My Issues With The Bible.
Part 1 in a series of unknown length.
If you’ve ever read the bibble in full, there’s a good chance you’ve come to understand that there’s some nasty shit in that book. And if not, there’s a good chance you’re blinded by confirmation bias and need to read it again from a more objective perspective.
One has to understand that even though we call this collection of myths ‘the bible’, it does not follow that this is a book in the proper sense, with a linear beginning, middle and an end. It is a collection of text compiled in the last few centuries based on the provenance of the separate texts in question and the opinions of the people doing the compiling. What’s more, any given tradition can have a bible that is completely different from the others, and still make the claim that theirs is the proper biblical stance.
Anyone who has done a serious academic study of the literary history of the bible will know that there are a lot of texts from the various cultures involved which didn’t make the cut. The Gospel of Thomas is one that didn’t get included in the official canon, and people have spoken about the Apocrypha for ages, debating the merits of inclusion or exclusion.
The Catholics have a bible which includes 73 books, whereas the standard Protestant bible has only 66. The Eastern-Greek Orthodox bible has all of the New Testament but not the Old Testament, for some reason I have yet to discern. And if you’ve ever been harassed by those putrid jackasses in bad sport coats and even worse cheap haircuts, you probably know that the Gideons push a pocket bible which has only the New Testament and Psalms and Proverbs from the OT.
I’m not here to give you a rundown of the literary history of the bible though. I’m merely here to rant about things I’ve read in it over the years which make me wonder about the claims Evangelicals make when they say it’s the perfect word of their god. As you’ll see, it’s anything but perfect.
Genesis — We Can’t Create
I couldn’t resist the obvious Phil Collins reference here, which, if you don’t get it, has to do with the fact that his claim to fame is as the drummer and later lead singer of the progressive rock band…Genesis, which released an album in 1991 called We Can’t Dance. It wasn’t their finest hour, let me tell you…the title track, I mean.
Anyway, many of the stories we learned in that yawn-fest called Sunday School come from Genesis, probably because that’s the most kid-friendly part of the tome. In the first part, we get to read about how god created everything under the sun. God obviously wasn’t on his best game that day because he actually had to experiment with solutions to problems one would think would be obvious for an all-knowing creator.
For one, certain parts of the narrative have Adam lamenting that he is all alone, so god decides to create a series of ‘help meets’ (whatever that fucking term means) in order to give Adam some company. When all the animals were done being created and Adam went ‘nah, don’t like those’ god anesthetized him and then made Eve from one of his ribs.
This, of course, smacks of cloning and genetic engineering to the modern scientific mind. Adam was made of dirt first, of course, so Eve can really be considered a by-product of dirt, for whatever amusing, childish quips that may inspire. At any rate, if we extend the cloning metaphor out, that means that Adam was just fucking a mutated version of himself…not a good basis for a genetic lineage by modern science standards.
More than one warped mind has suggested that the process of searching through all the animals first, before Eve came along, hints at some manner of bestiality, but we don’t need to go there. What really needs to be said is that an all-knowing god would never have needed the process of experimentation to begin with. He would have just plopped Adam and Eve down together and sad have fun…but don’t you dare eat that fucking fruit over there.
Basically, if god were actually omniscient, he’d have known what Adam needed from the start (as is suggested in the first creation account where man and woman are created at the same time) and wouldn’t have had to produce the Eve clone to satisfy the need for a ‘help meet’. She would have just been there from the start. That makes for a boring story though, and if you’re trying to brainwash impressionable children, you need something that holds their attention.
Babel On (see David Gray)
The story of the Tower of Babel is another that really made me wonder once I started looking into the religious history of various cultures. The basic narrative is that, post-flood, humans became numerous and decided to settle in a place called Shinar to build a city with a tower at the center which would reach to heaven. God saw what was happening, didn’t care for it and decided to divide and conquer by making them all speak different languages.
Naturally, this is a myth designed to convey some sense of why different people do different things, but once I learned what a ziggurat was, it started to look more and more like political propaganda directed against a culture the author(s) found disagreeable. These structures served as places of residence for many gods in the varied pantheons of the Mesopotamian region, and human elders would go to these places to commune with their gods to divine truths which could be imparted to the greater community.
This is not unlike the ancient Hebrew idea of the tabernacle or the later advent of Solomon’s Temple. Many, many ancient cultures built structures where their gods supposedly lived. So, to me at least, the idea of the Babel tower acting as a conduit to heaven seems to me reminiscent of a ziggurat in basic function, and I therefore interpret the story as one from an Ancient Hebrew writer trying to explain why his people were more virtuous by condemning via metaphor the religious practices of other societies — “we’re better than them because we don’t try to reach the heavens.”
