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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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
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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
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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
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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
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Cain and Abel — Christianity’s First Dysfunctional Family.

Ah, the magnificent story of Cain and Abel.  Jealousy, rejection, murder, incest, banishment, a curse from an invisible being, sex, drugs and Rock and Roll. O.K. not drugs and Rock and Roll. But dudes, this story has almost everything else!  Nearly every conflict that humans can engage in, and all in about 25 lines. The Bible is often long on action but a bit short on details.

So let’s look at humanity’s first sex, first murder, first incest, and second banishment.  Cain and Abel set the bar so high!

Adam had relations with his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.”

Once again, I find it more enlightening to assume the Bible true as written and then look at the logical inconsistencies from the inside.  It’s harder to find holes in your tent while it’s still lying on the ground.  Set it up.  Crawl in.  Look around. Live there a bit.  The flaws become more apparent after an hour or two.  Just be sure to get the hell out before you become too used to flaws and fail to see them any longer.  That’s a doom I would wish on no free thinker.  So let’s explore a bit.

You have to wonder about those first relations.  Was there a manual?  Did God have that awkward rednecky birds and the bees talk with Adam? Was it instinct?  Trial and Error?  Sigh! Poor Eve!  It’s always the women who suffer!   Well, she did say she had the help of the lord.  Hmmm!  I’ll just stay away from that entirely.  And don’t you get all offended.  Look what happened to Mary with the help of the Lord!!

Then Abel was born, and he grew to become a shepherd, while Cain grew into a farmer. God, unbeknownst to Cain, was a carnivore and looked with disfavor on an offer of veggies and fruit, while smiling on Abel’s MegaMeat offering.  Hey, we were created in his image and what man wouldn’t favor a bit of tender lamb chop?   Damn vegetarians!  Anyway, God doesn’t like Cain’s offering and Cain doesn’t like God not liking his offering.  As anyone who has even the slightest intimacy with the human race knows, this will lead to no good.  So in typical human fashion and not being able to harm the one who truly wronged him, Cain takes out his shame of rejection on his brother and kills Abel.  Problem solved, right? Well, not so much.

As with so much in this book, When we look with modern eyes on these decisions of God, they come up lacking in both compassion and common sense.  Even at a glance, I feel uneasy with offerings to an all-powerful being.  What does an all-powerful god need with offerings, anyway?  I mean, he can create shit out of nothing!  He’s the ultimate “guy who has everything”.  What does he get out of it?  A sense of satisfaction? An enjoyment of the gift?  An opportunity to meddle?  Oh yeah, baby!  I think we found us a winner!  Old Jehovah is no different than Brother Zeus, always looking for an excuse to descend and tinker with human lives.  Am I being too hard on the old guy?  I think not.   This is a theme that we will be returning too over and over.  An all-seeing and all-knowing God cannot but know what the consequences of his actions will be.  He knew Cain would kill Abel before Cain was even born.  He knew the why and the when.  This is the direct logical conclusion of being all-knowing and all-seeing.

When Cain is crestfallen because of the rejected offering, God does nothing to calm his spirit, nothing to stop the terrible sin.  If you knew someone was going to kill his brother but did nothing to stop it, would you not share in the blame. People who witness a rape but do nothing to stop it, are they not partly responsible? With a deity, the blame magnifies.  He created the world.  He created Cain. He made the whole human race in the view of the literalists.  How can he escape the blame for what we do?  Let’s say I made a very advanced robot capable of making decisions on it own.   It runs into the street one day and starts mowing people down.  I do not believe that blaming the robot for the error would be a valid legal defense.  In the infinite wisdom of Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  It’s sad when Peter Parker show a higher morality that the Lord God.

Here is what God actually says when he sees a very sad Cain “Why are you so resentful and crestfallen? If you do well you can hold your head up, but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door: his urge is towards you, yet you can be his master.”  Is this what Cain needed?  Assuredly not, because Abel’s soon bleeding into a field. He tells Cain, and I paraphrase here, “Do better. Please me more!”  What the….

During the murder, does God reach down and block the blade?  No, he doesn’t even know it has happened until he hears Abel’s blood calling out from the ground.  For an omniscient God, he is peculiarly blind at times.  And it’s not like he had too much to attend to.  There were only four people on earth at this time for god’s sake (irony intended).

