The sanitized Bible

I wrote recently about my email correspondence with ‘Henry’ (not his real name). In the course of my probing as to what he actually believed, I asked him whether he believed in Noah’s flood (the story begins at Genesis 6:9) as a historical event. Christians who believe this to be true tend to paint with a broad brush and gloss over the details. For them, it is a short story the moral of which is a just god punishing evil humankind and starting over with a clean slate, using just the righteous Noah and his family. The whole story is treated as if it were a road (or rather boat) trip for Noah and his family and all the other people are ignored. If they dwell on the details at all, they consist of quaint images of cute animals marching two by two into the ark.

I don’t let believers like Henry get away with this sanitized version of the story. I ask them, if they think the story is true, to imagine the details of what must have come before the supposedly happy ending of a new dawn for humankind with doves and rainbows and perhaps Celine Dion singing in the background. I ask them to think of the steady non-stop rain, the relentlessly rising water, people panicking as they realize that this is no ordinary flood, parents gathering up their infants and children to save them, climbing to the tops of buildings or trees or desperately seeking higher ground, hoping against hope that the rains will cease, and their increasing terror as it does not.

Once they get as high as they can, they will do what parents instinctively do which is try and save their children, holding them up above the water even as they themselves get covered and are unable to breathe, wishing for some miracle to save their babies at the last moment. But nothing happens. The rising waters swirl over the terrified infants and soon even their gurgles subside to a deadly silence as they suffer ghastly deaths by drowning. [Update: Commenter Jeff alerts me to this image by Gustave Dore that captures my words almost exactly.]

Meanwhile god is watching all this and does not lift a finger to help. At any moment he could have chosen to save at least the infants who have not done anything wrong, unless you believe in the truly idiotic doctrine of original sin. But god does not do what any ordinary person would feel compelled to do when seeing others in danger, and that is to try and save them.

I ask religious people how they can possibly believe in such a god. I do this because if you take the flood event to be historically true, surely it must rank as the worst act of genocide in history, revealing a truly despicable god, one who is a callous mass murderer. Anyone who takes the Noah story to be true has forfeited any right to speak of morality or the existence of a loving god.

Religious people get increasingly uncomfortable as I describe the above sequence of events because I don’t think they have ever actually thought these things through and their religious leaders never go into detail either, for obvious reasons. And this is just one story. The Bible is full of such ghastly stories of a cruel and vengeful and merciless and vain god. This is why any thinking and compassionate person who actually reads the Bible has a good chance of becoming an atheist.

Most religious people are not really taught the Bible except in the highly sanitized form they learn in Sunday school as children. I have in our house something called a Children’s Bible and it omits all the horrendous elements of the stories, like Abraham’s willingness to murder his son, god’s commands to stone to death rebellious children and women who are not virgins on their wedding night and people who merely gather wood on the Sabbath, not to mention all the rape and incest and genocide. It reads more like an epic adventure story. This is reasonable for something written for children but the problem is that many religious people never grow out of it. Their knowledge of the Bible progresses little beyond their childhood indoctrination. For them, ignorance is truly bliss.

Next: Some actual conversations with believers on this topic.

What to expect in 2011

Here are my predictions.

On the political front, things are not going to be good.

  • We can expect an assault on Social Security, the dismantling of which is a long-held dream of the oligarchy. This will be facilitated by Obama, the faithful servant of the oligarchy, who has already signaled that the fix is in by (a) reducing the employee contribution to 4.2%, thus creating a resource problem where there wasn’t one before; (b) saying that he wants to ‘reform’ it so that others don’t do a worse job; and (c) encouraging his ‘Catfood Commission’ to use Social Security as part of their budget deficit plans.
  • We can also expect Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan to continue their assault on public education by diverting resources to charter schools and continue the practice of bribing school districts to fire teachers.
  • We will see Obama go along with the attack on public sector employees (he has already frozen their salaries) by cutting their numbers and undermining their unions.
  • We will continue to see further encroachments on our civil liberties and a further tend towards an imperial presidency, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
  • We will see a further attempt to siphon wealth towards the oligarchy by means of ‘tax reform’.
  • Providing adequate health care to people and controlling its costs will loom as the biggest problem facing the US because of its refusal to adopt a single-payer system.
  • There is going to some political theater in February when the debt ceiling will need to be raised in order to continue funding the government. The oligarchy needs this to happen so the ceiling will be raised but there will be some Kabuki theater before it happens in which Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress will pretend that they are being held hostage by the mean old Republicans in Congress and that they are forced to concede to some of their demands in order to keep the government running. I don’t know what specifically the Democrats will ‘reluctantly concede’ but you can be sure that it will be something that harms the less well-off.
  • There will be no end to the military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and only token reductions in forces in those two countries. Furthermore, the wars in Pakistan and Yemen will escalate.

As I have said repeatedly, the oligarchy is most successful in their assault on the poor and middle class when a Democrat is in the White House because then the base of the Democratic Party is lulled into inaction, thinking that the president is looking after their interests when all the evidence points to the opposite. Measures that would have had them howling in protest if a Republican president proposes them are meekly acquiesced to when a Democrat advocates them.

On the bright side, the longer-term prospects are better. All oligarchies contain within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and from the ashes of the wrecked US economy, there might emerge a better society. But the interim is going to be brutal.

There is also every indication that religion will continue its slide into oblivion. I know that this does not seem obvious, but the signs are pretty good, actually.

I will elaborate on these issues in the coming year.

The future of humankind

British director Lindsay Anderson produced a trilogy that began with If… (1968), continued with O Lucky Man (1973), and ended with Britannia Hospital (1982). Anderson’s films were surreal and took swipes at all the stupidity and hypocrisy of society. No one was spared: politicians, clergy, business, trade unions, scientists, education, all were targeted with biting class-based satire.

That great British character actor Graham Crowden plays a mad scientist Professor Millar who was introduced in O Lucky Man, a wonderful, sprawling, surreal film with the best sound track ever (by rocker Alan Price). The role was expanded in the final film from which this scene is taken.

The story of the whale

Of all the arguments that are used by religious people against evolution, the most fraudulent is that there are no transitional forms between species. People who say this either willfully ignore the evidence that does exist or think that a transitional form must be a hybrid between two currently existing species.

Do you think that no one could be that stupid? Behold the infamous crocoduck argument.


[Read more…]

Casino Jack

A scene from the new film Casino Jack about lobbyist Jack Abramov, in which the filmmakers cleverly use a moment’s fantasizing by the title character to reveal the real corruption in government. Too bad it doesn’t happen in real life.

Kevin Spacey is a wonderful actor and although I haven’t seen the film, I hope that after a long time he has a role worthy of him. Here’s the trailer.