On Religion, Chapter 1

In picking up my series on religion, I want to begin at the beginning.

Let’s take the creation myth.

If I may, the judeo-christian creation story may be recounted as follows: At first there was nothing, except God. John put it as “In the beginning there was the Word and the word was God…” We’ll say God was all that existed. At some point, God decided it was time to create a universe. It took him all of six days, and on the seventh he rested. He created the entire universe, as well as all the laws of physics in this time (!) that held planets in motion, that caused capillary action to occur, that essenially made everything that we see work and describe as physics, earth science, biology, chemistry, and a whole host of other natural sciences work as it did. He also created Earth, a special little place with animals, plants, amoebas, viruses, marijuana and the like, all good and bad, but all serving some sort of rational purpose (even mosquitos have a purpose, which is to feel spiders).

Greatest of all his creations, according to the bible, was that creation we refer to as ourselves. Man was formed complete as he is, walking upright, knowing how to use tools, knowing how to bend the world to serve him. All of this information is genetic, breathed into the first man. Let’s call him Adam, which means, apparently, “First Man”, but could also, according to sociologists be refering to the most fundamental element of society (as in atom… This is not a real theory of course, but one I just made up.) Adam was not an isrealite, and many people suggest he really had no nationality (the nations came from his offspring, most especially Cain, who murdered Able and the sons of Noah, who were grandchildren something like 5 times great to Adam…) But Adam did physically inhabit an area of the world. And that area of the world still exists somewhere, even if it’s under an ocean. We know it was not in North America, and certainly (heaven forbid) not in Africa. Most think it was somewhere in Northern Iran, so we can say, grafting our modern concepts onto ancient myth, he was Iranian, which makes him an aryan (yay Nazis! You finally got one right! Good for you!).

Adam named all the animals, and all the plants in a taxonomy now lost to time, or at any rate completely replaced by the taxonomy of the 17th-19th centuries. In his paradise he had anything he could have possibly wanted, and nothing he did not. But then, as so often happens with men, he became bored, so according to the story, God made him a companion (we’re going to leave off the EQUAL partner who only exists in feminist fokelore, called Lilith, who, according to feminists, was Adam’s first wife and was made using the same exact method as Adam was, and is therefore Adam’s equal. I don’t think Genesis talks about her in this capacity, and we are talking about Genesis. We should take it as a given that the religion is patriarchical, and unequal, and describe it as such, while avoiding the desire to find some redeeming sexual equality in a book where it does not objectively exist.)

This companion was named Eve, and was made apparently from a rib of Adam (thus explaining why women have one more rib than men do!? Despite the obvious problems with explaining some anatomical oddity in this fashion, I will say this seems childish at best, like some stupid lie your grandfather tells you when you ask too many annoying questions: “Grampa, where does the sun go when it sets? Into the Ocean… Grampa, why does my sister have one more rib than I do? Because God took one of your ribs to make her…” that sort of thing. But I digress…) Then the bible has them doing God knows what, but nothing sinful, of course, until God sets them up and tells them not to eat fruit from a certain tree, because they would then have the knowledge of good and evil, and they would be “like us”… whoever us is.

So what’s the first thing they do? They listen to a talking serpent (?!) and figure, “well, if we eat it nobody will know, “despite the fact that they know God is watching them, and that he is wandering about in his garden at that moment, and that, if he knows how many hairs are on one’s head, he certainly knows how many apples are on the most important fruit tree in the entire garden! So Adam and Eve both take a bite of the fruit, and basically screw themselves, and the rest of us for the rest of time. Whoops…

Immediately God comes in looking to punish them for disobedience, and now that they know what they have done, they run to hide, as much from apparently realizing for the first time that they are naked (like how could they NOT notice? They were the only man and woman on the face of the planet! I’d think that would be the first thing they noticed!) as from the shame that they willfully disobeyed God. Adam, like a typical little boy, blames Eve. This is how the hatred of women comes about for the rest of time. It’s justified by the Bible, folks, so it must be ok, right?

