The Baffling Bible

Live Science is carrying a story about how the amount of food featured in paintings of The Last Supper has increased over time.

Computer-assisted calculations have enabled researchers to compare similar items in 52 depictions (made between about 1000 AD to 2000 AD) of Jesus’ fabled final meal. They show that portion sizes of main courses (usually eel, lamb and pork) shown in the paintings grew by 69 percent, while plate size grew by 66 percent and bread size grew by 23 percent.

Seems like no better time to remind everyone to enter the Fat Jesus competition over on The Amateur Scientist.

Here’s my effort:

So if you’re feeling a little guilty about sitting down to the big Easter Sunday lunch today, just console yourself by asking: What Would Jesus Do?

Being as I am an atheist, one of the things that peeves me about religion is the idea held by many that without it we’d somehow be completely incapable of navigating the complex moral issues of human existence. Religions would like everyone to believe that they have the answers to all the big moral problems, and claim to have the final word on how we should live our lives. Of course, in the Christian religion, the Mac Daddy of religious moral imprimatur is, without question, the Ten Commandments.

Today on The Cow I thought we might scrutinize the Big 10 and their heritage. Anyone with a Sunday Schooled childhood will know that the story of the Ten Commandments is outlined in Exodus, so it is here that we open our Bibles in order to find out the real nitty gritty behind what Moses brought down with him from Mt Sinai on those big stone tablets. I suggest that it might go a little differently from what most people might think…

To set the scene: The Israelites are fleeing from Egypt under the guidance of Moses. They have been travelling for three months1 when they arrive at Mount Sinai. After laborious admonishments from God that he should come alone, Moses heads on up the mountain to take receipt of the Ten Commandments that we all know and love:

1. You shall have no other Gods before me.

2. You shall not worship idols. (This is pretty much just a variation on #1)2

3. You shall not take My Name in vain. (So’s this)

4. You shall keep the Sabbath day holy. (And this is just a sub-clause of 2&3, by any sensible reckoning)

5. You shall honour your mother and father.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10. You shall not covet they neighbour’s house/wife/manservant/maidservant/ox/donkey/XBox etc. (God is nothing if not circumlocutious. He could have simply said “You shall not covet anything that your neighbour owns”. Maybe he feels he has to spell it out for the really stupid – after all, they must number a fair percentage of his followers)

OK. So that about wraps it up and we can trundle off down the mountain with our slab of stone, and our moral certitude intact, right?3 Oh no, not on your nellie. Now that God’s got the soapbox there’s just a few teensy other things he wants to add…

11. You shall set your Hebrew servant free after six years. Except if he doesn’t want to go, in which case his ear will be pierced with an awl. (It is pretty obvious already that the end of #10 was always going to be a good place for an edit, isn’t it?)

12. You shall not let your daughter go free if you have previously sold her as a servant. Conditions apply. (I’m abbreviating for the sake of sanity. Pretty much all these further Commandments are long-winded and full of caveats)

13. Anyone who strikes someone else shall be put to death. Unless it’s an accident, in which case I/God will decide on a place to send him. (God persists in talking in both the first and third person throughout Exodus. It is really quite irritating. I suppose it’s something to do with him being a Holy Trinity and all that, but you’d think that an omnipotent being would have a better grasp of grammar and language structure).

14. Anyone who attacks his father or mother should be put to death. (No exceptions for accidents here, evidently)

15. Anyone who kidnaps someone and sells them should be put to death.

16. Anyone who curses his father or mother should be put to death. (This is certainly a little stronger than #5: “Honour your mother and father”)

17. If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed. (Geez – it’s starting to sound like the minutes of the annual general meeting of a bowling club)

18. If someone beats their slave and they die they should be punished. But if the slave gets up after a day or two, that’s OK, no worries.

19. If fighting men injure a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely, then they have to pay up whatever her husband thinks fair. (Many of these latter commandments smack of rules made by a committee – “But Jehosaphat what if a bearded man goes into the temple and kicks a priest in the balls? Surely we need to cover that?”)

20. If someone knocks out a servant’s tooth or eye, the servant is to be set free. (This Commandment coupled with #18 can best be summarized thus: If you have a servant, make sure any wounds you inflict upon him can – in the grand manner of modern prison retaliation – come under the explanation “He slipped in the shower”)

21. If a bull gores a man to death….

OH GOD4 THIS IS SO FUCKING TEDIOUS. It just goes on and on and on and on like this for a good part of Exodus – for a total of 56 Commandments by my counting.5 I won’t assault you with the rest of them, even though Moses had to stand there and listen to God drone on about what to do if your bull gores someone else’s bull and what to do if your goat gets into someone’s vineyard and the finer points of disputes involving arson. You know Moses lived to be really old, right? He aged about a hundred years on that mountain listening to God yakking.

