The Absurdity of the Book of Genesis part II

[We continue our ‘cold reading’ of the Bible to see what we would gather from these scriptures if we knew nothing about God or Jesus or any of it before we ever picked up the book.]

Continuing on with Chapter 4 of the Bible, we read about Adam and Eve’s two sons, Cain and Abel. In this story we discover that Cain kills his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy because Cain’s ritual offering is not as pleasing to God as is Abel’s. It seems reasonable then to conclude that God is vain in that God doesn’t refuse being worshiped. Second, we also see that a knowledge of good and evil do not prevent Cain from murdering his brother, making us wonder what is the point of knowing good from evil if knowing the difference makes no difference. See what I’m saying? Further in the story God asks Cain where his brother is to which Cain replies, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Until Abel’s blood calls out from the grave, God doesn’t know where Abel is – which is in contradiction to elsewhere in the Bible where it can be read that God is all-knowing. To be fair, God may have been giving Cain a chance to confess, but this is the second time God didn’t know something in the very first book of the Bible. If this is our starting point for determining if God is all-knowing, then we have to conclude that God is not. Anyway, God sends Cain away with a mark on his head as a warning to other people for them not to take vengeance upon Cain because…? Where these other people come from is not clear either since up to this point only four people have been named in Genesis. 

Moving on to Chapter 5 we read with a fair amount of skepticism that men routinely live in excess of 900 years. Chapter 6 verse 3 goes on to say that for no other reason than men being made of flesh, their numbers will be limited to 120 years. And, if we kept reading as far as the Book of Psalms, we’d read that the days of a man will be limited to 70 years. Will someone please make up their mind! It doesn’t matter; plenty of Biblical characters tend to exceed these limits immediately following their announcements. So, whatever.

Immediately thereafter we get these two verses in succession; “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” and suddenly we have a god who regrets having made man. First there are ‘men of renown’ then God regrets making them? Uh, okay. I think a lot of story got left out here. God goes on to lament making man and beast and announces to Noah that he will destroy it all. Right here we learn once again of a god that makes mistakes; God is fallible. Certainly I can’t be the only one who expects a god not to make mistakes.

The rest of Chapter 6 and 7 give of Noah’s tale of the Arc which is not without some minor absurdities. A 450 foot long boat that houses two of every animal on Earth? Sure. All those animals boarding the Arc in one day? Naturally. A worldwide flood that lasts 40 days while just a few verses later the flood lasted 150 days? WHO EDITED THIS THING?

By the way, do you like the scent of burning animals? No? God sure does. At the end of Chapter 8 Noah makes a sacrificial offering that is so pleasing to God’s nose that God regrets flooding the Earth. If we recall, this is now the THIRD time God has regretted a decision…in the very first book of the Bible! What does this guy do for an encore?

In Chapter 9 there are some very strange family affairs afoot. Noah, previously described in the Bible as a righteous man “Drank of the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered in his tent” (read: naked). God’s #1 guy is a drunkard. Anyhoot, Noah’s son Ham sees his father naked, tells his brothers, and they all go to cover dad up being careful not to look. (Remember, being naked is a big no-no to God, which is why he didn’t cover Adam and Eve up. Wait, what?) When Noah wakes up he is outraged that he was seen naked and sentences Ham’s son to a life of servitude. What a douchebag! The Bible seems to have a bizarre code of justice I am sure we are all glad we no longer live by. Please also note that at the end of Chapter 9, Noah dies at the age of 950. Wtf?

Skipping ahead to Chapter 11 is the story of the Tower of Babel. In this story, God is worried that mankind may become capable of too much as men attempt to build a tower to reach the heavens. Well, God can’t have that! To thwart mankind, God confuses the language among men and spreads men around the globe in an effort to keep them from working together. This appears to us as if a parent were intentionally trying to undermine the achievements of their own children so that the child could never be as accomplished as the parent. I doubt many of us know someone who parents their children in this manner. If we didn’t already, we probably starting to not like this god.

Believe it or not, the Book of Genesis gets more outrageous. Chapter 12 brings us the story of Abram, a man God is sending off into the world and upon whom God will bestow a great nation, for absolutely no friggin’ reason we’re privy to. In his travels, Abram enters Egypt and lies to the locals that his wife is instead his sister. Abram fears he would be killed by the Egyptians because his wife is so beautiful they would want her for themselves.  It winds up that Abrams wife is taken away from him to the Pharaoh’s court for said reason with Pharaoh compensating Abram with sheep, oxen, camels and servants as any fair man would do. Unfortunately, God takes Abram’s side in this deception and rains down fire and brimstone upon Pharaoh’s house. Of course, Pharaoh didn’t know Sarai was Abrams wife, but so what? Why wouldn’t God side with the liar? Pharaoh finally learns of Abram’s deception and promptly sends him and his wife away least things get any worse. The moral of the story? THERE IS NONE! Where do you see morality anywhere in this tale? Dare we read any further?