Wrong. It was God, a male figure (”the Father”) who set them up to fail, and Adam who was not more of a man and didn’t refuse to take it when he knew just how much trouble he would get in for doing it. Anway, for their crimes, men got to work the lands, toiling everyday in backbreaking labor, until the invention of the iron plow or at least domestication of beasts of burden (but a more sinister foe loomed over the horizon when labor was not so backbreaking anymore: the corporate farm and the bank loan foresloser), and women were cursed with the pain of menstruation and child birth. Snakes apparently lost their abilities to walk upright (? the bible is unclear about what their condition was before the “fall”) and had to slither in the dust, forever being the subject of torment and head-crushing for the rest of time. As such, they got off comparatively easily. Humans were to bear original sin for the rest of time.

Etc etc etc.

Many have written about the deviousness of original sin. But let’s take that into context and go through this story. First. God has according to modern religion always existed, even when there was nothing else. As such, the ideas of Hegel are applicable here, and any good marxist will tell you Hegel has been refuted and repudiated. But Hegel said in the beginning of time, there was nothingness except Geist (read: God and so far the two ideas jive). But the Geist became aware of nothingness. In essence he was aware of nothing. This is not semantics, people. He was aware of nothing, including the fact that he was aware, or that he even existed. I am not saying that he was not aware of anything. I am saying that he was aware of nothingness, including himself, including his awareness. There was nothing, and there was Geist at the same time. So Geist was nothing, and yet Geist was aware of that. Don’t ask me, I didn’t make it up.

Anyway, this is a paradox. The system collapsed as a result of Geist becoming aware of nothing. And the concrete world was made as a result. A new system into which a kernel of that Geist was propelled. And from then until the end of history, Geist is attempting to make itself concrete. This hegelian god is not messing with the world. From this god the world came. But Geist does not play an active role in the creation of activities in the world. On this point we lose the Christians, and most certainly, the fundamentalists, who believe not only does God influence things in the world, but that God takes a *special interest* in their individual lives and makes special things happen for them individually, because they “worship”, speak in tounges on occasion, damn abortion advocates and providers, wave their arms in the air and listen to praise music in their SUV’s.

Back to the creation story. The breakdown of the paradox was instantaneous. Too mindboggling to imagine. But if we graft that image of God onto the judeo-Christian version and take subsequent thought about God into account, how could God have possibly been the only thing there was? That doesn’t make any sense. It twists the brain when you go to try and figure out where he was when he started work on the universe. Was he in his house? Because then something must have existed. But no, the bible very clearly states on a number of occasions that heaven did not even exist; nothing existed. Only an object that was sheer will who merely realized nothingness and willed the universe into existence.

The bible makes the old testiment God out to be a physical object. But a physical object cannot exist outside of the physical world. Otherwise he has absolutely no frame of reference, nothing to even be aware of that would suggest to him that he even exists. We can say that the bible gets it wrong here. For a number of reasons, I’ll add. First this story was not written by God himself, but through a finite man, Moses. Apparenly, God told him about this. But even if God did speak in a burning bush, why would God describe it like this? The answer to why the bible got it wrong is because I believe God was at a historical loss for words to describe it. Moses was too ignorent to have any clue about what God was talking. So God probably said “Well, I guess I could describe how I made the world this way.” in simple terms that a finite individual could comprehend, but more importantly that he could describe to other, less educationally advantaged people.

On this topic, I just want to insert a thought: How is it that Jesus can speak in parables: “The kingdom of heaven is like a…” but ALL of Moses’ words are taken litterally by fundamentalists? Who’s to say Moses wasn’t writing “The world sort of began like this, and I’ll dumb it down so you can really get a handle on it…”

Which brings us to our next topic. Why did it take God six whole days to create the universe? If God is truely as powerful as he would have to be to create the universe in ANY amount of time, why did it take him SIX WHOLE DAYS? Especially since there was no earth to go around a sun, nor any sun for the first couple “days”. Again, it must be a figure of speech that Moses used to give former golden calf worshippers some context.