It is, for the most part, totally irrelevant dreck, unless you happen to be a pre-technological Middle-Eastern goat herder. And even then, it’s hard to see the purpose of many of the abstruse and often contradictory instructions. Here’s just a few more highlights:

32. Do not allow a sorceress to live. (She’s a witch – burn her!)6

33. Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death. (…and you fuck one goat…)

38. Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people. (Repetition, much? There are at least four variations of “And don’t call Me any bad names!” among this particular batch of Commandments. If there’s one thing that reading the Bible constantly impresses upon me, it is how utterly petty and childlike God sounds whenever he is supposed to be speaking in his own voice. In fact, for an omnipotent being he seems almost neurotically obsessed with trivia)

47. Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt. (But don’t worry about having Hebrew slaves. They don’t count as aliens and slavery doesn’t count as oppression)7

And finally ending with:

56. Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (This last seems to be not so much a moral injunction as a cooking tip. God has plainly run out of ideas by now. One gets the sense that maybe His initial notion was to have 100 Commandments but that he realised somewhere around #50 that this was a tad ambitious. So he battled on for a half dozen more and then just threw in the towel.)8

Anyway, God eventually senses that Moses is nodding off, and He’s a little worried that the people at the bottom of the mountain might be using the idle time to, oh, smelt down their jewellery and turn it into a Golden Calf or something equally as stupid, so he uses his Super Laser Vision9 to etch the aforementioned 56+ Commandments onto a couple of stone tablets and send Moses on his way.

So, just to clarify the situation at this point: Moses arrives back at the Israelite camp with two chunks of stone bearing the Words of GOD – the supreme omnipotent Creator of All Things – and what does he do? What does he do with the moral guidelines that are to set all humankind on the path to a correct and sinless future?

Exodus 32




That’s right folks – he smashes them into bits! In a fit of pique (due principally to his followers getting overly enthusiastic during his fairly lengthy absence) he petulantly renders the Words of God into marble chips in an act that has inspired literary editors ever since.

You really have to ask how seriously Moses was taking any of this, and question God’s choice of representatives on Earth. I mean, think about it. If you were a boss and you were sending an employee to do something really important and they fucked it up because they had anger management issues, what would you do?

Then some time passes. God sends down a plague on the Israelites, appears naked in front of Moses (although He only agrees to show Moses ‘His back parts’)10 and visits Moses’s tent disguised as a pillar of cloud. Eventually He commands Moses to come back up Mount Sinai with a newly-chiselled pair of stone tablets so that He might refresh them with a second set of Commandments. Here’s a weird thing – God does not seem for a moment pissed at Moses for his careless handling of the first version. Elsewhere, God smites people mightily for infractions that seem a LOT less egregious.

And of course, now that God has Moses’s attention again, he can’t resist in adding a few things. He also rehashes numerous edicts that we’ve heard before, and concludes once more with the perplexing:

Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.

In fact, given its repetition almost word-for-word, and its obvious status as the last thing He wanted to impress upon Moses, one has to believe that this Commandment was as at least as important to God as ‘Thou Shall Not Murder’ (which is only mentioned once, and is contradicted at least a dozen times with ‘except-in-the-case-of’ clauses), and ‘Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery’. All things considered, it’s surprising that it doesn’t appear in the #2 slot after the monotonously reiterated ‘Thou Shall Not Take My Name In Vain’11

A few things should now be clear: The choice of ‘ten’ commandments as some kind of rule set for humans to follow is more or less arbitrary. Nowhere does God actually say – ‘Really, it’s only the first ten that count’. Indeed, the moral value of those ten, as Christopher Hitchens eloquently puts it, is particularly questionable in the first four, which have no bearing on morality at all, but are simply exhortations to accept irrationality as a bedrock of a worldview before going on to anything else.

God, as represented in Exodus, is a spiteful, small-minded and confused being. His thought processes appear meandering and obtuse. He contradicts Himself repeatedly, and repeats Himself infuriatingly. He plays silly games with Moses on numerous occasions, where it seems a less-petty deity would have just directly communicated His wishes. He dresses up as pillars of cloud and burning bushes and delivers terrible dialogue – being on the whole reminiscent of a bit player in a cheap pantomime.

