Abram lies and parties to pagan gods.

Oh, its so nice to not be under any "spiritual" obligation to read the Bible. I've been very busy working and I just haven't made time to read the Bible. But the great thing is, it does not matter.

Genesis 12 - 14

We find right off, in Chapter 12, that Yahweh is stealing property from one group of people and giving it to another. To me, this is just another example of the Bible not being a good source for morality. I know, I know, the excuse for this is, "He is God, He can do what he wants." Sorry, that still doesn't make it moral. No one has the right to take someone's ability to survive away. But, we still see this going on today. We have government claiming it knows best, so its ok to take property and lives. We have churches using God as leverage to take money from people in the form of tithes and offerings. Generally, in both cases, that money goes to line the pockets of a selected few.

The story of Abram, Sarai and the Pharaoh is just amazing to me. Its something I hadn't noticed before a couple of months ago. Here's the story. God gives Abram this wonderful piece of land, then forgets to have it provide food, so Abram decides to go to Egypt to keep from starving. On the way, Abram says to Sari, "Hey baby, you are hot. These Egyptians will take one look at you, want you and will want to kill me, so they can have you. I have an idea, lets just say you are my sister."

They get to Egypt, and sure enough, the Pharaoh wanted her. As a result, Abram is treated very well and acquires livestock, servants and camels. Well, good ol' Yahweh gets a little upset about the Pharaoh and Sarai and strikes the Pharaoh and his household with diseases. When the Pharaoh somehow figures out what is going on, he says to Abram, "Dude, why did you lie to me. Take your wife and get out of here." So Abram takes everything he has, which I'm assuming the things he acquired in Egypt fraudulently, and leaves. I don't know about you, but to me, its a little screwed up that Yahweh acted that way toward Pharaoh, when Abram was the one that lied about it.

After the relocation, Abram and Lot have some problem existing together, so Abram says, "Uh, I like you and all, but you have to go." They check out the land Lot decides where he want to go. Now its worth noting there is a wonderful foot note saying, "This was before Yahweh destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah". Really? You are going to give away the punchline to a big climatic story before we even get to it. That's not very good story telling.

After they part ways, Lot gets captured and Abram comes to rescue him. After the smoke clears, Abram and Melchizedek have a party to celebrate El Elyon. What many don't know (and I didn't either), is El is the Canaanite supreme god, the father of mankind and all creates. His sons where Hadad, Yam and Mot. Some say, this is just another name for Yahweh (and perhaps supported by verse 19), but either way, it still shows the pagan polytheism that early Judaism was, at best, influenced by, but more likely derived from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)

Chapter 15 starts the story of what could arguably be the greatest holy war in the history of humanity. More on that next time.

Hints of Polytheism:

El Elyon

The future is bright, y'all.

So today, Ellie, my 3 year old daughter, comes up to me with her tablet and says, "Daddy, find me a game that will teach me the numbers in Spanish to 100."

I'm thrilled by the fact that kids are smarter today than I was as a kid, and that there is more information available for kids today than there was for adults just a couple generations ago. I of course, love that she loves to learn. But really, what I'm excited about is that she is already learning to teach herself. She's realizing that if she wants to know something, she has to go find the information and she's figuring out how to use the tools she has to do that.

Its not just her, I see it in other kids her age. I see it in young adults.

I met a bright young woman, a couple of years ago who has amazed and impressed me. The State of Oregon slashed the budget on music and she took it upon herself (with help from some friends of hers) to put together a concert to raise money for her school to offset the defect. In spite of the school not really supporting her in her efforts, she put together a great event and raised a decent amount of money. I could have never done that.

In the last few weeks, on Adam vs The Man, Adam has hi-lighted a few critical thinkers that are grasping ideas that escaped me until my twenties and thirties.

I know its really easy to get caught up in all of the things going wrong. But when I look at all of the good that is happening, I have to conclude, the future is bright, y'all.

Surprise!

Genesis 1

Wow. I didn't expect anything from Genesis 1. I've read it a hundred times (no hyperbole there) and this time it struck me differently. Its a nice little story, in context. Imagine being a primitive culture and telling this story to your child as a way to understand the world around them. Its not a scary Grimms story or a funny Suess story, but its nice.

To me it is very fun to try to understand the hows of things. To the dismay of mother, in March or April, I would take those Christmas presents from December and tear them apart. To her, I was destroying the gift she scrimped and saved to buy for me. To me, I was getting to the best part of the gift. Sometimes I could get the item back together. Sometimes I would make little changes. Often, it would end up in a collection of parts that one day I would use for something else.

I like discovering and I like the attempted explanation in Genesis 1. What saddens me is many of us grow up being told that the Bible must be taken literally and God is the answer to the unknown. Sadly, that often kills further discovery of the unknown. Neil deGrasse Tyson does a brilliant talk on this. But right now, I have a serious man crush on him, so I think everything he does is brilliant.

