What Kind of Book Would Your Bible Be...If You Were God?

Would it be one that needs a warning label to protect children and adolescents from the depravity of its content, and to warn adults of its irreconcilable absurdities?

Look closely: if you were god and you decided to reveal yourself, your rules and ideas and your wishes to mankind for all the ages in one grand, inimitable and perfect medium, a book to be the guiding light, the single ultimate source, the one literary moral, ethical, spiritual beacon that humanity could always trust and look to and could never pervert, mis-translate, mis-interpret or edit...

...would it be, of all possible choices, the Bible?

If it would be, you haven't read the thing. If you've read it and studied it and you actually think that's the best Almighty God can do, you're either blissfully self-deluded, a Catholic nun, a tinhorn evangelist or - scariest of all - an academic theologian. If you think that the Bible is unique in its wisdom and astonishing in its profundity, you haven't read very many books, have you? (The collected works of just one 16th Century English writer -- William Shakespeare -- rival the Old Testament in more ways than you realize. Also, by sheer volume, not to mention a sharper wisdom, the Buddhist canon --all the teachings of Buddha and his close contemporaries -- stack up to several dozen bibles.) I could go on and on, kids.

Okay, enough my-holy-book-can-beat-up-your-holy-book...

Following is the warning label that, if you were God, I bet you'd want stuck to every Bible cover...knowing what was in it:

WARNING: YOU MUST BE 18 YEARS OF AGE TO PURCHASE. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO DISCERN REALITY FROM FANTASY TO READ.

This book contains references to -- and often graphic descriptions of -- the following acts and concepts: polygamy, adultery, seduction, fornication, masturbation, prostitution, pedophilia, ritual male genital mutilation, castration, violent abortion, homosexuality, bestiality, rape, gang rape, incest, teen pregnancy; cannibalism; murder, mass murder, genocide; war, total war; Satanism, demonic possession, ghosts, witchcraft, ritual symbolic vampirism/cannibalism, torture, crucifixion, disembowelment, suicide; ritual human and animal sacrifice; reanimated corpses; slavery; nudity, lasciviousness, pornography, drunkeness, voyeurism, blasphemy, bribery, corruption, disease and pestilence, insanity, shit eating, piss drinking, existential abandonment, hopelessness, helplessness, armageddon, eternal ferocious hell, a talking donkey, a talking snake, and kids-making-fun-of-a-bald-guy-who-then-cursed-them-in-the-name-of-the-lord-and-got-his-revenge-when-two-bears-appeared-and-tore-apart-the-42- children. Amen...

Or maybe the warning label should simply quote the following, from one of America's greatest early writers and thinkers:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

-- from The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, American Founding Father

Would You Want People To Prosper, Be Wealthy...If You Were Jesus?

Here are Jesus' most famous quotes on the wealthy:

“Blessed are the poor…the hungry… But woe to you who are rich…well-fed…”

“How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!”

“[to follow me]…sell your possessions and give to the poor…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

Would You Confuse Your Children...If You Were God?

Well you might, if the interplay between Immortal Parent and mortal children were a great chess game to you. If you were like Zeus, King of the Greek gods, watching the human anthill below Olympus, it just might be interesting to confuse those two-legged ants now and again, see what might happen, teach them a lesson or two.

But would you, as a loving Almighty God, confuse an already confused race?

See, once upon a time - the Book of Genesis claims - humans had only one language. Then, in an area we now call Iraq, a collection of these humans got real proud and architecturally clever and they decided to build a great city with a tower that would reach to the heavens. This remarkable and grand human endeavor seemed to threaten the Bible God though. So here's what that God did to all humans because of the actions of a few very good builders:

"If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel — because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world.

So the ability to communicate, to understand each other, was bad?

This is another prime example of how the Bible reduces God to a petty, insecure, not-too-bright deity: so inscient that he thinks nothing will be impossible to humans, and that confusing their language will prevent them from such haughty endeavors; so insecure that he feels challenged by these two-legged ants trying to raise their anthill a few feet...

Genesis minimizes God to the level of Zeus, just an average ant diety.

Now, if going to the trouble of confusing language, why did the omniscient God of the Old Testament do such a half-assed job? He seems not to have realized that scattering people would still leave them with remnants of a common core language -- which is why it's easy to trace the English word "God" to the German "Gott" which came from way-back Proto-European "ghut" and so on. He also seems not to have forseen that it would take about half a minute for, say, Genghis Khan, Ramses II, Geronimo and Abe Lincoln meeting and pointing at a rock, and saying their respective words for the object, to understand and start translating their confused languages.

Get it? Verstehen sie? Usted entiende? Okay, enough of the Tower of Babel. Where else does God confuse things?

He gave Moses two conflicting versions of The Ten Commandments; that's confusing.

One commandment says, Thou Shalt Not Kill, yet God repeatedly sanctions killing; that's confusing.

Instead of one ultimate pristine beyond-question true version of The Bible there have been hundreds, often contradicting each other. To this day, the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have at least a dozen more books than any Protestant bibles; that's confusing

Jesus taught to honor your parents, and to hate them; that's confusing.