And worst of all, His ‘commandments’ when distilled down to the really useful bits, are nothing more than good common sense. Something that any atheist could have come up with.


Thanks to Cissy Strutt who pointed out the Christopher Hitchens article in Vanity Fair where I got the idea for this post.


  1. To the very day! as the Bible gleefully exclaims, as if to make a point of its superb timekeeping abilities. This is something that is noticeably absent about, oh, EVERYWHERE else… []
  2. In the King James version, which is not neatified like some of the more modern renderings of the Bible, God makes no bones about issuing a threat along with this: “… for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”. God is jealous? How sad to believe that an all-knowing being is unable to rise above the petty human foible of jealousy! []
  3. I just want to bring up something here: how is it, with 2000+ years of guidance from God in their pockets, Christians still transgress the above rules in numbers equal to, or perhaps even greater than, the rest of the population. Are we to think that without these guidelines these people would be even worse? Or is it just that religion provides a convenient excuse for not taking any personal responsibility? []
  4. Yes, I mean YOU WITH THE BEARD []
  5. Give or take. It’s hard to know which are Commandments and which are just sub-clauses and asides []
  6. Actually, this is not that funny – it was readings of these verses that allowed the Christian Church, throughout history, to kill so many innocent women on the flimsiest of pretexts []
  7. You want hypocrisy? The Bible is teeming with it! []
  8. Don’t get it into your head that he stopped talking, though. He goes on for many more chapters about how to make a whole lot of knick knacks for His tabernacle, including the Ark of the Covenant, the Table of the Covenant and the Lampstand of the Covenant. And not just with general descriptions either – God has some really specific design ideas when it comes to His temple furniture. He’s the epitome of every designer’s nightmare client. []
  9. It doesn’t say that in the Bible – I just made it up. But you have to admit that this was the most colourful image in the whole story I’ve told here today, right? []
  10. He agrees to do this for a most unusual reason: “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” Wha? He’s fucking OMNIPOTENT! He knows EVERYBODY by name! []
  11. The Commandment ‘to not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk’ was probably meaningful to the Israelites and most likely an instruction not to follow Canaanite practices. This is just one of many illustrations that the texts of the Bible were written for their time, not for all time. It seems obvious to anyone with a rational thought process that if you can drop one Commandment because it doesn’t make sense in a modern idiom, then the relevance of all the others is quite reasonably called into question []

OK, so where were we? Oh, that’s right, God had just made the fish and the birds and was patting himself on the back. Again. Crikey – what is it with all the self-congratulation? How annoying does that make God sound? Aside from anything, it shows a distinctly un-Godly lack of humility.

Day 6:



Jesus Christ! There He goes again! With no-one to cast a critical eye over the proceedings, God might have been able to convince Himself that all his handiwork was the bees knees, but if you ask me He could have used a good supervisor. If we were concerned with the Truth, in a proper accounting of things somewhere about here there would be a passage that read something like:

~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth cancer and leprosy, cockroaches and merchant bankers and Scientologists. Let there be abundant flooding and drought, and earthquakes and plagues of mites. Let there be hydrocephalic children, hemophiliacs and fatally conjoined twins. And behold, it was so. And God looked on all that he had done and saw that it truly sucked big time.

Where are the passages like that, eh? Funnily enough, not in Genesis. Or anywhere for that matter. God happily takes credit for all things bright and beautiful, but all things ugly and screwed-up are conveniently ignored or blamed on someone else.1 Hands up who amongst us doesn’t recognize that kind of person in the workplace?

And, as I mentioned last episode, it’s here we start to see God’s preoccupation with ‘creeping things’. There’s more:


God seems obsessed with creeping things in much the same way as Fundamentalist Christians are fixated on atheists and homosexuals. It’s almost like He made the damned things but can’t quite believe they exist.

You will also notice that in that previous passage2 God creates man, bizarrely lapsing into the possessive plural personal pronoun. ‘Let Us make man in Our image’? There’s someone else around? Who the crap is that? Are they the ones responsible for the water, maybe? Or is it, perhaps, that, in the manner of all those who abrogate responsibility, God is just trying to avoid taking the whole blame for making humans?


Again with the creeping things. And back into the singular personal pronoun. God is supposed to have created an entire universe and He’s still shit at grammar? It’s obviously a manifestation of ‘omnipotence’ which excludes language skills.