Here is one of those inconsistencies that shine so brightly.  God then curses Cain to restlessly wander the earth,never living off the soil again.  Cain whines that his fate is too terrible, that with this curse anyone he meets can kill him.  God then places the Mark of Cain protecting him from harm by threatening seven fold retribution on anyone who kills Cain.  Death would be the easy way out, and God seems to want him to suffer for the murder of Abel.    Here’s the problem.  Who in the hell is there to kill Cain?  According to literal biblical interpretation there were only two other people on earth at this time,  Cain’s parents.  Is this who he was afraid of?  Who else could there have possibly have been? At the very most, there may have been a few unmentioned brothers or sisters about, but remember Cain was the third person on Earth and the first one born of woman.  How many could there have been?

Cain then moves to the land of Nod, has relations with his wife and founds a city.  Wife? Who? City? With who?  Scarecrows? Lego people?  Weird little Blair Witch Project stick people?  Again, there was no one else around.

A few months ago a letter to the editor in a local paper stated quite boldly that we atheists were sinful to even ask this question.  In the time of Adam there was no prohibition against incest.  God made it OK, initially, and only forbade it later.  Talk about relative morality.  Therefore, Cain’s wife was merely an unmentioned daughter of Eve, a sister. Eww!  This is troubling on so many fronts, the incest and cities populated with hordes of nearly genetically identical people.  Not to mention that a sister marries a brother who murdered another brother.  After this, is it any wonder humanity has such a taste for soap operas?

On the other hand, metaphorically, this myth does have a beauty. Was there a small seed of truth here? Did Cain screw up and have to live with his fratricide.  Could he have forgiven himself?  Could his parents?  Banished from his tribe he was forced to wander forlorn and alone.  Screwing up and being banished or shunned is a very human theme from the playground to the workplace. We have all felt this many times, if not to this degree.  This myth does show how terribly we are flawed, how we are weak and hateful, jealous and petty.  How we long for some explanation of why we are as broken as  we are.  This story tells us oodles about who we are, good and bad, and what it really means to be human.

It just doesn’t have much good to say about God.

2010
01/22
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The Nuts and Bolts of Creation (Why are there far more nuts gathered around this topic than bolts?) Genesis, Chapters 1-3

“In the beginning, God took a coconut and smeared it with the dingle berries off his Chihuahua’s butt.  Man arose”… Wait!  That’s not it.  Sorry, wrong myth.

“In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the earth…”  Yes, here it is!  The great creation myth of the western literary tradition.  Myths, actually.  Were you aware there are two of them?  They don’t tell the same story, but they’re not altogether different?  When read, it gives a distinct impression that two different myths from two different times were crushed together to make one, not so very cohesive, whole.  The first story deals with the six days of creation and the day of rest.  This is the crux of the most anti-scientific elements of religion.  So this is where we will start.

First, the Bible itself.  I have studied for weeks about which Bible to use, fearing I would be faulted for using one that is currently out of favor with the whatever theists may read this.  I read reviews, have been on numerous Christian sites, and paged through several at Barnes and Noble.  The facts turned up by this rigorous search were few.  Everyone likes something a little different.  I wanted to go with the most literal translation possible and finally decided on the non updated 1972 New American Standard Bible.  It was said to be more literal that it’s updated descendent, was readable and lively and had one other unique advantage: I had received one at my Catholic confirmation way back in 1983.  So let’s just call it divine will and use it as my translation of choice.

There are some cool elements to this myth.  Like the myths of Zeus, the golden apple, and the trojans, it has attractive parts.  Much as the world of Middle Earth or the bottom of Alice’s rabbit hole, these types of stories attract great audiences and have fanatical followings.   In the 14 to 24 male population there may very well be a better understanding of Middle Earth history than our own reality. But few have ever proposed that this is actually what happened in prehistory.  It may be fun to imagine, but as history it is garbage.  Genesis as scientific realism it remains absurd no matter how times or which translation I study.  Although beauty exists within it,  I will never be that attracted to the world it describes.  Quite repelled actually.  If I had the power to make a myth reality, it would be world of Tolkien that would spring out of the ground.  Middle Earth rocks!  The Garden of Eden… Meh.

