Is the God of the Bible Really Supposed to be Omnipotent?

Last week I was reading Exodus 3 (that post should go live as soon as I can find 20 quiet uninterrupted minutes to record a podcast) where God talks to Moses through the burning bush. Within his speech to Moses, God says that he sees his people suffering and wants to help them get out of their current situation. He wants Moses to go help them, and God will be there with him to help him be successful. I have been having trouble interpreting passages like this for a while now.

I'm trying to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt as much as I can, I don't want to just always look at things in a negative light, I want to try to consider a positive interpretation whenever possible. In this case God sees a group of people dealing with extreme hardship and takes steps to help them out. He seeks out Moses and tells him to go help those people, and God will even be there with him to make sure he's successful. That sounds pretty good right? He's helping people.

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On the other hand, he's omnipotent. He supposedly can do anything. Is he doing enough to help these people? He could just blink them out of their slavery. He could put the Egyptians in prison long enough for his people to get away. Hell, given that he is also omiscient, he could have made sure they were never put in slavery in the first place. Early on when the king of Egypt was screwing them over and putting them on the path toward slavery he could have put a stop to it somehow.

You might say God is doing all of this for the benefit of Moses, to teach him that he can be a powerful leader. That seems to be a lot of suffering happening to a lot of people for the benefit of one man. And as far as I can tell, any other rationalization will have the same problem. Whatever God's aims, it is hard to imagine that an omniscient and omnipotent God couldn't come up with a better way to do it. But what if God wasn't originally supposed to be so powerful?

We know that the surrounding people all had their own gods, my understanding is that everyone around back then were polytheists. I have my god, you have yours. My god could come and help me out when I am fighting against you with the help of your god. From this perspective Yahweh looks so much better in this story. His people are slaves of the Egyptians, of course the Egyptians have their gods. Yahweh asks Moses to go help his people and he will use what power he has to make sure Moses is successful. This would show real bravery on Moses' part, and even on Yahweh's if there could be a potential battle of the gods.

This goes for other stories that we recently saw in Genesis, consider the whole story of Joseph (Genesis 37-Genesis 46). One reason given for the whole episode is so that Joseph can save a bunch of people from starving during the 7 year famine. How much sense does that make? An all powerful god could have just made the famine not happen, or he could have warned someone already in a position of power, or even with the famine he could have given everyone a magical pantry that refills with food whenever it runs out. However, if he's one god among many with a limited amount of power, he could be setting up some very delicate events to save as many people as possible.

There are many other stories like this, if Yahweh is one god among many with limited power it is easy to imagine that he is doing the best he can with the situation in front of him. He can't save everyone but he can push things one way or the other and help large groups of people. If he's the one and only god with unlimited power and ultimate knowledge his actions are inadequate at best and psychotic at worst.

Do We Just See What We Want to See?

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Last year I started this blog to read the Bible and find out what is in it for myself. My motivation from the beginning was that I would often hear atheists claim that the bible is full of really terrible things and Christians would always claim that it was full of really wonderful things. Both sides seem to think that if you read the Bible you would come around to their way of thinking. A very curious situation indeed. Before I started I figured there were a couple possibilities for what I would find.

1. The Atheists were completely right, the bible is full of horrible things, God is a jerk, Jesus is overrated, and while there are a few good verses here and there, they are vastly outnumbered by bad verses
2. The Christians were completely right, the bible is full of good things. Sure, there are a few passages that look bad in isolation, but when taken as a whole even those passages make sense coming from a loving God
3. The truth lies between both of these extremes. There are enough passages on both sides of the ledger that each group can pay attention to stuff that fits their point of view and ignore things that don't. 

When I started this, I assumed that 3 would be reality. The interesting part would be to discover how much it leans towards either option 1 or 2. I think it is important to be as fair as possible, to count both the good and bad equally. In fact, given my bias I think it is important to push things in the opposite direction a bit, try to highlight any little bit of good I come across, and dispense with the nitpicky bad things (or at least admit they are nitpicky). I think I succeed pretty well in this matter most of the time, I really try to highlight good aspects of the reading, the Christian commentaries have definitely helped me on that account a few times.

