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| I Am The Blog — The new site is live!It's finally ready, my new site I Am The Blog! You'll find atheist / freethought / skeptic news, links, and resources. Please check it out!
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| God loves saltI'm not going to post all the time about where I'm at in reading the Bible, but this struck me as completely ridiculous. I'm reading Leviticus, and in Chapter 2 God tells the Israelites they must always put salt on their offerings
" neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt." (Leviticus 2:13, KJV)
This is sounding more and more to me like Moses and/or Aaron are coming up with a list of things THEY want: they want a fancy, minutely-detailed Arc of the Covenant with gold, bronze, and all, and say it's God's will (God only talks to Moses generally, so everyone just has to take Moses's word on all this).
And all the very specific ways the meat must be prepared for the offerings, so that it will please God. Why? And now, all the offerings HAVE to have salt on them?! Why would God need salt on his offerings?!?!?!? He just likes salty food? He doesn't have to worry about dying from high blood pressure and wants to flaunt it??
It sounds more likely to me that it's Moses and Aaron who like salty food. Either that, or they want to make sure it's preserved for when they eat it later.
Why else would God want salt on it? I'm trying very hard not to laugh at the Bible and keep an open mind, but come on. I had to laugh in spite of myself when I read that. Certainly someone must have suspected that these offerings weren't really for God...
They must also have really liked barbecues, since they keep saying how much God likes the smell of burning meat. This also doesn't make sense to me why God would love to smell his creations burning, and why sacrificing all these animals would forgive any so-called sins. It simply makes no sense.
Anyway, back to reading!
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| Heavenly Father not so heavenlyFather's Day was yesterday, and the past few years it's made me think of God as a father figure. I'm not the only one.
Here's Dwindling in Unbelief's Father's Day post, updated from last year. One thing I'm going to endeavor to do on my site is not just post links, since links change or disappear, but also explain what's there. Basically, DIU goes through a number of patriarchs in the Bible and gives some examples of bad things they've done. Noah, getting drunk and naked and cursing Ham's son (who didn't even see the guy in that state!) to slavery because of what Ham did and saw. Lot getting drunk and having sex with his two daughters. Abraham abandoning his first son and almost killing his second on God's command, etc.
My favorite though, which got included in this year's DIU post, is Yahweh towards Jesus. I brought this up (back when I was "Anon") last year. God sends Jesus down to suffer, die, and go to hell, just because he wanted a bloody sacrifice for humanity's alleged sins.
Here's a blog called Unreasonable Faith (linked to in DIU) which goes into greater detail about what a great Pop that Yahweh is. Some highlights (or lowlights, wonder if that word's made the dictionary yet?) include:
• Setting up his creation to fail in the Garden of Eden
• Telling his chosen people it's a good thing to slaughter entire cities, man, woman, and child, except for keeping the girl virgins alive for sex
• Getting Mary pregnant so that humanity could kill his son, as planned
• Sending plagues, death, and destruction when his son comes back to Earth again. I'll have to read Revelation, but my understanding was that Jesus will do most of this on his own for the Second Coming, in which case it would mean Yahweh was a bad influence on his son. Like Father, like Son.
• And so on. Go read the post, it's really well-written.
He ends the blog post by saying "If that’s not the worst, most abusive father ever imagined, I don’t know who is. Thankfully, it’s very unlikely he actually exists."
Agreed. I'm sure that most people haven't thought about that side of their so-called Heavenly Father. "Heavenly" is "sublime; delightful; enchanting," according to American Heritage Dictionary. Based on this definition, the Bible's "heavenly" father is anything but.
Notes: "heavenly." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/heavenly (accessed: June 23, 2009).
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| Genesis 50 — The end of the beginningChapter 50 of Genesis marks the end of the beginning in two ways. First, it's the end of the first book of the Bible (which at times I thought I'd never get to!). Secondly, it marks a good time to do two things which I had decided to do several months ago, but which time and other commitments had prevented. I will explain this at the end of the message.
For Chapter 50, we see the death of two of our favorite characters from the second half of Genesis, Jacob and Joseph.
Joseph falls and weeps on his father after his father's passing, which is touching. If the Bible were filled with more compassion and love, maybe it would be a better book. Joseph orders his servant/slaves to embalm his father, which apparently took 40 days back then. Egypt mourned Jacob for 70 days. Pretty amazing for a guy whose profession of shepherd was an "abomination" (Genesis 46:34, KJV) to Egyptians. You think I wasn't paying attention, didn't you?! I suppose it could be argued that they mourned him out of deference to Joseph, the guy who made them sell themselves into slavery for food. This possible inconsistency is not in the SAB I see, so maybe there's some explanation I'm missing, or it's just a fairly minor detail.
Pharaoh gives Joseph permission to go bury his dad in Canaan (don't forget Joseph himself was a slave, but an important slave!) and all of Pharaoh's servants and elders go with. The Canaanites see the Egyptians mourning (apparently not seeing it's because of Jacob's death) and name the place for this. When Joseph's brothers see that Jacob is dead, they fear Joseph's wrath. So they lie and say Daddy told Joseph to forgive them. Joseph weeps (as he is wont to do) and says it's okay, because although they had evil intentions, it was all part of God's great plan. So Joseph will be kind and provide for them and their families (no mention of servitude here, unlike the Egyptians!). Does Joseph know the brothers are lying? We're not told, and their dishonesty appears to go unpunished.
