God’s Gheyer than an 80s Musical
I’ve been on a tear lately with respect to how “obvious” it is that the Bible was written by man. At every turn god is inefficient with his actions, forgetful, angry, grudge-holding, drawn out, and just all-around a great showman. I realize that if he exists, god can pretty much act however he wishes. It just seems that, time and time again, the god of the Bible acts exactly like a petty human would, and not how I imagine a rational, all-powerful being would.
For example, take the story of Moses. Rather than just change Pharaoh’s mind and set all the Israelites free, god embarks on a long, drawn-out story arc involving a kid in a basket, a prophet with magical powers, plagues of frogs, unadulterated murder of innocent firstborns, parting seas, burning bushes, and so on. It’s as if Andrew Lloyd Webber were sitting around his apartment one day with too much synthesizer music on his hands and decided to write a stage production involving lasers and smoke. Why a burning bush rather than just talking to Moses in his head? Why part the sea rather than just kill all of the Egyptians with a wave of the hand? Why float Moses down the river in a freaking basket rather than oh, I don’t know, just let his mom walk him over to Pharaoh’s house?
Or, how about Noah? Rather than just snap his fingers to wipe out mankind and be done with the whole sordid affair, god cooks up a convoluted plan involving floods, a boat too impossibly small to hold all the animals, 40 days of rain, drowning every last man, woman, and child (and dinosaur!), a dove, a rainbow, and so on. It is unfathomable that a rational, all-powerful being should go to such lengths to teach mankind a lesson, and then to actually instruct his human scribe to write down that the rainbow is a reminder to himself, as if he would somehow forget! I wonder if he forgets to send Christmas cards to his ugly kids from his first marriage?
Why say we have free will and command us to choose god, only to let a malicious evil spirit run around and tempt us surreptitiously? Why say we have free will, but handicap us from the start with original sin (the default state of which is hell)? Why create animals with camouflage and organs for killing when there is no death or hunting in the garden of Eden? Why give Adam and Eve a urethra (we know this because they were ashamed of their nudity) and not just allow them to exist without the need for food? Why create billions of stars and planets that mankind will never see, even with telescopes?
Lest I drone on and on about what a good playwright the big G-O-D is, let me just say that the Bible itself is the biggest farce of them all. Why record, over the course of several thousand pages, the convoluted and most banal occurrences of a few hundred insignificant humans? Why not just imprint the most salient points inside each human’s mind, or perhaps save us all the boring filler and just have a page listing the don’ts? Why not just create us like the angels, instead of throwing horrible physical tests at us, not to mention torture, starvation, burning, and so on? You can almost see a little Jewish priest sitting around a campfire, making stuff up, thinking of ways to show how cool he is because he’s good friends with Yahweh.
The fact that the most important testament that the universe has ever seen was written in languages unknown to 95% of the word’s population, or that it was not physically present in geography where 95% of the world’s historical population has lived, demonstrates that it is at best irrelevant to human existence.
I realize that I’m arguing from an irrational position (”IF god, THEN anything” is the simple refutation to my position), but the religions of the world are so needlessly complex that even the best soap operas can’t touch them for worthless story line and non-nonsensical filler. To take the religious tomes at face value would imply that god is highly inefficient where he could be efficient, painfully murderous where he could painlessly snap people out of existence, and incredibly unimaginative. “Hi, I’m God, creator of the universe. I’ll create everything and then let it all unravel because a talking snake is too smart for me. Oh no!” Bloody hell. If the true god is really this incompetent and dramatic, we’d be better off with a junior high school girl in charge. Sure, they’ve about as much drama as god is, but at least they won’t murder your children every time a king pisses them off.
