans standing up and using science not kneeling down in worship to a vengeful god.  None of this happened because somebody sacrificed a goat, or scared demons away with prayer bells or swung a dead cat over their head.  And none of it happened because someone prayed.  Ever!

The swamp is getting shallower, the ground firmer.  We know so much now, but it is a single bucket of sand on a beach of potential knowledge.  There is still so much to learn, so much that is necessary for us even maintain a semblance of our way of life. Especially now as water and energy shortages loom ahead, and climate change and rapid population growth lurk around the corner.  The future will be harder and our light may dim.  Still, we must go on. We cannot stop, for the danger grows greater if we hold here now. We must continue our advance.  We are multitudes, and technology and science is the only thing that keeps this vastness alive.  With nearly seven billion people on the planet, we cannot return to the ignorant past. We cannot descend into the murk.  It would be the height of folly to turn our backs on the single thing that can save us from the hazards we have created, science.

Yet, there are some among us who would drag the mass of humanity back into the swamp of ignorance, back into the mud from which we have so recently escaped. Change has come too fast for them and change and science bring a complexity, and complexity makes them uneasy. Their primate brains do not understand it and they are afraid.  They want to simplify, to discard the knowledge that should be our inheritance and pick up the superstition we had left beside the trail.  They want to return to a mythology where God created the earth 6000 years ago and did it all in six days, where there are no plate tectonics and the great flood accounts for all the coal and oil on Earth.  They demand a return to their superstition not only for themselves, but for the whole of humanity.  They push for a return to  a simpler time, forgetting or ignoring the brutishness and squalor that used to be the rule rather than the exception.

They will lead us to our doom.

These young earth creationists are today’s intellectual terrorists, sowing distrust in science and knowledge, replacing it with myth and superstition.  Though, wallowing in ignorance, they remain cunning.  They have marketed themselves well for the masses. Disguised as reasonable critics, they  seldom voice their most extreme beliefs in public. Catch phrases like intelligent design, teach the controversy, and irreducible complexity echo through their arguments.   They hide behind the fear and unease they themselves stir up.  They play off the fear ever-present in their less fanatic cousins, questioning their faith with lines of thought running something like this. Belief in God means a belief in the Bible.  Belief in the Bible means the Bible is a literal truth, not metaphoric truth, that everything within it is absolutely factual. People of true faith must believe that the creation stories in Genesis are true exactly as written.  Therefore, any true Christian must believe the world is 6,000 to 12,000 years old.

I’m not making this up. If you have doubts please go to their websites to see for yourself.  Try one of the largest and most fanatical, Answers in Genesis. or here.  Whatever you do, do not miss the world’s largest black hole of reason and knowledge, The Creation Museum.  This is a 27 million dollar, 70,000 square foot facility dedicated to the proposition that Adam and Eve shared the Garden of Eden with dinosaurs.  These groups abound in the ignorance so common in the true fanatics.  For an excellent review of the museum try A. A. Gill’s witty Vanity Fair piece on his trip to Kentucky’s Museum .  And it’s not just Kentucky.  A young earth creation museum lies just 200 miles away from here in Glendive, Montana.  They are spreading.

In addition to the dinosaurs living in perfect harmony with Adam and Eve, these people believe a range of unscientific nonsense.  There are too many examples for a complete list so just a few will have to do.

Dinosaurs were vegetarian before the fall of man.  In fact, all carnivores ate plant life because before the fall there was no strife in the garden.  Personally, I find it impossible to picture the great T. Rex eating leaves and berries with those six inch jagged teeth.

The majority of the fossils we have found have been from the great flood.  You see it’s hard to explain how some of the fossils are often buried under thousands of feet of sediment.  The reason that the more primitive fossils are found in the deepest layers is that they weren’t capable of fleeing to the high ground with the more advanced animals.  Huh?  Not a single dinosaur made it to the tops of the hills, but all the big mammals did???

All the coal and oil deposits on earth today were made in the flood buried under the sediments washed down from the hills.

The Grand Canyon and every large canyon in the world was formed by the runoff from the flood.  Running to where you may ask?  Apparently there are huge reservoirs under the earth that the water sprang out of and returned to. Understand that these subterranean seas would have to be several times the volume of all the terrestrial oceans combined.