Let me give you a few problems here which a completely literal translation brings out.

Before creation,  the world was formless and void and a great wind blew across the waters.  This indicates there were some things before creation, wind, water and earth.  If God didn’t create these items at creation then when did he? Day minus one.  An interesting fact arises here.  My translation of a mighty wind was change in the updated NASB translation to the Spirit of God.  How fortuitous!

Then God created light. Not the sun, mind you.  That would be two days later, but light without a seeming source.  He then separated light and darkness into day and night.  Light without sources, no sun, moon, or stars.  How do you have day and night without the sun?  Sun?  Sun?  He don’t need no stinking sun!  He’s God, bitches!

Then God created a dome to separate the waters above from the water below.  He called the dome: the sky.  Where in the unholy dogshit do we have a vast dome holding water into the sky?  Conceptually,  this idea of the universe above bears far more resemblance to all the other ancient myths and beliefs rather than anything modern and scientific.

Then the plants were created.  No sun yet, just flowering plants.

Then the sun, moon and stars to give light to the earth.  God must have forgotten he already created light on the first day. Keep in mind that it was a tough week.  But enough of picking this apart nit by nit.  Can you see why a literal viewing of this is absurd?  I will quickly weary of this project if this is all there is.  This is so obviously not the literal facts of creation. They are MYTHS!

The second myth details the creation of man more than the first myth and is therefore, the more interesting of the two.  This is the Garden of Eden and the whole woman born from the man’s rib thing.  They were created and given dominion over everything.  They were naked, but felt no shame, presumably, because they did not know sin.  The only sin in the Garden was the eating of a certain fruit from one tree at the center.  They were forbidden by the Almighty God to eat from this fruit, forbidden in the strictest terms.  So of course,  being human, they ate the fruit.  Someone will have to explain to me how an omniscient God could not see this coming?  I could have predicted this in the blink of an eye, but God?  Totally blindsided!  A real WTF moment.  Face it! Any thinking human on the face of the planet would be waiting for someone to eat the damned fruit, begging them really.  But more on that later.  The first and presumably most important thing they realized was that they are naked.  This is the big epiphany they get from tasting the fruit containing the knowledge of good and evil.  Nakedness? Is he kidding.   Tits and ass everywhere and suddenly, they are terribly ashamed.  God gave us wonderful bodies to be ashamed?  Why was this?  Was his work so shitty that he couldn’t bear to look at it. Jesus Christ people, cover that shit up.

So they cover themselves with fig leaves.  This is how God finds them.  The all seeing and and all knowing God has to look at their fig leaves before the gig is up.  Does he turn that whole omniscient thing off at night?  So he does what any parent of mildly rebellious children does.  He throws them out on their little leaf-covered butts, never to return.  That not being enough he then curses them for all eternity for that terrible, horrible, awful sin of not doing exactly as they were told. The merest deviation from “The Plan” casts us from paradise into drudgery.  Woe is us.  It is true; we are fukwits.

Other points bother me here and so many other places in the Bible.  The Evangelicals state that God is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. He (and he’s always a HE) is perfect.   I say that this negates any concept of free will.  If one knows exactly what is going to happen at all times (this is the all-seeing part)  then there is a predetermined future.   The fact that anyone can see a certain future means it’s all preordained.  If God knows what path you are going to take then there is only one path.  If this is the case, the Calvinists were right and we are all saved or damned from the beginning of the universe.  We have no choice in any matters.  Hence, free will is absent.  Life is just a movie we are stuck watching for eternity.  Not a bad movie mind you, just not as interactive as we think it is.

In a similar vein,  if God is all-seeing and all-knowing then he knew Eve was going to do what she did. Did he set her and Adam up?  An all-knowing  God would have to know how this would all turn out.  He created us.  He created our entire environment.  We had no choice in the matter.  It’s obvious that he created us to fail.  We call it entrapment in our justice system.  I wonder what God calls it?  Fun?

