And On The Eighth Day, God Created Assholes

We concluded in our previous post that Cain and Abel must have banged their own sisters, because we couldn't even entertain the possibility that their mother Eve was involved. We are delicate that way. But the question of how that population ball got rolling isn't actually answered anywhere in what people persist in calling the Good Book.

In fact, the Book was originally devoid of punctuation, and consequently the plot lurches along without coherence. There are Gaps. If we want to fill in those gaps, we have to guess. And guess what? People of legitimate religious credentials have been guessing for centuries. With apologies to my Jewish friends, I never heard of Midrash before this week and still don't know how to use it in a sentence, but I love it. Midrash is sort of a Cliff's Notes for the Torah, supplementary material designed to be clipped to the scroll to explain all the bits that clearly got left out. Early rabbis wrote it and some even supplied conflicting stories for the same gaps, and that's just fine with everybody. After a lifetime of having Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door jabbing their confident fingers at the Scriptures, I love a religion that doesn't get all precious about God's Word. "Could be this," one rabbi says, and the next comes along and says "Or that," and nobody comes to blows. Speaking of coming to blows, that's one of the gaps that got filled in. Cain slew Abel but it's not clear why.

The only thing Genesis said was that Abel was a shepherd and Cain tilled the soil, and when they both brought offerings to the Lord, the Lord favored Abel's over Cain's. But you've got to expect that when you bring a vegetarian dish to a potluck. Doesn't seem like a murder situation, though, and in fact many scholars point out that there might have been quite some time between the hummus and the homicide. And the Midrashim offer us some possibilities.

Apparently it's just understood that Cain and Abel were each born with a twin sister, because why not? It's not like such a non-event as the incidental birth of a girl would rate a line in the Torah. And each was supposed to marry the other's twin, out of some very early notion of decency, but Cain's twin was purtier than Abel's, and they both wanted her. Or, alternately, Abel had two twin sisters, and they decided to fight over the spare.

Or, postulates a different rabbi, Cain and Abel decided to divvy up the world, and one took the land and the other took everything else. And in the course of a standard double tantrum, the one told the other to get off his land, and the other told him to take off his clothes. "Strip!" demands brother one, and "Fly!" retorts brother two, and before you knew it, that was that. The first murder.

But when God confronted Cain about this, demanding to know where Abel was, as if he didn't know, Cain complained that he was not his brother's keeper. Especially now that he was dead on the ground. Fine. That's all in the book. But it gets punched up in the Midrash. Cain starts deflecting right away. He says to God it's your fault because you made me do evil, and why didn't you prevent it? Awesome. Typical abuser turning the blame around. I guess it works if you're accusing the Democrats of your own racism, but it's pretty bold to think you can gaslight God.

I don't know. The Midrashim all ring true. One way or the other, the women don't get a say about anything, and the men are obligate assholes, and cause all the trouble, and then blame someone else for it. Nothing's changed to this day.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Adam and Eve had belly buttons. I know because they're in all the pictures. The pictures were divinely inspired, so they must have been there; and Adam was made out of mud, so I'm thinking God stuck a thumbprint in him while he was baking, so his eventual offspring wouldn't feel weirded out about their navels. That's the only thing I can come up with and it does speak well of God, who nevertheless went on to do a heck of a lot of smiting, but things were fresh and new then, and everyone felt optimistic.

But if you keep on with this story you'll quickly arrive at more questions than answers. For instance: who did First Sons Cain and Abel get children by? All the possibilities are awkward.

As it happens, this question has troubled people through the ages. It doesn't trouble people at all that nobody ever mentions any daughters of Adam and Eve, because after all they're just females, but speculating about such daughters and their possible coital relationships with their brothers has put religious folk in a flat tizzy for thousands of years. (No more than six thousand, though.) There has to be another explanation. So one theory goes that Cain got a wife from a race of humans that pre-dated Adam and Eve. Which is problematic if you've already swallowed the notion that Adam and Eve were the first and nobody ever said anything about Neanderthals.

