Tag Archives: self-defeating

God must be crazy

God warns Laban in a dream that he supposedly needs to “be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad”. Laban then completely ignores this pointless command, with no consequences.

God talks about God in the third person, then apparently realizes that’s kind of confusing, and feels the need to clarify that he wasn’t talking about some other God.

God chooses Moses to be the one to speak to Pharaoh about letting his people go. But then God decides to let Moses’s brother Aaron do the actual speaking, while Moses tells Aaron what to say, and God tells Moses what to tell Aaron to say. Why does Moses need to be involved at all, then? Just because God can’t admit that he was wrong to choose Moses? He’s making Moses into a pointless middleman. (But Moses still gets all the credit as the leader, for some reason.)

God threatens Egypt with plagues that will kill some of their livestock… after he’s already sent a plague that killed all the livestock of Egypt.

When some of the people of Israel ignore God’s instructions, God gets mad at Moses and acts like he’s the one disobeying.

God apparently decided to help his chosen people in battle only when Moses had his hands up in the air.

In the story of the Golden Calf, God communicates with the Israelites through Moses incredibly inefficiently, making Moses go up and down the mountain way more times than necessary. Good thing Moses can teleport. Apparently.

God likes to describe himself as compassionate, forgiving, and slow to anger, even though he is constantly getting angry and killing people over nothing. And when God decides to punish people, a lot of the time he ends up punishing the wrong people for some reason.

God punished the land of Canaan. He didn’t just punish the people there, who were having sex with animals and stuff. He specifically says he also punished the land, for the land’s sin.

God is apparently so worthless that he has worthless inanimate objects for rivals, and he’s very insecure about it.

When Joshua wants to know why God has stopped helping his people, God explains that one of them has stolen something that God claims belongs to him. And therefore God is angry with the whole nation for what one person did. God tells Joshua to have each tribe come before him so God can say whether the culprit is in that tribe or not, and then do the same with each clan in the guilty tribe, and so on, until they narrow it down to the individual thief. But God is already speaking directly to Joshua, so why doesn’t he just tell him who’s guilty right now?

Saul makes an offering to God to make sure he has God’s favor. Then Samuel comes and tells him that God has rejected him as king, for supposedly breaking some command. I have no idea what command Saul is supposed to have broken by making an offering to God.

David says he has heard two things, even though God only spoke one thing. He says what the two things were, and neither of them make any sense for God to say. Apparently God talks to himself and assures himself about how powerful and loving and just he is.

David also says God announced that he has a dove with gold and silver on its feathers while people sleep among sheep pens.

The death of God’s faithful servants is precious in his sight. God just can’t get enough of that precious death.

According to Solomon, God told David that since the day his people left Egypt, he had never chosen anyone to be ruler over Israel. That’s obviously not true, since the person God was talking to was someone God had chosen to be ruler over Israel. And he wasn’t even the first one.

Solomon claims that the results of casting lots are actually controlled by God. If he’s right, that would mean that God’s decisions are so completely random that they’re indistinguishable from the results of a random decision generator.

God tells Elijah to go out and stand on a mountain. When Elijah does, God asks him what he’s doing there, apparently having already forgotten what he had just told Elijah to do.

God tells Isaiah that all these people are annoying him by bringing him meaningless offerings of dead animals. God asks who has asked this of them, apparently having forgotten that he has.

God has a day of crying out to the mountains.

God makes people queef. Painfully.

God wishes there were briers and thorns confronting him, so he could march against them in battle and set them all on fire. Or maybe let them make peace and come to him for refuge. Whichever.

In the middle of talking about his plans for mass destruction, God randomly says he’s crying out and gasping and panting like a woman in childbirth.

God says someone is going to wear her children as ornaments, because he thinks that’s what brides do.

The first vision God shows his prophet Jeremiah is an almond tree branch, which has no purpose other than to make an opportunity for God to make a pun.

After describing his plans to poison his people, pursue them with a sword, kill their children, and ruin their cities, God describes himself as “the Lord, who exercises kindness“.

God says he intends to fulfill a promise that he has already fulfilled.

