I've got a new website up with material from my book: MP3 files to listen to or download (embedded YouTube videos have half-baked, value-added "visualizations" as well).
Yes, there are contradictory Bible passages. But some of the words must be beyond dispute. How else could the book be considered holy?
The Ten Commandments are revered by many believers. From the get-go they were set in stone, literally (so the story goes). There shouldn't be other passages that clash with these. Right? Well.... Discounting the creative rationalizations of those who wish otherwise, Gawd* definitely flip-flops on his own commandments.
1. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.
John 10:30 (New International Version) reads, No one comes to the Father except through me.
Jesus says these words, in essence, putting himself before "the Father." To Christians, there is nothing wrong with this, for Jesus is their god. (Which means Jesus said the equivalent of, "No one comes to me except through me."...Alrighty then.) But the Old Testament was written by Israelites for Israelites, and they didn't and don't recognize the divinity of Jesus.
Can you see the problem? In a profound way the deity of the New Testament revises the alleged flawless words (Proverbs 10:30) of the Old Testament Gawd.
2. Thou shalt not make idols in the form of anything above or below, nor bow down to them.
The ancient Israelites' gold-plated "mercy seat" -- built to their god's specifications (Exodus 25) as an integral part of the Ark of the Covenant -- is supported by two cherubs. Fat, winged babies. Also plated in gold. Gawd first instructed his people not to make idols, then tells them that he'd like a couple for his seat. Okay, so you could argue that the wings fly these cherubim out of the realm of "anything above or below." Or how's this rationalization: hybrids can't be idols.
3. Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain.
As far as I know, this commandment passes the consistency test. But I could be wrong.
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
In several places Jesus himself violates this one (Matthew 12:1; Luke 6:7; John 9:14). In fact, he just about outright pulls the plug on it by preaching, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).
5. Honor your father and mother.
Here's more of what Jesus taught: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26).
Ouch.
6. Thou shalt not kill.
Following on the heels of the ten commandments, we find this law: Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death (Exodus 21:17).
In much of the Old Testament, Gawd is a zealous army general, leading his troops to bloody victory after bloody victory. Which involved killing.
Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.'"(Exodus 32:27)
So the LORD our God also gave into our hands Og king of Bashan and all his army. We struck them down, leaving no survivors. . . . We completely destroyed them, as we had done with Sihon king of Heshbon, destroying every city-men, women and children. But all the livestock and the plunder from their cities we carried off for ourselves. (Deuteronomy 3:3-7)
Ad infinitum (nearly).
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
King David is one of the great heroes of the Bible--an exemplar of Gawd's chosen folk. Here's a little story about his exploits from 2 Samuel 11: 2-4 . . .
One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her.
Nowhere in the Bible does God advise ordinary folk (peasants) to "hook up" with the spouses of other Israelites. But in a number of places he does give the green light to his troops to take on more wives as part of the spoils of war. (E.g. Numbers 31:17-18, Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.)
8. Thou shall not steal.
Exodus 3:22 reads, And so you will plunder the Egyptians. In well over a dozen other places in the Bible, Gawd encourages the plundering of thine enemies.
Here's part of the Encarta Dictionary definition of plunder: "to rob a place or the people living there or steal goods."
9.You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
Hmm. I can't recall any verses that contradict this one. The Bible is now batting 2 for 9. In terms of baseball statistics, that's not horrible. But we're not talking baseball.
And finally, 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, or thy neighbor's wife.
What did King David do in the above passage but covet a neighbor's wife?
David's story ends on a happy note, however. The Israelite King arranges for the husband of his infatuation to be killed in battle. So the good guy gets the girl in the end, minus her ball-and-chain.
The great David, a polygamist, also enjoyed the "services" of his concubines. But that was David. As for you, you shalt keep thy mind and body pure.
Why? Because "God" says so. Look it up. It's in the Bible. Kind of.
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*I use "Gawd" rather "God" because I think the latter is a bogus term and do not want to reinforce to it's legitimacy, even by arguing against it.
Then the LORD said to Moses, "I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions"....However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them. (Exodus 16:4,20, New International Version)
That was no Wonder Bread the Lord rained from heaven. After one day it bred maggots and stank. Seems the Lord delivered to earth an inferior product. I'd like to know whom he commands to operate the Cloud Nine Bakery. God is certainly too busy and important to personally work the ovens. Why not Satan? Put the storefront on Divinity Drive, the factory on Hell Alley. All Satan needs is some bricks and a wooden paddle. Ta da! This might explain the maggots and the stink. Satan spat in the dough.
