Ebling - Holy Bible: Best God Damned Version: Genesis: For atheists, agnostics and fans of religious stupidity

It is an ancient library of books, written over a span of 2,000 years, by different authors, in different places, with different theologies and conceptions of God, that plagiarize myths, legends, and stories that occur in a "world" that does not exist.

As for Genesis:

Four original Hebrew source documents, written between 900 BC and 500 BC, were cut up around 450BC and pasted into the irrational mess of duplicated stories, contradictions, lunacies, and impossibilities that became the first five books of the bible (the Hebrew Torah and the Christian Pentateuch).

There is no consistent God character in these five books. He is the family god of Abraham or the tribal god of Moses or the national god of David, all destined to one day evolve into the one true God of the later prophets. His name is Yahweh or El or El Shaddai or some other variation of El, and he gets lost in the Garden of Eden or has lunch with Abraham or wrestles Jacob in the small picture, and he creates and rules the "world" in the big one, all depending on which fragment of what source is being repeated in any given story.

I followed the Jerusalem Bible because it uses many of the ancient God names, so in Genesis his name might change between paragraphs and sentences and sometimes even within a sentence, so expect some confusion.

Every version of the bible ever written weasel-words around and glosses over the astounding stupidity that infects every page of it. I am writing a complete version of the bible that does precisely the opposite. My "Best God Damned Version" of the bible will celebrate biblical stupidity for all the atheists, agnostics, and anyone else who enjoys the exposition and ridicule of it. I am publishing Genesis alone, frankly, to see if you're interested. I mean, I'll write my bible if you like it or not, but I'm likely to write it faster if I think you might actually read it, is all.

So thanks for taking a look. I hope you enjoy the read and that you learn something from it. I have established an email address for your own thoughts and comments and I hope you use it. If you are thoughtful and sane, I will respond to you.

Steve Ebling

bgdbible@gmail.com

Steve Ebling

Copyright 2013 by Steve Ebling

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth

So the bible begins and right away I have a gripe. The Hebrew word translated here as God is elohim and elohim is plural, so the first verse of the bible should actually read:

In the beginning gods created the heaven and the earth.

This is no small thing. The difference between God, capital G, and gods, small g is the difference between monotheism and polytheism. It's fun to watch the apologists dance around this inconvenient fact. Their best explanation is that God is so great that he cannot be expressed as a singularity.

Do you like that one? It's like saying that Abraham Lincoln was so great that Abraham Lincolns gave the Gettysburg Address!

Preposterous.

But let's get back to the famous seven days of Creation:

Day 1. The world was a formless spill of water. God let light shine on it to create day and night and I have no idea where this light came fromthere being no sun, moon or stars yetor how the day/night part worked without any sunset or sunrise, but that's what the bible says.

Day 2. God created a vault, a solid dome in the water to make space for the worldkind of like inflating a balloon underwater, with our world inside the balloon, surrounded by the waterand he named the vault heaven.

What?

I thought heaven was this fabulous theme park where you lived forever in perfect happiness with God and he picked up every check?

Sorry.

Heaven, originally at least, is just the blue expanse of the sky, sitting over the flat, circular earth like a cup turned over a saucer, and yes it's solid, it has to be, because it's holding back the primal water above, while the earth somehow floats or sits on the water below.

Day 3. God collected the water below heaven into the seas and allowed dry land to appear. Seems you would have to reduce the amount of water on earth to allow dry land to appear, but the bible doesn't say, and maybe God let dry land appear the same way he let light appear, something he could do just because he's God and is not required to make sense. Anyhow, soon as the land appeared, plants and trees and bushes and grasses sprouted up on it and don't ask me how this occurred without sunlight. I guess God made due with the original mystery light from day one and, by the way, what ever happened to that original mystery light? Did the batteries run out or what?

Whatever, there were now two elements in the world: Heaven and Earth.

Day 4. God created the sun, moon, and stars and installed them in the dome of heaven. The two big lights, the sun and the moon, govern day and night. All that was left now was for God to create life on the earth and he got right to it.

Day 5. God created all the plants and animals that live in the seas and he probably tinkered with the water temperature to get it just right.

Day 6. God created all the land animals and the birds of heaven and then, for the grand finale, he announced:

Let us make man look just like us and let them be masters of life on earth!

Huh?

Let us make man?

Just another reference to gods having created the world, so don't worry, just understand that God's or the gods' creation was done and it was time for... drum roll, please... God's famous day of rest!

Day 7. God's lounging in a hammock, eyes closed, gin and tonic resting on his belly, bathing in the heavenly light, a big contented smile on his face after a hard week's work.

Bible says here:

Thus heaven and earth were completed with all their array.

But wait...

Get that lazy prick God up out of his hammock! Turns out there is a second Creation Story! It begins right after the first one ends, and sure they contradict each other; especially in the sequence of events involved in the creation.

Begins at Genesis 2:4.

The first thing you notice is that God's name has changed from Elohim to YHWH, the Hebrew theonym, commonly referred to as the Tetragrammaton, which is Greek for (what else) four letters.

So how do you pronounce YHWH?

You don't.

Originally, God's name was considered too sacred to speak, so in ancient Hebrew it is the properly unpronounceable: YHWH. Although, just to offend God, I tried to pronounce it, but the sound I made didn't amount to much of an insult, even when I yelled it all it did was give me a sore throat and this probably explains why so many depictions of the ancient Israelites show them clutching theirs. A couple thousand years later they decided it was okay to pronounce God's name so they bought a couple of vowels, inserted them into YHWH and made it Yahweh and I'll call YHWH Yahweh in this bible so you can read it aloud to your kids without hurting your throats. Just remember, whenever you read Yahweh, technically it's "YHWH".

The second version of the Creation Story begins with a barren, waterless, rainless, and vacant earth. YHWH, I mean, Yahweh got right to work:

He made water flow up from the ground to irrigate the earth. He made Man out of dirt and breathed life into his nostrils. He planted the Garden of Eden in the east and put Man in it. He made trees grow in the Garden, including the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" and he ran rivers through the Garden.