Read God Hates You, Hate Him Back: Making Sense of The Bible Online
Authors: CJ Werleman
To defend the Bible as an argument for morality places one on a very slippery slope. By what standards or framework do we cherry-pick the Bible? What do we leave in and what do we omit? And who decides? Do we stone our daughters to death for working part-time at Burger King on the Sabbath? Or do we remove the law that demands we take our sons to the edge of the city limits and execute them for calling their fathers, “A cranky old bastard”, in a heated teen-angst moment? And if we are picking and choosing the laws worthy of following, then aren’t we playing God ourselves? Furthermore, if we accept that it is barbaric in the 21
st
century to sell our daughters into slavery, then it is evident that morals, like everything else in the human experience,
evolve
. Resulting in the conclusion that moral evolution is at the behest of man and not by God.
Further, if belief in God were inextricably tied to morality then it would be fair to assume that statistical, analytical or anecdotal data would demonstrate that societies with a higher degree of religiosity would be safer places to live, as those citizens abided by the moral code prescribed by the respective religion. What we find, however, is the opposite. This data is best described by Sam Harris in his ‘
Letter to a Christian Nation’
:
“
While political party affiliation in the United States is not a perfect indicator of religiosity, it is no secret that the ‘red (Republican) states’ are primarily red due to the overwhelming political influence of conservative Christians. If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in ‘blue’ (Democrat) states and 38 percent are in ‘red’ (Republican) states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the most pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rate of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.”
Harris’ social data is consistent with a paper published in July 2009 on the online journal
Evolutionary Psychology
by Gregory Paul. Paul finds that countries with the lowest rates of social dysfunction – based on more than 20 indicators, including rates for poverty, unemployment, crime and sexually transmitted disease – have become the most secular or anti-religious. Whereas those nations listed as the most socially dysfunctional including the US, are listed as the most religious. Hasn’t history taught us well enough that when you oppress or prohibit a certain behavior the ‘blowback’ is double? So, with the continual decline of religion and with a collective awakening around the world that if there is a God then surely there can’t be just one path to him, the question becomes what part will religion play in the future? I will let you ponder that as you read this book, but in the interim you may want to consider Harris’ brilliant hypothesis, included in ‘End of Faith’:
“
What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can’t make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there’s that business about getting food and building shelter that we would to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity – like the ‘fact’ that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk’s sacred animals are horses, dogs and a dragon with a forked tongue……and when we will want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death?”
Harris further contends that if the above all-humanity memory loss were to occur, then our relearning of all things of relevance would place the Bible and Qur’an on the shelf next to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and the ‘Egyptian Book of the Dead’.
Alright, enough with the Theology 101 lesson, let’s have some fun in exploring the ancient Biblical world of murder, barbarism, bestiality, rape and plunder.
PS: God doesn’t know you are reading this book, so don’t be scared.
“
Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?”
Bertand Russell (London, 1927)
Genesis is the first book of the Bible of Judaism and Christianity, and the first of five books of the Pentateuch or Torah. It recounts Judeo-Christian beliefs regarding the world, from creation to the descent of the children of Israel into Egypt, and contains some of the best-known stories of the Old Testament, including Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel and the biblical Patriarchs.
For Jews the theological importance of Genesis centers on the covenants linking God to his Chosen People and the people to the Promised Land. Christianity has reinterpreted Genesis as the prefiguration of Christian beliefs, notably the Christian view of Christ as the new Adam and the New Testament as the culmination of the covenants.
The very first sentence of Genesis and therefore the Bible states:
“
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1 NIV)
That’s it! Doesn’t tell us how he made it; what building materials were used; if any of the work was outsourced to India; or from where he sourced the materials. The Bible’s explanation of the creation of the universe is paramount to the smart-ass kid in the classroom telling you, “It just is and you wouldn’t understand it even if I told you anyway!” Imagine how confusing the creation of the universe by the Hebrew God 6,000 years ago must have been to the Sumerians as they watched on from their huts drinking beer, and using glue. Wait. What?
The next time someone says there is still a debate between our modern cosmological understanding of the universe versus the Biblical creation, know that on one hand we have a library full of hundreds of years of scientific research cataloguing our galaxy, the relationship between stars and planets; and the wondrous beauty of evolutionary development, and on the other hand, that being the Bible, the good book has compressed all that natural world wonderment into a single pithy sentence. Magic! Scientists are the first to admit that there are still some missing links in understanding the finer details as to the creation of the universe, but any ‘gap’ that we currently have today is not logically resolved by the Bible’s explanation of ‘wham here it is’!