God makes Jeremiah buy a belt, bury it, and dig it back up only when it has become ruined and useless. The only purpose of this is so Jeremiah will have a comparison to make when he talks about God’s plans to make his people “ruined and useless”. But that won’t be very meaningful to the people he’s talking to, since they didn’t experience the thing with the belt.

God implies that the children of the people he’s talking to are dead. Then he says their children will come back, acting like the only problem is that they’re in another country right now.

God says some particular houses will be filled with dead bodies, forgetting that he just said those houses have been torn down so the materials can be used for other things. Those houses can’t be filled with anything.

God tells people he will restore them to their land, when those people have never had to leave their land in the first place.

God makes Ezekiel do all kinds of outrageous and silly and unpleasant things that are completely unnecessary. He starts by confusing Ezekiel with a vision of bizarre otherworldly creatures when he’s not even a prophet yet, which God never explains and which seems to have no purpose. Then he tells him he has to go prophesy to Israel, though God doubts they’re going to listen to him. And then the first thing God requires Ezekiel to actually do is eat a scroll.

Next, God makes Ezekiel besiege a drawing of Jerusalem. Then he ties Ezekiel up, and makes him lie on his left side for 390 days, and on his right side for 40 days. And even though he’s tied up, God expects Ezekiel to somehow still be besieging his drawing. He also expects him to bake bread over burning poop and eat it, while he’s tied up.1 And he instructs Ezekiel to be afraid while he eats and drinks. That’s not how emotion works, God. You can’t just tell people how to feel.

God makes Ezekiel shave with a sword, then burn some of the hair, and attack some of it with the sword. And he says he’s going to punish his people by shaving them. Then he tells Ezekiel to talk to the mountains, more than once. (He makes Micah talk to mountains too.)

God calls Sodom Jerusalem’s “younger sister“, even though the Bible indicates that Sodom was destroyed about 700 years before the Israelites settled in Jerusalem, so Sodom is actually much older.

God tells Hosea to name his daughter “Not Loved”. This God sucks at picking names.

God considers punishing some women, but then he notices that the men are sinning too, which somehow means that now he doesn’t need to punish them.

When God decides to turn against his chosen people and attack them and rip them open and devour them like a wild animal, he calls himself their “helper”.

God describes a city that’s being flooded as being “like a pool whose water is draining away“. Like draining is the problem.

God tells Zechariah to say that God says something that makes no sense for God to say. Something about having been sent by God. God wants us to know that God was sent by God?? Why does God keep saying he sent himself to deliver a message from himself?

God wishes for God to rebuke Satan. Why doesn’t he just rebuke Satan, instead of talking about himself in the third person like that?

God says he’s setting a stone with seven eyes in front of a priest who is apparently the branch that he’s talking to the priest about as if the branch isn’t there yet and which will supposedly also be a king.

God tells his people to plead with God to be gracious to “us”. So God is among the people God wants to punish? And he needs other people to intervene and try to convince him not to punish himself??

God threatens to curse the priests’ blessings. And then he says he’s already done it, without giving them any time to do anything about it, so what was the point of the threat?

The Bible says Jesus is God, so of course Jesus is crazy too. His own family thinks so.

John the Baptist baptized people by immersing them in water, but he said he was just preparing the way for Jesus, who would baptize people with fire.

John thinks Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around. Which makes sense if Jesus is indeed God, since he wouldn’t need anything done to him that baptism supposed to do for people. Baptizing God would be pointless. But Jesus insists on getting baptized anyway. I don’t know what that’s supposed to accomplish, unless it’s to show that Jesus is not God.

Jesus asks what reward you’ll get if you only love those who love you. You’ll get love, duh. But what kind of person thinks you need a reward for loving?

Jesus says anyone who does God’s will is his brother and his sister and his mother. And the Bible says Jesus did God’s will, therefore Jesus is Jesus’s brother and Jesus’s sister and Jesus’s mother. In addition to being his own father.

Jesus says the crowds don’t need to go away, even though it’s getting late. Then after he feeds the crowds (who were going to go eat anyway), he immediately sends them away. Sounds more like they didn’t need to stay.

