Outgrowing God Page 6
Another possibility, which may have already occurred to you, is that Pygmy mythology is not pure Pygmy in origin. Could it have been contaminated at some stage by Christian missionaries? The missionaries would have taught the Adam and Eve story to the Pygmies. Then, after generations of Chinese Whispers garbling in the deep forest, the biblical idea of forbidden fruit got incorporated into the Pygmies’ own origin myth. I think that’s pretty likely. Against this, Jean-Pierre Hallet, the Belgian anthropologist who translated the myth (an amazing character, by the way – try Googling his name plus ‘badass’), was convinced that the influence went the other way. He thought the legend of the forbidden fruit originated with the Pygmies and spread to the Middle East via Egypt. If either of these theories is right, the differences between the two myths demonstrate yet again the power of the Chinese Whispers effect as one myth morphed into the other.
Many tribal myths, including the Adam and Eve myth, have a poetic beauty. But there’s one thing I unfortunately have to repeat, because too many people don’t realize it: they are not true. They aren’t history. Most of them aren’t even remotely based on history. We tend to think the United States is an advanced, well-educated country. And so it is, in part. Yet it is an astonishing fact that nearly half the people in that great country believe literally in the story of Adam and Eve. Luckily the other half is there too, and they have made the United States the greatest scientific power in the history of the world. You have to wonder how much further ahead they would be if they weren’t held back by the scientifically ignorant half who believe every word of the Bible is literally true.
No educated person today thinks either the Adam and Eve myth or the Noah’s Ark myth is literally true. Plenty of people do, however, believe in the Jesus myths (like Jesus rising from the grave), the Islamic myths (like Mohammed riding a winged horse) or the Mormon myths (like Joseph Smith translating golden tablets). Do you think they are right to do so? Is there good reason to believe those – any more than the myth of the Garden of Eden? Or Noah? Or John Frum and the cargo cults? And, if you believe the myths of your own faith, whichever faith you happen to have been brought up in, why are those myths any more likely to be true than the myths of other faiths, believed equally fervently by other people?
So, we’ve dealt with the Bible as history. It mostly isn’t. And we’ve dealt with the Bible as myth. Much of it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Myths are rightly valued. But there’s nothing to single out the biblical myths as any more valuable than the myths of the Vikings, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Polynesian islanders, the Australian aborigines, or any of the countless tribes of Africa, Asia or the Americas. The Bible has one more important claim, however. It’s called ‘The Good Book’, a book of moral wisdom, a book that will help us to lead a good life. Many people, especially in America, go so far as to believe you can’t be a good person without it.
Does the Bible deserve its virtuous reputation as the Good Book? You may like to decide after reading the next chapter.
‘The animals went in two by two.’ We love the story of Noah’s Ark. Mr and Mrs Giraffe, Mr and Mrs Elephant, Mr and Mrs Penguin and all the other couples, patiently walking up the gangway into the great wooden ship, welcomed by a beaming Mr and Mrs Noah. Sweet. But wait; why was there a worldwide flood in the first place? God was angry with the sinfulness of humankind. All except Noah, who ‘found favour in the eyes of the Lord’. So God decided to drown every man, woman and child, plus all the animals except one pair of each kind. Not so sweet after all?
Whether or not we think God is an entirely fictional character, we can still judge whether he is good or bad, just as we might judge Lord Voldemort or Darth Vader or Long John Silver or Professor Moriarty or Goldfinger or Cruella de Vil. So throughout this chapter, when I say ‘God did so-and-so’ I mean ‘the Bible says that God did so-and-so’, and from these accounts we can judge if the God character is a nice character, whether the stories about him are fact or fiction. I shall do so, and you will no doubt feel free to decide for yourself whether you think it’s still possible to love God in spite of everything. As a man called Job did, in the following story from the Bible.
