Let’s see what Chapter 5 has in store for us.

1 – This [is] the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;
2 – Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
3 – And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat [a son] in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:
4 – And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:
5 – And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.
6 – And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:
7 – And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:
8 – And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.
9 – And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:
10 – And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:
11– And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.
12 – And Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel:
13 – And Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years, and begat sons and daughters:
14 – And all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and he died.
15 – And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared:
16 – And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters:
17 – And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.
18 – And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch:
19 – And Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:
20 – And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.
21 – And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:
22 – And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:
23 – And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:
24 – And Enoch walked with God: and he [was] not; for God took him.
25 – And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech:
26 – And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:
27 – And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.
28 – And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son:
29 – And he called his name Noah, saying, This [same] shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the groun+d which the LORD hath cursed.
30 – And Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and daughters:
31 – And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died.
32 – And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

To be frank, there’s not an enormous amount to say about the 1500-year swath this chapter cuts through the history of a world that’s only, if its adherents are to be believed, only 6000 years old. We see the delayed sex lives of a number of old men who live far beyond what we could reasonably assume would be possible, with no reason given, and their beneficiaries of primogeniture. There is only one reference to women at all, and they are subsumed under that name “Adam,” diminishing their already vapid importance to the narrative so far.

We get to see Noah and his three sons, and my guess is that we hear more about them in some nautical tale yet to come, but we can only move on to determine for certain.

(Scripture source: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-5/)

Continuing on from where I left off before an extensive and unplanned hiatus, there’s Chapter 4 of Genesis waiting to be tackled to the ground and torn apart in the search for any truth within its words. I have my doubts about finding any veracity here, but I’m driven by duty and purpose to figure this out from an unbiased perspective in pursuance of my dream of a perfect, educated world. Hah!

1 – And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
2 – And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
3 –And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
4 – And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5 – But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

Sigh. Well, I work with what I have. Adam and Eve begin simply after their overly-ceremonious ejection from the Garden, with Adam carnally knowing his wife and her bearing two sons. Abel keeps sheep, and Cain sows and reaps from the earth. I’d say that this is a rather intuitive distribution of labor, knowing as I do that a healthy diet is a balanced diet. But God seems to think otherwise, as when the brothers offer the fruits of their labor up to him, he accepts Abel’s and rejects Cain’s outright. Well, this is hardly a surprise: Abel’s role as a shepherd clearly appeases the Lord with its imitative flattery. Surely Cain could do better, but I’m guessing he was mindful not to cross the line into blasphemy by raising his own human flock. Not that there were any other humans on the planet, excepting Mom and Dad…right?

Whatever the case, God shows favoritism to Abel and indifference to Cain, and since everyone in the story thus far has the self-esteem level of an obese and acne-riddled adolescent, Cain is unsurprisingly disconsolate over this.

6 – And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?
7 – If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee [shall be] his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
8 – And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

I imagine that the conversation between brothers probably consisted of a lot of one-sided gloating from Abel, given the result, but we’ll never know. But Cain has pretty much screwed himself over here, diving headfirst into what even an atheist would begrudgingly call a sin by killing his brother and failing completely at strategic thinking. And thus we see the birth of homicide, at least indirectly influenced by our holy creator. What a swell guy!

9 – And the LORD said unto Cain, Where [is] Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: [Am] I my brother’s keeper?

And here we’ve got the birth of sarcasm, my rhetorical weapon of choice! I’ll add Cain to the list of Biblical figures I like. Let’s see: that’s Satan, and now Cain. I’m in deep.

10 – And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
11 – And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand;
12 – When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

This God hardly seems understanding. He hasn’t yet codified any of his rules (except forbidding to eat from the Tree of Life, which you’ll recall he repealed after his subjects didn’t listen anyway, those rebels), he’s far from offering second chances for transgressions that have no precedent, and his penal code is like something out of the Old Testament! (See what I did there?) Brutal and swift in his justice, God virtually sentences Cain to death, albeit a slow, painful demise from starvation.