Nevertheless, after reading all of the New Testament and Genesis all I see is number 1. There are terrible things everywhere and there's not that much good stuff. What's more, the good stuff is usually mixed up with an equal portion of bad (take the sermon on the mount for example). It's hard to me to imagine someone sitting down and reading this book and thinking it came from a loving God, and yet they do. I used to think that Christians must just not read the thing, but I come across people all the time who do read it. People say they have read it cover to cover X number of times in their life. I will occasionally see someone post the challenge to read the whole bible in 90 days and chart their progress. 

What the hell is going on here? How can we both read the same book and have such a different impression of it? Is it not as bad as I think and not as good as they think? I think I can make a pretty compelling argument that there is a ton of horrible things in the bible, but am I also missing a bunch of good stuff? Honestly, I don't think so. I think there are many stories that I count as bad and they count as good. Look at when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac for example. I read that story and I'm horrified at what I see, obviously both the God character and the Abraham character here are terrible. And yet Christians will almost universally describe this as a good story because Abraham is obedient. They want the bible to be a good book, and so they twist their perception to make it good even when it is plainly not. They are seeing what they want to see.

Now the question is, am I doing the same thing from the other side? Am I looking for the bible to be a piece of shit and that is what I'm finding? I feel like I try to be as fair as possible and highlight the positive as well as the negative. I really try not to be bias, but it's pretty hard to explain the disconnect without it. Is it really reasonable for me to think they are taking a book that is THAT terrible and twisting their perception to see it as good, or am I also twisting my perception to make it worse than it is? While I think it is important for me to be self-reflective and consider my own bias here, looking at a few examples such as the Abraham and Isaac story it really does seem that I'm on solid ground. In that story there's no middle ground to be reached. God is a horrible character and so is Abraham. The question then becomes whether that story is typical of the bible or an extreme example.

A Conversation Between Dawkins and a Young Earth Creationist

I've watched a ton of formal debates, and I am totally sick of them. The way they usually work is that both sides have a few items prepared, they talk past each other in 5 or 10 minute increments a few times, then at some point there will be rebuttals, but so much has been said already that the vast majority of it is never addressed. It's not terribly uncommon that in closing argument one party will point out that all of their assertions were not considered and then claim victory. I'm pretty much done watching these debates, but there are certainly times when I would like to watch something else along the same lines.

Recently Lady Atheist posted a link to an interview between Richard Dawkins and a Young Earth Creationist. This format I like a lot better, it is much more conversational and they are able to explore ideas and interact much more than in a debate format. If anyone knows of other good videos in a more conversational format I'd love to watch them. If you toss in a comment I'll edit the original post and put it up here. BTW, I'm sure if I don't mention it someone will suggest the atheist experience, I listen to that show every week. I'm guessing everyone reading my blog is aware of them, but if not you should go check them out.

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I haven't had the chance to watch it yet, but in the comments Christian suggested a video where Dawkins interviews a creationist.

Guest Post: The Creation Myth Demystified

This will be the last of my guest posts from some friends who volunteered to help me out while I'm out of town for a few days. Today's entry comes from Cephus, who writes Bitchspot and of course is one of the hosts of the bitchspot report. He is a great writer and he comes from a conservative atheist perspective which is somewhat of a rarity it seems. If you have yet to check out his stuff I definitely recommend it.

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Not long ago, we had a wonderful visit from Hausdorff on our podcast, The Bitchspot Report, where we discussed the absurdities of the Biblical account of creation.  However, at the time, we looked at them mostly as a simple Biblical narrative without acknowledging where the stories actually came from.  Most Christians simply accept that the stories in the Bible were original to the ancient Hebrews without the understanding that most ancient cultures were quite adept at plagiarism.  Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, referred to it euphemistically as “borrowing”, but there were many mythic elements that were  commonplace among ancient cultures that they “borrowed”  back and forth between their tales to lend them legitimacy.  This kind of thing is rampant throughout the Bible; even many of the miracles supposedly performed by Jesus were “borrowed” from other mythologies to make Jesus appear more acceptable.