Genesis 1 ends at this point, with the newly-made sun setting on Day 6 (which is really Day 3 if you’re talking about days actually being determined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun) and we take up Genesis 2 with:

Day 7:


God is so knackered from all that creatin’ that he’s done that he has to put his feet up. But people – HE’S OMNIPOTENT! Why the fuck does He need to REST? Does it occur to anyone else that this is pure unadulterated baloney?

Seriously, you can’t have it both ways – God is either omnipotent and can do anything he likes with no restriction, or HE’S NOT. You can’t be Almighty God and be ‘kind of’ omnipotent. Do Christian people who believe in the Bible never think about these things?3

Anyway, Week 2 continues on much as Week 1, with God creating man again (it’s there in writing, I’m not making it up) and straightaway telling him: ‘I’ve made all this stuff, but you can’t play with it unless I say so!’ – quickly assuming a petulant and vindictive tone that doesn’t let up for most of the Old Testament. Oh, He also creates woman too, pretty much as an afterthought, and not until after Adam has named every living creature on the planet (and after He has created them for the second time too):


I imagine it to have gone something like this:

God: Hey look at this Adam. Whaddya think?

Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘rabbit’!

God: Righty-ho! So it shall be! What about this?

Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘spotted toad’.

God: Brilliant! I would NEVER have thought of that! What about this? I think this is quite good, if I do say so myself. And I do, often.

Adam: I think that should be called a ‘procompsognathus’.

God: Hahaha! Awesome. that should keep the Creationists on their toes! What about this?

Adam: Oh, I dunno. Er, a ‘wallaby’? No, how about a ‘squid’? Look, how long is this going to take? I’m kind of tired. I’m not omnipotent like some people.

God: Chin up, Skipper, we’re just getting started! Look at this! It’s really quite well crafted – I think you should call it a ‘sea cucumber’. But it’s up to you of course! Don’t let me sway you!

Adam: You really need a girlfriend. Come to think of it, so do I.

I don’t think I need to point out to you, faithful Acowlytes, that, as we’re in Week 2 with God still creating stuff, it kind of makes nonsense of the claim that He did it all in seven days. He quite explicitly did not. But for the moment I will leave God and Adam naming the siphonophores and the echinoderms, as we ponder what God has been doing ever since those first couple of enthusiastic weeks.

Mostly making a nuisance of Himself, is my opinion.

  1. Satan or humans, typically []
  2. I’m reproducing all these verses from Genesis in order, with no excisions, lest you think I’m being partisan []
  3. God demonstrates his lack of omnipotence numerous times in the Old Testament. For instance, a few paragraphs from where we are in Genesis 2, after Adam and Eve have eaten of the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, realised that they are naked, and so hidden themselves from God, He walks through the Garden of Eden calling out ‘Where art thou?’ Well, of course he already knows this, obviously, so it’s quite plain that he’s just being a bastard. []

Day 3 (cont):



In other words, God made all the plants. And felt mighty pleased with himself. Then he remembered that maybe the plants would all DIE if they had no sunlight (at least they had plenty of water), so when he went home that night he obviously scribbled up a few ideas for the next day’s chores.

Day 4:



OK, so I just want to go over that. In the first verse it says God made some lights in the firmament, and then in the next one he made the sun and the moon and the stars. What the fuck is the person who wrote this smoking? If he made lights in the firmament, what were they if they weren’t the stars? And didn’t he already make light anyway? Where the hell was that coming from if it wasn’t from the sun or the moon or the stars?1

If these verses tell us anything, it is that God is very fucking badly organized. Why the crap didn’t he do the sun & the stars and so forth before he did the Earth? It’s like he was doing this for the first time or something. Oh, right.

Anyway, God set the sun & stars in place…


Here he is acting smug again, even though he’s royally screwed up Day 4. Can it possibly get any worse?

Day 5:



On the Fifth Day we find God creating winged fowl and whales. The most astute of you will have already noticed that God’s To Do List for Day 5 specifically describes ‘Birds and Fish’ and so again he has fucked up from the get-go by creating whales, which as anyone knows are mammals and not fish. As for the fowl, he has given them free reign to flap around the firmament, which, as we learned from the last installment he designated as Heaven. Yes, that’s right – Heaven is full of chickens.

Stay tuned to Tetherd Cow Ahead for Episode 3 of ‘What God Did’, where we find out what God got up to on Day 6, and examine in depth his obsession with ‘creeping things’.

