Examining the Bible: Genesis, Part II

For those who followed me on Xanga, I apologize.  I’m migrating my favorite posts over here.

Moving on to Genesis 4, we learn about Adam and Eve’s two sons: Cain and Abel. As if the story of the “fall of man” didn’t seem like it was written by an underachieving sixth-grader, we’re now going to dumb things down so all you fourth-graders out there have something to read. As expected, this story has problems and I’ll tell you exactly what some of them are.

Problem 1: Reproduction
As you may or may not recall from my last blog post, Adam and Eve were damned and thrown out of paradise because they were purposely created too ignorant to understand what disobedience and sin were. Along with being banished, they were commanded to make more of themselves! Yes, that’s right, the most perfect being in the universe was so angry with these two sinners he told them to immediately go out and start breeding like rabbits. I’m not making this up. So Adam and Eve started breeding and popped out two sons: Cain first and then Abel. Presumably, the boys made it to their teens without any more brothers and sisters (or the documentation was pretty shoddy at this point).

Problem 2: Favoritism
Cain was a gardener and Abel was a shepherd. At some point, the boys got to talking and decided to bring the best of their best offerings to god to show him just how much they loved him. Cain, of course, brought fruits and grains in this bundle of healthy, fiber-rich hippie food. Abel, on the other hand, brought leg of lamb and a big tub of lard that would clog the arteries of even a deity who worked out at the YMCA every day…and took Lipitor regularly. I’ll tell you something: god is not a vegetarian. So god, who loves everyone equally, told Abel that his offering was awesome and Cain’s sucked. That’s bound to piss anybody off, right?

Problem 3: Divine Nonsense
Cain was mad. He had put a lot of work into gathering his hippie food for god and got the cold shoulder. So god, in that incredibly sensitive way he has of comforting people, told Cain to suck it up and stop being such a goddamned baby. Not only that, but he told Cain that if Cain did what was right then he’d always be accepted. So…was offering the best of what he had to give not “right?” Silly carnivorous god!

After he imparted that glaring contradiction, he told Cain that sin was crouching at his door (the Bible doesn’t mention that these people had made houses at this point, so I’m not even sure if Cain knew what a door was) and he had to “rule over it.” Cain, at this point, was probably like, “OMG, WTFSRSLY?”

Problem 4: Murder?
Cain asked Abel to go chill with him in the fields and was still so angry (and confused from what god just told him) that he killed his brother.

Now, here’s where things are a little fuzzy for me. Christians keep telling me that our moral code is derived from god’s 10 Commandments and that without them we’d be raping each other and stealing each others’ baseball cards and eating too much. I don’t agree (I will always eat too much regardless), but if we granted them this premise then at this point the 10 Commandments didn’t exist. How is it then that Cain, without a moral code, should have felt guilty about killing his brother or should have been punished as though it were a sin? After all, he was really pissed off. God never told anybody that killing was wrong. In fact, god’s plan was to murder anybody who ate the knowledgeberries. Remember those? What kind of example does that set?

So while this is an issue for Christian sticklers of 10 Commandment-based morality, let’s take a humanist approach and say that we all inherently know that killing other humans is bad. Cain murdered his brother and god found out (again with this “finding out” stuff! Doesn’t god already know this?) and cursed Cain and took away his gardening skills. Bad Cain, no granola for you!

Problem 5: Spontaneous Humans!
God told Cain that he would drive him from his home and he would wander the Earth restlessly (can you restfully wander the Earth?). Cain felt overwhelmed and asked god for mercy because everywhere he went, people would try to kill him.

Wait!

What people? So far as we know, Adam and Eve were the first humans created and when they got kicked out of the garden, they had two sons and one of those was now dead. There are three friggin’ people on the planet. Of whom is Cain afraid?! Nobody knows, not even god, because god told Cain that he’d put a special mark on his forehead so nobody (whoever this “nobody” was) would kill him and Cain started his restless wandering…restlessly.

Problem 5: Sex With Your Sister
Cain went into the land of Nod and made love to his wife.

Wait!

I think I just skipped something, let me see here: Genesis 4:16 says Cain wandered into Nod and Genesis 4:17 says Cain made sweet love to his wife. From where in the frick did this woman come? Where is Nod? How many people lived there? Were they all Cain’s brothers and sisters or were they magically conjured up from dirt? The Bible doesn’t say.

We have to assume that these people were all products of the original mating pair of humans but there’s a problem with that:

Problem 6: Timelines
Adam and Eve had another son and named him Seth. When Seth was born, Eve said that god had given her another son to replace Abel since Cain killed him. It seems to me this is still a fresh wound and this verse would suggest that Seth was born while Cain was wandering. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that not that much time had passed between Abel dying and Seth being born. However, just for sake of argument let’s call it a full generation (~30 years). If that was the case, then Adam and Eve would not have had time to have enough children between Abel and Seth for them to have grown up, migrated, and started settlements (like the land of Nod). This means that Cain would have entered the land of Nod prior to its being inhabited. Do you see the disconnect, kids? I do.

Conclusion
What have we learned from this story? That god is a meatatarian? No. We’ve learned that god’s purposeful creation of ignorant beings with no moral compass led to the first murder and incestuous relationship ever recorded and that the Bible was unfortunately written before the invention of clocks and calendars.

Now, again, some may argue that this story is allegorical and that we’re merely supposed to learn a lesson about not killing your brother and sleeping with your sister or something but no matter how you slice it, it’s got problems from a moral standpoint.

First, god says he loves us all but he clearly shows favoritism. That’s bad. Second, god purposely created ignorant knuckleheads and never told them not to beat each other to death and was surprised to see that one of the knuckleheads beat the other knucklehead to death. That’s ridiculous. Third, god’s punishments always seem disproportionate to the crime – not only was Cain banished from his home but he was cursed so that he’d never be able to grow any food again for as long as he lived. That’s cruel, although it doesn’t seem to have affected Cain much since he went right out and made whoopee (does anybody say that anymore?) with some spontaneously-generated chick. I’m amending “cruel” to “bull crap.”