But the one thing that is not just context: why did God have to rest on the Seventh day? Does this mean that the work of creation wiped him out? No, this can’t be. God has infinite power, he could do it just by willing it. He could do it entirely by willing a generic fully-functioning universe, and it wouldn’t be so much trouble as if he had done absolutely nothing in that instant. So why have him rest? There is absolutely NO evidence to support the idea of God resting on the sabbath. World processes do not shut down on the sabbath, blood doesn’t stop flowing to the heart, the world does not stop spinning, new stars don’t take a break from being formed. And yet, apparently, the creator of the world felt the need to rest after only six days of work that he could have just as easily completed in a nano-milli-second without the slightest expenditure of energy on his part, and this was held up as the example to follow, not the creative aspects of God’s other six days of work. In fact we are discouraged from trying to be too much like God (don’t judge, don’t blaspheme this sort of thing), but resting is apprently the most important thing God did and it is the only one of those activities we are ordered by the 10 commandments to emmulate, though nothing else in nature emmulates it.

So, going on… Why was Earth so important, and among ALL things on Earth, why was man so important? I think I am too cynical on this topic to even give it a modicum of fairness. But I firmly believe that we are not special. We just happen to be here, and the authors of this particular version of the same myth as everyone else had back then, didn’t know a goddamned thing about other planets. They looked up at night and saw spots in the sky. They didn’t know what those were, nor did they know that the sun was one of them. Moses and those who probably conferred with him when this myth was finally wrote down after centuries as oral tradition were probably like “This world is our entire universe. There is nothing else outside it except heaven and maybe the place where the serpent came from…” Again, if you have no frame of reference, how can you possibly understand that your planet isn’t the only thing that exists in the physical world? The nature of the planets wasn’t figured out definitively until the late 1950’s when people actually went up into space and confirmed that there was more stuff outside the bounds of earth. Up until that point, it was all just theory, and each one was just as valid as the next one, so long as it was formally correct.

And man being the most important and beloved of all God’s creations? Not likely. If God loved us so much why did he equip us with so few natural defenses? Did he really believe that we would always look to him for our protection? Surely, God couldn’t have been THAT dense. No, we would need fast running skills, or claws, or even some sharp teeth for simple survival. Instead all we got was the opportunity to think and put things together to make primative weaponry that worked only half as well as it should and was eventually used only seriously against other humans. No, the only reason why humans were the most beloved was because a human was writting the tale. Period. We were the ones who could write words, and so we, (Moses didn’t come up with this plot on the hill, mind you; all this was oral tradition until Moses wrote it down for sunday school classes time immemorium to describe for little kids) set ourselves up as the most important. But I’ll bet God loves Rabbits more, because they are so helpless, or the HIV virus because it can kill humans so easily and there isn’t anything we can do about it, or bears, because who’s going to take down a bear?

And Eve being made form Adam’s rib? Think about it: that would make Eve Adam’s genetic copy. We all know cloning is possible through extraction of DNA from some cell or another of the animal you are trying to clone. That DNA contains every single trait of the person or animal, and sequencing that exact formula a few million times will produce a genetic copy of the cloning subject. This is how identical twins are formed, and they are genetically interchangable, minus whatever mutations have occured since the first mitosis. If Eve was made out of Adam’s rib, she wouldn’t be a woman, first of all. She would be a man. God would have had to exchange all the Y chromosomes for X chromosomes in the rib. Now I’m not saying that he couldn’t do this, because he could, in an instant at that.

I am saying that he DID not, because if he wanted to do this, he could just have made another creature from the same process that he made Adam (apparently he did, but her equality with Adam was bad somehow, so God got rid of her… talk to the feminists about this one. I don’t buy it…) No. The hebrews needed some justification for keeping women in a subcategory of “Man”, less than the original. This episode, like so many others in the bible, are just excuses for men to continue to keep women in subservient roles and positions: You aren’t equal to me, part of me was used to make you, and you wouldn’t even exist had it not been from my rib.” Scientifically it’s highly improbable that God used Adam’s rib or any other body part from Adam to make Eve.

Therefore, we can simply not take a word the Bible says on this topic of the creation of the universe seriously. Was the first man really called “First man” or Adam? No, that was not his real name. The language Moses wrote in did not exist in Adam’s time, due to influences like the Tower of Babel and the Egyptian captivity and Abram coming from Mesopotamia and this sort of thing. Or Eve? Certainly not. Yet we blame these two fictional characters for messing the rest of us over.

