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.

Lord, Lord, Wasn't That A Fish?

My earlier musings about whether a whale fart could contain a horse led me, at one point, to imagine that this was being proposed as a humane marine transportation device for land-dwelling mammals, and although these sorts of things are generally tried with mice or guinea pigs first, perhaps somebody was going for glory. And the prospect is worth investigating, after that Jonah debacle.

Which led me to study Jonah. Jonah is a great Bible book: it's only two pages long. I'm not a hundred percent certain what it's about. Jonah is suicidal from start to finish. First God tells him to pop over to Nineveh and preach to the citizens that they must mend their ways and repent or the city would be destroyed. Jonah says he'd rather die. Instead he tries to go somewhere God can't find him--he's a little unclear on the concept, there--and tries to take a ship to Tarshish.

To this day no one knows where Tarshish was and it is possible "going to Tarshish" is one of those phrases like "buying the farm," and refers merely to a place that is very very far away, possibly just outside Bumfuck, Egypt.

Anyway he never gets there. There's a terrible storm and Jonah admits to the ship's crew that it was probably his fault and offers to be cast into the sea, that evidently being a better fate than having to preach in Nineveh. The sailors don't want to do it but things were taking a turn and eventually they beseech the Lord to let them throw Jonah overboard but not get into trouble for it, and so it was done. The seas calmed instantly and the grateful sailors made a sacrifice unto the Lord. Sacrificing Jonah didn't count because they hardly knew him.

God locates a nearby biddable whale and offers him Jonah, because God loves whales. Everybody loves whales! Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and nights. This is probably using the omniscient point of view, because it would be hard, one thinks, for Jonah himself to know just how long he was in there, unless one imagines, as I do, that in the daytime the belly is sort of semi-dark yet pinkish, with a floor and throw pillows. Anyway Jonah had a chance to think about things and decided he had been unfaithful to the Lord and that's what got him into this situation.

God noted Jonah's remorse and directed the whale to ralph him up onto dry land despite the dangers to the whale of the shallows, because maybe God, being mysterious, doesn't love whales after all. Giveth, taketh away, it's the old story.

Unfortunately for Jonah, this reprieve meant he couldn't skate on the Nineveh deal, so he hied off to Nineveh, and told everyone to repent or die, and somehow they not only didn't kill him, but everyone from the King on down put on sackcloth and ashes. Sackcloth is itchy and made of goat hair and it's worse than Carhartts.

So the Lord spared Nineveh. Which ticked off Jonah. Not sure why. Maybe he felt cheated out of a good urban cleansing that he'd predicted, after all, and if it didn't happen, who's to say it ever would have happened? And here all these people are sitting around in hair shirts and ashes and they've got to be wondering the same thing. Jonah wanted to die.

Anyway Jonah went off to pout and see if the city blew up after all, and then God put a gourd out there that grew up in a day and shaded him, which was nice, and then he sent a worm to kill the vine the very next day, and I'm not sure why it matters because Jonah had already built himself a booth for shade, but that all pissed him off too.

The End.

And God said you didn't have anything to do with that vine, and why shouldn't I care about Nineveh, that has 120,000 people that don't know their right hand from their left, and also has cows? That is what God said, and I believe it, because you can't make this stuff up.

Still, it doesn't make much sense, and the whale clearly got the bad end of the bargain. How much nicer it would have been all around if Jonah had been permitted to make it all the way through the whale and shoot out on a fart! He could bob around in the ocean all warm and eventually make it to the surface, and the poor whale can go about his business.

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.

We Heard It From On High

Fake news angel. Angels aren't girls.

Did you know Angelology is a thing? The study of angels? I'm going to admit right up front: I suspicioned that, stacked up against the other sciences, it might lack rigor. But I was wrong. It's got rigor out the wazoo.

My primary source is an article by a gentleman who graduated from seminary school fifty years ago, became a pastor, died, and went home to be with the Lord, so he's got credentials. Dr. Keathley pointed out that just as there are many forms of life lower than Us, we should expect that there are forms superior to us, if not quite as fancy as God. If there was nothing between us and God, that would be like a vacuum. In space. Which would be silly. So dollars to doughnuts it's filled up with angels.

Not only that, but almost all of the heathen mythologies posit the existence of lesser deities. We generally ignore heathen mythologies, but they had to have gotten the idea from somewhere, even if they got everything else wrong, like God's first name.