Joseph eventually gets old himself, and at the ripe age of 110 he tells his descendants God will take care of them in the promised land. The end of Genesis says that Joseph was buried in Egypt. As the Skeptic's Annotated Bible points out, this seems to go against what Jacob foretold to Joseph in Genesis 48. But, if you're picky, you could say that Jacob did go back there, he just wasn't buried there. If only the omniscient, infallible Yahweh and his followers would have known that this was unclear!!!
So Genesis begins with God's creation of the world and ends with the death of two of God's main men, who helped found the nation of Israel, which is meant to show I suppose that while God created everything, he has a special place in his heart for the Israelites. In the beginning of the chapter, God seems to be everywhere, towards the end God is pretty quiet, although I know he'll be back again in force in Exodus.
The so-called "Good Book" starts out with Genesis, a violent, immoral, sick collection of stories that most believers know very little about, sprinkled with very rare goodness. I think if Christians and Jews took the time to read it through and thought about it with an open mind, it would really start to cast some doubts on the imaginary God they think they love, but who is likely very different than most of them imagine.
That's the end of Genesis! There's a lot left in the Bible, but first two announcements about my blog and site...
• I am planning to redo my website. Some visitors may be familiar with my blog only through Xanga, but for several months now I have a site which for the moment mostly features my blog. My intent is to finally have it so you don't need to excuse my dust anymore, by revamping the site and expanding its contents to include useful links, news stories, and information. Since I'm not a professional web designer, it may take some tinkering for me to get this done, possibly a week or more.
I think the renewed site will be a much better experience for people. In addition to my blogs on the Bible, there will be a wider of variety of things to read about and explore. Right now, I have a couple of blog posts that have attracted a lot of people (in particular my Just Imagine... post, which caught the eye of over 400 people thanks to http://good.is and Skeptic Annotated Bible's blog, Dwindling in Unbelief). This made me realize that if I put my mind to it, I can reach more people and hopefully spark more discussion and reflection about religious issues (as well as a good dose of humor now and then)!
• I am also planning on reading the Bible cover-to-cover as soon as possible. Since it will take me years to blog the Bible in its entirety, I've decided that the end of Genesis is a good point to take a break from blogging chapter-by-chapter. I am going to start with Exodus, read the rest of the Bible through without stopping for posts, give some general impressions when I'm done, and then go back to chapter-by-chapter comments afterwards. This way, I can feel more knowledgeable about the book I'm talking about, and can also say that I've read the Bible cover-to-cover. I am sure I will find both positive and negative things in what awaits me, and I will go out of my way to note both mentally to be fair.
In the meantime as I'm renovating the site and reading the Bible, as I've already done here and there, I'll also blog on other issues dealing with religion, atheism, freethought, and related current events.
I hope these changes sound good. If you have any ideas or comments, please let me know. Thank you for reading, hope you like the new site when it's up!
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| God minus GodSince I can't sleep, I thought I'd share this hopefully funny thought.
Have you ever heard of Garfield minus Garfield? It's basically like it sounds: the daily Garfield comic strip, stripped of its famous striped cat. To quote its inventor/author, Dan Walsh, the strip shows
"the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."
I think it's absolutely hilarious. I don't read it every day, but every couple months I think of it and go and catch up on some ones I've missed. I find it a lot more entertaining than the original strip, and even Jim Davis (Garfield's cartoonist) apparently likes it.
Well, I just had a thought, which unless it's already been done, I hereby copyright (just as I've copyrighted "the-patriarch-intermittently-known-as-Israel" ©). What about a version of the Bible with God taken out of it? I think this would be a fabulous idea since, as you may know, it would reflect reality. It could either be called "God minus God", or "The Bible minus God", can't decide which is better.
Here's an example (proof of concept, if you will) of what this would be like, taking Exodus 3. You can (re)read it first to get an idea of what the scene is like if you want, it's the Moses and the burning bush story. (All quotes are paraphrases put in quotes for comic effect.)
Moses sees a bush burning and suddenly shouts out "Hey, here I am!" No response.
Then Moses suddenly ducks and hides his eyes for no apparently reason. Prolonged silence.
Then, he suddenly says "Who am I to go tell Pharaoh that I have to free the Israelites?!" Silence.
Then out of the blue, Moses says "I'll tell the Israelites the God of their fathers sent me! But what should I tell him is his name?" No reply.
Moses then says "Yeah, I'll tell them "I am" has sent me!!" Moses just stands there in silence.
The end.
Okay, maybe it's only funny to me. Kind of like a Brick Testament rendering of the Bible, except without the God. If nothing else, the absence of God would make it closer to reality!!
One final note, and I don't remember if I've mentioned this before — part of the reason I chose "I Am" for the title of the blog, in addition to the story I tell in my first post about my eventual coming out as an atheist, was because God refers to himself as "I Am", which even when I was a believer sounded weird to me. So instead of "I Am the LORD" or "I Am I Am" (or Popeye's "I am what I am, and that's all that I am"), we have "I Am the BLOG" (or Blog, take your pick).
Okay, time to try to get to sleep!
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