Here is a perfect being who makes the hugely and wonderfully flawed human being.  Is this possible?  Perfect creating flawed?  Was he drunk?  Nippin’ on the communion wine?   Either we are the way he always meant us to be (petty, mean, lustful, among other traits) or he messed up, kept us too long in the oven or mismeasured the ingredients.  He probably confused teaspoons and tablespoons.  I’ve done that before.  Anyone not blinded by faith has to take note of this logical inconsistency.  One cannot be all the things listed and still come out with us sinners and Him as ultimate saint.  It’s either his mistake, or he did it on purpose.  He must take the responsibility for our fall.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume this second myth is truth for a moment, as difficult as it is to accept the talking snake and the dome of the sky holding back a vast amount of water.  There are ethical problems with this view.  The Christians aren’t reading their own myths right.  An omniscient God creates us in his image and then forbids us to do one thing, to know right from wrong.  Am I the only one who finds this troubling?  Isn’t this knowledge essential to be human?  Were we not animals before “the fall” and only became truly human after the sin?  Was God not denying our free will?  For what is free will, but to exercise our  choices with knowledge in hand.  Our quest for knowledge and our ignoring God’s commandment is what made us sentient.  Instead of original sin, this event should be viewed as our separation from the animals, our first step towards the future.

The castigation Eve has received throughout history is unjust.  She should be applauded for making us human, for taking that first step to becoming a worthy companion of any supreme being worthy of being called such. Biting that apple was progress.   Adam, the frakkin’ coward, should have made his first act in the garden a feast of all the knowledge offered by every damn tree in that garden.  The yellow bastard should have been a glutton for the knowledge denied.  To hell with edicts from above.  Screw God!  We should never submit to the slavery of one stronger than us.  Might never makes right even when that might is all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful.

It is a simple fact, humankind did not fall with that apple.  We climbed.   Way to go Eve!

2010
01/20
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And Finally, the Beginning.

Here we are, finally, at the beginning.  A fine place to start, but not the only place, as anyone who has watched “Pulp Fiction” can attest.  But I’m old- fashioned, or simply not smart enough, so chapter one it is.

The creation myth of Genesis is one of the most widely known on earth.  It tells a tale of the rise of man, his brief stay in paradise, and his precipitous fall, over a woman, no less.  It is a beautiful allegory…

What’s that? Here’s a solid atheist calling the Bible beautiful.  Absolutely, but only allegorically!  As literature, the Bible is a glimpse into human nature. Like all great writing,  it tells both of the people who wrote it and humanity in general. The key point here is the term “literature”.  Like Homer and Virgil and so very many others, the Bible is has some universal human stories within it’s pages.  There is much of what makes us human there, gems amidst the gravel.  But if one demands that the Bible be taken as literal truth, then the beauty is discarded.  It’s dirtied and marred, often irretrievably.  You may as well tear out its pages and pick up dog shit with them for all the good it will do.

So as an allegorical tale, let’s look at the quite sexist rendering of the fall of man and how it has been interpreted over the ages. Man is in paradise living a life of bliss and innocence until a woman comes and destroys him.  The same story has been told over and over.  In fiction and even news broadcasts, this theme continues to pop up?  From the fictions of Jane Austin to Danielle Steel to the factions of Bill Clinton and Mark Sanford, every man is fine until a woman tempts them to destruction.  I fully understand this is the same sexistly simple way to look at these events that boys and their doting mothers have used for centuries. He was such a good boy until he was led astray.  It harkens back to the innocence of the playground when all boys were yucky and all girls had cooties.  Today we tend to be somewhat more equitable with blame, and modern man is now asked to take the responsibility for his decisions, here anyway.  Islam in its harshest interpretation hasn’t made it beyond blaming Eve for all our problems.

But this story in its basic element is still a human story, a universal story.  How many times have we heard something similar?   How many friends, male or female, have related a personal experience that could fit onto this framework with a bit of stretching.  Humanity still fits into its baby clothes even if they’re a bit uncomfortable.  How much have we really grown?.