But the possibility of angels becomes a certainty when we realize that the Bible told us so. Because the Bible is God's word. We know this because God himself told us, and God wouldn't lie outright, although he was not above messing with Job just for fun. Even the weird bits in the Bible that contradict each other are proof that it must be God's word, on account of He is mysterious. Slam dunk, in the can, mortal lock, shut the front door.

As supporting evidence for the existence of angels, we can start with the fact that God is Spirit; and there's a material kingdom, and an animal kingdom, and a human kingdom, so it stands to reason--I believe it's reason it stands to--that there is a spiritual kingdom also, with angels in it. (Dr. Keathley leaves out the viral kingdom and the phlegmish kingdom but those should remain below us, unless there is a terrible reckoning down the line.) Also there is the undisputed fact that a significant portion of Americans believe they have felt the presence of one or more angels, although not as many as believe in aliens and trickle-down economics.

Now THIS is an angel.

What a lot of people don't know is that eventually, if we play our cards right, we will surpass the angels and even be in a position to judge them, and wouldn't that be awesome. Our ace in the hole is that we were created in the image of God and the angels weren't. Yes, we just learned the angels are not physical but spiritual just like God, but if God weren't spirit he'd totally look like us. So once we're redeemed, we'll slide right by them into the end zone and score. Nanner nanner, angels.

I'm willing to go along with this up to a point, even the biblical fact that angels were created before the earth (so, over 6,000 years ago), but when humans arrange that convenient end run around the angels I surmise God's Word has undergone some editing. This is a suspiciously fine result for ourselves. I'm not anticipating it myself. I don't suppose if anyone were to redeem me they'd even get so much as a toaster out of the deal.

So Much For The Blessed Meek

It's recently come to my attention that God gave Man dominion over the earth, which explains everything. The news came in the context of a typical political Facebook thread and was stated flatly and irrefutably. Which is not to say I couldn't refute it--just that my arguments would be as seed cast upon stony ground.

Four-plus billion years on this marble and everything was coming along so nicely! Little sparks of ingenuity happened all over, and sure, there are always winners and losers, but anyone with a little resiliency did pretty well, overall. And then we came along and began to chisel out our own little niche, as one does. We couldn't fly, and we weren't fast, and we weren't strong, and we couldn't see or hear particularly well, but we were clever. So we got even cleverer. In fact, at this point your average human ape is smarter than your average other ape. That's a fact. That doesn't mean that there aren't some exceptional apes that are cleverer than a whole shitload of humans, and don't make me name names. So this is just a broad generalization.

Still, as interesting as the big clever brain turned out to be, there were some early signs of trouble. Every single place we went, the large animals went extinct. One after the other. You can actually map the migrations of humans by the extinction dates of the big critters. Africa has the lion's share, as it were, of those still remaining. It is thought that since we evolved in Africa alongside the big animals, they had a chance to learn how to avoid us. But when we cast out for the hinterlands, the resident megafauna had an unfortunate tendency to walk right up to our big clubs and spears. The thousand-pound thunder ducks were doomed. The giant sloths. Mammoths. Wooly rhinoceroses. Saber-toothed cats. Giant beavers and short-faced bears. But we were just getting started.

Not saying it's necessarily causal, but everything really went to hell when we began to write. It wasn't the overuse of adverbs or the lack of an arc, either.

First it was just bookkeeping and accounting, like tallies of sheep and grain stores and such, and writing puttered along for a few thousand years, but then, boom! Bible time. The Bible itself dates back to either 400 BC or the Beginning Of Time, depending on who you ask. Claims to authorship are similarly all over the map. In any case, the important thing to note is that on the first day, man created God.

I don't mean to get anyone in an uproar over God in any of his or her specifics.  You can believe anything you want, and fight about it with whomever you want, and I'm staying out of it. But this particular Bible-God was definitely created by man. How can we tell? First thing, he was created in our own image. What are the odds? What is the chance the Creator of the Universe looks like, say, Donald Trump? I'll tell you. Zip. But here we have a God who looks exactly like us, only souped-up. Right there, the fix is in. Right away, we've given ourselves a supernatural legitimacy that we totally did not earn.

Then we started writing the dialogue. And that's where that self-dealing really comes to the fore: we're the only critters with a soul, because God blew it into us while we were still dusty. Which means we have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth. It's all ours, baby. You couldn't get a better deal if you put all your cronies in power and had them write the legislation. And now we can take everything including ourselves right up to the brink of extinction and beyond, and it's all okay because God put us in charge, right there in Chapter One, when we made him.

What a hell of a waste of a fabulous brain to take it just to the point in evolution where it can admire itself. Because then that's all it does.

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.