David — My Life as a Thrill Kill Leader
Are you getting tired of the bad music references yet…?
Let’s move away from Genesis for a while and take a look at 1 Samuel. I have to include this one in my first edition here simply because it sticks in my craw as one of the nastiest examples of horrendous shit in the bible. Many people know the basics of the David story, that he was elevated to King over Israel and that he sent one of his generals off to war so that he could take the guy’s wife. Pretty mundane as ancient stories goes. Many leaders tried to compromise rivals in order to secure their position or to acquire spoils.
David was almost the victim of the same behavior on the part of his predecessor Saul. David was a warlord who was well liked and Saul saw this as a threat to his rule. So Saul tried all kinds of things to eliminate David, and when David proved too hard to kill, Saul tried to bring him on-side by offering him marriage to Michal, one of Saul’s daughters. David was a fighting man, though, and wasn’t too keen on the life of a royal, except…
Saul was trying to kill David by sending him off to fight their enemies, the Philistines, and when Saul demanded a bride price for Michal of one-hundred foreskins, David perked right up. Nothing like a good day of bloody slaughter to brighten the mood, eh Davey-boy? For the sake of context, ancient warriors often mutilated the bodies of their enemies as proof of their victory, so this part of the story isn’t unique to the bible.
So David goes out, does the killing he needs…and then some. He was so fond of murdering his enemies that he brought back two-hundred foreskins to pay the requisite bride price. He married, became king, sired Solomon and the the rest is myth-story, as the pun goes (yeah, I just pulled that one out of my ass).
Your average biased christian will say that this story illustrates how their god can make something good come from something bad, but it makes me wonder why he needed to use such a savage killer to do so. He could have just said, this dude is an asshole so I’ll make him the leader of my people. The grisly details of the story make for a ‘hero’ no one should admire, at least not in the modern context. Yet christians do. It’s like Friday the 13th parts five through nine. We already knew Jason was a deranged killer, we didn’t need all of those extra films to drive the point home.
Of course, when compared to Greek mythology, this kind of character paradigm isn’t so strange. Heracles himself was something of a bastard, yet he was revered as one of the greatest champions the Greeks ever produced. So taken as pure myth, the David story is nothing to get excited about. Modern christians, however, take it as historical fact and insist David is something to be admired. That’s where I draw the line when it comes to taking them seriously when they claim superior virtue over all others.
Jephthah, Jephthah, who do you burn to…god?
Come on, listen to a story about a man named Jephthah…
In the book of Judges there exists a story about a war leader who vowed to sacrifice whatever appeared to him out his house once he returned victorious from battle. In ancient times, this was a normal thing, to sacrifice animals to the gods in thanks for good fortune. Sadly, the first thing Jephthah saw when he came home was his daughter, and since he was sincere in his vow, he sacrificed her to his god. He was courteous enough to allow her a brief respite to mourn her virginity, so that’s something…I guess.
You’ll also remember that in an earlier part of the bible, god commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a show of devotion, but in that story, god eventually said ‘just kidding. I was just testing to see how faithful you were’ and let Abraham sacrifice a nearby animal instead. One wonders why the same couldn’t have been done for Jephthah’s daughter once god saw the sincerity of his faith…?
The answer is, of course, that sons have always been more prized as offspring than daughters, at least as far as recorded history can tell. And some observers will say that the lesson of each story differ, in that in one case the lesson is one of obedience whereas the other is to stress the importance of keeping promises, but that’s just a distinction without a difference as far as I’m concerned. It boils down to women being less valuable as people, plain and simple.
Modern christians try to mitigate the savagery of the story by claiming the ‘sacrifice’ is a metaphor and try to argue that Jephthah didn’t really kill her, but dedicated her to a temple or some shit like that. There is, of course, no basis for this crap in the text as it goes completely against the tradition of sacrificing in the face of victory — something has to die for the sacrifice to be meaningful. She died, plain and simple.
At the end of the day, I can understand why people internalize these stories as an integral part of their identity, and accept them as ‘gospel’ truth, but that doesn’t mean I accept this behavior as valid. A comfortable lie is still a lie, and if we are to deem as acceptable the building of our civilizations on layers of falsehood, what are we really saying about our core identity as people…? I leave you with that.
Adieu Mes Amies.
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