I'd love to write a Bible. Andrew's Big Book O' Mythology. Here's what I'd need: 1. a force or forces of Good (to promote and provide what I value); 2. a force or forces of Bad (to endanger what I value and/or to illustrate and advance what I don't); 3. a code of honor/conduct for the Good to follow, despite opposition; 4. heinous misconduct (or a really scary costume) on the part of the forces of Bad; and 5. a holy grail, whether it be justice, trails end, a bodacious babe, or, better yet, all three, which, when attained, would result in the playing of a victorious orchestral score as the scene fades to white.
Wait a minute. I just described a your average Hollywood script. And Hollywood, according to fundamentalists, is not holy, but evil. Why? Because of the graphic violence, the sex, and the perversion in the movies it produces. The Bible, on the other hand, is squeaky-clean, good family reading. Right?
You be the judge:
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us--he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.
Friday the 13th Sabbath, or Psalms 137:8,9?
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.
Debby Does Damascus, or Ezekiel 23:20,21?
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Brokeback Mount of Olives or Romans 1:26,27?
Bambi the Bible ain't. Wholesome family reading? Not if you read it all.
Religions are very big book clubs. The books are big, as are the clubs. The primary difference between them and the small groups meeting at Barnes and Noble is that the religious groups stick to the same book week after week, month after month, year after year. It's a shame they don't broaden their horizons and move on. Another difference is that the church coffee isn't as good.
What the big book clubs and the smaller book clubs have in common is that many who attend the meetings haven't gotten around to actually reading the book. At least not all of it. They form their opinion from select passages or listen to what others have to say, and then agree or disagree with that.
The Bible is a very big book, and, like most works of fiction, its message can be interpreted a number of ways. Hence the need for many different groups of readers/believers.
Does god demand that we be circumcised or baptized? It depends on which group you belong to. Was it the Jews who killed Jesus, or Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick? Scratch that. Was it the Jews who killed Jesus (a.k.a., the son of god, god himself, and the secret 5th member of the Beatles) or is no one to blame but God's own plan, thus the whole event was an act of spiritual suicide? Scratch that, too. As you can see, I belong to no group that has formed one interpretation of the Bible and placed it on a pedestal.
After having recently read the Bible page-by-page, cover-to-cover, twice (different versions), I have come to see it as an interesting anthropological document. Call it the fictionalized history of a changing group of people. For me, the Bible has no scientific and little to no moral value. Approached as a cultural artifact, on the other hand, the Bible has quite a bit of value. It can tell us a lot about ancient civilizations and their concerns, needs, customs, and beliefs.
Consider these lines:
We are the chosen - my friends
And we'll keep on fighting - till the end -
We are the chosen - We are the chosen
No time for losers
'Cause we are the chosen -- of the world . . .
The above words are not from 2 Kings 1:10. That passage reads,
Elijah answered the captain, "If I am a man of God, may fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men!" Then fire fell from heaven and consumed the captain and his men (New International Version).
The five "We are" lines indented above are actually from Queen circa 1977, from their "News of the World" album. Except I changed "champions" to "chosen." Still works, I think.
I was never a Queen fan, but that is a pretty darn good song. I'm also not much of a Bible fan -- in terms of finding value in it as a poetic-slash-inspirational book. As a whole, I believe that Biblical wisdom and morality is less than worthless. Beyond the pervasive, battle-happy xenophobia, the sexism, the anthropocentrism, the glut of mixed messages, the book just doesn't move me. I'd rather spend my Sunday mornings reading items from Bartlett's Quotations. Or going bird-watching.
Speaking of bird-watching, I certainly have activities in my life that, were I to go loose with language, could be called spiritual. Making excursions in nature and becoming surrounded by the amazing complexity, beauty, and even brutality of the wild pulls me out of myself. When bird-watching, I feel I glimpse a bigger picture.
Where my experience differs from those who spend Sunday mornings in church re-reading their favorite book, I think, is that I come away from my activity with the perception that humans play no central role in creation. We are part of it, sure, but not the most important part, as almost all religions assert.
