God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible (11 page)

A standout command is one that concerns bestiality, whilst also hinting that it is women and their relationships with horses that we should worry about, which is an image I have tried to delete from my memory that stemmed from an email sent to me from a friend:

Which, again, suggests that some of the Israelites were shagging the sheep or there’d be no reason to offer this law. Further, I can’t figure out if this permits men to have their ways with animals or not? Thankfully, clarification comes a few chapters later:

Hardly seems fair on the poor old sheep does it? Not like an overpowered animal has much say in the matter.

I am but a mere mortal, and I had difficulty in putting together Human Resource rules for managing my previous business, but even I can see a few glaring omissions that God had overlooked in compiling his list of sexual dos & don’ts. Including:

Do not have sex or inappropriately touch a child under the age of 18. This rule applies to Catholic clergy too.

Do not rape. If a woman says, “No,” no means no.

Do not forcibly attempt to replicate what you watched on a pornographic movie with your wife and/or girlfriend.

Do not suggest a threesome with your wife’s best friend to her best friend without your wife knowing.

The thing that stands out from God’s sexual laws is that a majority are clearly written from a man’s perspective. For example, it forbids a man to have sex with your brother’s wife, but does not state that a woman cannot sleep with his sister’s husband; forbids sex with your aunt, but not with your uncle. I guess a moral oversight not of God, but of the Hebrew men who wrote this stuff. You see, under Hebrew laws a woman was property of a man and thus adultery in the Bible applies only to a married woman. Married women were not to sleep around but polygamy for men was encouraged. As we will read later, all the great men of Biblical times such as King David and Solomon had hundreds of wives. It was good to be a man and it was good to write the rules being a man. Yeah for penis! She’s standing right behind me, isn’t she?

The moral malice and wickedness of Leviticus is telegraphed with the first stated punishment for sin:

How many of us are required to now go out and take our rebellious teenage sons or daughters out into the backyard and butcher them? Had God already forgotten his commandment that ‘thou shall not kill’, which was dictated only a few passages ago in Exodus? Seems the various authors of the Bible never got together to synchronize their respective stories. Even a bunch of keystone cops could pull this apart under cross examination.

Death warrants are spelt out for a host of indiscretions including blasphemy. Leviticus 24 tells of a story of a fight between the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father. The son of the Israelite mother, in the heat of the fight, assumedly cried, “Jumping Jehovah, you are a big fucker!” Subsequently, the blasphemer was taken into custody and led to Moses, who would in turn get on the 1800-Godhotline to await the sentence. The Lord then said to Moses:

The moral of this passage is don’t bother turning to God for any compassion or mercy. It is also in this chapter that we get the first half of the ‘eye for an eye’ versus the ‘turn the other cheek’ conundrum:

Seems like an unjust justice system. What if you caught your single neighbor going one step further than merely coveting your wife’s ass and, as rightful revenge, you punched him in the face, forcing one of his teeth out? According to the law, your wife’s pro-bono gigolo can now knock out one of your teeth. Now both of you are absent a tooth, but he has still shagged your wife.

Amazingly, God delves into some laws of seemingly obvious minutiae including one that just boggles the mind:

Did the God with a current count of greater than 30 million and growing, just say, “Do not seek revenge”? Ok let’s back the truck up a moment. It was only in the preceding book, Exodus, that God issued vengeful pay-back against the Amalekites. God said to Moses:

For God, it really is a case of do what I say not as I do! Which overtly implies that we should behave more like humans, ourselves, rather than God.

How the almighty overlooked this irrefutable moral abomination would remain a mystery if God were true:

If God had said that slavery was wrong and is the equivalent of moral bankruptcy, placed at least below that of cursing your father, then the argument that God is real, or at least just, would have a little more credibility. Rather, God lists the commercial terms and conditions of buying and owning slaves, including the command that Israelites are not to be kept as slaves, as all Jews are his chosen people. Uhuh!

In my personal debates with Christians, regarding God’s endorsement of slavery, my religious friends will argue that these were the times these Israelites lived in and slavery was socially acceptable back then, therefore no problem that God applied his rules to it. My counter-argument is a reminder to my zealot buddies that this is God’s only book and wouldn’t they be on far firmer argumentative ground if God demonstrated a little bit of enlightened foresight to inform his people that what they were doing was morally reprehensible, just as shagging goats is? I mean, why go to the lengths of protecting the rights of animals from bestiality assaults but dismiss the human rights of those in bondage?

It’s important also to appreciate the ugly dynamics of slavery by understanding where slaves came from, or how they came to be. Slaves were the defeated enemy, men, women and children. When, for example, the Hebrews conquered the Amalekites, children were torn from their mothers and sold to the highest bidding Hebrew family. There is hardly an uglier scar on man’s past than slavery, and God not only sanctions but also endorses it.

Reward for obedience:

The reward for obedience is some fruit and the ability to fight better. Modest rewards for having to live one’s life in serfdom to a capricious celestial dictator. Contrast the above with the following decree for Punishment for disobedience:

We can spend your and my valuable time considering the implications of God’s warning that he will convert us to cannibalism but it really is too absurd to warrant serious discussion. What is significant is that the above passage from Leviticus, as spoken by God, are just the headline comments, as the actual passage contains approximately twenty paragraphs of venomous bile spewed from the Great one’s mouth.

Leviticus Count: 0

Cumulative Count: 31,032,701

Emo Philips

The fourth book of the Torah begins with God’s command to Moses to count the number of men amongst all Israelite tribes that are fit and able for military service, from 20 years of age and up. For reasons that will soon become obvious, I prefer to think of this as the Book of Moaning.

It had been nearly forty years since the Exodus from Egypt and the Israelites had moved from camp to camp suffering at the hands of famine and war. Thus this book begins with the counting of the Israelite tribe, before they set out on their journey from Sinai to Moab, then later across the River Jordan.

The result of this census is that 603,500 Israelites are found fit and strong enough to serve in the military. Let the war begin.

God then prescribes how the tribes are to position themselves in formation around the Tabernacle, with the Levites given the honor of exclusive service of the Tabernacle, whilst also displaying no reduction for his appetite for death and destruction.

God informs Moses that he has constructed a test for wives who are suspected by their husbands of being unfaithful. Firstly, who but only a man could come up with this? And secondly, there is no test for an unfaithful husband. That so many women commit their lives to a doctrine of female discrimination appals me. I am sure if women believers around the world actually read the tenets of the three monotheistic religions, then they would have equal appeal to them as does Nascar racing to me!