Unitarian For A Day

This year I got to march in the Gay Pride Parade, behind the banner of the Unitarian Church! I know what you're thinking. Murr, how can you presume to march in the Gay Pride Parade? You're not a Unitarian.

This is true, but I'm not all that far away from being a Unitarian. The motto of the Unitarian Universalist Church is "whatever." Unitarians have been around a long time. There's some indication there were even some rooting around the Transylvania region in the 1500s. The main thing that set them apart, in the early years, was their rejection of the Trinity. The Trinity is a little odd anyway. It's the notion that you have your God, your Son Of God, and your Holy Ghost, three persons, but really all the same person, one of which is more of a vapor. It's designed to be mysterious. There's no point in being God if everybody gets you.

The early Unitarians thought this was pointless. There is only one God, with only one change of clothes. They liked Jesus well enough, but didn't get into his paternity. They didn't have him going up to heaven and sitting at God's right hand. According to the doctrine of the Trinity, sitting at your own right hand is something you can do if you are really big, which most people agree God is.

Unitarians!

Later the Unitarians found a lot of other things in the scripture that didn't sit right with them, such as the Virgin Birth. They didn't buy that. Really, if Joseph did, that's all that matters. And what with one thing and another, and doubt being cast about a lot of your so-called miracles, they abandoned the notion that the Bible was all that reliable. In general, they embraced science and intellectualism. And in general, they didn't believe any one religion had all the answers, and one must be open to new ideas. This is one reason a lot of people don't count Unitarianism as a religion at all. True religions are a hell of a lot more sure of themselves. You can't go to war over "whatever."

Da Bears

Well, Unitarians aren't as interested in going to war. They are interested in having an open mind and an open heart and aspiring to be kind. Right there, that's going to sieve out a lot of your other world religions. Unitarians are so little bound by creed that they embrace agnostics, atheists, humanists, Jews, Buddhists, and pagans. In fact, one working definition of a Unitarian is "someone who goes to a Unitarian church."

Which makes me, ipso fatso, a Unitarian, because I went to the Unitarian church to meet up with the rest of my marching squad. I didn't go inside. These things take time.

The Gospel According To The History Channel

Hey, I happened on the showing of The Bible on the History Channel the other day. Just cruised through the channels and there it was, right before the Big Bang Theory. It's a miniseries, and I didn't get in on the beginning at all, but that's okay--I've read the book. Everything starts out dark, and then it gets light, and then it gets wet, and then there are giants and lions and stuff. By the time I tuned in, we were all the way up to Jesus. I like Jesus.

They seemed to be doing a pretty good adaptation, as far as I could judge. Jesus was markedly lighter than everyone else, so as not to look too Jewish, and also gorgeous, a hippie mama's dream. He had the hair parted down the middle and all the things we've come to expect. Because we all know just what he looked like. There are pictures. We've taken his appearance, if nothing else, on faith for years. In fact that was our main talking point in the late sixties when our parents were telling the boys to get a haircut. "But Jesus had long hair," we said, as if we knew it for certain. Of course, there were no paintings of him done en plein right then and there. When Isaiah prophesied about him, he said he wasn't going to look remarkable in any way. A few hundred years after he died, people thought about it and decided he was kind of handsome. Various bits of fabric had turned up for veneration, if not laundering, upon which an image of Jesus's face had gotten smeared. By the fourth century, he had a beard in the East, and didn't grow one in the West until 1200 A.D. But he's stayed pretty much on the same template since then.

Anyone who has read Murrmurrs for a while knows that I'm going to get all crabby about them taking the screenplay from something more modern than the King James (God's) version. It's a pity. I know they do this because they think the KJV is just not as accessible to modern humans. But I like my language to have music in it, and using the New Revised Improved Standard Always-Low-Prices Version rankles. We're only one more movie version away from the Heavenly Host singing Boo-yah, and next time when Jesus holds his puny basket of loaves and fishes up to the sky for God to have a look at, he's going to bring it down laden with tuna fish sandwiches, sliced on the diagonal.

Other than that, the miniseries was fine. They did darken up Satan a gratifying amount. He looked a lot like Barack Obama. And tax collectors were properly revealed to be the lowest form of life. It was the Gospel According To John. Boehner. Except for the helping the poor part.

I missed the final episode, which miraculously aired on Easter Sunday. I've got a good idea that things took a bad turn, but (spoiler alert) it all turns out all right. Then we were going to go headlong into St. Paul's Revelations, so hold onto your hats. That calls for a lot of special effects. I think it's cool. These days, we just don't give as much respect to our schizophrenics as we used to.