This is a child’s nonsense.  It ranks as poorly thought out as modern day geocentrism (The ancient theory of the sun, moon and universe orbiting the Earth).  By the way, geocentrism also used to be a promoted plank of biblical literalism but seems to have been somewhat abandoned in the last 30 years or so, just 400 years behind Galileo. Mind you, there are still existing biblical geocentrists in an age where we have sent probes to other planets and to the further reaches of our solar system.  This is trailer trash science.

Taken together, the young earth creationist belief system is no truer than astrology or alchemy, just more dangerous.  Is there a difference between this and Allah’s promised 72 virgins for any Islamic fanatic strapping a bomb to their chest and killing women and children in a marketplace?   Only in the level of violence, but keep in mind, Young Earth Creationists are a group of people who are certain that God is going to severely punish the United Sates for condoning abortion and allowing homosexuality.  They are certain that God created AIDS (without evolution, there is no other possibility) to kill Gays.  The fact that it also kills the same children they don’t want aborted has yet to be explained satisfactorily.  They believe the only reason that our nation is the richest in the world is because God is on our side, and we stand or fall by his will alone. I know this viewpoint.  I was raised with this, hearing it constantly. You can be quite certain that when the times turn bad, an increasing number of these people will believe that God is punishing the nation for its sins.  Young earth Creationists will believe this because for ages they have been primed not to trust to science or humanity.  They have been programmed to trust in a minister’s interpretation of a bronze age myth. They have been long prepared for belief in absurdities, violent absurdities.  Their distrust in any scientific truth and worship of a god who murdered, by their own admission, virtually every man, woman and child makes them dangerous.  They lack faith in truth and exhibit a willingness to bypass a mountain of evidence  looking up the dimmest of clues that may possibly justify their mythology.

When our economy collapses because we continue our fall from scientific preeminence, they will not blame themselves or their war on the one thing that kept us ahead.  They will blame the sins and permissiveness of this nation. We can see this by the bombing of abortion clinics and the slaying of family planning doctors while fanatics protest military funerals because our nation doesn’t prosecute gays.  As things turn worse, as jobs become scarce when science flees from our shores, as our standard of living falls year by year, the population of fanatics will climb. Increasing numbers of people will believe in anything that will give them hope, give them some illusion of control.  They will look for scapegoats and patsies, and they will blame our decline on the things they most hate and fear, and they will take action.  This has already happened many times in the past and will happen again.  At times, history is depressing reading.

After the homosexuals are dead or hiding, there’s always those eternal victims of persecution, the Jews.

2010
01/29
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12 comments

The Flood 3, When God so Loved the World that He Murdered Nearly Everybody


And the flood came.  All but eight died so the world was finally cleansed of its evil diversity and free thought, rid of its differences and disagreements.  Like some fictional communistic dystopia, dissension was crushed and everyone thought as one.  Only eight survived, and these fearfully worshipped their dark God, cravenly offering sacrifices and promising to obey.   God looked upon the murder and devastation; he gazed on the lifeless swamp he had wrought and saw that it was good. The Lord Genocide had killed everyone and everything. The world lay in ruin and he was happy to see it so. Mission accomplished. Don’t you love it when a plan finally comes together?  Goddamned if I don’t love a happy ending.

I’m not sure what I can say to further shed light on this crime against humankind.  I’ve said enough in my previous two posts and the act itself should speak volumes to anyone willing to read it for what it really says.  The fact that people still worship the monster they themselves think responsible is a bit beyond me.  How has our species made it so far?

Reading the account of the flood isn’t easy, because so much of this entire section is hard to comprehend.  There is much repetition, but never exactly copying itself.  Differences and contradictions abound, as if two drunk story tellers sat down and argued over whose version was better.  Coming to no agreement, they simply included both… And the random mutterings of the schizophrenic homeless bastard on the corner.  In fact, it’s more like both drunk story tellers are with you and when one finishes a small part of the tale, the other interrupts and insists on telling his slightly different version. They then proceed to go back and forth arguing over which is truer.  Therefore, the events are often out-of-order, out of context and riddled with contradictions.

Examples:

Noah goes into the ark and the rains start, then he enters the ark. huh?

On the 17th day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat. But just after this Genesis says that the waters continued to diminish until the first day of the tenth month when the tops of mountains appeared.  How does an ark land on the mountains two months before they appear?

Seemingly, only after he lands does Noah send out the birds to look for dry land.  It’s like Pulp Fiction when they keep jacking the movie around through time, only this is far more sinister and not nearly so much fun.

