The Opinionated Bastard

Awhile back I got on this kick of trying to read the Bible. It would have been slow going, except for this one book:

Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction

That book was really helpful. I remember reading Genesis. For most lackadaisical Sunday-School Christians (i.e. me), it’s all about how God makes up these weird rules, people break them, and then God gets mad.

Lawrence Boadt’s book put it into perspective for me. At the time the Bible was written, the people in that region believed that there had been a flood, and that the region used to be more fertile. There were competing creation myths that went something like “The gods had a party, got drunk, threw up, and that created the earth.”. Not very inspiring, but if you look at the religions at the time, all the gods were really caricatures of humans. When they say you have to quote the Bible in context, the historical context is important too.

So Genesis tells the same story from the Jewish perspective. The message from the whole story about the snake and the apple is actually:

Pretty much, the bad things that happen to you are your own damn fault, so stop blaming the whims of the gods and clean up your act you lazy, shiftless pervert.

The older I get, the more I see this is true. It may not be immediate, the consequences of something I do, but if you go around being an asshole, eventually bad things start happening to you. So that’s message 1, page 1 in the Bible: Stop blaming other people; your problems are your own.

This of course explains why the Jews have done so well throughout history, they don’t whine, not whining is in their religion. It also explains why the Jews and Christians have been kicking Muslim ass for the last thousand years, for some reason Muslims miss this message. Strangely, they end up blaming the Jews instead, but I digress.

Of course most Sunday School Christians don’t get that message either, because in my experience, most Christians don’t actually know anything about Christianity. The Jews are lucky, they have the Talmud where they write down all their questions about the Bible. Though, I don’t actually really know anything about Judaism, I’m just having fun talking through my hat today.

The other thing that made me more of a believer was reading the New International Version, which is a much better translation then the crappy King James one:

Zondervan NIV Study Bible, Personal Size

I remember reading through to the laws about cleanliness and thinking, “Holy shit, they’re talking about the germ theory of disease! When did this get written again? 1400 BC? And us humans didn’t figure that out until 1870? So that’s 3400 years of people dying because they didn’t read this?”

So my new rule is if there’s something in the Bible I don’t understand (like everything from Revelations except the part about stamping people with barcodes), I give God the benefit of the doubt. I mean, after all, 3400 years ago he said “By the way, its a good idea to wash your hands after touching dead things.” No doubt people argued about that too. So maybe that whole “You really shouldn’t sleep around” thing isn’t so bad.

Though come to think of it, that’s kind of my rule for everything; give people the benefit of the doubt, from Walmart to Kerry. I think about half the problems in the world would go away if people would just ask one another more questions instead of assuming the other person is an idiot.

God knows why I’m blogging about this today. Must be dizzy from all the Weight Watchers dieting.