1
God Loves Creation: "And
God saw that it was good."
First, God loves the creatures he created. We see this in the eulogy to creation at the beginning of the first chapter of Genesis:
And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and
let
birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens."
So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves,
with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged
bird
according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters
in
the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."
...And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according
to their
kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to
their
kinds." And it was so.
And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle
according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground
according to its kind. And God saw that it was good." Genesis 1: 20-25.
We definitely know that God loves his creature, for the refrain "and God
saw that it was good" is repeated.
2
Then Comes the Vegetarian
Covenant,
Proving Once Again God's
love for Creatures.
God commands all creatures
to eat vegetation (and not each other).
A quite logical and moral vegetarian covenant comes soon after. God sees the creation of the creatures as good, and tells them to eat plants and not each other. It all makes sense so far. God is all love, and God doesn't want any of his creatures to be harmed.
"And God said `Behold
I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the
earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything
that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have
given every green plant for food.'" l: 29-30.
3
God's Morals Shift.
God's morals break down.
Then in chapter 4 of Genesis we suddenly see God accepting the animal sacrifices of Abel and refusing the vegetation sacrifices of Cain, even though he, God, had seen his creation of all creatures to be good and had commanded all humans and all creatures to eat vegetation.
And Adam knew Eve
his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said,
I have gotten
a man from the LORD. Ge 4: 1
And she again bare
his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but
Cain was a tiller
of the ground. Ge 4: 2
And in process
of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the
ground an offering
unto the LORD, Ge 4: 3
while Abel brought
several choice lambs from the best of his flock. The
LORD accepted Abel
and his offering, Ge 4: 4
But unto Cain and to his
offering he had not respect. Ge 4: 5
So, the
astute mind understands that this God has a real problem being consistent.
This God is obviously not too stable. For this God just got through
saying that all creatures should eat vegetation in the first chapter of
"Genesis," but now he accepts sacrificed animals and has no respect for
the vegetarian Cain.
Bible Critics throughout
the ages have seen this contradiction.
But the orthodoxies refuse
to deal with its implications.
You don't have to take literary criticism in college in order to understand that something is wrong. The tone of God's morality has changed. Somebody is lying. Either the Torah was rewritten, or the god of the Torah is seriously ill mentally.
4
God's mental condition
takes a radical turn
for the worse in chapter 9 of "Genesis."
As if this wasn't bad enough. We've already seen that this God changes his mind, quite unlike the God defined by theologians of every faith, as All Perfect, All Knowing, Immutable, Unchanging.
This God changes. This god shifts his morality. Or shall we say: this god has a shifty morality.
As if it couldn't get worse, as if the mentality and morality of God couldn't possibly break down any more, those who wrote the Torah show us a really degenerate God who very radically changes his mind. We see this, of all places, in the account of Noah and the Ark.
If you want
to know what really happened, ask anybody except an orthodox theologian.
Kids, and people who haven't read "Genesis" thoroughly all like Noah.
Noah is the one that
God chose to build and ark and save all the species of animals. How great.
Everybody sane loves that! Noah saves the lives of the species of
animals. He's God's chosen savior of the animals. What a beautiful story
of love. That's the way kids, innocent people in general, and those who
don't know the Old Testament well, understand the story. And for God's
sake, (the real Deity's sake), that's what was meant.
We tend, like human-centered people, instead of creation-centered people, to think that only Noah and family were chosen. Heck no! The two elephants, the two lions, who, by the way, on the ark were vegetarian, the two orangutans, the two scorpions, the two parrots, they too were also chosen by God.
But after the water subsides and ark lands, one of the first things Noah does is slaughter some animals. Whow! Do we need to rename the account as Noah and the floating slaughterhouse?
So here,
Noah, God's chosen instrument in saving the species of animals, decides
he's hungry, and slaughters some animals. A bit strange to many of
us.
But even worse, God now
gives the Carnivorous Covenant, quite different from the Vegetarian Covenant.
God now not only says that humans can eat other animals, but changes his mind radically, from saying first only to eat plants, then to saying eat the animals.
But, as if this weren't bad enough, God really goes berserk; God pretty much has a complete mental and moral breakdown, and says now that all other animals should feel fear and dread or terror in the presence of humans, because now it's okay for humans to kill, trap, torture, enslave, displace other animals. Any damn thing you want to do to animals. Let's put electrodes in their brains. Let's pour acid in their eyes. That's exactly the way the orthodoxies of the world interpret God's covenant with Noah.
That's right. Whatever sick act you can think of, God, the same God, ostensibly, that created the world and the animals, and loved the animals only nine chapters earlier, now says do what you want to them. It's cool.
So what have we learned? That the Torah was written? Obviously. For only those with contradictory morals themselves could possibly believe in such a God.
But I believe that we have also solved a mystery: namely, why there are so many Jewish Psychiatrists.
It's because Jehovah was a schizophrenic.
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P.S. Am I an atheist? Definitely not. I not only believe in, but I feel the Divine Presence in my daily euphoria and contentment and in occasional ecstasy.
I feel, as do Hindus, Buddhists, and the true remnant of Jews, Christians and Muslims, that we are reborn again and again until we face our negative impulses honestly and deal with them correctly.
I believe that the Divine wants us to love and respect creation as It does, not just the animals, but the plants and water, and air, everything that is. I feel that vegetarianism and egalitarianism are necessary corollaries of Divine Love. If we eat animals, we're supporting brutality to them beforehand. Or, if we enslave animals, or in any way coerce them, we are not being compassionate to them. The notion that humans have the right to subdue other creatures and have dominion over them is itself the Fallen Mentality. It means we are supporting a non harmonious state for other creatures.
If we don't treat other humans as absolute equals (love your neighbor as your self) then we create resentment-breeding societies of rich and poor, which will breed violence, rebellion, envy, etc. "Love your neighbor as your self" is not a pious but meaningless platitude, as it is when uttered by the rich, but a divine law, something we can easily see is inherently necessary for us to do if we are to create a peaceful society of humans.
Governments are all controlled by the rich. The earliest Christians didn't have bishops and priests as such. Those who understood the teachings more ate the same food, lived in the same places, had the same clothing as the other Christians. The same was true for the earliest Jews and Muslims.
But all of these religions, which began with vegetarianism and egalitarianism, i.e., loving one's neighbor as one's self, were later corrupted by the rich, those greedy for power and wealth. The rich are now, and always have been, the enemies of peace among humanity, and the tyrants persecuting the poor.
That is why the earliest Christians called themselves the Ebionites, from the Hebrew ebionim, meaning "the poor." It was in order to let all others know, without equivocation, that they regarded the rich as those who by definition do not love their neighbors as themselves.
And I feel and believe that the Divine far transcends the short-sighted views of personality that many of us have been conditioned to have about Deity.