"What if God was one of us..." -- Joan Osborne

.
“Religion… the people that get in-between, the bureaucracy!
First of all, you can’t talk directly to God-- That is bad.
You have to go to a priest... then he tells Jesus... and Mary got in there-- it’s like the DMV!”
-- Bill Maher


“And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words… And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty night; he did neither eat bread nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.”
-- Exodus 34:27

BAM!

EVEN if you believe that the events of the Bible actually happened…

The text clearly states that Moses wrote it down.
And I love Moses! I’m a big fan of Moses, especially of his early stuff (“Let my people go” of course, his big hit)
But as great as Moses was… he was human. And humans make mistakes. Heck, Moses did! When he hit the rock, instead of talking to it… like any sane person would do! (Numbers 20:11)
So Moses had his issues— he killed a guy in Egypt, he talked funny, his brother and sister were jealous of him.
(Ex.2:12, 4:10, Num. 12:1-2)

Moses was the first ever editor of the Bible!!!
And chances are… he made a mistake.
First of all, some people believe Moses “wrote upon the tables” the entire Torah (Old Testament), and others believe he wrote down just “the ten commandments.” Either way, he could’ve made a mistake!

Now, chances are if you think every single word of the bible actually happened, then you probably also think Moses didn’t make any mistakes in jotting it down— same goes for the ten commandments.
However, when reading this story, we must consider the following:
Moses (if he existed at all) was human. God (if God existed at all) was not!
How can we expect a person and non-person to use the same language?
For God’s sake, I get misunderstood when I talk to my Israeli friends, because I think they’re saying they own a pet dog and a pet diaper!
(In Hebrew, cat is “kha-tool”, diaper is “khee-tool” … important to know if you want to ask, “Can I play with your cat?”).

Language barrier!

But the Bible is nothing, if not contradictory:

“God is not a man, that he should lie; Neither the son of man, that he should repent…”
(Numbers 24:19)

And we put God in terms we can understand:

The Ten Plagues:

“And I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all my wonders”
-- (Ex. 3:20)

Parting the Red Sea:

"The Lord is a man of war" (Exodus 15:3).

"And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together"
-- (Ex.15:8) (Wow, God sounds like Rick Moranis in "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids")

How about in just ONE verse:

“And the Lord said, I have surely SEEN the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have HEARD their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I KNOW their sorrows.”
(Ex.3:7)
(with my capitalizations)

Heck, what about the phrase “And God spoke…” ?

How can God “speak”?? How can something without a mouth speak? Think about it!
Was it like The Voice in “Field of Dreams”?
Did God tell Noah, “If you build it… your sorry ass won’t drown in the Flood.”


“God doesn’t write books. He can make a sunset, why would He want to? …We make God into this semi-human.
You know, He’s a single parent who writes books, and gets pissed. He has a son?! He has a son?! What is this— Bonanza?
I know that you can’t KNOW God. Our imagination… is so limited. Everything that is not exactly like us, we make *almost* like us.
It’s the same with God. We make Him so much like us.
… The irony there, in the Bible, they’re telling you in the very first story that you CAN’T know Him. What’s the big sin they do right away? They eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Get it—KNOWLEDGE? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, that’s what He’s saying.
You understand God as well as your dogs understand you.
That’s why we love to be pet owners because we are God to them. We leave and they’re sad, we come back and the sun has risen again! The life giver has somehow returned to dispense justice and mercy… you are kicked out of the Bedroom of Eden for shitting”

-- Bill Maher, in his 2004 HBO stand-up special “Be More Cynical”