Genesis 7

Welcome back! Time for a quick post or two before the football games today, so we're off to see the promised flood!

God gives Noah further instruction about the ark. He tells him now to not only bring a pair of every kind of animal, but seven pairs of all the clean animals! And I thought that ark was gonna be crowded before. It seems like God is trying to skew the animal population post-flood towards the "clean" animals. Seems a bit unnecessary, no? I mean, God is the one who created these animals, and created them unclean (animals didn't sin in Eden!). So he either wants them or he doesn't, and why doesn't he just make them multiply less? I mean, micromanaging and all, but I've certainly been led to believe that God micromanages each and every one of our lives, so surely in his omnipotence he could make the unclean animals less fruitful? Hm.

So Noah (at the ripe old age of 600) goes into the ark with his family and all the animals, and a week later, the flood came. It doesn't say why they went into the ark a week early. I mean, it can't be that much fun in there, and surely God can just start the flood as soon as they're all safe without the week lag...perhaps that was a grace period for the dinosaurs? Heh. Anyway, this isn't an issue if you just read the next few verses. Why? Because they completely restate everything, with a slight twist.

According to verse 12 and 13, the rain fell and "on the very same day" Noah and all the animals entered the ark. If they entered the ark on the same day the rains started to fall, why did verse 10 claim that the waters of the flood didn't come for seven days later? I mean, if the writers were specific enough to know that this happened when Noah was 600 years, 2 months, and 17 days old, it can't be too much of a stretch to know whether or not they waited around in the ark for a week before the flood started. Even if they didn't know, they could at least decide on one version to put here!

As far as the actual flood, that they agree lasted 40 days and 40 nights. During this time "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth" in addition to all the rain. What's that supposed to mean? Geysers? Underground reservoirs coming forth to add to all the rain? What's preventing those empty spaces from now getting filled up with rain water? Hm. Perhaps God was plugging all the holes. However it happened, we know that the waters covered "all the high mountains under the whole heaven." Wow. That's a lot of water.

Given Mt. Everest is 8,848 meters tall, and the average elevation of the continents is 840 meters. So the water made a layer about 8000 meters deep. The radius of the earth is about 6400 kilometers. Doing a quick bit of math, this means there needed to be an additional 3,449,676,768,158,891,767,700 cubic meters of water. That's 3.4E24 cubic meters, aka 3.4 quadrillion. Where did all that water come from? Where did it go? There are all sorts of creationist "scientific" theories regarding this, but not one of them sounds in any way logical. So one must resort to "Well, God did it," which leads me to wonder why God would try to make it look like a natural phenomenon. Why not just strike dead all mankind at once? It's truly bizarre.

The cheerful ending of this chapter tells how every single living thing was "blotted out from the earth." Except for the ark. All those animals must have been the righteous ones. Or else God couldn't care less about animals. I'm thinking it's the latter. Very reassuring for anyone with a pet or a conscience, no? It must have been a lot of fun on that ark, as the waters of the flood stayed around for 150 days. So, a week beforehand, 40 days of flood, and then 150 days of floating...I can only imagine how snippy everyone was getting! Not to mention that everyone and everything they had known was gone. Like I said last time, I wouldn't accept such an offer from God. I'd rather die with everyone else.

The story of the flood is often touted as a children's story, with all the animals and the ark and everything. But I think it's incredibly morbid and gruesome. Luckily, it doesn't seem like it has any basis in truth, but that's only reassuring for those of us that can turn an objective eye towards this myth. Which isn't exactly an original myth (check out this Wikipedia page to see a list), so it's truly mindboggling that one can pick a story that sounds exactly like all the rest and say it is the true one. The more likely conclusion is that none of them are true.

Until next time!

Genesis 4

I thought at least ONE person besides myself would have seen this by now...but page views would say otherwise! Oh well. I am having fun doing this, it is something I've been wanting to do, so even if my words are just echoing around an empty internet, it's worth it! Also, interesting tidbit, there are 1189 chapters in the bible (according to Google, I don't have the time to count!), which means at my current rate, I'll be working on this blog for another 3 years and 3 months at least! So I guess I don't have to think up any new ideas! Okay, so, on to the 4th chapter, in which is the ever popular story of Cain and Abel...