Et cetera and so on. This is getting tedious, kids.

Would You Judge People Guilty for Breaking Unknown Laws...If You Were God?

You would? Moses did, and he blamed it on God’s orders. His “guilt offering”. Look closely:

‘The LORD said to Moses: "When a person commits a violation and sins unintentionally…he is to bring to the LORD as a penalty a ram from the flock, one without defect and of the proper value in silver….He must make restitution…and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him with the ram as a guilt offering, and he will be forgiven.’
"If a person sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD's commands, even though he does not know it, he is guilty and will be held responsible. He is to bring to the priest as a guilt offering a ram… the priest will make atonement for him...and he will be forgiven. “

So, if you sin unintentionally, or do what’s forbidden without knowing what’s forbidden, you’re guilty and held responsible. In Moses’ day though you simply bought your forgiveness, paying a priest with one of your male sheep.

Bummer for those unintentional violators and ignorant scofflaws who accidentally wove two kinds of thread together or who - in their hunger - ate some shrimp. Off to the Priest; but what if they were too poor or too old or too crippled or too mentally deficient to have a ram to pay with? And just for instance, wouldn’t it be impossible for a blind and deaf man to a)understand the laws and b) pay restitution?

Since Moses decreed over 600 laws, and since books didn’t exist in his time, were all Israelites – and Christians and Jews today – supposed to memorize every law? Or rely on what the priests told them? How could one not be unaware, not do something forbidden? Try this: Open your word processor and try to list 600 laws that apply to you. I’m kidding. Try to list 50, and their punishments. I’m not kidding.

Ignorance of God’s laws is no excuse, The Bible warns us. As if life weren’t hard enough, with us puny humans barely able to abide by laws we’re aware of and can understand.

Now true believers will scramble to point out, “Moses’ laws were way back then. God’s not nearly so strict now.”

Ah yes, The New Covenant they call it. (Saul-Paul of Tarsus expounded upon this, said you can skip the ol’ timey sacrificial, ceremonial and dietary laws now that Jesus was here). Whew, that’s a relief. I’m in my cotton/polyester blend, eating shrimp as I type, and I’ve broken some of The Ten Commandments in my time. And I’m all out of prime rams to sacrifice.

But wanna bet with Paul against God that the Old Testament laws have changed? Rationalize these as you look ‘em up:

“…all your righteous laws are eternal…” - Psalms

“I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” - Jesus

“Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the LORD your God that I give you.” – God

Could You Be Wrong...If You Were Jesus?

If you could, on what topics might you be wrong? For insight, let's look at what the prolific writer and atheist-turned-Protestant C.S. Lewis wrote on the idea. (Lewis is renowned as a champion of "logical Christianity" [as opposed to Christianity by faith, which Jesus of Nazareth taught]. He's also widely idealized and quoted by American conservative evangelical Protestants, a practice as intellectually rigorous as Scientologists quoting L. Ron Hubbard.)

C.S. Lewis said Jesus was wrong. Check it out in The World's Last Night and Other Essays - 1960:

`Say what you like' we shall be told, `the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, this generation shall not pass till all these things be done. And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else.' It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. …The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side. …The facts, then, are these: that Jesus professed himself (in some sense) ignorant, and within a moment showed that he really was so.

Jesus was in error, he was ignorant...? How many "theologians" have been so brave to correct their deity. Of course it begs the following logical question: If, as Lewis judged, Jesus was wrong on one item, of what else was He in error? The Trinity, the Kingdom of Heaven, God, salvation, the soul, loving ones enemies, His own divinity?

If you were Jesus, could you have been ignorant, in error?

Would You Tell People Your Second Coming Would Be In Less Than 100 Years...If You Were Jesus?

That's what he indicated, and he didn't return...did he? Find these passages in your inerrant Bible:

“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."

"I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes."

“What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?" (the disciples asked.) Jesus answered with a lengthy sermon, the summation of which was: “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

In addition, over 1900 years ago, St. John wrote:, “Children, it is the last hour..." St. James wrote, "...be patient and stand firm, for the Lord's coming is near." St. Paul wrote, "...Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air..." (referring to his being alive when Jesus returned.)

If you were Jesus, would you have promised your return so inaccurately? See the next post (Jesus 4) for a bit more insight.

Would You Ever Resort to Violence...If You Were Jesus?

“ [Jesus] made a scourge of cords (whip), and drove [the money changers] all out of the temple, with the sheep and the oxen; and He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.” (John 2:15)

Here The Bible accuses Jesus of being little more than a vandal, a pissed-off wild-eyed rabbi abusing animals and scoundrels. Would you do that, if you were Jesus and possessed supernatural power? You'd lower yourself to whip men and innocent animals?

Or would you perhaps perform a simple but profound miracle, equal in simplicity and effect to changing water into wine. Say, changing coins into bread, a lesson to the crass godless money changers. Whip them, they'll curse you and keep on gouging the rubes; convince them, and they'll praise you and change their ways, yes?

Think on the context and possible outcomes, kids. See if you wouldn't make more of an impact...if you were Jesus.