How long did the flood last?  Damn good question.  There are several day counts here but it is unclear which are concurrent and which are consecutive.  After reading it five separate times I finally went with the listed dates.  The other data contradicts it (Surprise, surprise) but it is the clearest item here.  Let’s just say, it was a year and ten days from the beginning of the rain until dry land.

These examples abound, and I’ll not waste anymore time on them.  I just urge you to look for yourselves. Try here http://skepticsannotatedbible.com, or http://www.youversion.com/ any other online or print Bible of your choice.  It is little wonder that humanity has seldom come to a consensus on the meaning of the Bible.  You can alter only the emphasis and the meanings often change dramatically.  This book has a near infinity of poorly defined material to fight about. Looks like were in for a long ride.

So Noah and family exit into the wasteland their God has recreated and free the animals that have been packed in the ark for a year.  Then Noah, righteous man that he is, drags forth one each of the clean animals and offers it up as a sacrifice to Jehovah.  Seems to me Jehovah should have been quite satisfied with the massacre of every other living thing on the planet, but nope.  He always wants more.  So Noah offers burnt sacrifices of a some of the very few animals left alive on earth using the very same technique the ancient Greeks used for their pantheon. All Gods must just love that burnt animal smell.  Can’t you just see Jehovah and Zeus lounging about Olympus getting high on the burning sacrifices. Dude.  Now that’s some good shit!   So Jehovah smells the sweet savor of Noah’s sacrifice and decides to give a little on the whole Genocide thing.

So God enters into a covenant with Noah promising never to commit complete genocide again.  Partial genocides, sure, but never the whole shebang.   But then, after realizing he has been rash in his promise, he qualifies the statement and says he will never actually destroy the earth by flood again.   This, of course, leaves his options open.  Even a merciful and omniscient God can never tell when the urge to destroy every living thing in the universe may come upon him once more, and we wouldn’t want to limit his potential, now would we?  As a sign of his good will and sincerity, he gives us the rainbow.  Evermore, humankind can look on that beautiful bow (the scientifically verifiable result of light refracting through drops of water) and know that God loves us so much that he will never murder all of us again in a single instance by vast amounts of water.  Don’t feel too bad for him,though.  Disease, meteors, run away greenhouse effect, alien attack, and about a thousand other options are still available, so he’s not exactly overly constrained.  Everyone knows that when the Lord Genocide closes a door, he opens a window… for himself.

I don’t know about you, but I sure trust the Big Guy in the Sky.  I’m absolutely positive that once you slaughter an entire planet, you’d never do it again.  Just like the old rhyme says:  Once you try crack, you never go back.

Wasn’t that it?

2010
01/27
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
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24 comments

The Flood, Part Two. How to Build a Rather Large Boat.


God is pissed. I mean, really pissed, murder every bastard on the planet pissed.  We’re not sure why, exactly. Oh, he keep mentions lawlessness, corruption and the  depravity of mortals, but I think this translates roughly to “No one is doing what I say, Dammit!”  And if mythology teaches us anything, it’s that deities get very upset if everyone isn’t doing EXACTLY what they say. Frustrated that no one is paying any attention to the invisible guy in the clouds, God decides to murder them all.  Not just the people mind you but every living thing on the planet!  Damn cats! Don’t come when you call them, never do what they are told! Pigs, filthy. Chickens, bah!  Kill them all.  (insert maniacal laugh here) God plots his revenge on all those who have wronged him, which, interestingly, is nearly everyone and everything.  His enemies list is packed.  Some gods are just a little too touchy,

I’m not sure what he planned to do afterward. Start over?  Surf for internet porn? Play Grand Theft Auto on the Xbox?  Fortunately, it’s not important, because Noah managed to suck up to the Lord and got himself pardoned.  Thank heavens or we’d be back to that “formless void” place.  That would be bad.  Well, the Bible would only be about ten pages long, which would be an improvement, but overall, things would still be bad.

Now Noah was a good man and, he really listened to God.  He and his family were the only good people left on the entire earth.  Everyone else was unforgivably evil, Terribly, awfully, horribly  evil, you know. Gut wrenchingly malignant. Everyone: fathers, mothers, children, the elderly, down syndrome babies, fetuses, embryos (must have been the largest mass abortion in history), puppies, kitties, absolutely everyone.  Three men, their wives and… no one else ranked good enough for the Lord.  Look, I don’t mean to criticize, but doesn’t it seem like God has set the bar too damn high. He simply must start grading on a curve! I mean really!

