Bible Study: Did You Even Read This Thing? Part II

Priceless poem placement.
On the right page is some sixteen-year-old's terrible poetry:

Page 151 - "Silence"

"How is it 

You're always with me; 

Yet sometimes,

I can't feel a thing?

 Never condemning. 

Never forsaking. 

You're too powerful for words; 

So gentle all the same."

And on the left hand side of the page is this gem of a story:

Numbers 16 - Basically, how the story goes:

The Levites have a rebellion. They say that Moses is acting way too chummy with God, and also they've been wandering around in the wilderness for like ever. They also want the priesthood (For some reason. The priests seem to have a high mortality rate. God kills a lot of them).

Moses tells them to light some incense, and then we'll see who's really holy. Or something.

Korah refuses. (I don't think this ends well for Korah). (Valid assessment, past self). 

Moses tells God not to accept their offerings, and tells Korah and his men to bring their incense burners the next day, and stand before God.

The next day, everyone's there, incense and all. Also, Yahweh makes an appearance, and tells Moses to get out of the way so he can smite these darn people. As usual, Moses has to persuade him not to kill everyone, just the ones that were making a fuss. Yahweh grudgingly agrees, so Moses tells everyone to get away from Korah and company, and not to touch their stuff.

Moses says, “Well, if I'm not the Chosen One, and I'm not speaking for God, then nothing will happen to Korah and his friends. But if I am, then the ground will swallow them up.”
Shockingly, the ground proceeds to open, and Korah and friends are no more. And then Yahweh burns the two hundred and fifty men that were burning the incense, and tells Aaron and friends to use the bronze to coat the Tabernacle or something.

Next day, everyone goes to talk to Moses and Aaron, being all, “You just killed a crapload of people!” And, as usual, Yahweh says, “Moses, get out of the way so I can kill everyone!” And as usual, Moses and Aaron grovel. However, Yahweh ignores them and sends a plague down on everyone. Moses tells Aaron, “Quick! Go get the incense burner and purify everyone so Yahweh won't kill them all!” So Aaron runs and starts purifying people, but the plague has already started and 14,700 people had died, not including the ones that died in the Korah affair.

Guys, guys, guys - copy editing. MAN. How did they think it was a good idea to place poetry proclaiming the goodness of God across from a page where the self-same God burns people alive for questioning Moses? Did they think it would cancel it out? It doesn't work that way! Maybe the most likely explanation for the poetry placement is that they literally could not find a page where God didn't brutally murder people. 

Come to think of it, that's probably it.

I'm thinking that the sixteen-year-old poet Anna did not actually read Numbers. I'm not feeling the whole "gentle" line...

Bible Study: Did You Even Read This Thing?

The Bible I am working with is a New Living Translation "Live" Bible, geared toward teenagers and other people with no critical thinking skills. It is therefore interspersed with bizarre additions, such as little articles proclaiming the goodness and glory of God, crappy amateur photography with ambiguous names that are completely irrelevant to anything, and chunks of pages left blank and dubbed "creative space", as if having a little 2 by 3 square to doodle in is going to inspire great masterpieces or spiritual revelations. (Maybe it's for writing "Jesus loves me" surrounded by little hearts. I'm not going to pretend to fathom their minds.)

What I find most interesting about this, though, is their painful attempts to tie in the sordid, sickening stories of the Old Testament into the lovey-dovey stuff of the New Testament. For instance, there a little article titled "Jesus Sighting" in Deuteronomy, which discusses the story in which Jesus says that the most important commandment is to love God and have no other God before him:

"Here, God commands us to love him above all else. Jesus' answer gives us a glimpse into who he really is - no some score-keeping, rule-obsessed* deity ready to whack your hand with a ruler when you misbehave. Rather, Jesus shows us that behind all of these seemingly nit-picky laws in Deuteronomy is a loving God" (Baker et. al 183).

This saccharine little line runs completely opposite to the past seven chapters of Deuteronomy. Exactly adjacent to it is this:

Deuteronomy 7:2 - "When the Lord your God hands these nations [of Canaan] over to you and you conquer them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaties with them and show them no mercy."

Did you even read this thing!? You're going to go on about a loving, ineffable, infallible God, directly across from a section in which he instructs the Israelites to pillage and burn and kill indiscriminately. Commit genocide, effectively. Are you paying attention at all?! Sure, it's great that Jesus is the picture of Aristotelian morality, but you're going to proclaim that on the same page where the Israelites kill thousands of people?! Are you awake in there? How did your copy editors not see this?