In Chapter 17 God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and establishes a certain painful covenant, again for reasons we are not privy to. This reminds me of being in the army where everyone is expected to follow commands without thinking. But, since that didn’t work out for Nazi’s Nazi war criminals, I don’t see why anyone ever follows commands blindly. Anyway, in Chapter 18-19 we witness the story and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities whose evils are so offensive to God that we never lean exactly what those evils are so we can avoid them ourselves. What we do learn from this tale is that offering up your daughters to an angry mob to save the lives of some angels (who are suspiciously mortal) is not offensive to God, yet another indicator of the level of respect God has for females.

In Chapter 22 God tests Abraham’s faith by asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son to God. Abraham prepares to do so only to have God say “Just kidding!” at the last second. Again we learn we are not supposed to question God no matter what this jackass says and we’ll be rewarded (with oxen or some such). I think, though, that this is a particularly cruel way to test someone faith, don’t you?

Now, folks, I am not going to even mention the fable in which another of God’s chosen dudes (it’s never a chick) blackmails his brother out of his birthright; blackmail obviously not being a crime. Nor will I mention the rape of Dinah in Chapter 34 in which God allows the destruction and death of everyone in an entire city as retribution for one man’s crime.

So, having read the first book of the Bible, what can we surmise? From beginning to end we are privy to a deity who is thoughtless, careless, confused, jealous, vain and savage. But it seems we are supposed to worship God simply because God (along with a few pals) created us. Nevermind that there are no arguments in Genesis that indicate why a creature should honor its creator. God also has a strong bias against women; few women are named in Genesis yet even the most trivial male is given a shout out. Thus, being a reasonable and conscionable person, I cannot take this God seriously. That is, I couldn’t possible respect this God even if it did exist and did create human beings. (There is no evidence that God exists, simply a book that says so. Meaning, I guess Sherlock Holmes actually exists, too, if we’re all supposed to simply take the word of some book.)

Sure, by all means keep reading the Bible if entertainment is your goal. There is even more batshit crazy stuff beyond the Book of Genesis. Volumes of it! Just remember to read it all objectively. You’ll shake your head in condemnation with every turn of the page.

Adam and Evil

“I’d rather laugh with the sinners than die with the saints; the sinners are much more fun…” Billy Joel

For two thousand years, a great deal of fanfare has surrounded the idea that people need to be ‘saved’ by accepting Jesus Christ as their savior because we are all sinners. The idea of sin goes back to the very first chapter of the Bible in the Book of Genesis, in which the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, perpetrate what is known as The Fall. Certainly, such a notion is a primary reason why some theists go to great lengths to justify a belief in their singular God and His son. Only, a critical analysis of this particular creation myth reveals a god that, if actually existent, is a god of questionable morality and perhaps even malicious.

In the book of Genesis, after God has made the Earth and heavens, He decides to make man in the likeness of Himself (and other unnamed gods) for no reason that is made even remotely obvious to the casual reader. Then, because this man, Adam, is lonely, God makes animals for the man to have dominion over. Next, He makes a woman for Adam, presumably because having sex with sheep is inappropriate. God places the both of them in the beautiful garden of Eden where they may live happily ever after, but not without a dire warning: Do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. If they do, God warns, they will die.

Most of us are familiar with what happens next. A serpent comes to Eve, telling her one lie and one truth. If Eve eats fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, not only will she not die—a lie—but she will come to have knowledge of good and evil as the gods do—the truth. After eating the fruit (presumably a bad apple), she then gives her husband fruit from the tree and he eats it too. They now know the difference between good and evil, which seems to come as a surprise to the typically described omniscient God the next time He comes around.

Incredulous, God punishes Adam and Eve. For starters, they’re going to die—and the serpent who instigated the entire affair, who gets off relatively easy by comparison. In addition, not only are Adam and Eve going to die, but God tells Eve she is going to bear tremendous pain during childbirth and subjugates her to her husband, while Adam is sentenced to the backbreaking task of having to grow their own food. Finally, they are cast out from the Garden of Eden least they try next to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.

It appears Adam and Eve sinned; they disobeyed God, and from this a reader is to extrapolate a lesson: If you disobey God, the consequences will be undesirable, to say the least. However, a philosophical question arises as to whether or not Adam and Eve acted with ill intentions towards God and whether or not they should be punished for what they did.