When a man begs Jesus to drive the demon out of his son, Jesus’s response is to randomly start insulting his generation.

More than one of Jesus’s parables indicate that to really make God happy, you have to sin.

Jesus says that when he returns, some people will be “taken” and others left. But when his disciples ask where those people will be taken, Jesus tells them where vultures gather, instead of answering the question. As a result of Jesus failing to answer that question, a lot of people now mistakenly think he was saying that some people will be “raptured” to heaven.

Because people think the kingdom of God is going to appear at once, Jesus tells a parable… which doesn’t address that issue at all.

Jesus asks a woman for a drink, when what he really wants is for her to ask him for a drink.

Jesus thinks if people didn’t call him a king, stones would.

Jesus tends to ignore the questions he’s been asked, and respond by saying something barely relevant or completely unrelated instead. Jesus starts to answer a question about when everything will end. But he ends up just stating whether certain things will end. When people ask Jesus where his father is, instead of answering, he just tells them that they don’t know his father.

When Peter asks him who he’s talking to, it says “Jesus answered” …but he doesn’t actually answer the question. Jesus instead asks something about the story he was telling. That’s not an answer. And when Peter asks him where he’s going, he doesn’t answer that either. He just says his disciples can’t follow him there.

Jesus explains why he thinks he doesn’t need to wash his hands before he eats. Then he tells a couple of brief parables, or mixed metaphors, or something. These metaphors are to explain why it doesn’t matter that he offended the Pharisees with his opinions. But then when Peter asks him to “explain the parable”, Jesus instead goes back to trying to justify his opinions on hand washing. His response to Peter says nothing about the topics of those parables, or about parables at all. But he still acts like he thinks he’s “explaining the parable”.

Jesus says people shouldn’t be surprised by him claiming that they need to be born again. But instead of explaining himself when asked, he says something dumb about the wind.

Jesus wants his disciples to break and eat his body and drink his blood. He wants everyone to eat his flesh and drink his blood, because he thinks he’s bread. And don’t forget to drink his spirit, too.

When Jesus is expecting to be betrayed soon, he tells his disciples they need to sell their cloaks so they can buy swords. But then when one of them tries to use his sword to defend Jesus, Jesus seems to disapprove of them using swords at all. So why did he tell them to buy swords?

When the elders ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, Jesus responds that if he asked them, they wouldn’t answer. Because they don’t know the answer, because he hasn’t told them. But he seems to think the fact that they wouldn’t have answered means he doesn’t have to answer. Even though the reason for them not answering obviously doesn’t apply to him.

The reason God loves Jesus is that he got himself killed and then came back to life. That’s a pretty weird reason to love someone. If Jesus hadn’t died, or if he had died by accident, or if he had stayed dead, God wouldn’t love him.

Jesus wants to indicate how Peter is going to die, so he says a bunch of confusing stuff about getting dressed and going places and feeding sheep, which doesn’t make it at all clear how Peter is going to die.

God talks to himself, which some people would say only crazy people do. I don’t think that’s right, but would a sane person talk to himself indirectly by telling other people to talk to him, and then telling them what to say to him because they don’t know what to say to him, but then the things he tells them to say to him are just wordless groans?

God makes Christians seem crazy too, by getting them to say things that make no sense to anyone else. He goes further and gives them the completely pointless “gift” of talking completely unintelligibly so that no one has any idea what they’re trying to say, including themselves, which makes everyone think they’re crazy.

God considers slaves to be free when they become Christians, and considers free people to be Jesus’s slaves when they become Christians.

God sends Paul and his colleagues with God to talk to God.

God is going to present undead people to himself.

The book of Hebrews claims that God said a bunch of stuff about himself in the third person, for some reason.

Revelation predicts that Jesus is going to come with a double-edged sword sticking out of his mouth, so he can fight people using the sword of his mouth.

Jesus is going to angrily trample the world’s grapes (either that or he’s murdering trillions of people) in a big winepress, causing a massive flood of blood.

God is going to invite all the birds to eat all the people.

Stupid, unreasonable, and self-defeating

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The Story of the Circum-Schism
Paul Hijacks Christianity

Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity

When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.