___
*Leviticus 10 - Nahab and Abihu, Aaron's sons, use the wrong kind of incense fire on the Tabernacle, and are summarily barbecued.
Numbers 15 - A man was gathering wood on the Sabbath, and so the community brings him before the Tabernacle and asks God what to do with him. God tells them to stone him to death. So they do.
Nope, not nit-picky at all! Ahahahaahah!

Bible Study: Not Understanding Sarcasm

When I first read this line in Deuteronomy, I was certain it was sarcastic, or at the very least hyperbolic. It was intended for emphasis, surely, and not to be taken seriously.

6:8 - "Tie [the ten commandments] to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders."

This was written in a long list of things to do to remember the Ten Commandments, such as telling your children and thinking about them when you're going to bed and getting up in the morning. I figured this was just another way of explaining how important the Ten Commandments are. But they didn't actually tie the Ten Commandments to their heads and foreheads, surely. That would look really silly!

This illustration was actually in my children's Bible.

Have you heard of the pharisees?
I don't know if this is still a practice in Judaism, but I know the pharisees of the Bible did, in fact, put the Ten Commandments on scrolls into little boxes, and tie the boxes to their hands and foreheads.
I don't mean to deride anyone's cultural practices, because, culture, hey, culture is great. In my culture we wear funny things, too.
But, doing this religiously, don't you think you're taking this a bit literally? This seems pretty obviously hyperbolic.

On the other hand, I guess you can't blame them for taking everything God says literally, given his propensity for incinerating people who step out of line in the slightest.
"We're starving and have been wandering in the desert for years!"
*ZAP*
"Why is Moses constantly telling us to do stupid things, like not eat bacon?"
*ZAP*
"Do the sacrificial goat intestines go on the left side of the altar, or the right?"
*ZAP*

Yeah, I guess I can't blame them for their caution.

Bible Study: The Eleventh and Twelfth Commandments

Fun fact: Did you know that in the Bible, the Ten Commandments are never explicitly stated? When Yahweh talks to Moses on Sinai in the desert, he doesn't give him ten discrete commands. He actually gives him a significantly longer list of laws, and the orders we recognize as the Ten Commandments are just mixed in there, with no special prefix. Therefore, it is apparent that when the Ten Commandments list was being created, someone just went through Exodus and decided that they liked these certain laws better than the other ones, completely disregarding the fact that Yahweh presented them all in equal importance.

We call this cherry-picking, kids.

Anyway, I've decided we need to right this historical wrong. Humans shouldn't just be picking what parts of the Word of God they like and which they don't! I propose we add an additional two commandments to the Ten, taken exactly from Scripture Itself. They are:

11. Thou shalt not eat yeast.
Yahweh hates yeast. I'm keeping a running tally, and so far we have about ten instances in which he expressly forbids the use of yeast, punishable by death. Therefore, we should all keep him happy by only eating pita bread.

12. Thou shalt not boil a baby goat in it's mother's milk.
Apparently this was a real problem in its day. It may seem a little archaic, but it's not like there aren't already archaic things in the Ten Commandments. For instance, keeping holy the Sabbath, or not coveting wives (wives are not possessions!), or keeping only one god. What, are you calling Hindus archaic? Way to go. That's so xenophobic.

I now thoroughly expect these to be posted wherever the Ten (now Twelve) Commandments are listed. You know, in churches, in public schools, in courthouses, in municipal buildings... You know.
Of course, if we're going to start taking the Bible literally, we're also going to have to stone everyone to death and start sacrificing animals.

Loki

I doubt anyone has read back this far (no one blames you) but a while ago, I made a post about fire gods and included Loki as one. I don't know if this is painfully obvious at all, but Loki is one of my favorite mythological characters. And with me, mythological characters are my equivalent of superheroes/athletes. Maybe I should make baseball cards or comic books for them.
(Though they already made a comic book out of the Norse stuff. ...it's called Thor.)
Anyway, I watched Thor recently (I'm slow at watching movies. I still haven't seen The Avengers or The Hunger Games or the recent Sherlock episodes). As you may guess from the pantheon, Loki is a character in this movie, and, not shockingly, because trickster gods always have to be the main villains, Loki is the main villain. This in and of itself was fairly distressing because Loki's not really the main villain type. He's sort of a chaotic neutral, bordering on chaotic evil. Oftentimes he's a complete douche bag, but sometimes he works with the Aesir and Odin in a non-murderous way. He's also wicked clever, if not always good at not pissing people off.
In the movie, the writers did manage to get one thing right: he's a bit of a misfit that no one likes. That's about it. In the movie, he's the main villain. He wears a stupid douche bag hat. Instead of disliking him or anything, the other characters just ignore him, which I think removes a lot of potential sympathy for the guy. Then he thinks up a crazy harebrained scheme that involves alienating his friends/family/colleages? and culminates in not working even a little. Then he dangles off of a cliff, which is something villains should really never do, and then proceeds to fall into the void. (You know, I have no idea how they got him back in The Avengers. I should really watch that).