The other side of the issue has to be the effect such writing has had on us as a civilization. Yes, there are universal stories here, but how much have these stories held us to the path  we actually took through history. All works reflect the human condition to some degree, but they also guide or nudge that condition.  How has the story of the fall of “man” shaped us? How have women been pushed into the various roles they have assumed over the centuries?  How have men?  Has it retarded our march out of the abyss?  Did it help?  My answers to these question would have to be :a lot, a lot, yes, and no.

The tale of Eve’s sin helped lock us into a system that didn’t allow women to vote until 91 years ago.  Even today, there remain sects within this country who still preach a return to a completely male dominated society, where women assume their traditional roles and are banned from politics.  Doubt me?  Four years ago I had a newly “saved” work partner who insisted that women were only given the right to vote to appease certain lobbies and that God always intended for men to lead; women to follow. His church was pushing for reform of  the voting laws to disallow women’s participation.   Needless to say, there was little unnecessary conversation after a few days.  He had said more than I ever wanted to hear.  You would might expect this from some ancient crusty relic of the past gasping hatred through his last breath, but this man was somewhat educated 30 year old with a wife and child whom he professed to love deeply.  The danger of his view predominating is very small, his being such a fringe group, but these people are out there in numbers that may surprise, and at the base of this oppressive belief and so many others lies the story of Eve tricking Adam into biting an apple.

Sometimes I wonder how we made it this far!

Oh yes, science.  Now I remember.

2010
01/18
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In the Beginning… The “Story” of Creation.

Ah, here we are, Genesis 1,1.  The beginning.  The origin.  Creation itself!  This is an obvious and fine place to start.  But let’s pause on the brink here, take a breath and collect our thoughts before we dive in.  It’s going to be a long journey.

Fascinating stuff, this creation, but what direction are we to go?  To which horizon should we point our prow?  We need to set the proper tone.  The first step is the most important.  In that light, we must do some preliminary discussion  before heading off into the labyrinth that is Genesis.  We need to glance at a map.  We need to know what’s at stake.

Now, Genesis is likely to be the most problematic section of the entire Bible  so allow me to digress a bit.  The difficulty arises with several points.  First, it ‘s written in a dry painful style, particularly with the first chapters.  Vast amounts of detail is piled on events that have little to do with any important theme and then detail so necessary to a good moral lesson is completely missing in others.  Examples abound of this incongruous exposition. Take  the marathon bargaining session for Sarah’s burial plot, for instance.  It seems to serve for little except as some random bit of quasi-genetic code for enthusiasts to hold up to support their odd branch of dogma.  At the same time, there are sections of the book that are passed over so briefly, they are very difficult to grasp fully.  The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,  is morally a very problematic chapter with the offering of Lot’s virgin daughters to be gang banged by the mob and the promise not to destroy the city if even ten good people could be found.  Were they even looked for?   Don’t children count?  The answers to these questions remains “We don’t know!”  Why don’t we?

As Genesis continues,  it does get less plodding and more detailed, but remains problematic.  But aside from these more detailed criticisms there is a potentially fatal danger with Genesis and that is the way in which it is viewed by a sizable population today.

My main difficulty with all of Genesis is some groups insistence that it is a literal truth instead of an allegory or metaphor.  Examples here include the infamous Discovery Institute, who promote, with terrible vigor, the idea that Adam and Eve lived amongst vegetarian dinosaurs and our coal deposits are the result of Noah’s flood knocking down and burying all the trees.  How can anyone possibly view this as literal truth? It’s the 21st century.  It doesn’t even make plausible fiction.  We know so much, yet this piece of mythical tripe is what many consider pivotal to our salvation?  What is the difference between this fallacy and sacrificing a goat tonight so your kid will win his basketball game?  Shall I spread some chicken entrails out on the kitchen counter tonight to see if I should go to work in the morning?  Perhaps I should run around my neighborhood at five AM loudly ringing bells to scare away the demons before the kids walk to school?  The difference lies only in which bronze age book you insist is literal truth.

