Genesis: Down Came the Rain and Washed the (Everything) Out

OK, so apparently the authors of the Bible were a little worried that all that sex, drama, and action with the Fall was going to overstimulate the audience. So they decided to offset that by boring the hell out of us with a genealogy list. My eyes glazed over for a few generations of geriatrics fathering named sons and nameless daughters until we get to Noah.

Now there’s a weird sidetrack about the “sons of God” marrying “daughters of man,” and something about something called Nephilim being great men of renown. None of it really makes any sense, and it’s not really defined who any of those terms refer to. So I was forced to try and look it up online (why would a perfect book be so vague that you have to look stuff up from other sources just to find out what the hell it’s talking about? Oh yeah… not perfect. We covered that.). Turns out… nobody’s actually sure what it means. There are a few theories, including one that it refers to rebellious angels interbreeding with human women to create a race of hybrid supermen called Nephilim. But since they all died in the Flood anyway, I guess it’s sort of irrelevant. Oh, and in the middle of that in a complete non sequitur, God decides that human life spans will be limited to 120 years (must have been a delayed action decision – we later see many generations pass with people living 400-500 years).

So yeah… Noah. Noah is the only righteous man in the whole world. Everyone else is a complete tool. And not only man, but apparently every animal is “corrupt” as well. God’s creation is basically a big steaming pile, and he’s pretty unhappy about it. His solution: kill it! Kill it with water!

“6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only for evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made man in the earth, and it grieved him in his heart. 7 So the Lord said ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

How do you like that? Explicit admission of a mistake.

Of course, since Noah is righteous and all that, God decides to spare him and a small breeding population of animals (specifically – one breeding pair of each “kind” of unclean animal and seven pairs of clean ones, though the Bible hasn’t told us yet which are the clean and unclean. It’ll be several generations yet before people get that news). So he commands Noah to build his ark and gather the animals. I’ll leave aside all the usual arguments about the physical impossibility of all this – we’ve all heard it before, and I’m sure believers just assume God gave the ark T.A.R.D.I.S.-like properties such as being bigger on the inside.

But the T.A.R.D.I.S. is cooler. No sense in arguing it; it’s just a fact.

Noah and his nameless wife then gather their three sons and their nameless wives to join the animals in the long cruise (Biblical wives apparently come in two flavors to this point: ones with names that fuck up all of creation, and nameless ones that bear sons for men with names). 40 days of rain, another few months of drifting about, and every land animal and bird except those that lived on the ark is dead.

Now take a moment here to imagine everyone and everything drowning. Cats, dogs, koala bears, cute fluffy bunnies… and babies. All those evil babies whose evil mothers struggle desperately to keep their little infant mouths above the inexorably rising water until they themselves drown and their lifeless hands drop pudgy little helpless bodies into the water to have their little infant lungs filled up until they choke. Got that image firmly in mind? Good. Live with it. That’s your God.

Fun fact: this would not have killed the albatrosses. They can literally go for years without ever touching dry land. They fly that efficiently, can rest by floating on the water, and eat fish. I guess God must have made special arrangements to kill the albatrosses. Side note: albatrosses rock! You should really look up information on them sometime.

First bird Noah sends looking for dry land is a raven, by the way. Why does that never get mentioned?

So the waters recede, Noah and his family climb out of the ark, and God promises he’s never going to destroy the world with water again. Maybe nightmares about drowning babies were keeping him awake at night.

Now we get to the part of the story that my Sunday school classes never covered. You see, Noah takes up farming, and one day he gets drunk on the wine he made from his grapes. Then he passes out naked in his tent (remember, kids, you can be a righteous man, and still drink yourself into a stupor and wake up naked just like college kids on Spring Break). One of his sons, Ham, comes into the tent in the morning and sees his dad naked. He thinks this is hilarious (as opposed to traumatic), and runs to get his brothers so they can see dad naked too. But his brothers are a bit more respectful, and they cover Noah with a blanket instead of standing around pointing and snickering.

Noah wakes up and finds out about Ham’s hijinks. He’s pissed, hung over, probably a little humiliated. So he does what any righteous man would do in his shoes: condemn Ham’s son Canaan to be a slave to Ham’s brothers. That’s Canaan, not Ham. He’s punishing Canaan for something Ham did. ‘Cause righteous men are assholes like that, I guess.

Mind you, this is the same Canaan from whom the Canaanites are descended. The people the Hebrews will later invade, slaughter, and enslave in order to claim their promised land. A cynical eye might look at this episode as an after-the-fact embellishment of the story to help justify that enslavement. It works, because the God of this book is pretty clearly in favor of punishing people for shit their ancestors did. It especially likes epic punishments for trivial offenses.

Again, the Bible winds us down from all that excitement by boring the shit out of us with lists of all the boys fathered by several generations of men with nameless wives (and presumably daughters, but that’s never mentioned). Mostly it reads like a half-assed “this is where all the nations came from” story, since many of the kids seem to have the same names as the various nations and peoples that populated the area where the Hebrews lived. Of course, people who sucked were descended from Ham. We see Quantum Wife Theory in action some more, since nobody ever seems to father a female but women keep appearing to bear more sons.

