God Hates You: Making Sense of the Bible Read online

  God Hates You, Hate Him Back

  Making Sense of The Bible

  CJ Werleman

  First Published In Great Britain 2009 by Dangerous Little Books www.dangerouslittlebooks.com

  This book is available in print at Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk

  © Copyright CJ Werleman

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, I’d like to thank my beloved wife and children for the suffering I put them through in the eighteen months it took to research and write this book. At the very least I can now be sure my wife truly loves me, because she never once interrupted whilst I explained to her many of the Biblical stories in my own words, even though she wanted to, so very much.

  As passé as it may seem, my darling wife truly provided me the resolve to complete this project, and I love her so.

  I’d also like to thank a long lost friend, who tracked me down after twelve years of no communicado. He is a dear friend, who truly played his part in silencing the voices of doubt inside my own head. I firmly believe that if every human being had a supporting friend like Oz, then we, as humanity, would have achieved so much more.

  To my big brother Bryan, I thank you. I thank you for showing me that anything is possible. It was in your lounge on that Christmas Day that you helped me shape the idea for the book, whilst also encouraging me along the way.

  To all my Bali expatriate friends: you suffered with my incessant Bible talk, whilst I was set on this one-track journey. You laughed when appropriate, and you never once told me to shut up. I love you all. Living in Bali for the past seven years has been one of, if not, the greatest experience of my life, and I thank you for playing your part in those memories.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my publisher, Dangerous Little Books. You took a gamble on me, and the book, and I thank you for the opportunity you have given me to articulate my message.

  Introducing The Bible

  “The characters and events depicted in the damn bible are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

  Penn and Teller

  The Bible is a collection of 66 different books, the writings of at least 40 different authors over a period of time that spanned at least 1,500 years. The Bible, however, is not a singular catalogue of these books as the sixty-six books are each respectively assigned to either the Old or New Testament. To illustrate this, the Old Testament comprises of thirty-nine of the sixty six, Genesis to Malachi; whilst the New Testament includes the balance of twenty-seven books, the Gospel of Matthew through the Book of Revelation. Now it is important for non-Jewish audiences to understand that the New Testament is not ‘new’ in the sense that it is a modernized or an updated version of the Old Testament, as an alarming number of Christians that I have spoken with incorrectly believe. Jews, for example, don’t call it the Old Testament, as to them there is no ‘new’. The Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible, starting there and ending there. Whereas the New Testament is a Christian ‘addendum’, or add on, so that their belief may allow for the introduction of their messianic hero – Jesus.

  The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, is the catalogue of Judaism belief. The Hebrew Bible ends where the New Testament begins. For these reasons the Jewish religion is relatively straightforward and uncomplicated. In contrast, the basis for Christianity is highly problematic and confusing because they introduced a special new character, somewhat like writing a new super-hero into a script after filming had already begun. Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, eloquently makes his punchy position on this:

  “[New Testament] is a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events and full of attempts to make things come out right.”

  The new Christian addendum for reasons of brand positioning became the New Testament and thus the Jews, of which Jesus and his disciples were, laugh and scoff at the Christian story in the same manner that most of us laugh at the idea that seventy-two virgins await in heaven for those that fly aircraft into buildings. But, much to their chagrin, Christians cannot divorce themselves from the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, because Jesus’ biography is hammered and nailed together (bad pun) from Old Testament prophecy and genealogy, i.e. no Old Testament – no Jesus!

  Further convoluting the whole mono-theistic party punch is the fact that the Koran, the Islamic Bible, has its roots in the Old Testament too, but at the risk of upsetting the unshaven Muslim guy seated next to me on this Trans-Pacific flight, I will dispense with any Islamic observations because I have seen what these guys are capable of when they get ‘pissed’!

  As you process the stories of the Bible, it is important to remember that the respective authors were not men of modern enlightenment. To put that statement into some kind of context, if we could somehow build a time-travel device and transport Moses from 2000 BC to 2009 AD, his knowledge of the universe would embarrass that of even a 3rd grader. This suggests that religious believers today spend their years on earth in worship of enlightenment and understanding that an eight year old could provide.

  The books of the Bible were crafted together by ancient man to explain how his universe and his surroundings came to be. These were books that provided comfort to man, as he feared the dark, death in battle, the sound of thunder, or illness and disease. Within all civilizations, within all societies, the human existence has demonstrated its proclivity to create gods for when we cannot find meaning or understanding. For example, we knew the sun was good because it made our crops grow. No sun, no crops, no food. Therefore we created the Sun God. Similarly, gods for water, fertility, healing, etc.