13 – And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment [is] greater than I can bear.
14 – Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, [that] every one that findeth me shall slay me.
15 – And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

I want this section to sort its own self out somehow, because otherwise these three verses are quite simply the most grievous affront to my sense of continuity I’ve ever encountered. We’ve got Cain, the world’s first murderer, cursed to wander the earth all of his days in fear of retribution from others and unable to grow food, and yet God gives him some protection against being killed himself, claiming sevenfold vengeance will be wrought upon those who would slay him. I don’t know what that means, exactly (Seven deaths? Seven curses against successful harvests? Seven expulsions from the Garden of Eden? All of God’s punishments so far fail to have an increased effect when multiplied), but I’m assuming it’s enough of a ward against murder attempts. There is a mark upon Cain to signify this, but it’s got to be rather large and prominent, perhaps in the form of a large scarlet ‘M’ on his face, for others to notice it. And who are these other people, anyway?

16 – And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
17 – And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
18 – And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.
19 – And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one [was] Adah, and the name of the other Zillah.
20 – And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and [of such as have] cattle.
21 – And his brother’s name [was] Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.
22 – And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain [was] Naamah.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. I’ve asked several times, and I’ll ask again: WHERE DID ALL THESE PEOPLE COME FROM? Cain obviously had enough constituents to build a city and presumably become mayor or something (which seems to me on par with a pedophile establishing a daycare center), and in the course of several verses, there are eight generations of humanity living on earth. I’d suggest that Eve took advantage of some primordial fecundity and spawned literal thousands of new people, who interbred and took over the propagation of the human race, but this is a significant stretch considering that she would have had to live to a super-centenary age during her tenure as a baby factory. Or did God store other human beings in the ground somewhere to arise after the birth of his first children, akin to the Dwarves in Tolkien’s mythology of Arda?

23 – And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
24 – If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.

Once again, I’m confused, and would kindly ask a theologian for assistance in understanding this, because if it can be taken literally, then my dream job as an executioner has just been defenestrated.

25 – And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, [said she], hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
26 – And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.

I’ve started to feel ill as a side-effect of trudging through this poorly-written web of grammatical atrocities, syntactic castrations and continuity-bending yarn balls. Thankfully I’m virtually done for now, since these two final passages do nothing but affirm a scenario similar to the one I posited earlier about the majority of humanity springing from holes in the ground. Adam and Eve do have one more child, however, and upon their new son’s own son being named Enos, the rest of the world begins to pray to God. They most likely begin begging for mercy and forgiveness, and perhaps a written book of rules to follow, because they finally have enough to hang on to that they’d like to avoid their creator’s wanton acts of wrath. But the reason isn’t specified; if you can think of an alternative, I’d be willing to hear it.

(Scripture source: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-4/)

For this segment of Bibliotomy.com’s serialized run, I’ve decided to make a slight detour from the course of the Bible analysis and take an opinionated stab at a certain issue that has pained me since holding my earliest views on Christianity: is Satan evil, or is he the real savior?

I have to note here that Satan, just like God, Yahweh, Allah, et al., is not a real being. The point I’d like to make is that of an incredible hypocrisy found within the Abrahamic tradition, the one that suggests that the fallen angel responsible for all human knowledge and independence is perennially cast as the arch-enemy of mankind. Somehow, it just doesn’t seem fair.

We haven’t gotten this far in the Bible yet, but for clarification, Satan (Hebrew for “adversary”) was once one of the greatest angels in Heaven, God’s veritable right-hand man. He is often referred to by the epithet Lucifer, Latin for “bearer of light”. He rebelled against God, probably because the Holy Father’s idiocy and juvenile tyranny came to light fairly early on in creation, and he was cast out of Heaven, taking an enormous host of heretic angels (let’s remember that the word ‘heretic’ comes from Greek ‘hairetikos’, meaning “able to choose”) along with him.

Satan is probably most notorious for his purported exploits in the Garden of Eden whilst disguised as a serpent. As we’ve read, he beguiled Eve and caused her to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, an act explicitly forbidden by God. Eve, in turn, caused Adam to indulge in the fruit, and they called down the wrath of God upon them, dooming them to mortality and every other pain a human being might ever be subjected to.