It just cracks me up that the Bbible cannot bring itself to say that Adam had sex with his wife, although sex is supposed to be holy in a God-sanctioned marriage. But it's not decorous to speak of it, so we just hear that Adam "knew" Eve and she had a kid. Or maybe that's how it really did work back then! Regardless, she has 2 boys somehow. She says that she has "produced a man" which makes me think of nothing so much as this internet pin:



The story is much as you probably remember it, even if you've never picked up a Bible. Cain is a farmer, and he offers God fruit. Abel is a shepherd, and he offers God fat portions of his sheep. God likes Abel's, but doesn't like Cain's. When Cain gets upset about this, God tells him that if he does well, he will be accepted, and if he does not do well, "sin is lurking at the door." Because apparently God doesn't like farmers. I really have never understood this. Cain gave what he had, and isn't that the theme of countless songs and sermons? And yet God tells him his offering is no good. No wonder Cain is miffed.

Of course, no matter how miffed one is, murder is not the answer. Cain taking Abel out to a field and killing him is a terrible thing. It is not Abel's fault that God is capricious and setting a double standard. God asks Cain where Abel is, and while I know I've been harping on God's utter lack of omniscience, this seems more like a rhetorical set-up question, so I'll give it a dubious pass. God is pissed that Cain killed his brother, so he punishes Cain to struggle with farming and to wander about the earth. Cain complains that this sucks, so God says that no one can kill Cain, and that's that. The interesting thing about this, something that has intrigued me since I was young, was that Cain is worried about wandering amongst other people. What other people? Cain seems to be Adam and Eve's firstborn, and Adam and Eve are the only 2 people God created. So even presuming that Cain is 40 or so (he goes on to settle in Nod and raise a family, so he can't be too old), there is no way Eve has pumped out enough kids to populate entire lands of people! This can be somewhat danced around by the claim that apparently people in the ancient Bible lived to hundreds of years old (and then life expectancy took a major turn for the worse once we reach written history, and only in recent years with medical advances has started to extend again, which really gives no credence at all to the idea that human lifespans are established by God...but I digress), but "dancing around" at all indicates that it's probably not a literal account.

The rest of the chapter goes on to describe how Cain populates the earth with his wife. Incidentally, his wife must be his sister, unless it's niece (a niece who results of a brother/sister pairing), and there is no escaping that the Bible has wasted no time in establish incest as a-okay. And yet this slippery slope argument against gay marriage is used today by Christians!

In describing Cain's descendants and the beginnings of civilization, it is stated that Jubal is "the ancestory of all those who play the lyre and pipe" and other such ancestries. I find it highly unlikely that all musicians are musicians solely because they all descended from Jubal. This strikes me as a similar to a polytheistic tradition of establish a "god(dess) of music" but in this case, it is an "ancestor of music." Which leads me, yet again, to the conclusion that someone made this up.

Lamech then tells his wives (yes, plural, that's also totally okay in Biblical marriages, again, how do Christians get away with the slippery slope argument when it comes to marriage?) that he killed a man for hitting him. Apparently murder runs in the family, eh? We don't see God having anything to say about this, though. Lamech just says that if it was bad to kill Cain, it would be even worse to kill Lamech. This makes no sense. Really. None at all. It sounds like he gets off scotfree for this murder.

The chapter ends with the statement "At that time people began to invoke the name of the Lord." Weren't they already doing that? Weren't Adam and Eve chummy with God from the start? Even Cain was having one-on-one conversations with him. So why wouldn't they start to invoke his name until a new generation comes along?

Sense? Where is the sense???

Again, after a logical examination of this story, I must conclude it is nothing more than myth. We're not off to a terribly promising start, seeing as I haven't felt God's presence yet, which is supposed to be a nice side effect of reading this. On the plus side, I'm having loads of fun!

Cheers!