The mind-numbing list leaves off to bring us the Tower of Babel story. Everyone knows this one. Some people get together to build themselves a city with a really tall tower, and God doesn’t like it. But reading the actual language of the story provides some interesting insight that I don’t think gets conveyed in Sunday school.

“Genesis 11:6 And the Lord said ‘Behold, they are one people and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.”

Did you get that? God saw that by cooperating together, humans could accomplish anything they set their minds to, AND IT PISSED HIM OFF!  He felt threatened that the collective penis of mankind might be bigger than his, so he had to fuck things up for everyone. Yay God!

The next story is Abraham’s. Most of us don’t know much about him other than that he was willing to kill his son and cut off bits of his penis for God (as if those are good things), but there’s a lot more to his story than that. So we’ll leave it for another day.

Take care!

Genesis: Falling Down

OK, when last we left our hero, God, he’d just finished making man. So the next thing he does is plant a garden, stick the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (we’ll call it Tokogae for short). Then he plops Adam down in the garden, and tells him he can eat the fruit of any tree but Tokogae (could he have eaten the bark or leaves or roots, if he’d been a rules-lawyering type?) “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. (Gen-2:17)”

I wonder how much value that warning had for Adam. Apparently nothing had ever died before this, so it couldn’t have seemed very meaningful. Kind of a nonsense word, at that stage of the game.

“Do not eat of the mandrake root, or else you will gnarfle.”

And at any rate, this phrasing seems mostly like a friendly warning. “Hey, Adam, that shit’s poisonous. Don’t eat it.” Seems to me like a lot of trouble could have been avoided if it had been named something like “The Tree of Death and Misery For Anyone Who Eats it and All Their Descendants.” Who would want to eat that?

Moving on, God wants to give Adam a helper. So he brings him all the animals to name, which he does, and they decide none of them are quite what Adam needs. So God puts him to sleep, takes out a rib, and uses that to make Eve. Dunno why clay wasn’t good enough like it had been for Adam – maybe equal forming methods might have implied equal standing, which the Bible is pretty down on.

Now since Chapter 1 says man and woman were both formed on the same day, we’ve got a pretty fucking busy day here. Get up in the morning, name every living thing on the damn planet and evaluate it for fitness to be your companion. Adam gets more done in a day than all of the taxonomists of every generation since can do in thousands of years of trying, and still has time to undergo major surgery and get hitched!

Anyway, I’m sure you know what comes next. The serpent (btw, text reads: “3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made,” which strongly suggests we’re talking about a literal snake, not Satan as is popularly put about) talks Eve into eating the fruit of Tokogae, and she talks Adam into eating it too. Now, supposedly, they have knowledge of good and evil. So of course their first thought is “Fuck! We’re naked! We need to make clothes!” rather than “Oh, shit, we disobeyed God, and now we’re royally fucked for all eternity!” Guess nekkidness is the highest order of evil.

God comes looking for them, and when he catches them trying to hide their naughty bits he realizes they’d eaten the fruit. They play the blame game: Adam says Eve tricked him, she says the serpent tricked her. God curses all three of them, and boots Adam and Eve out of the garden.

Weird shit in the curses: one of the curses on Adam to eat bread?! Wtf? I LIKE bread. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t. Bread is fucking awesome! Got any more curses like that one I could sign up for?

Oh, here’s a fun line:

“3:22 Then the Lord God said ‘Behold, then man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever-‘ 22. Therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.”

God kicks man out of the garden to prevent him from eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal. Then he sets a cherubim with a flaming sword outside the garden to make sure nobody else ever can either. If you’re picturing a winged baby with a flaming sword, drop that image – cherubim in the Bible are badasses. The winged baby thing is a later invention.

I gotta wonder, though… what the hell was the point of all that? Why would God have a Tokogae and a Tree of Life anyway? If he’s all powerful, eternal, and all knowing, he sure as hell doesn’t need them himself, and nothing else is allowed to eat them. They’re useless constructs. Of course, the most likely explanation IMO is that they’re just a plot device in a piece of fiction.

I read on to the Cain and Abel story. We all know it – God plays favorites with Adam’s kids, one gets pissed at the favoritism and kills the other. God finds out, and curses Cain to be a fugitive and a wanderer. Of course, Cain then goes and founds his own city, which kinda torpedoes that curse.

But that brings up another wtf moment. Cain “knew his wife” and she bore a son. Where the fuck did this nameless wife come from? Either Cain is nailing his own sister, or Biblical wives were like quantum particles just randomly popping into existence whenever a man needs to conceive a son.

Hmmm… Quantum Wife Theory. That may bear some investigation.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. Damn I’m getting long-winded already. Gotta work on that. Next up: Noah and the Flood!

Genesis: Making Stuff (Up)

Worked over 10 hours yesterday. Yes, it was a Sunday. No mobs showed up to stone me to death as a result. But if anyone would like to form a mob to stone my bosses for making it necessary, I’m pretty sure arrangements can be made.