We need a more logical basis for our lives and science offers us the way forward.  The wonders of science illuminate our entire world.    It is the pillar that supports everything we see around us today, industry, agriculture, medicine, electronics,  our entire  educational system and economy, everything!  But the Biblical literalists demand we throw away a vast chunk of our understanding of this universe and revert to a near stone age interpretation of creation. Does this sound like a good idea? Knocking out the walls and pillars of a house we have built so high and so strong that it can support the teeming billions that occupy it presently.  And to destroy that house’s integrity while we still reside in it is sheer foolishness.  I can think of few ideas that could harm us more.   Without a vigorous science, unfettered by ludicrous superstition, we are doomed.  Harder and harder the literalist push, and more and more they persuade Americans that science is full of lies and Genesis holds all the answers.  They are poisoning the average American against the science they need to survive.  Kids don’t want to grow up to be scientists any more. Their parents have pushed the sciences onto the same murky moral ground as lawyers, but without the money and the power of that profession.  The career is uninviting, no?   These are the same people who deny global warming or the need for any environmental protection.  In their eyes, the world was made so strong it is unchangeable by mere human influence but, ironically, all marriages can be irrevocably damaged by mere gay participation.  This is not a path we can afford to go down.

Science must remain supreme.  It is the tool we have used to reach the magnificent heights where we stand.  Religion and superstition had little to do with this achievement. In fact, it has actively retarded it.  Science has brought us here and allows us to stay.  Without it we could no longer support the people who are already living, let alone the multitudes to come.  Without it, we fail.  We will hurl over the precipice, and the fall may be long.  The cliff is out there, never doubt it ,and without science we have no lights to see the edge and very little ability to avoid it.

This insistence on the reality of myth will lead our nation back down the path that we have struggled so hard to ascend, and with us will go the rest of humanity .  Now, you may think that I am just a doom-sayer, a nagging Cassandra screaming nonsense about a certain wooden horse. That as a nation, we will see the truth and turn around.  Maybe, you say, it won’t get that far.  I hope you are right, truly I do.  But I have a serious problem with the “think happy thoughts” plan for the future.  Everyone needs to understand the mindset of the literalists.  This is the same mindset that burned Jews at the stake during the black plague, on one hand because they were thought to have poisoned the water wells and on the other because God was punishing Christendom for allowing them to survive.  This is the world view that called for the burning of heretics in Lisbon, Portugal after a massive earthquake.  God was punishing the Lisbonites for their sins.  Even today, we have not yet matured beyond this point.  One need only look at the recent destruction of Haiti and Pat Robertson’s assertion that this was God’s punishment for their selling their soul to the devil two centuries ago.

The literalist mindset will watch the destruction of this nation through their Genesis colored glasses and not see it for what it really is, a lack of understanding for how the world works.  The world will crumble around them and they will look, not for the true cause, but for scapegoats.   All you need do is look at their current hot button issues and you will see the first group to fall.

I sincerely believe that when the nation/world begins to fail, they will wail that this is God’s punishment for sin and hungry people often believe what they are told. History bears this out far too often to doubt it.  If the fall comes, the hard core fundamentalists will blame it on the homosexuals, and when they are gone, there’s always the Jews.  If you doubt this, please look at the events of last century.  We are capable of such terrible things.

Now, most Christians are good people, many are very good people.  But the insistence on the absolute literal interpretation of the Bible, particularly Genesis, paves they way for mindless behavior to come.  If you can believe that Adam and Eve rode on the backs of dinosaurs and that a tyrannosaurus ate only berries and nuts then you can believe nearly anything if said persuasively enough.  As your children get hungrier, it will take less and less persuasion.  This is the evil we must fight.  This is why the bible must be studied.  The superstition must be countered.  The wooden horse is already within our walls. It’s been here forever.  It must be exposed for what it is, a terrible danger.  We must win this fight.

Onward skeptics.

2010
01/17
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What’s an atheist to do?

I’ve been an atheist for over twenty years now.  Raised in a traditional semi-dysfunctional Christian family, it has been quite a journey to overcome the sheer inertia of the superstition in my head. My mother was always as right wing as one could get without becoming a card carrying fascist.  She was also quite religious for most of her adult life, but it wasn’t until I was about 13 years old that she took the plunge into an all out evangelical conversion.  All it took was a sudden move into a new place, a near bankruptcy, and about 1500 hours of watching Tammy Fay Baker on the PTL channel ( that’s People That Love) or Pat Robertson and the 700 Club ( I still don’t know what that means) and she saw the “light”. She would call it an epiphany.  I would now term it a traumatic brain injury.