I did promise to expand on the Babylonian mythology that predated the Hebrews and the clear similarities that exist between the Enuma Elish and the two creation stories that appear in the Bible.

Two, you ask?  Most certainly.  The first story appears in Genesis 1:1-2:3, but was actually the later of the two accounts, dating no earlier than the 6th century BCE and is part of the Priestly narrative.  The second, which starts in Genesis 2:4 is a far earlier and more primitive story which directly contradicts the first in many of the details and in the order of creation.  It can be dated to around the 9th century BCE and is part of the Yahwist narrative.  What many people don’t realize, especially most theists, is that there are four distinct styles of storytelling in the Pentateuch that have been woven together, the Priestly (P), Yahwist (J), Elohist (E) and Deuteronimist (D).  Each of these styles dates from a different time and has a different voice.  There are books written about each of these narrative styles, but to study them in detail goes outside of our stated purpose, therefore I think we’ll pay the most attention to the first creation story here; it is the most detailed and bears the most similarity to the Babylonian predecessor.  Please, don’t get the idea that they only “borrowed” from the Babylonians; there were many other myths common in the Middle East at the time from which they flagrantly stole.  There are elements of Hindu stories, Akkadian myths, Egyptian tales, etc. that run through the Bible.  However, that would be a book in itself so I’ll limit myself primarily to the Babylonian creation myths here, but may throw in a reference here and there to the others.

In order to really understand where these ideas come from, it’s important to have at least a basic grounding in the Babylonian mythic structure so I’ll give you a quick overview and try not to bore anyone too badly.

The Enuma Elish is a Babylonian epic, found on seven tablets.  Anthropologists believe it was read as part of a ritual performed at the Celebration of Akitu, the Babylonian New Year.  It details the Babylonian creation story, among other things, as a great war among the gods.  It begins with two great water dragons, the married gods Apsu, the dragon of the fresh water and Tiamat, the dragon of the salt water.  Within Tiamat are born other gods who live within her, but they make so much commotion that they perturb both Tiamat and Apsu.  Apsu wants to kill them so they can be in peace, but Tiamat disagrees.  And thus, a war begins.  The god Ea uses a spell to put Apsu to sleep and he is slain, pissing off Tiamat to no end.  She and her new consort, Kingu, set forth to conquer the gods that killed her first husband, creating 11 monsters.  In the end, Marduk, the son of Ea and the greatest of the gods, challenges Tiamat and kills her, using her body to create the world we see around us.
The order between the two tales is identical and it is clear where the ancient Hebrew writers “borrowed” content and modified it to their own purposes.  It is important to understand that ancient peoples didn’t look at stories the way we do today.  To them, a mythic story was a way of getting across an idea; it was not necessarily a means of transmitting facts.  Modern people can recognize that something like Aesop’s fairy tales can pass along a message without being a story about real things; they have problems accepting the same thing for ancient myths.  Unfortunately, when debating theists, we are often frustrated by their inability to treat the Bible as anything but a modern-day history when it is demonstrably anything but.        
Let’s start looking at this in more detail, shall we?  We can touch on each day of creation and see where the similarities lie.

Before Day 1:  Genesis 1:1-2 begins before the first day and so shall we.  It describes, as the Babylonian epic, that the world was not, in fact, nothingness; it was a vast sea, over which the “Spirit of God” hovers.  In the Babylonian, it was the great water dragons; here it is the vast waters.  This idea of divine spirits floating over the waters is commonplace, particularly in the aftermath of a terrible battle between the gods.  We have many such examples in mythology, Soshiosh battling Tiamat, Odin fighting Ymir, the gods of the Rg-Vedas battling Parusha, etc.  But wait, you might say, there is no sign of the “Spirit of God” fighting anyone here!  No, but there are signs elsewhere in the Bible, such as in the more ancient writings in Isaiah 27:1, where God is shown to be fighting with Leviathan.  In the apocryphal Book of Enoch, we find “In that day shall be distributed for food two monsters, a feminine monster whose name is Leviathan, dwelling in the depths of the  sea, above the springs of waters, and a male monster whose name is Behemoth.”  Remember those names, those will be important later on.

