God Loves Snakes More Than You
We all know the story of the Garden of Eden: God creates stuff, god forbids stuff, the snake tricks Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve go to college to learn how to sew and make clothing from fig trees, God punishes them and the snake.
There are a number of things I find cute about the first few chapters of Genesis, but I want to point out two here. First, the Bible says that the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals. Second, after the whole big to-do, God tells the serpent that his offspring will be forced to crawl on the ground.
That’s it!
The snake is pretty much responsible for every single act of pain and suffering in the world since then, and all he has to do is slither around on his belly. Humans? In addition to horrible diseases, warfare, tsunamis, etc, they also get to go to Hell. Sounds like God and the serpent had a little side thing going on….
But I digress. What I wanted to say was that it’s funny that all of snakedom was punished because one snake decides to get all uppity and overthrow everything that God slaved away on. You think that A) God could have created dumber snakes, or B) more intelligent humans. Or, for that matter, he could have avoided the whole debacle by you know…NOT putting a Tree of Knowledge in the garden. Nevermind that he imagined light and magically made stuff appear out of nowhere: throw in a snake with an IQ of 85 and everything falls to pieces. I can see God now: “Oh noes!!1! How could I forget about the cunning snake? All my plans, ruined! If only I could see the future, nothing like this would have happened! Oh…what a world!”
Note that the Bible does not say that the devil tempted Eve. It’s clearly a smart (talking!) animal acting of its own volition. By the way, who taught the snake about good and evil?
One final thing: why punish every serpent for this one serpent’s crimes? Probably because the big G-O-D seems to like punishing everyone and everything when a couple of people make mistakes. Adam and Eve eat from a forbidden tree? Why not give some little African kid AIDS and then let the vultures eat his carcass when his mom starves to death? We should probably hack off his father’s arms when a roving militia comes into town too! A bunch of adults turn away from God? Why not drown everyone on earth, including newborn babies and animals in the Great Flood? A pharaoh starts acting like a jerk to Moses? Hmmmm…let’s see…what’s a good punishment? I know! How about killing all the innocent firstborn children? After that, we can give everyone else boils. Nevermind that it’s one guy being a dick; we’ll let everyone starve and suffer horrible pain. Hooray!
Or, how about this chestnut: a king hears that a messiah was born. Why not let him slaughter all the innocent male children in Bethlehem? That should make everyone happy!
I guess what I’m trying to say is, Go Team God! You’re super awesome!