It’s understandable, on one hand, that most believers are afraid of eternal condemnation by their god. The universe ought to be an incredibly lonely place without the heavenly shepherd, and it’s in human nature to follow the crowd. But for those of us who possess the spark of independence and the will to choose our own paths through life, why should we cut down the one being that helped us become the way we are? The commonly-made analogy of Satan to the earlier Prometheus is an interesting take on how we perceive our mental liberators. Prometheus, as any grade-school student can tell you, was the Titan in ancient Greek mythology that stole the secret of fire from the Olympian gods and taught it to humans. His deed, quite congruent to the Satan’s nickname “Bearer of Light”, brought physical illumination to the world at the cost of Prometheus’ eternal punishment.

This issue may be trivial to non-believers, but to anyone on the fence about the real nature of God, consider why Satan made his self-sacrifice and taught humanity to take control of its own destiny. Was it stupidity, an ill-advised attempt to irreparably cut his ties to the All-Powerful One? Was it vanity, in an effort to legitimize his initial rebellion? Or could it perhaps have been charity, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for a fledgling population imprisoned and enslaved to an ethereal dictator?

For those who value their free will and their right to choose the self over anything else, the answer is clear.

(P.S. – I should apologize for the lack of recent updates. I’ve been trying to keep a certain pace that is unrealistic in the face of a number of other projects I have going concurrently with this blog. I promise to try to resume a more consistent posting schedule, and at the termination of those main pursuits currently sapping my time, Bibliotomy will begin to take much more of the spotlight.)

God continues his string of blunders in Chapter III of Genesis. In this chapter, we get to see how he revokes the privilege of paradise from his unwitting subjects and condemn them to death, simply because they ate an irresistibly delicious piece of fruit.

This unfortunate event occurs because a talking snake convinces Adam’s mate to disobey God’s prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. We discussed this tree in the last chapter, and essentially came to the conclusion that, if God isn’t a complete idiot, it’s some kind of trap engineered to snare humanity forever. But let’s get back to the magical snake that spoke to people. I suppose my best advice is the recommendation that you try to suspend your disbelief while digesting this concept, as though you were reading a bit of fiction. Although I also suppose one could apply the same tactic to the rest of the book, as well.

Since the study of snakes is subsumed under the broader field of herpetology, I had almost elected to give the snake the affectionate nickname “Herpie” for the remainder of the document. However, it’s generally accepted (even though not explicitly stated in this chapter) that the snake is actually an avatar of Satan: the fallen angel, the prince of Hell, the father of all sin…that guy. If this is the correct canonical view of the snake in the Garden, then the notion of the reptile speaking possibly provisions for why we don’t talk to snakes in modern times, if not actually lending credibility to the story. So I’ll be dispensing with tongue-in-cheek references to venereal disease and referring to the serpent as Satan.

1 – Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 – And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 – But of the fruit of the tree which [is] in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 – And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 – For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

I know that this is a far cry from the prevailing opinion, but I think I actually like this Satan fellow a little bit. He sort of resembles the Abrahamic analogue of Prometheus, the ancient Greek Titan who stole the secret of fire from the Olympian gods and shared it with mortals. As we’ll see shortly, he wasn’t trying to deceive the woman, and by veritably spelling out what would happen if she ate the fruit, he certainly wasn’t being subtle or incomprehensible. Plainly and simply, he stated that they would open their eyes to good and evil, and possess the same knowledge as God. Okay, perhaps they wouldn’t acquire God’s marginally greater intellect, and they wouldn’t gain his creative powers. But they’d certainly be enough a match for God if they knew…I’ve trailed off here because I actually don’t know what would be so bad about knowing good from evil. They’re forbidden to eat the fruit simply because God says so. Satan the snake tells them that they ought to do whatever they want, since the alternative is practical slavery.

6 – And when the woman saw that the tree [was] good for food, and that it [was] pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make [one] wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
7 – And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they [were] naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
8 – And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
9 – And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where [art] thou?
10 – And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I [was] naked; and I hid myself.