  The earliest books of the Bible, Genesis in particular, were written by ancient Hebrews in an effort to explain how their existence and the things in their environment came about. All civilizations have their roots in folklore, mythology and legend. The ancient Romans believed their existence was founded by the twins Romulus and Remes, both orphaned and raised by a wolf. The ancient Hebrews believed a sky-god placed a man named Adam created from dust and a woman created by Adam’s rib on earth, to be the first family of their existence.

  There is little doubt the Bible, due to its wordiness, size and often incomprehensible translations, is an intimidating book. This explains, in large, why people don’t read it. This assertion is corroborated by my own anecdotal experiences, in which I am utterly flabbergasted as to how little my Christian friends actually know of the Bible’s claims, commands, assertions, dictums and history. Interestingly, my personal findings seem to be in synch with the findings published in an editorial titled The Greatest Story Never Read: Recovering Biblical Literacy in the Church. The author’s findings include a swathe of statistical data that literally would blow the socks off any Baptist preacher. The research showed that 93% of American households own at least one copy of the Bible, but this is what is known of the ‘Good Book’:

  • More than 35% of college attending Christians could not put the following in order: Abraham, the Old Testament prophets, the death of Christ and Pentecost.

  • One-third could also not id
entify Matthew as an apostle from a list of New Testament names.

  The above findings corroborated by an editorial published in Politics Daily titled, Why a ‘Year of the Bible’ Would Horrify its Sponsors showed:

  • More than 50% don’t know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible.

  • More than 50% can’t name even one of the Gospels.

  • More than 60% can’t name at least 5 of the 10 commandments.

  • More than 20% think Moses was one of Jesus’ disciples.

  • More than 50% of High School seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah was a married couple.

  Put the above data in context of a recent Rasmussen poll which showed that 44% of Americans believe in the literal translation of the Bible, meaning 140 million Americans believe that a talking snake encouraged a woman to eat an apple; that a 900 year old man built an Arc to replenish humanity; that the sun revolves around the earth; and Jonah lived inside a whale for three days. It is the majority of these 140 million that enabled, by their votes, arguably the worst President in American history to inflict his Crusades paradigm upon the world. So I suggest the next time you see a guy step out of a car with a Bush-Cheney 04 sticker please be sure to kick him in the shins and tell him I sent you.

  To offer your life in servitude to an unseen sky-god based on the writings included in a book you have never read, seems to me to be the far limit of irrationality. This irrationality seemed to be all around me, from my conversations with my dearest friends, the idiocy of evangelical Christianity, right through to the President of the United States, who said, when asked if English should be made the national language, ‘If English was good enough for the Bible it is good enough for me.’ A President who had either never read the Bible himself, or at the least did not understand what it was that he was reading, and who once said on live television that ‘faith in Christ was part of his foreign policy.’ Put another way, The Bible, is the blueprint for living a Judaist or Christian life, but the believers are simply choosing not to read it.

  Is it possible believers choose not to read it because Isaac Asimov’s famous quote, in regards to the Bible, is a truism?

  “Properly read, the bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” – Isaac Asimov

  Therefore, it is my objective in writing this book; God Hates You, Hate Him Back, to demystify the Bible for the layman. And I don’t use ‘layman’ as some kind of elitist derogatory term, I use it because I consider myself a layman. I prefer simple explanations to things that I do not understand rather than a ‘know it all’ lecturing me in how smart they are. Therefore, with that in mind I hope this book demonstrates the absurdity of religion in a modern context without me preaching from a theological or philosophical soap-box. If this book enables you to win a dinner table argument against one of your ‘happy-clapper’ Christian fundamentalist friends then this book has achieved what I set out to do in writing it.

  The God I refer to in the title is the God of The Bible, and it’s important to make this distinction as we in the western world mistakenly assume that God is God. God, as we know in The Bible, is not everyone’s god today, nor was he everyone’s god 4,000 years ago. The God you know through the ‘good book’ was purely the god of the Hebrew tribes in ancient Middle Eastern times. The Egyptians had their own gods. The Greeks had their own gods. The Romans had theirs, as did the Assyrians and Babylonians. All of these hundreds, maybe thousands, of gods hold equal evidence for their claim of being the one true god. NONE! The God you are familiar with is only such because historical events approximately 1,500 years ago, and more recently, shaped it so.

