God's opinion on racism

12:1 And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian
woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.

and here's what God sez

12:7 My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house.

12:8 With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in
dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold:
wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?
12:9 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them; and he
departed.

12:10 And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold,
Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam,
and, behold, she was leprous.

White as snow

Hey, look at that! White Power! Too bad there isn't a God that would give all the racists leprosy. That would rule.

Ohwell. At least I can cite this section to them.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that right-wingers haven't ever read the book the claim to revere.

Learned a little something

One point of ire for me in dealing with religious people is this whole 'un(dis)provable' notion of a 'reward after death'. To me, it seems idiotic. I mean, live happy, enjoy your life, and unless theres a God and he happens to be a total flaming dick, the after life will take care of itself (Or, much more likely, it doesn't exist but people can't generally cope with the idea that they'll be dead)

But I see now in reading the bible that they're taught again and again to wait. God is apparently a master in procrastination. When God says he's going to give you some gift, he doesn't mean now, or even tomorrow or next week. He's talking about like 50 years from now. So the timespans of events in the bible serve two purposes. 1) Makes it sound more dramatic and epic. 2) Conditions people to wait for miracles, so they'll do what you say for the maximum amount of time. Pretty clever device actually.

Also, a word on this 'seven days' stuff. I was reading some native american folklore this evening and the editor mentioned that the Penobchot stories had been heavily revised due to their 4 centuries of contact with western religions. Anyhow, the '7 days' bit came into the story as a religious element and I wondered if this was a western cultural influence. I imagine it probably is, but I also considered the idea that possibly this is common to many religions. The length of the lunar cycle is roughly 28 days, the gestation time for many plants is about 14 days, and it's an easy way to keep track of time when you say it 'When the moon is 1/2 full, it will be time' instead of 'Seven days from now.'

Interesting stuff. Also the obvious western influences (for instance, their enemies riding on horseback) so I'm sure the writer wasn't completely crackers in saying that the stories may have been altered from what they might have been 2 generations prior.


Anyhow. falling asleep. Nightnight.

The important bit.

In Deuteronomy, I find something that makes judism different from what I know of other religions of the time. It's really the important bit.


4:27 And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be
left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you.

4:28 And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and
stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.

4:29 But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt
find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul.

4:30 When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon
thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and
shalt be obedient unto his voice;

4:31 (For the LORD thy God is a
merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor
forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

Most of the other religions of the time, as far as I know, the Gods would say something along the lines of "If you go beyond such and such, I shall no longer be able to protect you."

But this religion is saying, if you keep believing in your God, even if you're in some foreign land or lorded over by someone else, that he'll continue to protect you. Things might not be fantastic, but you won't perish.

This really gets at the core of why judism is still around. No promises of huge gifts, just survival, but for the common person, who was toiling away in rotten conditions, even survival was a pretty huge promise, but it was one people could believe in as long as they were alive.

These few passages, in my opinion, get at the core of why this religion is still around.

Mmmm. Roadkill!

Remind me never to shop at a kosher meat market.

Deut 14:21 Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt
give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or
thou mayest sell it unto an alien: for thou art an holy people unto
the LORD thy God.

Niiice!

On social security

Aw crap! Another one where God spends pages and pages saying 'Don't be a Republican'

Deut 15:11 For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I
command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy
brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.

That's the most to the point bit of it, but there are a dozen paragraphs around it that restate it in other ways.


I wish there were some way I could force a right-winger to write down their version of the bible without looking stuff up just to see what exactly it is they are reading because it sure isn't this book.

It puts the lotion on its skin

There have been a lot of passages where God tells the hebrew that it's fine to enslave and rape people who don't worship as they do, but this set really hit me uncomfortably. It's a bit too vivid, a bit too horrifying.

21:10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD
thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them
captive,

21:11 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and
hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife;

21:12
Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her
head, and pare her nails;

21:13 And she shall put the raiment of her
captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail
her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go
in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

21:14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt
let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for
money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast
humbled her.



Take her, strip her of her identity, lock her away for a month, then rape her, when she's weak, lost, alone, dehumanized. If she still has spirit and you don't like it, tell her she can go free as a raped, famililess beggar because even selling her into slavery would give her some sense of purpose, some feeling that she has a place to be. Utterly destroy this woman for that is the word of the lord.

This set of passages, describes almost verbatim how to inflict the greatest possible level of psychological abuse on a victim. Yeah, she's probably going to stay with you and serve you because you've so utterly destroyed who she is that she becomes dependent on you. You sick fucking twisted shitbags.

Stuff like this is why I have nothing but contempt for religion.

Needs more fringe!

Oooh. Here's the line in deuteronomy about transvestites.

22:5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man,
neither shall a man put on a woman's garment.

Of course, a few lines later, it also says:

22:11 Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse sorts, as of woollen and
linen together.

22:12 Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy
vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself.

Oh snap. Tee-shirts are just as bad as crossdressing.

MoreDeuteronomy

Section 27:15 through 27:26 contains a list of reasons people are 'cursed'. Includes incest and beastiality but notably absent is homosexuality. Hmm.

Error, packet resend and version control

You know, I think I'm able to read the bible much faster than most people because I'm a computer nerd.

Seriously. This thing reads like a raw datastream with a lot of packet resends. There's a little bit of new text as it progresses and then there's a chunk that you just red 10 lines ago or in the previous book. It's some seriously glitched up data.

I'm looking at it as a stream because it is a linear progression with a bunch of packet repeats.

However, the other possible way to look at it is as the edit file of a document under revision control.

As the story was written, someone went back and changed a part of something already existing, and then maybe they liked it and kept the original wording or maybe they changed the wording or maybe they just did a cut and paste of a section and changed some names.

It would be an interesting project to re-assemble the bible this way. Start at the front and every time there's something that's repeated, edit the earlier bit of text to reflect the current passage, and instead of recapping whatever was said, when God says, "remember, I did blah blah blah', change it to, 'See Also:' and a link to the parable location in the preceeding text.

It would make the whole document much more readable and you could check the revision history on any passage if you wanted to see the other variations of it. It would also cut the linear reading time of the book by probably 70%.

I'm sure someone has already probably done this decades or even centuries ago. A condensed and less redundant version likely as not has to exist. The advantage of a version under version control would be that you wouldn't have to take any one interpretation of a single passage. If it interested you, you could look at the history for all the variants of it.

Storing them chronologically with the latest one being the 'primary' definition makes the most sense to me, but you could argue a variety of sort orders.

Aw. Poor baby!

Judges
9:53 And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's
head, and all to brake his skull.

9:54 Then he called hastily unto the young man his armourbearer, and
said unto him, Draw thy sword, and slay me, that men say not of me, A
women slew him. And his young man thrust him through, and he died.

Poor widdle man.

This is a good example of it, but it runs all through the bible. If there's one thing these men fear more than God, it's the idea of women being powerful. It just scares the shit out of them. From the garden of Eden on, women are consistently played as stupid, wicked, selfish, petty, childish, and evil. What is it they're so afraid of?