Apathy Sketchpad

Last night when I was trying to get to sleep, the only book within reach was The Student Bible. So I randomly opened it and started reading. I figured if the book of Numbers was anything to go by then I ought to drop off to sleep nice and fast. Unfortunately, I opened it to the book of Job. This is a little worrying because it suggestive that my accusation against Hare Krishna propaganda manual Facts For Life, that it could reliably be opened at random and produce something preposterous, may be equally true of the Old Testament.

Seriously, if you’re of the opinion that God is not a mentalist you definitely should read Job, optionally with annotations. If you can’t be bothered, then I shall summarise it here. I’ll try to leave in all the important bits.

Job is a nice man who lives in somewhere called Uz. He has ten children, a lot of slaves, and a faintly ridiculous amount of livestock. He is big on God. One day, God and Satan are having what can only be described as a friendly chat, in which God bets that Satan can’t make Job curse God’s name. So God agrees to let Satan smash all Job’s stuff as long as he doesn’t touch Job personally. So Satan kills all Job’s sheep (which must have taken a long time), then kills his slaves, and then kills his children, all with God’s permission. And Job still loves God, so Satan loses the bet. That is the end of chapter one: like its sequel, The Da Vinci Code, the Bible has very short chapters, although they mostly don’t end in cliffhangers.

In chapter 2, Satan and God go double-or-quits (basically) that Job won’t curse God’s name even if Satan hurts him a lot. So Satan, with God’s blessing, inflicts a lot of nasty boils on Job, boils being the only disease in the Bible, other than leprosy. And Satan loses the bet again.

I stopped reading after that, because it was late and there was no cliffhanger I needed to resolve. But the moral of the story is clear: God is a bastard who will happily kill (or allow Satan to kill) your family and your sheep and oxen and your slaves (which you’re allowed to have) and then cover you in nasty boils, just to settle a bet, and you should praise him for this. Presumably, so should your family and slaves, at least up until the point where they’re murdered by a mythical being.

It’s lucky we have the Bible for moral guidance, isn’t it, or we’d probably all be horrid to each other the whole time.

On Tuesday night we had a curry, and, like many curries it came with spicy potatoes. Spicy potatoes are such a common fixture at our house that the recipe book naturally falls open on the spicy potatoes page, and most of the other pages are still in mint condition. That day, though, we decided that the potatoes themselves weren’t important; as long as the same spices were used you could substitute almost any foodstuff. (Unfortunately, instead of seeing this plan through, Dad accidentally forgot to include any spices, which left the potatoes rather bland.) One of the more fun suggestions was spicy locusts. Don’t ask why.

The first problem with that idea was that we didn’t have any locusts, and the easiest way we could think of to get some would be to get some Hebrew slaves and imprison them until God sent us a plague of locusts, at which point we curry them and eat them. In order that we might be prepared to fight the other plagues God would surely send, using such weapons as a fake Passover and a River of Sudocrem, Mark went and fetched a copy of the Bible.

Now, Mark owns two Bibles, one called the “Student Bible” and one called the “Adventure Bible”. Now I was disappointed with the Student Bible, because I was hoping that it would involve the Student Jesus turning water into lager and condone the worship of Chesney Hawkes, but not half as disappointed as I was with the Adventure Bible, because I was hoping it would include the instruction “If you want Pontious Pilot to crucify Barrabus, turn to page 53; if you want Pontious Pilot to crucify Jesus, turn to page 61″. Using the Adventure Bible, we looked up Exodus and found out about the plagues.

I don’t know how religious you are, but if you think ‘very’ is the right word for it, you might want to consider not reading this paragraph, because although it won’t convince you that God doesn’t exist, you might like Him very much afterwards. The part we had a problem with is that — and I swear this is exactly what the Bible says happens; feel free to look it up for yourself — that Pharoah wanted to free the slaves after the first few plagues, but God “hardened Pharoah’s heart” so that he wouldn’t, just so that He would have a good story to put in the Bible about how He totally showed Pharoah who’s Boss. Now, I’m no religion nut, but I would have said that any God worth his pillar of salt would have just said “alright, thanks for letting my people go, have seven fat cows and seven thin cows” and had done. Yes, that’s God, the supposedly merciful Lord, saying “let them go or else I’ll kill all your first-born sons” and then rigging it so He gets to kill them.