So not many people go with that. We're left with Cain and Abel marrying their own sisters, and, as has been pointed out, there's nothing in Genesis that rules out that Adam and Eve had daughters first, especially since they wouldn't have been important enough to mention. Also, Adam had another son, Seth, when he was 130 years old and then he lived another 800 years. Say what you will about our progenitors, they knew how to get lead in their pencils. The idea here is that after a short period of time you'd have scads of humans running around and plenty of broads to choose from, were you Cain or Abel, although they'd all be pretty seriously related.

Which is obviously appalling, or at least frowned upon in most of your modern cults. How can we reconcile this? Easy peasy. God never told anyone he couldn't marry his own sister. Especially since he gave him no alternatives. God didn't have a thing to say about that until he changed the rules and funneled them through Moses. Up until then it was fine. You can't commit incest if there's no such thing as incest, but after a certain point, as outlined in Leviticus, there were all sorts of rules. You don't even want to know. Cain and Abel got in under the deadline.

So we can assume that Cain and Abel had carnal relations with their own sisters.

Nobody said they had to enjoy it.

The Good Book

I took a little stroll through the Bible the other day. I was familiar with it as a child but you never know if your literary tastes hold up into adulthood. I thought I'd just flip through but instead I got completely caught up in the first book. Talk about your pacing!

Right off the bat, humans started screwing up, starting with disobeying an admittedly arbitrary rule and then plunging right into murder. Some of the action is off-screen: for instance, you've got your two humans who are supposed to get the population ball rolling, which means their kids are going to have to get fruitful either with each other or their mom, but we soon learn this kind of thing is totally normal in Genesis. Anyway God looked at the whole mess and called for a do-over, with good reason, and sent down ark instructions and invented the rainbow. (Noah, the one God had taken a liking to, had three sons and a vineyard, and one day he got drunk and blacked out in his tent naked, and his sons carefully covered him up without peeking at him, and for some reason this really ticked him off. Whatever.) The three sons ended up populating the whole world.

Which brings us eventually to Abraham. He and the Lord conversed, leaving Abraham in fine shape. He traveled to Egypt with his wife Sarah but worried that the Egyptians were going to want to have their way with her because she was so beautiful, even though she was at least 65 at that point--people didn't let themselves go so much back then--and he told her to tell everyone she was his sister, so they wouldn't kill him. (It's bad to steal another man's wife, but murdering him is okay.) And sure enough he palms her off on the Pharaoh, but it falls apart eventually when the Lord sent plagues to punish the Egyptians for all this; but Abraham is in no trouble at all with the Lord, and they leave and get rich again. They pull the exact same sister gambit later on with the king of Gerar. And not only that, but when Sarah, who really was his half-sister but who's counting, fails to have children, she suggests he help himself to her pretty Egyptian maid, and soon enough Abraham is a first-time dad at 86.

God was cool with all this and looked favorably upon Abraham and told him he was going to be the father of kings and nations, and all he had to do was snip off a bit of skin around his then-99-year-old penis and do the same to his son and his slaves and any other males in the vicinity. That had to have gone over well. And not only that, but it was going to be Sarah having the anchor baby for the nation-building. Sarah overheard this and chuckled at the Lord, which you should not do. "Is any thing too hard for the Lord?" the Lord demanded, rhetorically, and maybe no thing is, but he made Sarah bear a child at age ninety, and that can't have been easy.

Meanwhile, their nephew Lot had decided to move to the greater Sodom area, which was a bad move. Abraham found out Sodom was doomed and asked God if he'd really smite Sodom if there were fifty good men there, and God said he wouldn't, and then Abraham, who thought he had a good rapport, bargained him down to ten good men, and probably thought he'd done well, but God didn't look too hard and stuck with his plan to take Sodom out with fire and brimstone anyway.

Salt.

God decided Lot was okay and encouraged him to leave Sodom but he didn't, so he sent some angels that looked like men after him to close the deal. The wicked men of the city wanted to meet the new "men" but Lot, being a good guy, refused to make the introduction, instead generously offering to send out his two virgin daughters for them to do with as they wished.

Then the angels dragged him and his wife and daughters out and told them not to look back while God smote the city, but Lot's wife did, probably because her other kids were still back there, for Pete's sake, and she was promptly mineralized for her maternal instinct. Lot and his daughters scampered off to a cave and his daughters drugged him with wine and got themselves knocked up by him--their own dad--without (wink, wink) even waking him up. All that was fine and dandy.

