Religion Is Absurd

Yes, religion is absurd. I refer here specifically to the three Abrahamic religions (and their many subdivisions), which are based on the Five Books of Moses and its associated volumes. The stories make no sense, and it's hard to understand why anyone ever took or still takes them seriously. The Bible is literally a string of fables that are laughably implausible and morally outrageous. The six-day creation--yeah, right. Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil--really? The flood and the resulting mass murder--come on! Lot, his poor wife, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's incestuous daughters--x-rated soap opera and gratuitous violence. Does anyone think that stuff actually happened? 

How about Abraham's willingness to kill his son Isaac because a voice in his head claiming to be Yahweh's told him to do it. Please. Like Abraham wouldn't have been appalled by the very idea and wouldn't have torn up the covenant in which he promised to trade the foreskins of all his male descendants in return for a strip of other people's land. 

If you insist these are only allegories, then answer me this: to what good moral purpose are these allegories told? What are we supposed to learn from them?

Then we get to Exodus, and the absurdity just gets more extreme. We're told that the Israelites were slaves in Pharaoh's Egypt. But earlier on, we were told that the Israelite Joseph, son of Jacob, when he was Pharaoh's prime minister, had maneuvered to enslave the Egyptians during a famine, while the Israelites were allowed to live free in a separate Egyptian conclave. This doesn't mean that the fabled enslavement of the Israelites was justified, but it is an interesting fact nonetheless.

By the way, didn't Yahweh know this was all going to happen on day 1? Why didn't he write a different script?

Later on Moses, an Egyptian-born Hebrew who is raised at court, is introduced to the reader. Having run away from Egypt after killing a slave driver, he encounters Yahweh in the form of a burning bush, who tells him to return to Egypt to free his people. One wrinkle: Yahweh tells Moses that he, the Almighty, will "harden Pharaoh's heart" so that he will not let the people go. Why? So Moses can threaten the lives of the Egyptians' first-born children. Does that make any sense to you? 

As if this isn't absurd enough, while Moses and his family are on their way to Egypt, as burning-bush Yahweh had directed, Yahweh meets up with him and plans to kill him! Why? We aren't told! But his life is saved when his wife crudely circumcises their son (who, strangely, had not been altered on day 8 of his life) and touches Moses with the bloody foreskin, saying, "A bridegroom of blood thou art to me." You don't believe me? Look up Exodus 4:24-26. This isolated episode is dropped into the story for no obvious reason. It's bewildering. As Dave Barry might say, you can't make this stuff up, except that someone made it up.

Let's go into the liberation story a bit more. In the book of Exodus, the part about the 10 plagues, Moses's attempts to persuade Pharaoh to free the Israelites are thwarted by--Yahweh himself! Eight times the text says that Yahweh "hardened Pharaoh's heart." It even explains why: Yahweh wanted opportunities to demonstrate his awesome power. Good reason, right? Had Pharaoh, unmanipulated by Yahweh, simply been allowed to let the Israelites go, Yahweh would have lost the chance to display godly awesomeness, not to mention that the Israelites would have been freed much earlier and the Egyptians wouldn't have suffered from the ghastly plagues. Remember: Yahweh is all-powerful; he could have easily transported the Israelites to freedom anytime he wanted (or prevented their enslavement). But no, he wanted a chance to perform his great feats. That is, Pharaoh, rather than being a slave-driving tyrant, was merely a convenient tool in the divine plan. That casts a different light on this, doesn't it? Yahweh's a piece of work.

And we're barely into the second book of he Hebrew Bible! 

Let's recap: the Almighty Lord creates the human race so he would have living things to worship and serve him. (That's needy.) Then he arbitrarily chooses one unexceptional guy and promises that his descendants will be a great nation living on other people's land if they obey all commandments and surrender their foreskins. Then he arranges to have them enslaved so he can later free them to great fanfare. But he doesn't want the tyrant to be a pushover, so Yahweh repeatedly makes the tyrant change his mind about freeing them until Yahweh has no choice (yeah, right) but to impose 10 plagues on every Egyptian, including the slaying of their first-born--an act of collective punishment that ranks high on the list of all-time unspeakable atrocities.

And remember, Yahweh will hold this so-called act of liberation over the heads of the Israelites forever. Whenever anyone of them disobeys, Yahweh will wrathfully remind them that he was the one who led them out of Egypt. Lack of gratitude is a terrible offense. The Israelites will never be allowed to forget the release from bondage even though it was Yahweh who set up the whole thing. There are no grounds for gratitude here, only rage. How do we know? Yahweh's own memoir says so! (Thankfully, it's all fiction.) If you believe all this, what won't you believe?

I won't say these fables prove there is no God (reason and logic do that, thank you), but I will say the fables prove that the Yahweh in these stories was not great or good.