By the way, the Bible god is not what you would consider a bird-watcher. Sure, he allegedly knows when every sparrow falls. In Genesis (King James Version) he refers to birds as "those things that flyeth." The Bible god's taxonomy is impressively simple, but incorrect. Elsewhere in the Bible he recommends the sacrifice of doves and partridges as recompense for sins. This is a case of two wrongs not adding up to anything. Nowhere in the Bible will you find information on the yellow-breasted warbler, the blue-gray gnatcatcher, or the red-headed woodpecker. Instead, it's all about people, people, people.
Doesn't good literature, in general, tend to expand our horizons, to show us something new? What does reading and re-reading the Bible accomplish?
I wonder.
There is an historical claim in the New Testament that is such a whopper it deserves to be better known. While there are a number of historical claims in the Bible that seem correct-ish, with some form of evidence supporting them -- such as one nation invading another -- there are others claims that lack extra-Biblical support. Numero uno would be the cornerstone story of the Jewish religion. Scholars don't know for certain whether ancient Hebrews were, in fact, enslaved in Egypt (or Greenland, for that matter).
As for Jesus, he lived hundreds of years later, in a time and a place in which elaborate records were kept. If anything, the Roman Empire was one of the world's great bureaucracies. So I think it is reasonable to conclude the following story is fiction of the whole cloth variety:
Matthew 2:16, New International Version, reads,
When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under.
Is there any evidence, beyond verses in Matthew, that ALL the male infants in the Bethlehem area were snuffed per order of Herod's command? No. Not even Mark, Luke, or John repeat this tale. That there is no record for an enormously significant event outside the Bible is suspicious in the very least. The rational verdict: It never happened.
On the theme of errata in the New Testament, one commonly pointed out is the parable of the mustard seed. Pointing it out is more on the level of nit-picking, but I find it interesting just the same.
Though it [the mustard seed] is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches." (Matthew 13:32)
If the Bible god is omniscient, there sure are a lot of errors in his book. The mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds. But wait. "The Bible," as quoted above, says "the smallest of your" seeds. So the Bible god didn't screw up.
This verse is a good example of two things. One, there is really no such thing as "the Bible." As in, "It's true because I read it in the Bible." There are Bibles. And they are different. Second, translators continue to change the Bible to make it more acceptable to today's more educated minds.
Here is how other versions of "the" Bible translate the same verse about the mustard seed:
New American Standard Bible: and this is smaller than all other seeds.
Amplified Bible: Of all the seeds it is the smallest.
King James Version: Which indeed is the least of all seeds.
American Standard Version: Which indeed is less than all seeds.
English Standard Version: It is the smallest of all seeds.
Contemporary English Version: Although it is the smallest of all seeds.
Not much difference there. It seems the New International Version engaged in some trickery by inserting that single word, "your."
That said, the creative translation award must go to the Message Bible. It words the very same passage this way:
God's kingdom is like a pine nut that a farmer plants. It is quite small as seeds go, but in the course of years it grows into a huge pine tree.
Mustard seed to pine nut. Wow. The Bible is evolving in remarkable ways.
Here are three, other Biblical errata in newer part of a god's allegedly error-less book:
1) "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." (Matthew 16:28)
The spin of apologists notwithstanding, this verse claims that Jesus will re-enter stage right (i.e., ye olde second coming) in the lifetime of some of his contemporaries. Other verses make the same claim (Matthew 24:34, Luke 21:32). Did it happen. No.
2) Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." (Matthew 21:21-22)
This passage does not say, "If you believe you will be blessed . . . somehow or other." No, that would be tougher to rubberstamp "denied." For a person could be blessed in his or her heart. But whether or not believers receive whatever they ask for in prayer can be tested. And by any semi-stringent measure, the Bible god fails to deliver time and again. The claim is false.
3) Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS. (Matthew 27:37)
Although the New Testament writers tried to place the blame for the crucifixion of their hero on the head of the Jews, anyone familiar with the ways and means of the Roman Empire during Jesus' days knows this: If the preceding stories in the New Testament narratives are remotely accurate, Jesus would have been found guilty of sedition/treason against Rome. The Roman's took social order and their hierarchy extremely seriously. But they did allow the Jews their own leaders.
Sure, "the King of the Jews" thing is more dramatic. But likely of the fictional sort. A fudge used to make the story more provocative. The story. One with very little fact to stand upon. And yet people continue to claim it contains the holy truth.
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