  The Bible

  The Bible begins with a story of how the Hebrew God, whom we shall just refer to as ‘God’ from now forth, created the earth and all living things. It explains how God revealed himself to Abraham in 2100BC, and how Abraham took his descendents to Egypt, involuntarily due to famine, and who would ultimately become slaves of the Pharaoh. Subsequently, God made a covenant with Abraham and promised not to forget his people, the Israelites, and in 1400BC he summoned Moses to lead them out of Egyptian captivity to go directly to the ‘promised land’. However, their bickering, whining and continual questioning of God led to a 40-year wait in the Sinai desert.

  Under the leadership of Joshua they established the nation of Israel, grouped into 12 tribes or clans. In approximately 1050BC the nation of Israel asked for a human king. In turn, Saul was appointed by the prophet Samuel, who turned out to be a complete flop and thus was followed by David and then Solomon who built the Temple in Jerusalem as the center of Israelite worship.

  Israel was then conquered and destroyed by Assyria in 722BC and then Babylon in 586BC. Its people were taken as captives to Babylon but after 40 or 50 years were allowed to return to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. This, in effect, ends the Old Testament story at approximately 430BC.

  Israel continually fell under the control of other powers and at the time of Roman control Jesus was born. He was recognized by a handful of eccentric Jews as the Messiah, or God in human form, and his teachings lasted only for a period of three years. Thus commencing the stories of The New Testament, that has its origins nearly a full century after the supposed death of Jesus Christ.

  “The great unquestionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These are the sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal – God is the Omnipotent Father – hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.” – Gore Vidal

  With the Old Testament laying the foundation for the respective Judaist, Muslim and Christian faiths, one can assert that the Bible is the written, or inspired, word of God in the minds of more than 4 billion people alive today. But what does the ‘inspired word of God’ actually mean? This is not an easy question to answer because the texts of the Bible are, unarguably, written by human hands. As a matter of fact, not a single word of the ‘Good Book’ was penned by the Lord Almighty. Surprise! Allegedly and without any empirical supporting evidence, the more than 40 various authors who contributed to the texts claim that God spoke to them alone on a mountain top, or via someone else (a medium) that that person personally knew. This always befuddled me as a child, the fact that God only spoke to Middle Eastern men one-to-one, with the risk of the message being lost in translation, rather than just sit us all down for a chat, collectively. Thus believers must believe it is the ‘inspired’ word of God or the book has no meaning at all; and if it has no meaning then you have no religion. Therefore, their belief is based on the fact that the Bible says it is the word of God. Nothing more.

  If you ever get into a religious discussion with a Christian, for example, a circular rationale usually ensues, something like this: “The Bible is true because it is the word of God and I know it is the word of God because the Bible says so. And if the Bible says so, then it must be true, because I know the Bible is true because it is the word of God and God wouldn’t lie. I know that because the Bible says so.” Are you dizzy yet?

  At the risk of further extending the circular roundabout, the theological conundrum is that the onus is now on the believer to prove the existence of the Biblical God, because if he isn’t real then the book isn’t inspired! And because we know that there were no Xerox machines or Kinkos on the Arabian Peninsula four millennia ago, we can conclude that the words were passed down orally from generation to generation, from one copy to another copy, each producing a slightly different version of the same story. Therefore, for the Bible to be truly inspired by a Heavenly creator, it would require that all the hundreds and thousands of men that took part in the copying and translating were ‘inspired’ by God. I now need to get off this merry-go-round.

  But if we grant the believers their faith and be gracious enough to offer our humor, then shoul
dn’t we expect the Bible to be brim-filled with wisdom, wonder, enlightenment and beauty? Shouldn’t this book, co-authored by the supreme-being, the creator of all, be the most marvellous thing ever written; standing side by side with progressive scientific discovery and not starkly against it? Is this too much to ask? Because having read the Bible back to front, front to back, right to left, left to right, I think it is one of the most uninspiring books ever written. God’s greatest preaching to mankind, his creation, counts for little more than who I can and can’t shag; what I can and can’t eat; when I can and can’t work; how I should treat my slaves; under what terms I can annihilate my neighbors; and how to slaughter an animal as a token of my gratitude to him. Furthermore, this God has some bizarre and brutish methods for getting his point across including forcing his prophet Ezekiel to eat nothing but bread smeared with human shit for 430 consecutive days; vaporizing people into salt for innocuous errs; and of course seeing to the slaughter of entire civilizations because they may happen to be in the way of an Israelite land grab.