Genesis 2 & 3

"Good feeling's gone." God puts a tree of knowledge of good and evil and doesn't want man to partake in it? Knowledge of right and wrong results in death? This really flies in the face of everything that is good and decent. It also refutes a very typical argument I hear from theists. "Without God, how do you know what is moral?" Well, apparently, the question should be "Without a Tree, how do you know what is moral?"

So you have God who creates man but then turns around and want to make sure that man doesn't have a chance to have the same knowledge that he does. How screwed up is that? My youngest daughter at 3 has more knowledge than I did when I was 5. I don't resent that or fear that. I LOVE the idea. I think its great that kids are smarter today than when I was a kid. I love the fact there is more information and more accessible than ever before. Why is God so uptight about it?

Its also interesting, I was under the impression it was Satan that deceived Eve, but nothing in the story even implies that. Its a serpent. A talking serpent. But I've read that some traditions say that all animals talked before the fall. Some even more bizarre is that the first piece of knowledge about right and wrong is being naked? Really? This was the most glaring thing that was wrong?

I find God's reaction a bit over the top. It really makes you wonder, why is a being who is clever and creative enough to create an entire universe, complete with a planet with plants and animals so insecure the can't deal with people recognizing their own nakedness? The nice story in Genesis 1 has turned terribly ugly.

Genesis 4

You have two kids, one likes to play in outside, one likes to paint pictures. The child that likes to play outside, makes a mud pie for you and says, "Look, I made this pie for you." At the same time, your other child is drawing smiley faces and scribbles on a piece of paper. "I made this for you too!" So you look at the child that made the painting and say, "That is a stupid drawing, that face doesn't even look real. Why can't you be more like your brother, he gets outside and get's his hands dirty. Did you see what he made? Did you?" I guess its okay to be an asshole when you are God. Too bad he couldn't see that its ok to be a farmer.

Genesis 6-9

There are so many things wrong with this story, its hard not to just pick everything apart.

I'm wondering, how in the world did they keep a year food supply for all of those animals? What did they do with the waste from said animals? It would seems from Genesis 8:6, they were stuck in this water tight structure for almost a year before Noah even opened the windows (can you imagine the smell?). Although I'm not too sure how they were able to see the mountain tops without the window open. Maybe they had invented glass already.

Oh and how did animals get to Australia after the flood? Actually how did they get to the ark before the flood?

The violence of this story is unbelievable. The whole story is God committing genocide. Although, you do have to feel bad for a god who has such a bad memory that he has to create a rainbow to remember his promise to never destroy all life with a flood. Whew! I feel better already. Genesis 9:6 is God endorsed barbaric brutality. Genesis 9:25 is the first I've seen of grouping people into classes and chapter 10 just gets into the tribalism even more. 

Overall, this is not a very good story.

Genesis 11

Once again, Yahweh is feeling insecure about people maybe knowing as much as him. But hey, this chapter introduces Abraham. This will be fun, but in the next post.

Hints of Polytheism: 

I'm fascinated by the little indications of polytheism scattered throughout the supposed monotheistic Bible.

Names of God

Elohim

Yahweh Elohim

Yahweh

References

Genesis 1:26 "Let us make man in our image"
Genesis 6:2 "sons of God" (son of Elohim)
Genesis 10:7 "Come, let us go down"

http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Hebrew_Index.htm for names of god

Reading through the Bible

Its been about 8 years since I read the Bible in its entirety. At that time, I was using the Bible to try to make sense of my own existence and how the guidance from the Bible could improve my day to day life. What happened was a discovery of things I didn't realize was in the Bible and finding that many of the ideas didn't match what I believed to be moral actions. Of course, the Bible was the final authority, so I assumed I must wrong in how I was looking at things.

I struggled for a few years with this, having less confidence in what was written in the Bible. As I continued to try to learn more about the Bible and how it came to be I finally came to realize the problems with the Bible is that it isn't the inspired word of God and it is a bunch of man made ideas.

I've decided to read through the Bible again, following this plan. Part of this was prompted by a couple of friends recently reading through the book of Genesis. There was a discussion on Facebook about Genesis that prompted me to read through parts of it again. I realized when I was reading that there were things that I didn't remember and things I realized I was seeing differently. I will attempt to read the Bible again, this time without the influence of being told what its supposed to mean and making excuses and justifications for what I'm reading.

I plan on blogging things I discover. I'm going to try to stay away from the obvious, low hanging fruit, like the two differing accounts of how man was created in Genesis 1 and 2. I want to share the things I discover that are new to me or holds a new interest to me. I welcome comments and feedback along the way. I don't want the conversation to reduce down to God is great and atheist suck or Christians are stupid for believing in a stupid book. Now onward.