Day 1 (Genesis 1:3-5):  It seems odd that the Genesis account would list the creation of light before the creation of the sun, as though they were two different things.  In the Enuma Elish, light is said to emanate from the gods themselves and is quite different from the illumination that would later come from the sun.  This is a clear case where the ancient Hebrew writers “borrowed” a concept, yet did not understand the concept they were borrowing, otherwise why would there be light before the creation of the sun?  Modern day apologists try all kinds of hand-waving rationalizations for this but really can’t come up with a better explanation than the obvious, that the ancient Hebrews blew it.  However, the ancient Hebrews did leave us some clues as to their sources.  In the earliest manuscripts, “Day” and “Night” are capitalized, which gives us an indication of something more than the mundane meaning.  Remember, at this point, the earth had not been created, nor was there a sun or moon, thus this cannot refer to a traditional day/night cycle.  What we’re seeing here is called by the Hindus, “the Day and Night of Brahma the Creator” and refers to long periods of time in creation, measuring, according to some Hindus, 4,320,000,000 earthly years.
Day 2 (Genesis 1:6-8):  At this point in the Babylonian myth, Marduk, son of Ea, the god of wisdom, killed the evil dragon Tiamat and split her into two pieces.  The upper half was fixed into the sky, to keep the waters above separate from the waters below.  Both Hebrew and Babylonian cultures viewed the universe as a series of nested spheres, very similar to a set of Matryoshka dolls.  The earth was a curved bowl, above which was a solid, dome-shaped structure that held back the torrential waters of the sky.  The sun and the stars, which will be created later, were simply lights attached to the inside of the dome.  The word used for “firmament” in the Hebrew is “rakia”, which literally means “to beat metal into thin plates”.  Today, we know that the Earth is a mere speck of dust in a vast cosmic sea.  It’s understandable if a primitive people didn’t comprehend that, it’s not understandable if some all-knowing, all-powerful deity doesn’t.

Day 3 (Genesis 1:9-13):  On the third day, the gods in both pantheons have created the three levels of the cosmos, the heavens, the seas and the earth.  They are then populated in that order in both mythologies.  It is important to note that in Genesis, the concept of “ruling” is introduced, with the heavens “governing” the day and night and the cycles of the seasons.  In the Priestly tradition, the various religious rituals were based around the seasons and the cycles of the sun and moon.


Day 4 (Genesis 1:14-19):  Here, the gods put lights in the firmament.  The word used in Genesis is “ma’or”, which means “lamps”.  The Babylonian story, however, refers to gems and precious stones that shone.  As you can see in the illustration, the ancient view of cosmology is quite different from what we know today.  Surely an action deity would have known better, this is certainly the uninformed beliefs of primitive man, not some omniscient God.

Day 5 (Genesis 1:20-23):   We do not know if the Enuma Elish discusses the creation of animals, that story would appear on Tablet 5, but it is largely damaged and portions are missing, so I cannot speculate what may appear there.  Instead, we’ll touch on something I brought up earlier.  Remember I told you to remember the monsters fought by God?  This is a very common mythic theme that also appears in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian creation myths, but which is not as clear in the Hebrew myth unless you know where to look for it.  Far too many people assume that the Bible is a chronological work, where each book is written after the one that precedes it and before the one that comes after.  This is simply not true, there are books that are actually written before the creation account and these give us clues to the beliefs and culture of the Hebrew people.  As I said before, if we look at Isaiah 27:1, we find a story with God fighting the great serpent Leviathan, which is very similar to the Babylonian war with Tiamat.  In Psalm 74 we find “Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.”  These passages betray a background very close to the idea of Apsu and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish.  So why does this not appear in the creation story?  Because the writers of the Priestly account need a superior being, one that does not need to fight for supremacy, it is already supreme.  However, all traces are not missing; let’s look at some more Hebrew.  To plug some Hebrew into Genesis 1:1, we see “In the beginning Elohim (many gods) bara (cut out, not created) the heavens and the earth. And the earth was tohu and bohu and darkness was on the surface of the tehom.”  Tehom, the word used for “deep” comes from the Akkadian word Tiamat, the dragon of Babylonian myth.  Tohu and bohu are two words mistranslated as “formless and void”, but as Professor Jeremias, the German orientalist says, “There can be no doubt that tohu is connected with Ti(h)amat and bohu with Behemoth.  Bohu is the equivalent of the Babylonian Apsu, the male mate of Tiamat.”  We come back to the concept of a council of gods cutting out the world from the skin of a great serpent, virtually identical to what appears in the Babylonian story.