So Noah built himself an ark following God’s plan,and let me tell you that plan was a bit short on detail. Fortunately, Noah was a master improviser. The ark was built to the measurements of 440 feet by 73 feet by 44 ft over three levels.  This comes out to be 52,343 cubic yard in volume.  The three decks would be  96,360 square feet.   I know this sounds like a huge amount of space but that’s the same square footage as the Home Depot building in Bismarck, North Dakota only with much lower ceilings.  Now realistically, at least a third of this space had to be taken for structural elements, access ways, food storage, human quarters and like.  Even with stacked cages and packed to the gills, that is very little room.  There are 5400 different species of just mammals on the planet, many quite large.  Add to this over 10,000 bird species and 8300 reptiles. This includes no insects, amphibians or other animal types.  Let’s assume they could survive  the flood on their own.  You know there’s nothing a freshwater frog likes better than floating in the salty brine for 150 days or so.  I’m sure they were just fine.

You are aware that the young earth creationists believe that there were even some smallish dinosaurs aboard!   Whoo boy!  Isn’t this fun?  Now squeeze them all into Home Depot along with enough food and water to keep them alive for 150 days. Whew!  What a job!  Are you aware that’s an average of a just little more than a foot of floor space for each animal.  I strongly suspect that it would be difficult to shove that many freeze dried animals into that space.

Whenever I hear someone speculate on where all the Neanderthals went, I strongly suspect they just devolved into young earth creationists.  I sincerely apologize for denigrating any offended Neanderthals.

Then God tells Noah how the ark is to be loaded. He tells him twice, in fact.  Not the same way, mind you, just in similar but still inconsistent ways.  First, it’s two of every animal, then God seems to have changed that to two of every unclean animal and seven pairs of each of the clean animals.  I really don’t know why.  perhaps, the extras were like emergency rations in case the flood lasted too long.  Just pop open an extra cow and make it another week. That’s probably where the unicorns went.

In time, the ark is built.  The animals are on board, and the pantries are full.  Now they are ready to survive the tsunami of God’s hatred that is about to eradicate every other life form on the planet.  They alone have jumped through God’s hoops to a sufficient degree to be spared.  The old adage was as true then as it is today: It’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.

Seriously though, I cannot stress too much how repugnant this myth really is.  The God of the flood and so many other stories is not acting for our benefit, quite the opposite, in fact.  Examples of his evil abound in the biblical myths but always get passed over for some imagined love and kindness. In so many of these Old Testament books, God is a dangerously spoiled child who when he doesn’t get his way he’s going to take his planet and go home.  Mercy is only for those who toe the line precisely. For the rest it’s death, destruction and eternal torment. what a sweetheart!  This old god is a vile and contemptible monster.   Worshiping such a creature is immoral and unthinkable.

Kind and loving, my hairy white ass.

2010
01/25
CATEGORY
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Myth
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6 comments

The Flood, Part One. God is Pissed, Really Really Pissed.


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.

2010
01/25
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
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5 comments

Begat, blah,blah, Begat, blah blah. Enough already!


X begat Y begat Z, etc., ad infinitum. Holy shit, this is boring.  Remember that book “Who’s Who in American High Schools”?  Where you would pay a small fee to a minor company and they would print every accomplishment you were even possibly willing to pay for.  That’s a close approximation of what we have here, a long list of unimportant people who are irrelevant to both history and moral teaching.  Or reality for that matter!  Did Methuselah really live for 969 years?  According to the young earth creationists, that’s one sixth of the entire age of the earth.  The impression is of ancient Bible scribes in a dark alley furtively whispering, “Pssst!  Hey  buddy,  wanna be remembered forever”

Of course, as everyone knows (not) next come the Nephilim.  Bear with me here, please .  This is a bit odd. The sons of heaven (angels?) see how lovely the daughters of man are and come down and take them for wives.  This union produces the Nephilim.  These giants/ heroes of old do, well nothing… They just decided to mention them.   What the f…  These angels get so hot and bothered by the Daughters of Eve bending over while doing the laundry that they rush down and “took for wives as many of them as they chose.”  Hard to comment on horny angels.  In the unmatched eloquence of Spock,” Fascinating!!” Not to mention juvenile.  It’s as if this part was written by 12 year old boys. And I know, I have one.

This entire section is empty of real meaning, and I am empty of any real interest in it.  Mere Biblical filler.   We trudge on!  Next: Noah, the flood, and how the Grand Canyon was really formed!  Exciting, isn’t it?

2010
01/22
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
3 comments
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