Genesis 1 - 8

Bringing in the new year on January first, I started with my first reading in the bible and I ended up choosing to read the bible in regular order, beginning with Genesis. I downloaded the One Year Bible Plan app on my iPad to help me keep track of my progress. The app is very simplistic and easy to use. It assigns you the daily readings and tells you what percentage of progress you've made through them, so it makes it very easy to keep track of things.

Why did I chose the read the bible in regular order? Well, for starters, it was one of the choices in the app. Also, someone put the books in that order for a reason, so I'm just going to trust that they knew what they were doing there.

My reading begins in Genesis and I will say, the bible has a pretty strong opener. Some of the most famous stories of the bible are in Genesis, so I kind of knew what I was getting myself in to. The embellished stories as I learned them as a child definitely differed in the level of detail from what is actually written in the text. There is a lot of room left for imagination.

I guess was struck me most about it is the rather negative and vengeful tone of everything. Its like, God made people in his image, right? But then he was all like, damn, people are evil. He punishes Adam & Eve rather harshly. I rather didn't like the part about Eve being given painful childbirth as a punishment, having done that myself... anyway. And now all of humanity get punished because of original sin? I mean, what did I do? It's a rather negative viewpoint to believe you are born evil. I'm more of a blank slate believer myself...however, people do seem particularly inclined toward evil if you look all throughout history and the modern day. We've had a lot of years to sort that out and we never have. So Maybe not completely off base here.

And then like the very next offspring of Adam & Eve kills his brother, which is like, actually pretty evil, so I guess I'll agree with God's assessment of evilness there. Also, can we talk about why Cain kills Able? Just because God doesn't like his sacrifice? Which is totally weird in the first place. Like ok, from what I understand of the time period the belief was that these sacrifices atone for their evilness and sins. But then God's all like, Naaa, not good enough.

I don't really understand this concept of sacrifice at all. It does not seem very kind or loving. Seems wasteful. Which I think is the point? The point is to cause pain basically, which again, why would a loving God want to do that? It doesn't compute to me, and is honestly just kind of scary. On a side note, I had to look up if the Jewish people still did animal sacrifices, and I guess the answer is no, because once God finally told them how to do it correctly so that he'd be pleased, the only temple they were allowed to do it at got destroyed, so now they just don't have to do it any more. So now Jewish sin just goes unatoned for? I don't really understand this part, but maybe someone smarter than me can help explain.

Anyway, back to Cain. So he gets exiled as punishment, but still manages to find a wife (who has to be his sister, right)? His descendants are very specifically mentioned, but they will become irrelevant anyway because they are all gonna get killed off in the great flood coming soon. In fact, all the "other sons and daughters" mentioned in Genesis seem to be irrelevant because them and their linage all just die in the flood. Linage seems very important to the bible. Not very important or interesting to me, personally.

The only linage that matters is Seth, because after a whole slew of people mentioned and very specific years & lifespans, his descendants have Noah, who somehow God likes. Not a lot of specific there on why he's good guy, but OK. Obviously, I have lots of questions about this supposedly totally literal ark. I think there was like a documentary made about that one time? I might look that up later.

So to finish out my reading for these last two days, to paraphrase, God basically says "Ok, I got that out of my system. Just needed to kill y'all evil beings once, but I'm good now. Go about being evil and I won't do that again." But, why? I ask why way to much to be satisfied by any of this text.

That's all for now. Let me know your thoughts!