There was no going back. The brakes were off .  The hill was long and steep.  Dad converted soon after. Now my father is a good person, decent and  loving, but he seldom has an opinion that my mother didn’t put there.  I have often thought that that was why they married, he had an opinion deficit and she had a opinion surplus, thus she had storage for the extras, and I think he kind of liked that full feeling.  As a marriage, it works, but it isn’t what I would I would choose.  Both us kids succumbed shortly after, and we made a cute little “born again” family.  Having nowhere else to go we plunged ever deeper into an ocean of religion/superstition with my mother’s hand firmly on the tiller.

Mayhap, you think that I am being a tad unfair.  That my parents truly loved me and were only doing what they thought best, that they needed something to fill the emptiness.  All this is true, I freely admit.  I seldom felt unloved as a child; dominated and misunderstood, oh yes, but  loved.  As to what they thought best, what would you think if these same parents converted to Buddhism or Hinduism or hard core Islam and drug their families along.  Would it be unfair to criticize then?   And then there is the emptiness,  that inner need to feel like you belong somewhere, someplace – anywhere, anyplace. We all get it from time to time.  But to counter the emptiness by backing up to whatever manure pile is being advertised on TV for a small donation and filling up the trunk to overflowing seems less than wise.   But then to demand that everyone else must fill from the same pile of shit,  to  dismiss those who fill from different piles as unsaved and those who refuse to fill at all or actively spend their life shoveling the accumulated shit out of their respective trunks as evil, this is unkind.

You may think I exaggerate,  judge for yourself.  We attended every revival meeting in western Montana for years.  I saw people speaking in tongues, people rolling on the floor screaming,  demons cast out (mostly from the same people, apparently they have  poor firewall).  I heard preachers preach fire and brimstone.  I saw “healings” (same people, same ailments, every time).  And I believed!!  I begged for God to speak to me.  And what did I hear?  Nothing.  Ever!  It was a nothing that echoed off the lustful thoughts in my head. It was a nothing made me feel unloved.  It was a nothing that filled me with sadness and self loathing.  It was nothing. It was only later that I realized that the reason I heard nothing was that there was simply nothing to hear.  Nothing.  At all!

After  graduation from high school, my parents wanted me to attend a good Christian College.  So I attended the University of Mary in Bismarck North Dakota and became an atheist.  This was not quite as fast or painless as I make it sound. It was a long hard journey.   Nor was it quite what my mother intended and the manure has hit the fan on and off ever since.   You see, if you’re not for my mother, you’re against her.  If you don’t believe the exact dogmatic superstition that she does then you don’t love her.  You ungrateful child!   Sigh.

Needless to say, my atheism as been a bone of contention ever since.

In arguing with my mother over my not submitting to the ONE TRUE GOD (copyright 4004 BCE) her unfailing final response was “read your Bible.”  This never actually made sense to me.  If you don’t believe in God, the Bible assumes no more spiritual importance than Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or, for that matter, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy .  But after years I have started to change a bit.  Oh, not that way.  The Bible is still just a work of literature.  But perhaps, there would be a value in reading it, but reading from my perspective and mine alone.  Maybe a daily dose of contradiction and death, murder and mayhem, rape, incest and adultery  would truly change me.  I jest, but a careful reading would firm up my own lack of faith.  It would force me to put down my thoughts and thereby making me think.  And though rare, true thought is seldom a bad thing.

So I start my atheist bible study.  pull up a chair, dust your bibles off and for nary a god’s sake get a glass of wine. This shit’s dry. Let’s see what this God is all about.  Let’s dig him out, look in his closets and see what he has swept under the rug.  Let’s dig through that lump in his backyard and see where the bodies are buried.   We are going to be the paparazzi of religion.  We will leave no cruel or senseless act unturned.  We will find God and drag him kicking and screaming into the light for all to see.  We are off on an adventure.  We are taking a journey through time to a formless void, back some 6000 years (and change)  Genesis, chapter one.  In the beginning…

2010
01/16
CATEGORY
Atheism
Bible study
Myth
Religion
Thoughts
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