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Live Blogging the Bible, Exodus 22:28
by Noah Lugeons
So I’m at the part of the bible where God gives Moses the 10 commandments, which, by the way there aren’t ten of. I don’t give a shit how you decide to count those fuckers, there aren’t ten. I can see a reasonable argument for 9, 8, 11 or even 12, but to get to 10 you’ve got to start cutting these suckers up mid-sentence at some points and adding whole paragraphs together at others.
But after the 8 commandments, God carries on and it really seems like he just lost his train of thought. He keeps spouting out moral dictates, but they’re as haphazard as you can imagine. He’ll go straight from a details proscription for who pays who what if a donkey falling into an uncovered pit to a command to kill female sorcerers. A couple of these things do seem reasonably moral, but some of them actually start out with stuff like, “When a father sells his daughter into slavery…” and end with something other than him be punished mercilessly.
I suppose I should sit back and enjoy, as I know I’m in for a lot more of these schizophrenic lists of archaic morals and some of them are hilarious. These tend to be the parts of the bible you most often hear atheists alluding to, as they are the quickest proof that this book is a horrible source for morality and as I come across the little nuggets I’ve quoted before this whole endeavor seems momentarily less pointless.
Most of the best shit is in Leviticus, to be sure, but I was quite pleased to come across this one tonight. I’ll be sure to toss it out next time I see one of my Christophile friends or neighbors bitching about Obama. Exodus 22:28;
You shall not revile God or curse a leader of your people.
I can see how that one gets lost, as it is sandwiched between a pointlessly involved explication of why you shouldn’t borrow your neighbors cloak and then not give it back to him if he’s cold and a warning not to delay in making offerings from the fullness of your harvest, so I can see how maybe it got tossed out as archaic. I mean… who sleeps in a cloak any more, right?
But to all of those Obama-haters that actually believe in this silly little book, it might be a conflict worth losing sleep over. At the very least, I can hope.
The Moral Lessons of Genesis
by Noah Lugeons
I don’t say it often, but it turns out that those Christians are right. As an atheist, I’ve had this whole morality thing ass-backwards from the start. Luckily I’m reading their divinely-inspired ethical guide, though, so I’ll be able to correct my misguided notions. up until now, I’ve seen “morality” as a communal effort to decrease suffering while increasing happiness, but it turns out that none of that really matters. From what I’ve gathered in the first book of the bible, the keys to being a good person can be summed up with the following moral edicts:
- Don’t cover your nakedness.
- Cover your nakedness.
- Don’t see your dad’s cock, even if it’s by accident.
- God loves a deceitful liar. Just ask Abraham and Jacob.
- Ass-raping angels = bad. Offering your daughters to mobs of angry rapists = good.
- If you meet God, throw down some Brazilian Ju-Jitsu on his ass.
- God made your penis wrong.
- When your brothers sell you into slavery and fake your death, you should probably forgive them.
- God promised earth to the Jews.
- Traditional marriage = A man, his wives and their maids.
I’m sure there will be moral messages that are every bit as surprising as we go forward, so I’ll try to keep all my godless brothers and sisters up to date. On second thought, just my godless brothers. I’m pretty sure I’ll learn later that teaching things to women-folk is immoral, too.
The Scathing Atheist 
The Moral Lessons of Exodus
by Noah Lugeons
Exodus is a good guide for morality only if you compare it to Genesis. I’ll give the book of Exodus the credit that it did seem that on some level the authors were aware that this book would one day be used as a moral guide. In Genesis we basically got a bunch of morally dubious just-so stories but in Exodus at least we get a haphazard, antiquated, random list of dictates.
Granted, that only comprises a small portion of the book. The majority of Exodus is consumed with god’s sick revenge fantasy against all things Egyptian and some really detailed instructions on how he wants his tabernacle (which are repeated no fewer than four times in the fucking book). So it seemed that the authors figured all moral enigmas could be taken care of in about four chapters but we need at least a dozen chapters to hammer down how many cubits of tanned rams’ skins and goat hair each curtain around the tent around the altar get.
So despite the fact that god spends the first half of Exodus breaking many of the commandments he’s going to lay down later, the book does manage to squeeze in a few good moral nuggets. It’ll make for a kind of long list, but I’m going to break all of the “commandments” down here and we’ll rate them all on a moral scale with the following grades:
We’ll start with the eight and a half commandments:
So far we’ve got 3 genuine moral ones, three that lean that way and two that lean against. That gives Exodus a +7 on the moral scale, so that’s not too bad. But then we get into all the sub-commandments and it gets pretty wonky.
And that’s pretty much all god offers in Exodus in the way of moral instructions. If you add up the 47 sub-commandments, you get a whopping negative 28 (negative 21 if you factor in the 8 and a half commandments). Even if you quibble with a couple of my scores, you have to admit that we’re dealing with a pretty crappy source for ethics.
It also bears mention that of the 15 things that I rated moral, 11 of them are meaningless if you don’t have any goats, oxen or vineyards, so even a negative twenty eight is probably too high a score. I mean, there’s no way I know of to quantify the relative morality of an act, but if there was, I’m willing to bet beating a slave to death would be way more than twice as immoral as spreading rumors.