I admit, it’s early on, but there are times where I almost want to give up on this attempt at critical analysis. I’ve found that it’s pretty obvious that the whole enterprise is a vast exercise in redundancy, since the Bible seems to have no problem at all with pile-driving itself into the dirt, line after excruciating line. What on earth was the author thinking when he (or, actually, they) decided that Adam and wife comprehending their own nakedness was the worst thing that could happen after eating from the tree? Maybe something more solid would have been effective, like realizing that they’d been obsequious sycophants to their heavenly tyrant. But realizing that they were naked? I’ve mentioned this earlier, in Chapter I, but it will be worth to say again that I’ve not met a married couple who was ashamed of seeing each other sans le vêtement. And it probably made sense for the first humans to be naked, since the Garden was Paradise on earth and was most likely warm enough to go bare. But in any case, they’re made to be ashamed of the least condemnable thing about them: their own bodies. Sorry, no one’s pulling the wool over my eyes here.

11 – And he said, Who told thee that thou [wast] naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 – And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest [to be] with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

Great job, Adam! Throwing your wife under the bus…yeah, that’s what real men do. Take a little responsibility, big guy; she didn’t tackle you to the ground and force it into your mouth. In fact, she was probably just being nurturing and caring, like most women I’ve met are. It almost seems like there’s even an implicit finger of blame pointed at God here in “The woman whom thou gavest [to be] with me,” as if God’s at fault for putting the woman there in the first place. It sounds like Adam needs an extra serving of divine humility. And, oh, how he gets it.

13 – And the LORD God said unto the woman, What [is] this [that] thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 – And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou [art] cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 – And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The last three verses should make us wonder about the whole concept of the snake as Satan. I mean snakes don’t actually speak, so I doubt that, regardless of how subtly he worded his lie (which wasn’t subtle at all, you’ll agree), that it was at fault for beguiling Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. But in that case, God ought to have tightened down the hatch to Hell a bit more tightly and spared the limbless lizards, instead of condemning them to crawl on their ventral sides (much like the manner in which they already did) and bite clumsy animals that step on them(presumably, as they had already done).

16 – Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire [shall be] to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Why does any self-respecting mother or wife believe in this God? Even considering issues of race, religion, and politics, women are, by far, the ‘minority’ worthy of the greatest indemnity the world has to offer. Women weren’t even granted the right to vote in the United States until the passing of the nineteenth constitutional amendment in 1919, a full fifty years after black men were given the right to vote. But why should this come as a surprise? Just look here at the birth of misogyny itself: right from the mouth of our benevolent and loving creator.

17 – And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed [is] the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat [of] it all the days of thy life;
18 – Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 – In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return.

In contrast to Eve, Adam really gets off easy. Maybe God felt a little guilty about sticking him with the gullible woman who screwed everything up, but I suppose Catholic altar boys weren’t a feasible option at the time (chronologically, of course, they just don’t make any sense).

Bread and herbs: what a great diet! I, for one, could definitely live on bruschetta. Also, Adam is cursed to eat from the tree of knowledge for the rest of his life. I can’t imagine what kind of a curse this is, but since God clearly believes that blind obedience is the favorable alternative to mental independence, the fact that this is a curse makes sense in some convoluted way.

The biggest issue here is the introduction of death. Admittedly, this is a terrible thing. For one, God makes no attempt here to explain the purpose of life, which is the fundamental question every competent human being asks the day they begin to think. Before death, the point of life was to live. Purely and simply, with no resort to teleological fairy tales, life was about the unending experience of everything the world had to offer. But with death looming as a specter over every human life, now we’re faced with the problem of assigning a value to the finite experience. Most believers will speak of Heaven and Paradise and such things. But, to this point, Adam and his wife have been offered no such comforts. They will return to dust and be as nothing. Thanks, Father.

20 – And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.

All living humans, that is. And while I’m not entirely certain yet, I wager that the incest implied by this statement does get tangled up in itself later on in this increasingly confused story.

