Adequate substitutes for God: a golden calf, a pigs head and scrapings from the cat box.
Ah! After long and fruitless searches through the deserts of Exodus, we have come upon our promised land. No, it’s not the promised land of the Hebrews for that is a few books further along, but it is our promised land, a chapter in the Bible that is actually interesting. I know! I know! After that long list of temple building and other excrement, I, too, thought we’d never get here, but Exodus 33 is a real story with a plot and everything. Oh, never fear, it’s still quite ridiculous with fantastically twisted logic and plot holes we could throw Aaron through. But as any long time reader of this blog knows, these are the parts I most enjoy, parts we can point at and laugh, parts in which it defies common sense to believe, parts that require one to only pull their head out of their ass a little way before they come to a WTF moment. Damn, are we going to have fun.
Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Aaron said to them, “Tear off the gold rings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” Then all the people tore off the gold rings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” Now when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.”
Allow me to paraphrase. Moses has been on the mountain for forty days making up shit and learning how to chisel stone tablets… um, I mean, of course, talking with God. Meanwhile his people, bored without him ask Aaron to make them another God for as every one knows that when your first imaginary friend proves inept, just make another out of what ever you have lying around. Aaron takes everybody’s gold and fashions a calf out of it. Everyone gives offerings and a great time ensues. Sound about right? Most of us have heard this story before, myself included, but have never really thought about what this honestly means.
So let’s think about this now. The Hebrews have worshipped Yahweh since their release from Egypt. Great miracles were supposedly preformed by his priests and terrible plagues were laid upon Egypt proving his magnificence as a deity, yet as soon as Moses is gone for a few days, they all turn rapidly to another god to lead them from here on. Yeah… Yahweh was so powerful and magnificent that as soon as they are alone for a few minutes, the Hebrews manufacture a different God out a few baubles and proceed to merrily worship it? Even more interesting is that they seem quite as convinced of the divinity of this hand-made statue as they were with “real” Yahweh. WTF! By left testicle of Christ, they supposedly just saw Yahweh in all is smoky glory on the mountain. How in the hell were they convinced of this new god’s authority so easily. Could they really see so little difference between the real Yahweh and the false Calf? Allow me to say that judges of character, they were not.
Well, there is one perfectly plausible answer here, so let me state this bluntly. The only reasonable way to look at this is that Yahweh’s actual majesty was so pathetically inadequate that without Moses, the demagogue, around to browbeat his cult into obedience, God himself could be replaced without a problem… by a fucking statue! Really? The great and mighty lord God can convincingly be usurped by a rough carving of a young goddamned cow in a few days? You’d think that if he had actually been baddass enough and truly proved to all the people that he was The God with all those miracles, they would be reluctant to piss him off, but… not so much. Obviously, he never made much of an impression on the Hebrews, and his “miracles” were even paltrier than we had first imagined. Moses’ God was and is all smoke and mirrors piled with bullshit. What a wanker!
But now he’s pissed! How dare a people worship some other wanker God in place of his superior wankerosity. For this slight, God, the ever merciful, tells Moses that he will destroy the Hebrews for their sin.
The Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people. ”Now then let Me alone, that My anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation.”
If the Hebrews refuse to follow his every whim then he will annihilate them. Yeah… Isn’t that how everyone raises their children? Unfortunately, the old “Obey my every whim or you’re dead,” path to a righteous life is well trodden. But Moses doesn’t want the destruction of his people. Who in the hell is he going to push around if the Hebrews are no more?
Then Moses entreated the Lord his God, and said, “O Lord, why does Your anger burn against Your people whom You have brought out from the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? ”Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, ‘With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your burning anger and change Your mind about doing harm to Your people. ”Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom You swore by Yourself, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’” So the Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people.
God changed his mind… What? God, all-seeing, all-knowing and perfect, flies off the handle and is going to kill everyone, but then Moses puts him through a little anger management therapy and God changes his mind. Changes his mind? Will someone please tell me how perfection changes its mind? Was he out of control? Can perfection fly into a rage? Did he actually forget his promise to Abraham? Did he make a mistake in judgement? My paltry moral compass would indicate that flying into a rage and wanting to kill all the people you professed to love just a few weeks before is certainly a mistake in judgement, but Perfection doesn’t make mistakes. That’s the definition of perfection — never ever ever making a mistake! So how did Moses, a mere human, persuade his God, the perfect, not to act out the genocide he had set his mind to? It’s a puzzle to be sure.
Obviously, I suspect, nay, insist that down deep Moses and his God are the same person, a sort of divine schizophrenia. As with all religions, the voices Moses hears in his head are simply his own. Moses’ God is an echo of Moses himself. But isn’t this the basis of all religion, an internal and wholly invisible voice telling us what we want to hear.
Not always, I understand. But those two voices, the angelic and the devilish, we tend to imagine on opposite shoulders are really just that, imagined. The voices we ascribe to conscience or God are really just echos of us, wisps of ourselves trying to find our way through the situations in life. The voice of God that all Christians think of as thunderous and deafening is really just the quiet depths of our own little brain whispering its subconscious desires. The “angel” whispers of desire to protect those we love and to conform to our society to fit in. The “Devil” whispers to us of ways to get ahead of the crowd, to take what we may not have earned, to lie and cheat and steal. This is the product of our evolution, a games theory approach to passing on our genes. We strive to fit in and obey the mores of the group to succeed in mating and have offspring, but at the same time we are always on the lookout for the easy path, the quick fix, a cheat code to life. Now, cheating is inherently destructive to the group and only so much of it can be selected for, but evolution will never eliminate it entirely for it can be a very successful shortcut.
These “voices” are a normal part of being human and can lead to both good and bad, but when you consider them to be the voice of God greater evil can result. When you ascribe to God the moral wrestlings of your own conscience, you open the door to horrors and atrocities. Instead of looking on these internal conversations as the flawed workings of their own mind trying to find the best path in life, people can now view them as the divine wisdom of a perfect God. This allows the justification of nearly any action, any crime. A look at history will show what outrages we are capable with God in mind. Our past is littered with barbarities committed by people who thought they carried the will of one god or another.
God said it. It must be true.
Only God didn’t say anything. We did. The words we hear urging us into one course of action or the other isn’t God and the Devil pushing us into the role of saint or sinner. All the good and evil, all the virtue and vice, all the saintliness and bastardy that flow through our brain in the course of our life are not God or the Satan.
It’s us, all us. We are angels and we are devils, divine and demonic. We are large. We contain multitudes. For good and ill, we are legion. It’s time we started accepting our schizophrenic nature for what it is and take responsibility for our actions.
Faith is not doubting that voice in your head. Faith is mistaking that voice, that echo of yourself, for the perfect wisdom of a nonexistent being. Reason is understanding that we contain no perfection, that every thought and desire we have is suspect.
Faith is the way backward. Reason is the way forward. It’s time to choose.
