Adam’s Family Jewels

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and He took the bone of Adam’s penis and made him a woman.”

Er, wait, wasn’t it from one of Adam’s ribs that Eve was created?

Not according to Ziony Zevit. A professor of Semitic languages at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles Zevit posits that the Hebrew word tsela (literally “side,” but traditionally translated as “rib”) employed in Genesis refers in fact to Adam’s member.

In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang. The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”—testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Damm, A book of Calumny by H. L. Mencken.

A pillow for free will to fall upon—but one loaded with disconcerting brickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism err is in their assumption that the pulls of their antagonistic impulses are exactly equal—that the individual is absolutely free to choose which one he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise, is never encountered. When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition that chooses between them, but also his environment, his inherited prejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss a girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would be absurd to say that I am, in any true sense, a free agent in the matter. The world has even put my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and act depend upon the time, the place—and even to some extent, upon the girl.

The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious objections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may be well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious hypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, the consequences of his acts. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail. Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are tracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time of it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing.

Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage to theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for his involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to flout omnipotence—a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Damm, A book of Calumny by H. L. Mencken.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

How I Became An Atheist

Children are pliable in the extreme, and they without fail emulate those they respect. My father was a Christian, so I became one as well.

Realize what I mean by that: I didn’t decide to become a Christian; it just happened. As a child, if someone you respect tells you that something is true — or even just illustrates that they believe it to be true — it becomes absolute. This is something that people don’t realize. There is no choice in these matters for a human until much later in life.

The place was more segregated than anything I’d ever seen. Everyone disagreed on where Jesus was buried, where this happened or that happened, and overall had their own dogmatic and exclusionary versions of how things “really” transpired.

I remember the moment it happened — the moment I realized I no longer believed.

I was reading a story about Moses going into a town to spread the word of God. The people of the town must have been Pagans or something because they wanted nothing of Moses’s teachings. They became quite terse with Moses, as I remember, and invoked the anger of God.

In a fit of rage, God proceeded to set fire to the town.

As I was reading this, with all of these doubts and questions in my mind already, I was dumbfounded. Setting fire to a town? A town full of humans he created? Was he surprised at their non-belief? How could he be if he created each one of them from scratch as an omnipotent and omniscient being? Wouldn’t he have had to create the very “flaw” within them that gave them the option to choose incorrectly? If not, how did it get there without his knowledge? What part of any of this was outside of God’s control.

Nothing. Nothing is outside the control of an all-powerful and all-knowing God.

Moses ended up negotiating for the people who’s town was being destroyed by God. He begged and pleaded that they didn’t know any better, and that they should be sparred. God finally listened to Moses and stopped his attack (praise God).

That was it for me. I put the book down and have been an atheist ever since.

As an example, the Bible clearly says that if you work on the Sabbath you should be put to death.

Whosoever shall work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.— Numbers 15:32

But millions of Christians and Jews work on the Sabbath and think it’s just fine. Why? Because they’ve justified — using their own morality — that no just God would really condone killing people for such a thing, right? Well, here’s the simple question: what gives regular men the right to deny the parts of the Bible that they see fit? What tells them to pick and choose what to follow and what to discard?

The answer is nothing. Nothing tells them it’s permissible to ignore the exact words of the ten commandments if at some future time the laws don’t permit their enforcement. Let me state this again: God commanded Moses to kill a man for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. The man was killed. There is nothing about this that expired or became obsolete due to later law. If you are a Christian or a Jew, and you work on the Sabbath, you are breaking God’s law in a way that God himself says is punishable by death.

And that’s my point. You, my fellow humans out there who know this is a hideous idea but cling to a Christian identity are fooling yourselves. You are moral because YOU are a good person. You are moral because you don’t kill people who check their work email on Sunday. You decide how your family follows the Bible. You decide the moral way to raise your family.

You think your goodness comes from the Bible, but it doesn’t. It was inspired by the Bible, and you enjoy the idea of the Bible, but that idea is actually your own version of it — not the real thing. If it were the real thing you’d be in jail right now. The same goes for Muslims, as the Koran commands unspeakable evil as well of its followers. In short, if you’re open, thoughtful and moderate then you’ve perverted the original teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by being so.