  1. Out of his ass is the obvious answer. OK, I guess if anyone can claim that the sun shines out of his ass, it’s God, come to think of it []

As Reverend of the Church of the Tetherd Cow, one of my many duties is to ponder the Big Questions of Life so that I may duly pass my received wisdom onto you, my flock of faithful Acowlytes. Recently, I found my mind wandering onto one of the biggest puzzles of them all – that of the Creation of the Universe. Specifically, the kind of Creation as taught primarily (but by no means exclusively) by those who advocate the Christian view of things.

In case your Sunday School lessons have receded a bit too far into the foggy haze of memory, here’s a quick refresher on how the Almighty got things under way:

In the beginning there was nothing at all. Except, self-evidently, for God Himself.1 This must have been deadly dull for dear old God. Imagine the most boring day you’ve ever had and then multiply that by ten gazillion. There wasn’t even so much as a crossword to fill in or some paint to watch dry. There was just a whole big heap of nothingness. Just God sitting in a chair, on his ass, wondering what to do with himself. No, wait, there wasn’t even a chair.

So God decided to bring the universe and everything we know into existence.2 The conventional wisdom has it that he did this over seven days. Well, technically six, but more of that in a bit. This was the To Do list:

Day 1: Light.
Day 2: Separation of the Waters.
Day 3: The Earth
Day 4: The Sky.
Day 5: Birds and Fish.
Day 6: The Animals including Humans.
Day 7: Rest.

Day 7 wouldn’t count as a working day in any job I’ve ever had, so we can only assume God filled in His timesheet something like this:

But really, if you start to scrutinize God’s first week of work, some interesting questions arise…

Day 1: How long, exactly, does it take to create Light? It’s not like you can carve it out of something, or cobble it out of stuff to hand – there isn’t anything. So you’ve got to conjure it up from scratch. To you and me this sounds rather daunting but it is of course no real problem for God, since He is omnipotent. This means he could easily whip up a whole batch of light in a good 8 hour day. But waiddaminute… if he’s omnipotent, why spend a whole day on it? He could do it in half an hour. A minute. A second even. Just what was God doing all that first day? Is it possible he rocked up to work, zapped light into existence, grabbed a cup of hot java3 and then sat on his fat ass all day? Are you with me here? Alright. Then, the very next thing that happened was:4


Whoa! Wait just one damn minute there Big fella! Everyone knows that night and day are the result of the earth’s rotation5, and the Earth doesn’t get created until Day 3, according to the List. What the crap is going on here pal? You’ve got days, but you ain’t got rotation! Or even a planet. How the heck does that work?

Day 2: To me, creating Light sounds pretty damn tricky, but that’s a snack compared to what God did next:



OK, now did you get that? It seems there was a lot of water (I don’t exactly know where that came from, because there is no mention of it actually being created, as such. The water was just there.) and God divided it into two portions, separated by a firmament – a sort of watery firmament sandwich. God then called the firmament Heaven. Just so you’ve got a visual picture here, there’s Heaven, with a whole lot of water above it, sitting in a whole lot of water. I trust that God made sure Heaven has good caulking.

Day 3:


From here on in, there is no mention at all of the waters that float somewhere above Heaven. Like it doesn’t matter. What bothers me is if this supra-water was not important, then why bring it up it in the first place… What has it got to do with ANYTHING? And, as far as I know, we never again hear about this extra water in the whole course of the Bible!6

Well, I’ll leave you to ponder that until the next installment, when we will learn some more about the Creation of the Earth and then about the Sky, including the Sun and the Moon (Yes, yes – I know we have days already without the Sun being in place… if you think that’s daffy, wait till you see God make all the trees and plants and then the Sun. Talk about workflow inefficency.)

  1. There may also have been a lot of water – see later []
  2. Why He did this all of a sudden is anybody’s guess. []
  3. OK, I guess he couldn’t have done that – he hadn’t created coffee beans yet []
  4. All biblical references are from the King James Bible, ‘cos I’m an old fashioned kinda Reverend and I don’t hold with these modern ‘interpretations’ of the Holy Bible where some joker has gone ‘I know God said that, but this is what he really meant’. []
  5. Anyone going to argue with me over that? No? I thought not. []
  6. Although I guess God had to get the water for the Great Flood from somewhere… []

Discovered by Viridian and Vermilion in the local Blockbuster, to their mirth.

(I wonder if Bale got the part by telling the producers that he was a good Christian?)

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