Day 6 (Genesis 1:24-31):  And so we come to the creation of man.  In Genesis 1:26, God says “Let us make man.”  Us?  Yes, the word “Elohim” comes from the word “Alheim” and means a council, in this case, a council of the gods.  Numerologically, the council had 12 members and this number shows up throughout many cultures.  It makes sense, lifting this from the Babylonians, where there were multiple gods, but the Hebrews were very influenced by numerology and its symbolic meaning.  This is the same point in the Greek myths that the 12 Titans started creating man.  The name Adam first appears in Sumerian mythology as Adamah, which means “clay” or “clod of dirt”.  So too appears Eve as Heve.  In Sumerian, the word “ti” means both “rib” and “to make alive”.  In the Babylonian myth, the goddess Ninti is called “the lady of the rib” and also “the lady who makes alive”.  In their creation story, she is made by the god Nimhursag to heal Enki’s sick rib.  So too is Eve created from Adam’s rib to be his helpmate.

Day 7 (Genesis 2:1-3):  And on the seventh day, all the gods in both pantheons rested, although at least the ones on the Babylonian side got to party.  The Hebrews get their word for this day of rest, “Sabbath” from the Sumerian word “Sabbatu”.

But what of the second, earlier, creation story in Genesis?  Surely it must owe it’s origins to some earlier mythic tradition.  In fact, we find that it does very closely resemble a secondary, and again older, creation myth in the Babylonian tradition called the Atra-Hasis epic, which demonstrates parallels throughout much of Genesis, right up to the flood story and its aftermath.  They share many attributes including the divine garden and man’s place therein, man’s creation from the dust and a chance for man to gain immortality.

One thing I did want to touch on, Hausdorff was curious when I mentioned that Christian apologists have long since claimed to know the date of creation, dating back to Bishop Ussher.  I came across a quote from Dr. John Lightfoot, written in 1654, which lays out the details.  “Heaven and earth, center and circumference were made in the same instance of time and clouds full of water and man was created by the Trinity on the 26th of October, 4004 B.C., at 9 o’clock in the morning.”  How they came to that figure, and I have seen formulations which state that it was, in fact, 9:04am in a particular time zone that creation poofed into existence, I shall never know.  Working through the genealogies only gets you so far.

And so, you can clearly see that the stories that appear in the Bible are not fully-crafted tales passed down to man by an omniscient, omnipotent deity in the sky, they were tales which were crafted by primitive man out of stories that started in distant lands.  When groups started to trade and communicate with each other, they passed along their myths and the Hebrews, like virtually every other culture, simply kept the parts that appealed to them and re-wrote the stories using their own social biases.  The idea that the stories in the Bible are original in any way, or that they are the product of anything but the human mind, is absurd if you bother to look at the evidence.  Too bad the religious are unable or unwilling to do so.

One Verse Test

I'm in the midst of doing my review posts for the new testament. My original plan was to simply do those every day, but it turns out they take a long time to write and I need a little breathing room, so today I want to  quickly talk about something that came up in the comments of my recent post about women. TWF mentioned something he calls the one verse test, basically, if you are making an argument that a particular position is supported biblically, find the verse that supports your position the most and remove it from the discussion. If you can still support your argument biblically then great, but if your argument falls apart then this shows how weak it really is.