Then, the Lord popped back to Abraham and suggested he murder his own son Isaac to prove his devotion, and poor Abe got all the way to the point he had his kid trussed up and on kindling and a knife at his throat before the Lord went all, ha ha, just kidding, take this here sheep instead. Isaac in turn grew up and went to a new town, where he started telling people his beautiful wife Rebekah was his sister, just in case the men in town would be inclined to kill him in order to ravish his wife. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. But the jig was up when he was caught sporting with her, and the town king said she must be his wife, because no one would ever sport with his own sister, there's no precedent for that, and the king promised Isaac he'd kill anyone who touched his wife, and everything worked out great because the Lord blessed all this and wanted them to be fruitful.

So Isaac and Rebekah had twin boys and those two went at it with each other before day one. Whoever was first out of the womb got the birthright (cows, goats, honor and glory and such) and apparently they knew this in utero. This was troublesome to Mom who had the audacity to ask the Lord why things had gotten so rough and unruly in there and the Lord explained "Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels."

Women really do not get much of a break in this book.

Esau squeaked out first but fairly promptly sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of lentil soup. Basically, Jacob wasn't that nice and Esau wasn't that bright. Also, they kept trying to kill each other. Eventually, Esau married two women from out of town, but nobody including God liked foreigners, so any thought of getting that birthright back was out of the question, because it was important to keep those lines of descent pure, if incestuous and homicidal.

We are not thirty pages into this tome. Already I have the vapors. I swan.

All Clear For Takeoff!

Me and my dinosaur, "Federal"

I've been baptized. I'll stipulate that right off the bat. I don't remember it, but it must have served as a sort of inoculation, and I plan to bring it up if there's ever anyone at the velvet rope checking the list, just in case. Still, I'm aware that the ritual is not without controversy. There is a right way, and a wrong way. I don't like being dunked or even dribbled on, so if I had to choose I'd hope to get away with a quick spray, like when you spritz your perfume into the air and walk into it for a more subtle effect.

Fortunately, thanks to the internet, we have at our disposal a wonderful website with all the correct answers. I recommend it. ClarifyingChristianity is a one-stop over-the-counter dogma depot, dedicated to teaching you how to get right with the Lord and go to heaven. It covers everything but the bus schedule. According to this site, only full immersion is going to punch your ticket. And you can take this information to the bank because (a) total immersion is what is described in the Bible, and (b) the Bible is irrefutably, demonstrably true. Put (a) and (b) together and you're in for a dunking, sweetheart.

I have Federal, and my sister and father appear to have fossils

How do we know the Bible is accurate? They're glad you asked. For one thing, the Bible has a 100% record of prophecies coming true, especially if you count the ones that haven't come true yet but totally might, which is even more impressive. As they explain it, the Bible is really good at future predictions, which are the trickiest kind of prediction.

Also? There's science all over it. In fact, nothing in science has ever contradicted the Bible. For instance, Genesis referred to the number of stars and the amount of sand in the seashore as being equivalently large--and even today Scientists admit they do not know how many stars there are! But it's a lot!

And the Bible described the wind as going south and north and whirling around continuously--thousands of years before Science described the circulation in the atmosphere! And in Leviticus there is a description of blood as being valuable to life even though the circulatory system of the blood was not discovered until 1616! And in Genesis they describe everything that creeps upon the earth continuing according to its kind--well before the discovery of DNA! That's right. Thousands of years ago, the Bible said wind whips around, blood is important, and cattle invariably produce calves, and there's nothing in modern science to contradict any of it.

Inseparable and coexisting

But nothing in the Bible is more exciting from a reality and accuracy standpoint than the mention of dinosaurs. Yes, three kinds of dinosaur were described in the Bible: the Tanniyn, the Behemoth, and the Leviathan. The Leviathan also breathed fire. And lest this strike anyone as unlikely, be it known that there exists, even today, a Central American beetle that blows fire out its own butt, so the technology is totally there, only with the dinosaur it was way bigger and out the front end. And many dinosaur skulls have been found that contain unexplained empty passages which could totally have been gas tanks. It only makes sense. With me so far?