The remainder of the opening sentence of Genesis continues:
“
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” (Genesis 1:2 NIV)
So, the question becomes what was God doing with himself leading up to that time? Sitting idle in the formless empty darkness? How long was he sitting on his ass flicking between channels waiting for something interesting to watch? Did he create us out of sheer boredom, in between inventing the dinosaurs 350 million years ago and then man 7,000 years ago? It’s reasonable to ask what he was doing during this extraordinarily lengthy hiatus. Evidently, he was indeed content with floating around in the dark until, all of a sudden, he says to himself, “Fuck it, I want to create a planet, a heaven, some people and sit back and watch them destroy each other in my honor because Monday Night Football is still 6,000 years away.”
This Genesis explanation for the origins of our universe is based on less rationality than the Hindu belief - the universe is a cosmic egg that cycles between expansion and total collapse. Sure, evolution may not have all the answers and there are a few gaps in the evolutionary timeline that science is still figuring out the answers to, but to argue that an invisible man floating around in the cosmos just decided on a whim one day to wave his hands and
bang
everything familiar to our natural physical environment appeared out of literal thin air – is too far a stretch even for the most deluded individuals, many of whom are sadly confined to a life in a padded cell, and should be.
From a scientific point of view, and I am armed only with a 5
th
grade scientific mind (the kids on ‘Are You Smarter Than a 5
th
Grader’ routinely kick my ass), the errors, follies and fables of the Bible begin with that very first sentence of Genesis, “
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.
This is completely untrue and unequivocally at odds with what we know of our universe today. The truth is that in the beginning a natural event created the universe as we know it and the earth did not form until billions of years later, thus an immediate booboo on behalf of the desert nomads who wrote this. For example, the Bible says that light and darkness are created after the water but before the sun. Discovery and Discovery Channel, have proven that the sun came first, then the planet and its rotation, which gives us light and darkness and day and night, and then the water, and this all happened over millions of years.
Put into a more humorous way, there is an interesting observation included in a pocket-sized book of quotations titled
The Atheist’s Bible
. A quote that is not attributed to anyone, but for a citation of an anonymous author, it reads:
“
Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Palaeontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species representing changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing your eyes shut and wailing ‘DOES NOT!’”
I find it excessively humorous that God made light out of nothing, on the second day, which means he made the heavens and the earth in the dark! Now, if creating everything we know out of nothing wasn’t a challenge enough, he did it in complete darkness. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? I can’t even write my own name in the dark, let alone create a fucking great big shark.
Irrefutably, the total balls up of the Genesis order of events is the smoking gun for demonstrating that God is the figure of 2000 BC man’s imagination, but in keeping with the spirit of things let’s pretend he did create all of this. Then we must ask, “How?”
God created light and darkness on day one and the sun and the planets didn’t appear until day four, according to the scripture. So where did the light come from? No sun, no light. Oops!
On day three he creates all the earth’s vegetation, the plants and the trees, but we now know God didn’t create the sun until the following day, so how can there be plant life without photosynthesis? Oops!
Now we run into our very first contradiction, and we are only on page one of the Bible mind you, as God says that on day five he created the birds and animals from nothing more than the water from the oceans, but then in the very next chapter, as he is doing a summary of these heady seven days, it is written:
“
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the land and all the birds of the air.” (Genesis 2:19 NIV)
God stays on message for less time than President Obama without a teleprompter. I’ve met goldfish with longer short-term memories. Sorry, I’ve flushed goldfish with longer memories. But don’t tell my daughter. She thinks Goldy swam to heaven.
Moving onto the sixth day of his celestial architectural program, God decides to create a human being:
“
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.” (Genesis 1:27 NIV)
Think about this for a moment: made in his own image? If we are truly made in his own image then why aren’t we invisible? But clearly I can see you and you can see me, so I think this is another fallacy straight off the bat. And if we do look like him, which of us does he most resemble? Is he Asian? Is he black? Is he an NRA card-carrying member of the Texas branch of the Young Republicans? Or is he somewhat Tokyo metro-sexual in appearance? Does he stand naked in front of the mirror and wish he gave himself an extra inch or two, not that I do that, I’m just saying, ok! And what if he were anything like Bill O’Reilly? Because if he is anything like the white angry men on FOX News then I will violate all of the 10 Commandments right now, grab a gun, shoot myself, assuring myself a place in the sulphur fires of Hell. Ahh, peace at last!