But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.

Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.

The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.

But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.

Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time, again. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.

Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus

Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.

So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.

The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.

The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation

Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.

The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.

So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.

Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested

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Paul Hijacks Christianity
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The Story of the Martyrdom of Stephen
The Speech of a Fool

Jesus had told his disciples that whenever they got arrested, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit would be there to tell them the right thing to say. He said God would make them sound so wise that no one would be able to argue with them. But when the Spirit tried to help them decide what to say, it mostly just made them groan and babble incoherently. This made people think the Christians were out of their minds.

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The Speech of a Fool
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The Story of Ananias and Sapphira
The Communist Cult

The disciples of Jesus were given the ability to perform miracles better than Jesus, and they convinced thousands of people to join their new religion. The members of this original Christian church didn’t keep any personal property; they shared everything they had. Everything they earned had to be brought to their leaders to be distributed among the community according to their needs.

The goal was for everyone to be equally well off, with no one having too little or too much. Everyone was to be paid the same regardless of how much or how little work they did, just as Jesus (and his ancestor David) had taught.

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The Communist Cult
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The Story of John the Baptist
Too Many Herods!

John the Baptist, a relative of Jesus, was in the wilderness of Judea, baptizing and insulting people. People thought he was demon-possessed. He made people get in the river, even though it’s possible to be baptized without getting wet at all.

Jesus (now grown up) came to the river where John was baptizing. John thought Jesus should be the one baptizing him, because he thought Jesus was greater than him. But Jesus wasn’t actually any greater than John, so Jesus had John baptize him instead.

Then John was put in prison for claiming that it was against the law for King Herod‘s son Herod to marry his niece Herodias after she divorced his brother Herod Philip. Herod and his wife Herodias both wanted to kill John, but Herod was hesitant to kill someone who was thought of as a prophet.

On Herod’s birthday, Herodias got her sexy daughter to help her convince Herod to have John beheaded immediately. Herod was very distressed at the thought of having to kill the man he wanted to kill. But he did it anyway, because he had promised to give his hot stepdaughter/niece whatever she asked for.

(Herodias’s daughter married Herod’s other brother who was also named Herod Philip. And later, she married the son of one of Herodias’s two brothers who were named Herod. Herodias’s other brother, Herod Agrippa, later persecuted the disciples of Jesus, and then an angel killed him for failing to point out that he wasn’t a god. Herod Agrippa’s son was… Herod Agrippa, who met the “apostle” Paul.)

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Too Many Herods!
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The Story of Queen Esther
A Leisurely-Delivered Urgent Message

An ineffective feminist, a beauty queen, and a genocidal anti-Semite

Xerxes king of Persia (the grandson of Cyrus) held a banquet. He showed off his vast wealth to his nobles and officials and subjects there. He wanted to show off his beautiful wife Vashti too, but she refused to come. The king consulted seven wise men, and they said he should divorce Vashti. That way, all the women in his kingdom wouldn’t think they could get away with disobeying their husbands. So he divorced her.

Now the king needed to find a new wife. So he had lots of beautiful young women from all over the kingdom brought into his harem, so he could try them out. After four years of this, the king found that a girl named Esther was the most attractive. And he made her his new queen.

King Xerxes’ top official was Haman, a descendant of Agag the Amalekite and enemy of the Jews. The king commanded everyone to kneel before Haman, but Esther’s cousin, Mordecai the Jew, refused to do so. This made Haman very angry. So he convinced the king to have all the Jews in the kingdom killed at the end of the year. The king was happy to issue this decree. (He didn’t realize that his wife Esther was Jewish, since she had never told him.)

Esther tries to waste her opportunities

When Mordecai heard about what was happening, he told Esther she should talk to her husband about it. But Esther said no one was allowed to approach the king without being summoned. Anyone who did was usually killed. And the king hadn’t called for her in a month. But Mordecai said if Esther didn’t go to the king, she would be killed anyway, because she was Jewish. So Esther decided to go ask the king for help.

The king was happy to see his beautiful wife, and decided not to kill her for entering his presence. He asked her what she wanted. But instead of telling him, she asked him and Haman to attend a banquet with her. At the banquet, the king asked Esther what she wanted again. But instead of telling him, she asked him and Haman to attend another banquet with her the next day.