I think it is fair to point out that it is perfectly clear that Adam and Eve had no knowledge of what was good and what was bad prior to eating the forbidden fruit. God may have told them that eating the fruit from this particular tree would result in their death, but they had absolutely no cause to believe that either death, disobeying God, or prancing around the Garden unclothed were bad things until after they ate the fruit.

With that in mind I think it equally fair to say that it is God then that explicitly bears the responsibility for creating the circumstances that would cause Adam and Eve to “fall.” What reason did God have for putting the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden? Why did He create a serpent that would be so beguiling as to fool Eve? If He was testing Adam and Eve, He must have known they would fail this test given that God is (or described as being later on in the Bible) all-knowing. Of course, if God had chosen not to know the future regarding this matter, God is either irresponsible or worse, a sadist. For the theist who wishes to take this creation account seriously, the absence of any analysis is required to think that God might not be evil. But we mustn’t judge too quickly.

We learn by reading further into the Book of Genesis that thanks to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, every subsequent human being suffers consequences. Because of the first man and woman, everyone is now born with a stain upon their soul as punishment for Adam and Eve’s insubordination. Certain monotheists call this “Original Sin,” something from which they think everyone is in need of being “saved” from. But what God does to Adam and Eve is akin to my requiring you to rob a bank with me, not tell you the details of the plan, then have you die during the heist so that I can get away unscathed. Best of all, your ancestors take the rap! Again, we must ask the compelling question as to why God would set the events of mankind into motion in such a manner. If we take into account that the Judeo-Christian god is described as being as omni-benevolent as He is omniscient (though we cannot figure out why from the Genesis account, other than to have faith that what the Creator creates is good), why did The Fall turn out to be anything but good? Couldn’t an all-powerful God have prevented this mess?

We, as human beings, must require that we know God’s plan in order to determine whether or not His punishment from the onset of our supposed history is just. Yet, if God is silent, if His ultimate plan is a matter of speculation, we might speculate many things—and that includes discovering who the Wizard of Oz really is. Given the account of man’s creation in Genesis, somewhere, somehow, one or more of God’s three, traditionally ascribed, major attributes—omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence—has failed to make either who God is or the story of Genesis (or both) credible.

God’s supposed goodness suffers the greatest damage in Genesis. After all, a child doesn’t know the meaning of a punishment until they are actually punished, so it seems odd to me that God would choose to punish his creation (and his creation’s creations) so severely. If God’s reasoning was to think that it would surely teach humans to never disobey Him again, He positively failed on that account.

It is this failure to be kind to his creations that casts doubt upon his other attributes, most notably His capacity to see the future. If God knew, or even could have logical deduced what the outcome of The Garden of Eden scenario might have been, He should have refrained from creating Adam and Eve. [That is, if humans hold God to any recognizable moral standard. Heck, even God’s own standards.] If God did not know what the outcome of events would be, then He is not omniscient.

Unfortunately, the best theistic defense is to characterize God as a perfect entity and this, they argue, by definition must include omniscience. Thus, if what the theist says about God’s omniscience in relation to His perfection is true, then God had to have known what was going to happen. If that’s true, we must return once again question God’s supposed benevolence. “Ah,” the theist will continue, “Keep in mind that God is perfect. God cannot not be benevolent.” But this would make God amoral since a being can only be moral if able to make choices. Even if God could choose evil but never did, we still couldn’t be certain that he could commit evil if He’s never made that choice. God must have free will then, hence, no one can be positively certain that God was without some evil intent in the creation of mankind. The theistic defenses of God’s qualities that allude to perfection drown in a circular sea of reasoning as quickly as any other characteristic ascribed to God.

            Given the contrivances in the story of Genesis, one should find it difficult to entertain tradition monotheistic descriptions of God seriously. God cannot be perfect because omniscience/amorality prevents this from being the case (a theistically “moral” person would argue, anyway). Nor can God be omniscient without casting suspicion on His “benevolent” motives. We might, for a second, consider that God is indeed supremely powerful given that the logic necessary to make the attributes of God mesh with the story of Genesis is as impossible as a square circle. But if God can only do what is logically possible then God’s attributes are reduced to contradictions, though perhaps we should have seen that coming. On the other hand, we humans are not omniscient and we’re not perfect. Maybe that’s a good thing.

References

God. The Holy Bible . 1000th. Hippo: Synod Press, 393.

Krueger, Douglas E. What Is Atheism?. 3rd. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998.

Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates. 1st. New York, NY: Dover Press, 1992.

Smith, George H. Atheism: The Case Against God. 1st. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1979.