It's an Exciting World

I never really thought about how terrible some of the things the people of God did before.  I’d heard some jokes about it before but listening to these two books (part 1) of the Bible audiobook bring it out.  Some of the terrible things are:

Giving away your wife so that you can get into the community, but telling everyone that she is your sister, then waiting for God to get angry and threaten to destroy the other person for their iniquity even when they didn’t know anything about it and taking a lot of their property as a reverse dowry of sorts.  After all of this you go to another city and do it all over again.  And then your descendant does it as well.  The excuse given is that you were afraid they would kill you to steal your wife.

After one of the daughters of your people has pre-marital relations with boy from another group you demand that him and all of his people circumcise themselves and tell them that they can then marry your women.  When they are all in huge pain from circumcising themselves you kill them all.

God sets a plague upon someone because they aren’t doing what God wants.  God makes them not change their mind so that God can show his power, and sets another plague on the person.  God then does this 4 more times before allowing the person to change their mind.  God them decides that the person should change back so God can have him destroyed.

God makes a people unable to convert so that they can be destroyed for not believing.

God makes new life, then when it hasn’t fully met it’s potential, he decides to remove it all from the earth (earth sized abortion).

This is also rife with the joke I put in the book of Mormon.  It is much worse in fact than the Book of Mormon in justifying anything a believer does to a non-believer because of the belief.

This book was very repetitive of the first two and I can’t tell if the guy likes telling the same stories over and over or if they repeated content between the books.  I think it is the former.  He references many of the good books and studies I’ve been listening to lately, like the marshmallow experiment from the willpower instinct.  I really enjoy the points he has on mindfulness and not being attached to emotion, but I still can’t get behind the end goal.  If the end goal is enlightenment and enlightenment is being fully detached from the world, then that is something that I don’t want.  I want to be fully attached to the world, but in control of myself.  I want to rule over my instinct, emotions, desires, and thoughts so that they don’t rule over me.  To do this I think the practices of Buddhism are very spot on, but the end goals that we strive for diverge greatly.

Audible Link

Wow was this dry and not at all what I was expecting.  This also was the worst narration of any book I’ve listened to.  The narrator reads the chapter number and verse, then rereads the verse number for every single verse in the entire book.  It was painful.  The history of the people in the book was mainly along the lines of ‘the people sinned so God did not answer them or was wrath with them, then they were faithful again and God killed their enemies.’  Something I’ve been finding to be very true in most of the religious text I’ve been reading (besides Buddhist texts) is that they all follow the lines of the joke below

Audible Link