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A Leisurely-Delivered Urgent Message
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The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel
Daniel in the Lions' Den

Fake fortune tellers exposed

After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon captured Jehoiakim (the third-to-last king of Judah), the four smartest aristocratic young men in Judah were brought to Babylon to be Nebuchadnezzar’s advisers. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel, but king Nebuchadnezzar renamed them Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Belteshazzar. (Apparently one of those new names wasn’t so catchy.)

Nebuchadnezzar had a troubling dream about a big statue being smashed by a rock, which then became a huge mountain. He decided to see if his magicians could tell him what it meant. To make sure they were really capable of interpreting it, instead of telling them what he had dreamed about, he demanded that they tell him first. The magicians said that was impossible; only a god could do that. Since they couldn’t read his mind, the king decided to have all the wise men in Babylon killed for being frauds.

But the king’s wise adviser Daniel said that wouldn’t be necessary, because his God could help him do what the king demanded. Daniel described the dream and said it was a prediction about the kingdoms that would come after Nebuchadnezzar’s. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Daniel and his friends to high positions.

Daniel obeys the king

After he had a dream about a huge statue, Nebuchadnezzar decided to make a huge statue. He decreed that everyone had to worship the statue or die. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship it, so the king had them tied up and thrown into a furnace. Daniel didn’t get thrown into the furnace, so apparently he was willing to worship the king’s idol.

God sent an angel to protect Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they came out of the furnace unharmed. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to high positions.

God continues to communicate badly

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Daniel in the Lions’ Den
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The Story of Jonah and the Fish
It was This Big!

God told a prophet named Jonah to go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and announce that it would be destroyed soon. But Jonah knew God well enough to know that he wouldn’t actually do what he said he would do. Jonah didn’t think it would be right to deliver a false prophecy, so he ran away from God and hid on a ship that was going somewhere else.2

But God sent a storm, which nearly wrecked the ship. The sailors found out that Jonah had angered his God and brought a storm on their ship. So Jonah suggested they throw him overboard, to divert God’s wrath away from the ship. But the sailors didn’t want to kill him. They tried to sail back and return him to land, so he could resume his mission.

But God liked Jonah’s idea better, so he made the storm worse and prevented them from getting back to land. So the sailors reluctantly threw Jonah overboard, and the storm stopped. God sent a huge fish, which swallowed Jonah and then threw him up on land three days later.

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It was This Big!
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The Story of Rehoboam and Jeroboam
The Kingdom Splits in Two

God wanted to punish King Solomon for worshiping other gods. But he liked Solomon’s dead father too much to do that. So he decided to wait until Solomon was dead and punish his son instead.

A prophet announced that God was going to let most of Israel be taken over by Jeroboam, one of Solomon’s officials. Solomon wisely attempted to hinder God’s plan by killing Jeroboam. But before he could, Jeroboam fled to Egypt, where he waited for Solomon to die. Solomon was succeeded by his son Rehoboam.

The people of Israel told Rehoboam they would serve him, but only if he didn’t make them work as hard as his father had. Rehoboam wasn’t sure how to answer them, so he asked for advice. The elders he asked said he should give the people what they wanted. But the young men he asked said he should make the people work even harder. While torturing them with scorpions.

To punish Rehoboam for what his dead father had done, God made Rehoboam decide to follow the bad advice of the young men. This caused most of the Israelites to turn against him. Israel made Jeroboam their king instead of Rehoboam, but the tribes of Judah and Benjamin seceded from Israel. They became the kingdom of Judah, and kept Rehoboam as their king.

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The Kingdom Splits in Two
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Can sin exist without the law?

No.

According to Paul, the law produces sin, and without the law, there is no sin. Sin only comes to life when there are commandments to give it an opportunity. He says the only reason we have any desire to sin is that the law makes us feel that way. Where there is no law, there can be no transgression. And 1 John says if someone sins, then there must be a law that they’re breaking, because that’s what sin is.

Yes.

Continue reading Can sin exist without the law?
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