See? Douche bag hat.

Basically, he makes me very sad. Granted, the movie did a few things acceptably. The actor was very good. Loki was Odin's adopted relative, and a frost giant (or something. I forget what it is in mythology). He's kind of a douche bag. But in the end, none of this makes up for the fact that he has a stupid hat, can't plan or manipulate or lie to save his life (all kind of defining trickster god characteristics, in my opinion), and he dangles off of cliffs. NEVER DANGLE OFF OF CLIFFS. What, is it too realistic or complex to have a villain be executed, or imprisoned, or run off? Why must villains always fall off of cliffs?! This is a problem, writers! You need to think of a resolution in which the villain does not fall off of a cliff!

Anyway, done ranting for a while. (At least until I see The Avengers.) And, fortunately, I doubt anyone will make a movie about Lucifer or Prometheus soon (also great mythological characters), so I'm good. There is a movie called Prometheus coming out soon, but I think that's about aliens.

Status Bashing!

It's time for a super special new installment of ... Stupid Status Snarking! Basically, this is a game where I pretend to be a total jerk for my your amusement!


"4 year old - I love you mommy!! 10 year old - OK mom!! 16 year old - My mom is so annoying!! 18 year old - I'm leaving this house...... 25 year old - Mom you were right! ...... 30 year old - I wanna go to my mom's house! 50 years old - I don't wanna lose my mom.... :'( 70 years old - I would give up anything in this world to have my mom with me right now!! <3 <3 xoxo Put this as your status if you appreciate your mom.....A girl ignored it and 365 days later her mom passed away!"


Oh, my granny goodness! A girl ignored it and exactly one year later her mother died?! What a terrible girl, not demonstrating her appreciation for her maternal figure through the passing on of saccharine tripe! It must be the curse of the poorly written, sickeningly trite chain status! If you don't pass on this over-punctuated message, YOUR MOTHER WILL DIE. Better pass it along then! Better to annoy the crap out of all your friends than to risk vague, anecdotal threats from bored Facebook denizens. Thanks.

I also appreciate how it goes from silly stereotypes of pre-adults to fairly dark stuff about not wanting their mom to die and leave them all alone in this dark, cruel world. Someone's having existential pangs...

Let's see, what's next on the list of stupid things people put on Facebook?

"There is no proof that God exists, but there's no proof that he doesn't either."


Sometimes I get fed up with people on my news feed and delete them, but I always feel bad about deleting people for ideological reasons. I mean, I find this silly probability-ignoring agnosticism to be irritating, but I hate to be that jerk that deletes people just because they don't agree with them. 
So, instead, I just lambaste them on my blog, which they'll probably never look at anyway. Win-win!


*rubs hands together* So, do you think that just because you can't prove that something doesn't exist, you should pretend it does? It's one of the flaws of logic that you cannot disprove anything intangible objectively. Anything is technically possible. But just because it's possible, does that mean that we should pretend it is real? You can't prove that unicorns, fairies, or mermaids don't exist. Do you believe in unicorns just because you can't say definitively that they don't exist? Are you agnostic about unicorns? 
If so, that's silly. Unicorns don't exist. There is no reason to assume that unicorns exist, because there is no credible evidence for unicorns. Even though there is a teensy tiny little infinitesimal chance that unicorns exist, the probability of such an event is so small that it is useless to regard it as anything significant. Otherwise, you would have to regard all other events as equally possible, and that would be wildly inhibiting. What if two possibilities are contradictory? What then? Which is right? The way to determine that, would be, of course, by looking for evidence supporting one possibility over another, which is what rational people do anyway.


Oh, and comment of the day: "Faith is believing in something common sense says not to."


You'd think that statement would be a wake-up call. "Hm, faith is contrary to common sense. MAYBE I SHOULD RETHINK THIS." 
You know how they say that common sense isn't actually that common? 
...yup.