religion, mythsEvery religion has its own absurdities. For me, the following story from islam ranks pretty high:
Sahih Bukhari Book 071, Number 614:
Narrated Abu Said: A man came to the prophet and said, ‘My brother has got loose motions. The Prophet said, Let him drink honey.” The man again (came) and said, ‘I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.’ The Prophet said, ‘Allah has said the Truth, and the abdomen of your brother has told a lie.”
Or this one:
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 54, Number 536:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Once while a prophet amongst the prophets was taking a rest underneath a tree, an ant bit him. He, therefore, ordered that his luggage be taken away from underneath that tree and then ordered that the dwelling place of the ants should be set on fire. Allah sent him a revelation:– “Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to burn a single ant? (that bit you)
Please post your own religious stories/texts/ideas, from any of the religions that you find particularly absurd or illogical..
What always gets me is the part of the Bible in which God is unable to deliver a military victory to his chosen people because their enemies have iron chariots.
To quote Judges 1:19,
And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.
Consider that modern war chariots, such as the M1 Abrams tank, are often armored with steel-encased uranium, against which the LORD would be completely useless.
I don’t know many religious stories. But I find the one about the guy who was willing to sacrifice his own child to the skydaddy, and gets held up as person of virtue for it, to be absurd on many levels. The worst is that people actually believe the message- that killing your kid to prove your devotion could ever, ever, be anything but the worst sort of evil, regardless of whether the being or cause the sacrifice is being made to is real or not.
Of the many that do it for me, one of the most ridiculous has to be about Noah’s drunkenness in Genesis 9:18-29. Noah (who lived to be 950 and from whom we are all related) gets drunk and is seen naked by one of his sons, Ham. Rather than punish Noah for getting drunk in the first place (and for reinventing original sin after it should have been abolished following the flood), or punish Ham for seeing his father naked, he condemns Canaan, Ham’s son by making a slave of him. It is of course Canaan that became the father of the canaanite tribe and was such a thorn in God’s side thus making him the genocidal bully in Deuteronomy 20:16-18, “you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them”.
Like somebody said: Noah Ark was successfully placed in walking range for all creatures of the Earth. That story is absurd on many levels.
Interpretations of things in religious scripture are often absurd.
My parents were both atheists and intellectuals. I was encouraged to manage my ‘subscriptions’ at a very early age, and I did.
One day, my mother informed me that I was invited to go with a friend to a camp out, but it was being put on by his church. It sounded fun, so I went .. and sure enough there was an hour of ‘Bible Teaching’.
The minister was reading a passage where Christ (supposedly) said to some people “You are all whitewashed tombs” .. and he (the pastor, not Christ) immediately turned to us (a group of 10 something year olds) and said ‘YOU ARE ALL GARBAGE FOR GOD! IT IS WRITTEN HERE!’
At that point, I became interested enough in the bible to read it, and was glad that I had chosen to eschew organized religions. I did read it, cover to cover. I enjoyed the peeks into history and laughed at the propaganda.
In a list of absurd religious stories, this is one I have heard since I was a kid and I don’t know the names of the original narrators etc:
Once the prophet of prophets was asked to perform a miracle by some unbelievers and he ordered the moon to split asunder and lo! the moon split into two parts, one half on one side of the sky and the other on the other side, and this story also involves the moon actually coming down to the prophet and prostrating him/her/itself towards the prophet after he asked it to become whole again. Of course, the story ends with the unbelievers now becoming believers.
I have paraphrased the above to the best of my recollection.
The Genesis creation story is pretty absurd, especially the part about woman being created from man.
I’m going to vote for Numbers 15:32. For a little background in this story, it was already established that you’re supposed to rest and do no work on the sabbath. So when the Israelites encountered a man doing something relatively innocuous, they weren’t sure what to do, so they took him to Moses, who was equally unsure. By the strictest letter of the law, he had violated the sabbath. It was a harmless act, and the biblical text gives no context as to why the man was gathering sticks.
In other words, both Moses and his followers were actually being just and merciful. But as devout worshippers, they appealed to god to determine what they ought to do.
God said he must be put to death by stoning. ‘Nuff said.
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “Once while a prophet amongst the prophets was taking a rest underneath a tree, an ant bit him. He, therefore, ordered that his luggage be taken away from underneath that tree and then ordered that the dwelling place of the ants should be set on fire. Allah sent him a revelation:– “Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to burn a single ant? (that bit you)”
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 54, Number 536
Abu Said: A man came to the prophet and said, ‘My brother has got loose motions. The Prophet said, Let him drink honey.” The man again (came) and said, ‘I made him drink (honey) but that made him worse.’ The Prophet said, ‘Allah has said the Truth, and the abdomen of your brother has told a lie.”
Sahih Bukhari, Book 071, Number 614:
In exodus, god sends plagues over the people of Egypt , to force the Pharaoh to let the people go. Yet god himself “hardens the heart” of said pharao, thus predicating the next plague.
This sadistic fellow is also called ‘endless love’. Well, thank you - no need for this kind of love over here.
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
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