So, Bible-accuracy-wise, let's review: we have the gigantic scaly turned-around fire-farting superbeetle with the fuel tanks in its skull, and it coexisted with Man, because the Bible says it was created no more than one day before Man, and we've already determined the Bible is true. But where are the dinosaurs now? Well. They did make it onto the ark (which, by the way, was filled to only 1/3 capacity, because of the sheer number of cubits involved in its construction); the dinosaurs would have been a stretch, but it is assumed they were little baby ones, which ate less also. So where are they now?

Ah. Climate change. The very same climate change that has been happening for the whole 6000 or so years of the planet. That's what caused the Flood in the first place: the clouds were way bigger and denser in the olden times, and that canopy of big fat clouds caused a greenhouse effect that trapped more oxygen, and everyone was big and happy until God made the clouds fall down all at once for flooding purposes. And once the canopy of clouds had fallen down, the world instantly cooled down, evidence for which is easily obtained by looking at all the mammoths found frozen in place, "some of them with food still in their mouths."

So there you have it--all buttoned up. We did fine with half the oxygen we were used to, but the Leviathan couldn't manage it, and if you need further proof just look around and count the dinosaurs. Heh? See any? Thought so. Well I'm convinced.

I'm still going to try to make do with my original baptism though.

I didn't make any of this up. For further edification, visit clarifyingchristianity.com and prepare to be amazed.

God Should Have Quit On The Fifth Day

Science has been unable to pinpoint which day of the week God created man, but for sure it was after he created salamanders, which showed up mid-afternoon of the fifth day. That was a barn-burner of a day for God, and he was justifiably proud, and probably went a little manic there for a while until he got some mud and made a man out of it, and after that he had to rest up. The book says "rest up," but really, he probably realized he needed to put the brakes on and think about what he'd done, because he'd totally overshot. It happens. Creative types frequently come up with their masterpiece early on and then spend the rest of their lives trying to replicate their success, and it never works.

"Day" is probably not meant to be taken literally, because God is more poetic than that, and bigger in general, with much longer days and a much greater imagination than us little mud-cakes he slapped out on the sixth day. So the salamander sort of worked things out on his own, with one great idea after another. There he was in the ocean, where things are constantly trying to make a snack out of him, and so he got closer and closer to shore, rolling his eyes around in alarm, until at one point there they were--his eyes--right on top of his head. Whoa! Genius. He could stay underwater where the oxygen was, and still see everything above the water. Like the land. Which, as far as he could see, contained nothing that wanted to snack on him. At that point there wasn't much more to do but fiddle with the flippers and do some push-ups and before you knew it, the first salamander hitched up on shore, where he grew the biggest and nicest smile anyone ever had before or since, and why not? He'd gotten everything just right. Lo, he was very good. And so he took the entire kit, handsome smile and all, right through to modern times, with barely an adjustment.

It might seem far-fetched about the eyes rolling around on the face, but it happens. Even today, flatfishes start out swimming sideways like regular fish with eyes on either side, and then one of their eyes migrates around to join the one on the other side, and then they drift to the bottom of the sea and blend in, with their eyes on top checking things out. It isn't the Mozart Requiem but it's still pretty cool. The eyes never look quite even, but it's the best they can do, having traveled around the side of the fish. And so you see this sort of thing in Nature all the time: halibut. Flounder. Shannen Doherty.

When God came up with the man, he told him to have dominion over every living thing, which was a big mistake, if you'll pardon my saying so. Sure, you're tired, you've worked hard, and it's tempting to just tell the kids to take care of everything, but that's how you get mud tracked in the house and candy for dinner and the credit card gets run up and all the forests turn to desert and someone cranks the heat up to high so they can sit around in their underwear all winter. It's not responsible. It's not all bad, but you're going to run through a hundred years of oligarchs and Republicans for every Mozart that shows up.

I have the good fortune to know people who do know their proper place in the world, and that place is chest-deep in a cold bog in February. Yes, the regional government Metro has sent out its intrepid Frog Warriors again this year to get a rough count of amphibian egg masses, so we can see if we've done a good job restoring wetlands to what God had in mind in the first place. It's an honor and a privilege to bear witness to the single greatest feat any critter has ever accomplished, something humans couldn't do in their wildest dreams: making new salamanders. No wonder they're still smiling.