Don’t even let me get started about the whole Apple thing! First of all, despite what we are taught as children, it was not Satan causing this mischief. It was a serpent. Read it in the bible yourself. Nothing special about this serpent… except that he could talk and didn’t yet have to slither… Whatever that says. But why would God put a tree of knowledge of good and evil in his garden? A slight oversight on his part? Or a deliberate action to cause man to fall? What would be the purpose of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden? Was it some ordinary apple tree? No, it was very specific one, with very powerful fruit. While we will summarily discount the potheads’ arguments that this tree was the original strain of indica weed, we cannot deny that this tree produced fruit that was extremely mesmerizing, especially after God pointed out that these two idiots were not supposed to eat its fruit.

The best way to get children to do something is to tell them not to do it. God must have put this in the garden as a test to see if they would listen to them. He knew they would not. He knew they would fail. Yet he did it anyway. And they did. And this is more proof that humans were not the favorites of God. He did not test any other animals in this way. No other animal, including the serpent who talked them into eating the fruit, bears original sin! God must have deliberately put that tree there, knowing FULL WELL that the humans would disobey him. But he must have needed proof to know difinitively that he had made a grave error giving men free will. Like he didn’t already know, because he could see the future.

As such, according to the bible, anyway, we are cursed for the rest of time, because God wanted to test humans with a test that he knew they would fail. Did he give us a second chance? People will say sending Jesus to earth was the second chance, and we messed that up too. But I swear to God! If God hadn’t put that tree in the garden, we wouldn’t need a second chance in the first place. But then again, I don’t believe that God was wicked. I don’t believe he put a tree like this in the Garden of Eden at all. I don’t believe there even was a garden of eden, or a talking snake, or Adam and Eve. Original sin is nothing more than a concept to get people to come into church. By saying we are born guilty of sins, that gives us a reason to loathe ourselves and our condition, and a reason to keep professional clerics in business offering absolution for millions begging forgiveness for their sinful “nature”, which came to us from a couple of fictional characters in a fictional location.

No, God did not do something like this to test people. It was all made up by the clergy to justify their line of work. Who can say the pope is wrong? Only the pope. And he says we have original sin. And so do all the other christian churches. And they ignore the fact, conviniently that the original sin was cancelled by Jesus’ death on the cross. But you cannot use theology to cancel theology. Whatever happened at the beginning of human existence, it certainly wasn’t ANYTHING like what is written in the bible.

The arguments of creationists, fundamentalists, and the so-called intelligent designists are bunk, because they are based on a myth that for some reason occupies a privileged place in our folklore. Even the most cursory examination of this story reveals it to be a complete and outright lie. And yet, from this comes one of the most important tennets of the faith: that all are BORN sinful and will always fall short of the glory of God, and thus we need Jesus Christ to save us. If we don’t buy the idea that things happened exactly as Genesis reports, or that there is only some truth to it, we can’t buy the rest of it. And we can’t accept that Jesus’ death on the cross was necessary, that he had to suffer for us, or any of the nonsense that was written after Jesus’ death by people like Paul. Because if there is no original sin, we don’t need Jesus to die for us; for that matter we don’t even need him to be God’s son (anymore than you or I are God’s children). And, more importantly, we certainly don’t need a preacher or a priest to announce absolution onto us every week at church or a religion to intercede between us and God.

God, if he truely is God, would not have set us up in the Garden of Eden. God is not evil like this; if God truely exists, which I believe he does, he does not want bad for us, and wouldn’t have done this to people. That story was a synthesis of local myths, and was no more told to Moses by the burning bush than I physically told it to you. Moses wrote it all down as an excuse to justify the way things were at the time. This is an example of a man getting in the way of the work of God here on earth. As this series continues I am sure we will see many more examples of this, where man totally misinterpretted God, and used it as power over other men.

Again, all comments are welcomed, but debate over this topic will occur on the Creepy Sleepy Website. When Cody Winchester responds to it, I will edit this comment to reflect that and link you to it.

More to follow,
Doceopterix

EDIT: Sorry for the lateness of this, but Cody’s Response, not to this chapter, but to the introduction, is at his blog site, and you can read it, then come back and read the rebuttal.

Doc