Making an offer on a house today. Busy times, but I managed to start my little project anyway. So without further ado, let’s jump in, shall we?

“1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

And with that, we’re off to the races. We have light without source, darkness without any objects to cast shadows, and day and night without any sun. But whatever, it’s pretty abstract shit. But basically, it’s the creation story we’re mostly familiar with if we grew up in the West. The days continue and we get the following timeline:

Day 2: God separates the “waters above” from the “waters below” with an expanse that he calls Heaven (so we have two layers of water separated by Heaven – a Heaven sandwich!).

Day 3: God gathers the waters below into one place, exposing dry land. Then he puts plants all over it.

Day 4: God puts up the sun and moon, and fills heaven with stars.

Day 5: Fish and birds

Day 6: Land animals and humans (when the hell did insects get made? Some fly like birds, some crawl like land animals).
Day 7: Rest.

At the end of it the Bible’s described a kind of layer cake of a world. At the bottom is the earth and some water. Above that is Heaven (kind of implied that Heaven = everything above the surface of the earth), and Heaven contains the Sun, moon, and stars… so basically the atmosphere and all of visible space (Odd that Heaven can be paradise while simultaneously being made of 99.99999999% environments that will kill you pretty much instantly – and possibly no water). Although to this point, there isn’t actually any claim of a Heavenly paradise, so I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. Beyond Heaven (beyond the edge of the observable universe?) is another layer of water.

I want to call particular attention to Day 3, when God’s making the plants. It reads like this:

“1:11 And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.”

Why’s that important? Let’s proceed to Chapter 2 and find out.

“2:5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground – 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

That’s a contradiction! Biblical perfection takes a flying leap out the window before we’re even ten verses into the second chapter. I mean, aside from the fact that the creation myth doesn’t line up with observed facts about the real world. If all you knew about the world was what you read in this book, even then it should be glaringly obvious that the writers didn’t have the first clue what they were talking about. Chapter 1 says plants were made on day 3 and humans on day 6, chapter two says humans were made first.

And don’t give me any crap about them saying the same thing because God just put seeds in the ground on Day 3, but they didn’t sprout until after man was made. The Day 3 description explicitly says the plants were brought forth and producing seeds of their own before the end of the day. These verses explicitly contradict each other, and saying otherwise is to pretend that they say something other than what they say.

Plus there’s the kind of asinine implication that humans working the ground is necessary for plants to grow in the first place. But whatever – I never expected science to be a strong suit in this book.

Guess that’s enough for today! Biblical literalism turns out to be logically impossible (Law of Non-contradiction), and Biblical perfection a myth. Next up will be the Fall.

Introduction – Why I’m Reading the Bible

On more than one occasion I’ve heard Christians tell atheists that they should read the Bible and it will lead them to god. I’ve also heard atheists say that the surest way to become an atheist is to read the Bible. So we have two sides of the debate saying mutually contradictory things about the Bible. Color me shocked.

So, let’s put it to the test, shall we? The purpose of this blog, quite simply, is to document my attempt to read the Bible, and give my impressions of what I’m reading as I go along.

Now I’ll say right up front that this is not a fair test. I’m already an atheist, and therefore already predisposed to think it’s all a load of crap. But I suppose there’s some possibility that reading the Bible will change that. I guess we’ll find out.

This first post is just to introduce myself, and set up the premise of the blog. I was raised by a Southern Baptist family, though most of my young life I went to non-denominational churches on military bases. Most of my understanding of the Bible came from Sunday school, which as we’re going to see is a pretty damn sanitized. Sometime around my 12^th birthday, my grandmother gave me a copy of the Bible as a birthday present. Dutifully, I tried to read it, and didn’t make it past Genesis. The thing’s a snore, to be honest, and just couldn’t compete with The Lord of the Rings or pretty much anything written by Heinlein (or most fiction written by reasonably creative high school students). The Bible went back in its box, displayed on my bookshelf amidst stuff I actually did read so Grandma could see it there when she visited.

A couple years ago I tried again. By this point I had been pretty comfortably atheist for years, a grown man with a college degree and a wife and two kids. This time, I made it as far as the Psalms before petering out. The reasons I couldn’t sustain this second attempt were slightly different from the first – I had no real outlet to express my frustration and disgust with the text. Being older and more experienced, and not at all predisposed to see everything in the Bible as good just because it was in the Bible, I was actually kind of horror-stricken to realize the stuff I was reading was stuff that many people actually believe was true and good. And since I don’t like burdening my friends and family with my own little rants (and most of them wouldn’t have been sympathetic anyway – Southern Baptist family, majority Christian society, etc., etc.), I just lost momentum under the weight of just how depressing a read it was. Aside from the fact that the quality of the storytelling hadn’t improved any with age.

But maybe blogging will help. Maybe this will give me just the outlet I need to keep up flagging spirits. So… here we go with attempt number three. I’ll be reading from the English Standard Version for a couple simple reasons: 1) I’m in the middle of moving, so the Bible my grandmother gave me is in a box in a storage facility, and 2) I could download it for free from Amazon onto the Kindle app for my phone.

Next post will start In the Beginning: Genesis.