21 – Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 – And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 – Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 – So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

And thus were ended the days of Man in Paradise. I get the impression that this God fellow has the whole game rigged, since he had to have known that Adam and Eve would screw up the ideal, if extremely shallow, life that they’d been given. Once again, we have to resort to the notion that God works in extremely mysterious and extraordinarily cruel ways, because, quite frankly, up to now, this story has absolutely no point. He’d planned to have the humans eat of the tree of knowledge and comprehend morality, thereby giving their lives some intrinsic meaning through the freedom of choice; on the same token, he’s utterly erased any meaning from their lives by making them finite, with the same fatal result occurring no matter how they choose to live. Really, there’s absolutely nothing believable about this poorly-written fairy-tale, and there isn’t even some moral commentary to extract from it!

That’s just my opinion after what I’ve read so far. I’d certainly like to be challenged on the issue.

As for the Garden itself, I doubt that there is a flaming brand and a host of Cherubim (which is the actual plural in Hebrew) guarding it. In fact, we’ve established previously in Chapter II that the Garden likely didn’t exist, and it’s certainly impossible to locate now. And why leave Paradise on Earth, anyway? Wouldn’t it be simpler to burn the place to the ground and destroy the tree of life? Leaving it within the domain of man is yet another myopic decision on this god’s part. Sword or not, modern man has the ability to fly, and if that tree were still there, we’d all be immortal. Since the elements of this story just don’t add up, it’s much more efficient to just admit that none of this actually ever happened.

I have nothing more to say on this chapter, except responses to any criticism directed my way. Since I haven’t seen any yet, I’m getting a little bit of an inflated ego and I’m really starting to think I’ve got everything figured out. So come, deflate me a bit! Or, at least try.
(Scripture source: http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-3/)

Let’s face it, and affirm it in the clearest of terms: God and his chosen prophets are trendy mallcore bitches. Long before the Bieber and Backstreet pop icons, faith has always been a sell-out; anything to get itself in your pocket, in your mind, in your psyche and, especially, in your wallet. Not surprisingly, as with pop albums and preteens with ridiculous haircuts, the masses gobble it up noisily, greedily.

Proselytizing is religion’s modus operandi in spreading brand awareness, its mission statement: inaugurating the commercial and cultural success of a prophet, dogma and divinity. Think ADIDAS or PEPSI COLA, but with concepts on the hard-sell instead of physical product. The cross, the crescent or the star are but logos for a pie-in-the-sky concept-corporation whose CEO’s existence is doubtful, whose public relations agent was allegedly crucified and whose clientele are to be burnt eternally if they discontinue use of the corporation’s concept-products. Does this sound far-fetched? It should, if you have at least half a working brain, but business is business and, in the realm of ideas, religion is just as rich as it is embarrassingly ignorant.

The talking heads of faith would have you believe that their holy books are essentially a written record of the absolute truth – or at least “absolute truth” circa 1500-2000+ years ago, back when the earth was flat. Civilization has come a long way since such primitivity thanks to the iron boot of science forging forward. There has been resistance. Believers remain cheerleaders for Bronze-Age ignorance, waving their pom-poms wildly every time they detect a possibility to discredit scientific advancement and reason. It’s like celebrating the triumph of stupidity, literally. There is a reason for such zealous celebration: believers well understand that one successfully disproved and discredited iota of their holy writ will be an arrow in the heel of Achilles. There are two specific passages that I personally enjoy bludgeoning believers with, and they are actually seemingly small choices. It is their smallness and superficial insignificance that make them all the more powerful. After all, if the Bible can’t get the facts straight on something as simple as botany or mathematics then it surely should stand mute on issues as immense as the meaning of life, the existence of an afterlife and the nature of truth.

PARABLE OF THE MUSTARD SEED:

Matthew 13:31-32 (KJV) says, “Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard  seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”

The problem with the above verses is that Jesus – who is said to be God and simultaneously the son of God, and thus omniscient - is clearly ignorant regarding botany. The mustard seed is not the smallest seed in the world – the Orchid seed is.

WHY MATH MATTERS:

1 Kings 7:23-26 (NIV) says, “He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it – ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea. The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.”

The problem with the above verses is that the Bible is giving measurements for a large bowl that, in a roundabout way, imply that pi is equal to 3. pi is not 3. It is 3.141592654…

So, these two examples, chosen from hundreds upon hundreds of other examples, beg the question: if the Bible is the word of God, how could God be ignorant about his own creation?

The answer seems obvious enough.