Job was a very good, righteous man who loved God. This pleased God so much that he had a sort of bet with Satan about Job. Satan thought Job was good and well-behaved and loved God only because he was fortunate – rich and healthy, with a nice wife and ten lovely children. God bet Satan that Job would go on being good and go on loving and worshipping him, even if he lost all his good fortune. God gave Satan permission to test Job by depriving him of everything. And Satan duly set about it. Poor Job! His cattle and sheep all died, his servants were all killed, his camels were stolen, his house blew down in a gale and all his ten children died. But God won the argument because, even in the face of such provocation, Job never became cross with God, and refused to stop loving and worshipping him.
Satan still wouldn’t admit defeat, though, so God gave him permission to test Job even further. This time Satan covered Job’s whole body with boils, like the boils God inflicted on the Egyptians (caused by bacteria, as we now know, though the author of the book of Job didn’t – and presumably God and Satan did). Still Job’s faith held firm. He didn’t stop loving God. So God finally rewarded Job by curing the boils and giving him lots more wealth. His wife had lots more children. And they all lived happily ever after. Pity about the ten dead children and all the other people who’d been killed because of the bet but – as people often say – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Like the Noah myth, it’s just a story, it didn’t happen. As with most books in the Bible, we don’t know who wrote the book of Job. And we don’t know whether the author himself (it probably was a himself rather than a herself) thought there was a real man called Job. He could have been using fiction to teach a lesson. This is quite likely, because the bulk of the book of Job consists of lengthy dialogues between Job and his friends (known as ‘Job’s comforters’) about moral questions and duty to God. But whatever the author’s intention, huge numbers of devout Christians and Jews still think it’s a real story about a real, suffering man called Job. Devout Muslims, too, for the story of Job is in the Quran. So is the story of Noah. And the very same people think the scriptures are our best guide on how to be good. All these devout people think God himself is a supremely good role model.
Here’s another story, a very upsetting one, also about God testing somebody to see whether he really loved God. Imagine that, when you were a child, your father woke you one morning and said, ‘It’s a fine day, how would you like to come with me for a walk in the country?’ You might quite fancy the idea. So off you go for a nice day together. After a while, your father stops to gather wood. He piles it up and you help him because you enjoy bonfires. But now, when the bonfire is ready to light, something terrible happens. Utterly unexpected. Your father seizes you, throws you on top of the pile of wood and ties you down so you can’t move. You scream with horror. Is he going to roast you on top of the bonfire? It gets worse. Your father produces a knife, raises it above his head, and you are now in no doubt. Your father is about to run his knife through you. He’s going to kill you and then set fire to your body: your own father, the father who told you bedtime stories when you were little, told you the names of flowers and birds, your dear father who gave you presents, comforted you when you were afraid of the dark. How could this be happening?
Suddenly he stops. He looks up at the sky with a strange expression on his face, as though carrying on a conversation with himself in his head. He puts away the knife, unties you and tries to explain what has happened, but you are so paralysed with horror and fear that you can scarcely hear his words. Eventually he makes you understand. It was all God’s doing. God had ordered your father to kill you and offer you up as a burnt sacrifice. But it turned out to be just a tease – a test of your father’s loyalty to God. Your father had to prove to God that he loved God so mu
ch that he was even prepared to kill you if God ordered him to do so. He had to prove to God that he loved God even more than he loved his own dear child. As soon as God saw that your father was really, really prepared to go through with it, God intervened just in time. Gotcha! April Fool! I didn’t really mean it! Yes, it was a good joke, wasn’t it?
Is it possible to imagine a worse trick to play on someone? A trick calculated to scar a child for life and poison a father–child relationship for ever. But that’s exactly what the Bible says God did. Read the whole story in Genesis chapter 22. The father was Abraham; the child was his son Isaac.