Things that seem to be important to the authors of the bible are said over and over. A great example of this is that the apocalypse is right around the corner, I found 17 different verses that forward this idea so this argument is quite strong. On the other hand, I have only found one verse (Luke 20:35) that supports the idea that married people are not eligible for resurrection, so my case for this argument is much weaker.

A nice thing about this idea is that if you only have one verse supporting your argument, you are very vulnerable to translation issues, or even things being manipulated (either intentionally or accidentally) by the early church. And there is even the possibility that you are simply misreading something or misunderstanding what is really written in the book. But the more verses you have supporting the argument, the less chance there is for these types of mistakes. It's much more likely that there was such an error in one verse compared to 17 separate verses.

Literal Versus Figurative

I recently started reading Revelation, and there was a discussion in the comments section about whether things in this book should be taken literally or figuratively. My original position was to assume everything is supposed to be literal unless there is a pretty explicit reason to think it is intended to be figurative. For example, many times when Jesus would tell a story, he would say it was a parable, which means we are not supposed to think it really happened. Without some explicit indication that a particular passage is intended to be taken figuratively, I would think the natural conclusion would be that it should be taken literally.

dsholland challenged my interpretation of the first book in revelation and relayed a story about a time him and a friend were not confused about the figurative nature of a drawing he had done. I argued that the situation is different because he wasn't trying to forward the idea that it was literal, while the bible is. TWF then argued that there are some pretty heavy metaphors in the bible and he thinks that most of Revelation is supposed to be metaphor. When I asked him how he determines it to be metaphor, he said that is a very hard question. Since it is communication via text it can be hard to figure these things out sometimes, but it is dangerous to start off with the assumption that things are either always literal or always metaphor. The best thing to do is to get a feel for the text and then take it on a case by case basis. I'd like to quote a paragraph of his

We use figures of speech, similes, and metaphor all the time in our speech today, and most of the time we understand the meaning because we've learned the cultural groundings for those phrases. But looking back on the Bible, so far removed from that era, is extra challenging to parse correctly. There are at least a handful of phrases in the original Hebrew text which even the Jews today do not really understand the meaning of.

He makes a really good point, it is very difficult to figure out the intent of the original author. It is probably too hasty of me to assume that everything is literal unless explicitly said otherwise, and yet part of me still wants to hold on to this. Perhaps it is because I was raised in a fundamentalist church, and to them we were always supposed to take the bible literally. Perhaps it is because this is an excuse I see some Christians make when things seem to be going against them. Don't like the way a bible verse sounds? Must be figurative. This is an annoying tactic, especially when abused by some Christians. However, even if they don't have a good reason to declare something figurative, even if they are simply declaring a verse to be figurative as a defense mechanism, it doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong. For me to claim that everything must be literal as a preemptive strike against such tactics is also crap.

So where does that leave me? I think the only reasonable course forward is to try to always consider literal and figurative interpretations. On one hand, I'm interested in what lessons people could get from reading the bible, and I know there are people in the world who interpret passages both literally and figuratively. I would like to consider what both groups could potentially get out of the reading. I am also interested in what the original authors actually intended by their writing, and as TWF pointed out, this is not always easy to figure out.

Understanding the text on a literal level is easy, I think I can do that without any problem. Understanding the symbolism is not going to come so naturally to me. I'll do my best, but I will mostly rely on the Christian commentaries I read, and on my readers to catch anything I miss. Let me know if you ever catch me being to literal, and I promise to do a better job at considering the alternate interpretations in the future.

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[Later addition to this post] In defense of my insistence to at least consider the literal interpretation of every passage, people make pretty crazy sounding claims all the time. Consider people who think they have been abducted by aliens. They will tell you detailed stories about what they saw and what happened to them while they were on the alien ship. Someone reading their account later might think it is so crazy they must not have meant it literally, but they would be wrong to assume that. How do I know that John is not the alien abductee of his day?