I'm not sure where this thought came from (believers will no doubt say 'from Satan'), but it has started to coalesce in my brain lately. I've often referred to the Bible and argued from it to debunk JW beliefs, and still tried to consider it as a great piece of literature at the very least. But as my wife was listening to the meeting on a loud speaker phone at home this weekend, I just had this thought.
See I'd been watching those hilarious Plinkett movie reviews from redlettermedia.com (thanks for getting me addicted to those, Leolaia--I think I might've stayed up till almost 5 in the morning once, just watching the ones about the Prequel Trilogy, though I think the 'Baby's Day Out' review is the true gut-buster in terms of laughter), and it made me think, as I was hearing the meeting, what if Plinkett reviewed the Bible like it was a movie? I just started hearing his voice in my head as I started with Genesis chapter 1. By the time I got through chapter 4, it started to sink in.
I mean, Chapter 1, God Makes Everything. Who is God? Why did he decide to make stuff? If he was eternal, complete, and never got lonely, why did he make everything? Better yet, how could someone who had never seen anything else, ever, make something? How would he know what it looked like? He'd never seen anything else, ever. He didn't have any books, so how did he have wisdom? It's not like he could do a Google search and find out what a star looks like and then make it. He would've had to start from scratch.
So did he just sit there, floating in nothingness, devoid of thought and reason? Did he come up with a gigantic plan based on...what, exactly?....to make the universe? People who believe Genesis 1:1 teach that everything was made by God, right? But then God was made by nothing? The sum of all wisdom and power came from nothing? Let me phrase it another way: Big Bang God started it all.
The other thing is, it took seven days to make heaven and earth, right? If these days weren't literal, then why would the Bible say "there came to evening and there came to be morning, a second day"? The writer would be using symbolic language that was unnecessary. The only reason there are evenings and mornings are because of the 24-hour periods we know as days. If it was a really, really long time, why didn't they just say that? They had words for "a really, really long time" back then, right?
Chapter 2, Man and Woman. So a bunch of dirt gets shaped into a man, breathed on, and then man is alive? How did his internal organs form if he was made out of dust? Why can't we put oxygen on dirt and make a man today? Better yet, knock somebody out, take out one of their ribs, and make it into a hot lady? It certainly beats having to lure one into my basemen--So Adam's job is pretty much to be a farmer, and then to name the animals. Question: how would Adam know what to call these animals? He was seeing them for the first time. Why would God assign him to name the animals? Wouldn't God already know their names and just tell Adam what the names were? As we know, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of animal species on Earth. How long was Adam counting animals? Did he devote 2 hours a day to counting animals after he'd finished maintaining an already perfect garden? Did he start looking at the sheep--
Chapter 3, Sin and Punishment! So a talking snake tells Eve she won't die if she eats from the tree of knowledge of good and bad. Did God not tell them that snakes don't talk? Why was she not freaked out? There were only two other beings who could talk to her, Adam and God, and they didn't look like snakes. Then again, one of them was invisible--So she starts eating the fruit, and then she gives it to Adam. Did Adam know what the fruit was? There could have been hundreds of fruit trees in the garden. Were those fruits somehow different from every other fruit on every other tree in the garden? What if he didn't know at all?
Okay, so God comes along at the breezy part of the day and is looking for them? Why would God have to look for them? Can't he see everything without even turning his head? Also, why did God make sure that women had to have horrible pain during childbirth? Was death not enough of a punishment? He didn't mention increasing the pains of childbirth as punishment for eating from the tree when he first gave the command. Seems more likely this was a commentary on the misogynistic worldview of the culture at that time--female pain during childbirth had to be punishment from above, right? Not a giant baby head coming out of a little--So then God kicks them out of the garden, after giving them some new clothes, and then he thinks, oh gee, maybe I should guard the tree of life, in case they eat from it and live forever. Did he tell them that the tree of life would enable them to live forever? If they knew, why wouldn't Eve just eat from that tree immediately after eating from the tree of knowledge, thereby inoculating herself against the deadly effects of the fruit? She could have just walked over there, with both fruits, and ate them at the same time, just to be safe. Apparently God was only watching at the breezy part of the day. I guess he wouldn't have noticed until it was too late. Why would God place a guard there as an afterthought? Did it matter so much that these human beings die, when there were no other human beings on the planet? Did God hate it that much that they ate a piece of fruit?
Why would God devise such a ridiculously simple test for human obedience? Did he think that with nothing else to do but name animals and care for a garden, they might not start thinking about why that fruit was there?
What about the snake? Wouldn't God know that the snake was his evil archenemy Satan and not all literal snakes? Why would he condemn snakes to slither across the ground if only one snake out of the many kinds of snakes was used by a spirit being to talk to Eve? Also, when God says "I will put enmity between you, and between your seed and her seed. He will bruise you in the head and you will bruise him in the heel", how do we know this is referring to some great, universal, mankind-saving prophecy? What if he was just talking about snakes in general? Eve's kids--humans, yeah, us--would get bitten in the heel by snakes, who would be drawn to the heat from their cooking fires. The humans would get really pissed off and hit snakes in the head with sticks, rocks, knives, or whatever else they could make. What if this had nothing to do with Jesus at all? Maybe snakes really did talk back then. The Bible writer never says that the snake is Satan or a wicked angel. He only says that the snake is the most cautious amongst all the beasts in the field.
Chapter 4, God Loves Meat and Protects Murderers. Cain and Abel make a sacrifice to God. God loves the fact that Abel killed a lamb, but doesn't like Cain's vegetables. What makes killing an animal better than putting up some vegetables? Was it like the original episode of MasterChef? Did God have a fork and knife and sample each plate or something? So Cain gets pretty pissed off, and God probably knows he's going to kill Abel. But, he lets him off with a warning. Right after that, Cain asks his brother to head over to a field, and kills him. But wait--wasn't Abel the one who had God's approval? Why did God just let him get beat to death all because God was the one who showed favoritism?
What makes it worse is that when God confronts Cain, Cain says that anyone finding him is going to kill him. Then God says that anyone killing Cain will be avenged seven times. Now wait a minute! Didn't Cain just murder his own brother? Why would God want vengeance for the death of a murderer that he directly warned to avoid that course of action? Why wasn't Abel avenged seven times? In fact, I don't think Abel was avenged any times. Sounds like King David was taking notes on Genesis 4, and just like Cain, got off with everybody but him dead as a result of being a murderer.
....Okay. I'll stop there. I was just thinking that maybe I'm having these thoughts because these thoughts were always there. Perhaps, as Plinkett would put it, I didn't notice it, but my brain did.
Just realizing that 2,000 years have passed and Jesus hasn't come back, and a lot of pointless ideas and violence have all come because everybody wants to claim Abraham as their father and fight over land that wasn't originally his to begin with but some being no one has ever met promised to him even though he was already rich before he left home (why couldn't Jesus have just been born somewhere else? Why did it matter for Abraham to move to this one spot? Why not just make Abraham king where he was and start the nation there?)....it all starts to add up.
I wanted to hold onto some religious belief because I figured it might help kept my moral compass a bit more steady in these uncharted waters. But the fact is, I just don't care anymore. I'm tired of pretending in front of my JW wife that I halfway agree with the crap she talks about from the Bible when I know I really don't. And maybe the lies didn't stop with the JW faith, maybe they only STARTED there and extended far beyond what I first imagined.
Well...when I realize just how much harm is being done to humanity because we're all stuck on ancient beliefs and divided by how to interpret books written thousands of years ago, it makes me think that we're being held back by our simple refusal to be objective about our belief system.
Well, I'll stop there. Just feeling a little...odd today. I don't know.
--sd-7