The same story is told in the Quran (37: 99–111). Here the name of the son is not mentioned, and there is a tradition in Islam that it was Abraham’s other son (with a different mother), Ishmael. In the Quran version, Abraham had a dream in which he saw himself sacrificing his son. Just a dream was enough to persuade him that Allah was telling him to do so, and he asked his son’s opinion. Amazingly, the son encouraged his father to go ahead and sacrifice him. According to another Islamic tradition – this version isn’t in the Quran itself – Shaytan (Satan) tried to persuade Abraham not to do this terrible deed. This would seem to make the devil the good guy in the story. But Abraham, preferring his dream, drove him away by pelting him with stones. Muslims symbolically re-enact this stoning in the annual festival called Eid.
If you were Isaac (Ishmael), could you ever forgive your father? If you were Abraham, could you ever forgive God? If anything like this happened in modern times, Abraham would be locked up for terrible cruelty to his child. Can you imagine what the judge would say if a man pleaded, ‘But I was only following orders.’ ‘Orders from whom?’ ‘Well, Your Honour, I heard this voice in my head.’ Or ‘I had this dream.’ What would you think, if you were on the jury? Would you think it was a good enough excuse? Or would you send Abraham to prison?
Fortunately there’s no reason to suppose it really happened. Like most stories in the Bible, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, there’s no good evidence for it. No evidence, indeed, that Abraham and Isaac even existed. Hardly any more than, say, Little Red Riding Hood (and that’s a pretty upsetting story too, for all that everybody knows it’s fiction). But the point is that, whether fiction or fact, the Bible is still held up to us as the Good Book. And its central character, God, is held up as supremely good. Many Christians still take the Bible literally as historical fact. As we shall see in Chapter 5, they think it’s impossible to be good – impossible even to know what good means – without God.
In both these stories – God testing Abraham and God testing Job – I can’t help feeling that the God character is not only cruel but – well – insecure. It’s as though God is like a jealous wife in a novel, who is so uncertain of her husband’s fidelity that she deliberately tries to trap him in unfaithfulness: persuades an attractive woman friend, perhaps, to tempt him, just to prove to herself that he’ll remain loyal to her. And if God is supposed to know everything, you might think he’d know in advance how Abraham would behave when put to the test.
In the Bible, the God character often describes himself as jealous. At one point he even says his name is ‘Jealous’! But where ordinary people are jealous of romantic rivals or business competitors, God is jealous of rival gods. Sometimes with good reason. As we saw in Chapter 1, the early Hebrews were not wholly monotheistic in the modern sense. They were loyal to Yahweh as their tribal god, but that didn’t mean they doubted the existence of rival tribes’ gods. They just thought their Yahweh was more powerful, and more deserving of their support. And sometimes they were tempted to worship other gods – with terrifying results if their own God caught them at it.
On one occasion, so the Bible tells us, the Israelites’ legendary leader Moses was up a mountain talking with God. When Moses had been gone rather a long time the people began to wonder if he was ever coming back. They persuaded Moses’s brother Aaron to collect a lot of gold from everybody, melt it down and make them a new god while Moses wasn’t looking: a golden calf. They bowed down and worshipped the golden calf. That may seem odd, but worshipping statues of animals, including bulls, was quite common among local tribes at the time. Moses didn’t know his people were cheating on God, but God himself could see exactly what the Israelites were up to. Mad with jealousy, he sent Moses storming down the mountain to put a stop to it. Moses seized the golden calf, burned it, ground it to powder, mixed the powder with water and made the people drink it. One of the clans of Israel, the tribe of Levi, hadn’t fallen for the golden calf. So God, through Moses, ordered each Levite to pick up a sword and kill as many of the other tribesmen as they could. This amounted to a total of about three thousand dead. Even this wasn’t enough to satisfy God’s jealous rage. He sent a plague to ravage the people who survived. If you know what’s good for you, you’d better not mess with this God character. Above all, don’t you dare look at any other gods!
What had Moses been doing up the mountain with God? Among other things, he’d been taking delivery of the famous Ten Commandments, carved on tablets of stone. He carried them down with him but, such was his fury when he saw the golden calf, he dropped the tablets and broke them. Never mind: God later gave him a spare set and we are told, in two separate places in the Bible, what they said. If you ask Christians today why they think their religion is a force for good, they will very often cite the Ten Commandments. But when I’ve asked them what the Ten Commandments actually are, I find they often can remember only one: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
I’d say that’s a pretty obvious rule for a good life. A rule that should hardly need to be carved in stone. But, as we shall see in Chapter 5, it turns out to have meant only, ‘Thou shalt not kill members of thine own tribe.’ God had no problem with killing foreigners. As we’ll see later in this chapter, the God of the Old Testament was continually urging his chosen people to slaughter other tribes. And with a bloodthirsty ruthlessness it’s hard to find in any other work of fiction. But in any case, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t have pride of place among the Ten Commandments. Various traditions differ a little in how they order the commandments, but they all give prominence to Number One: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Jealous again.
The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is wrathful. (Nahum 1: 2)
Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God. (Exodus 34: 14)
Another of God’s little ways, according to the Bible, is his love of the smell of burning meat: usually non-human meat, but not always. When he ordered Abraham to truss Isaac on a bonfire, the reason as Abraham understood it was God’s chronic appetite for savoury smoke. After making that last-minute intervention to save Isaac, God sent a ram to get its horns caught in a thicket nearby. Abraham got the message, killed the poor creature and gave God a fix of mutton smoke instead of Isaac smoke. The official Sunday School interpretation of the sudden appearance of the ram is that it was God’s way of telling people to stop sacrificing humans and sacrifice animals instead. But the God character in the story was in the habit, in those days, of talking to people – after all, he had told Abraham to kill Isaac. So you’d think he could have simply told them in words to sacrifice sheep instead of people. Why put poor Isaac through such a terrible ordeal? You’ll find, if you read the Bible, that messages are often delivered in that kind of roundabout, ‘symbolic’ way, rather than plainly and clearly. I can’t help feeling that a really nice God would have told them not to sacrifice sheep either.
Why doesn’t God seem to speak to people any more, as he did to Abraham? In parts of the Old Testament he seemingly couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He seemed to speak to Moses almost every day. But nobody hears a peep from him today – or if they do, we think they need psychiatric help. Did that in itself ever make you wonder whether those old stories might not be true?
Here’s another story that might make you question how nice God is. The B
ook of Judges, chapter 11, tells of an Israelite general called Jephthah who badly needed a victory against a rival tribe called the Ammonites. Jephthah was desperate to win, so he promised God that, if God would only give him victory over the Ammonites, he would make a burnt sacrifice of whatever or whomever he first saw on returning home after the battle. God duly gave him the victory he wanted ‘with a very great slaughter’. Poor Ammonites, you might think. But it gets worse. As luck would have it, the first person who came out of the house to congratulate Jephthah was his beloved daughter. His only daughter. She came out, dancing with joy to greet her victorious father. Jephthah was horrified to remember his promise to God. But he had no choice. He had to cook his daughter. God was so looking forward to the promised smell of burning. His daughter very decently agreed to be sacrificed, asking only to be allowed to go into the mountains for two months first, ‘to bewail her virginity’. After two months she did her duty and returned. Jephthah kept his promise and barbecued his daughter so God could have a nice, satisfying smoke. On this occasion God forgot the lesson of Abraham and Isaac and didn’t intervene. Sorry, daughter, thank you for being so nice about it! And thanks, too, for staying a virgin, which for some reason was regarded as important for the sacrifice (verse 39).
Why was Jephthah fighting the Ammonites in the first place, and why would God have helped him gain victory? The Old Testament is filled with bloody battles. And whenever the Israelites win, the credit is given to their bloodthirsty God of Battles. The books of Joshua and Judges are largely about the campaign waged by the Israelites, after Moses had led them out of captivity in Egypt, to take over the Promised Land. This was the land of Israel, the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’. God helped them take it over by exterminating the unfortunate peoples who already lived there. God’s orders here were not roundabout at all, but horribly clear: