WOW! The Urban Art of Joshua Callaghan

Check out the fantastic work of Joshua Callaghan.  As always, thanks digg.

That is a utility box covered in pictures of the actual scenery behind the box.

Picture: Joshua Callaghan / Misha de Ridder / Rex Features

Concubines!

Gen 25:2

Abraham had concubines.  God condones non-monogamous, extra-marital sexual relationships.

Morality schizophrenia?

Child Abuse, Again. And Innocent Slaughter, Again.

Gen 22 1-14

God decides to tempt Abraham by telling him to take his son up to a mountain and sacrifice him to the Lord.  Abraham obeys, taking Isaac to the mountain without telling him of his purpose.  Abraham ties up his son and places him upon the altar.  He raises his knife to kill his son when "the angel of the Lord" interrupts him, essentially saying that the Lord did not want Abraham to sacrifice his son, He just wanted to see if Abraham would do it.  God is pleased with Abraham's performance.  Just then, as if divinely arranged, Abraham just happens to find a ram "caught in a thicket by his horns."  Abraham frees it, kills it, and burns it for the Lord.  Ahh, the precious, burning carcasses of innocents.

One can only imagine the terror Isaac suffered at the hands of his father.

An Encore of Incest

Gen 19 31-36

And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.  And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth:  Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.  And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.  And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.  And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.  Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. 

God condones incest.  Twice.

The Genesis god's Moral Record

1. Imposition of unconscionable pain on innocent women in childbirth

2. Drowning of innumerable men, women, children, animals, and their young by choice

3. Dispersion and confusion of innocent Men by forcing upon them different languages to inhibit them from achieving peaceful social, economic, technological advancement

4. Sending plagues upon innocent Egyptians for Abram's deceit

5. Requiring the slaughter of innocent animals for mere sacrificial rite

6. Requiring the mutilation of infant genitalia

7. Endorsing slavery

8. Condoning Lot's offering of the rape of his daughters to a mob

9. Condoning incest

Rape My Virgin Daughters Instead

Gen 19 1-8

And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them... And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry all night... And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night... And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house... But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young... And they called unto Lot, and said unto him, Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them.  And Lot went out at the door unto them... and said, I pray you, brethren, do no so wickedly.  Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.

Lot offers the Sodomite marauders his virgin daughters to do with them as they please in exchange for the safety of these "angels."  The virgin daughters are not asked, they are offered without their consent.  TO BE RAPED BY A MOB.  (what good are these "angels" if they would not even protest Lot's offer?)

Lot is never punished for his ghastly deed, and retains custody of his daughters.  God offers no response in the way of condemnation or criticism. So the same goes for Jesus, who was with God, and so forth.   

The Genesis god's Moral Record

1.  Imposition of unconscionable pain on innocent women in childbirth

2.  Drowning of innumerable men, women, children, animals, and their young by choice

3.  Dispersion  and confusion of innocent Men by forcing upon them different languages to inhibit them from achieving peaceful social, economic, technological advancement

4.  Sending plagues upon innocent Egyptians for Abram's deceit

5.  Requiring the slaughter of innocent animals for mere sacrificial rite

6.  Requiring the mutilation of infant genitalia

7.  Endorsing slavery

8.  Condoning Lot's offering of the rape of his daughters to a mob

Circumcision and Slavery!

Gen 17 10-14

 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.  And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.  And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.  He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant.  And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.

 God makes a covenant with Abraham (formerly Abram), and demands that the members of his tribe/group be circumcised.  Well, if extremely painful childbirth, genocide, and animal sacrifice weren't enough, now we have penile mutilation.  Lovely.

 Oh yes, and slavery.  In no uncertain terms, God lends his support for the buying and selling of human beings.  Glad to know Jesus was there all along too, and said not one word in protest.  Thanks, Jesus.  Sadly, we're still not rid of that deplorable institution, but good to know God had no problems with it. 

At the risk of repetition, I feel as I should keep a tally (though not an entire one) of the horrendous record of this abominable god. Here goes:

1.  Imposition of unconscionable pain on innocent women in childbirth

2.  Drowning of innumerable men, women, children, animals, and their young by choice

3.  Dispersion  and confusion of innocent Men by forcing upon them different languages to inhibit them from achieving peaceful social, economic, technological advancement

4.  Sending plagues upon innocent Egyptians for Abram's deceit

5.  Requiring the slaughter of innocent animals for mere sacrificial rite

6.  Requiring the mutilation of infant genitalia

7.  Endorsing slavery

This book is an exercise in desensitization to cruelty to living things.  

Behold, the Lord Loves Bloodshed

Gen 15 1-18

In a vision, God addresses Abram, telling him that he is to inherit the land of Canaan.  Abram asks how he is to know that he shall inherit the land.  Inexplicably, God decides to charge for His answer.  What's the price?  The murder of a heifer, a female goat, and a ram.  Could not the Lord have merely answered him as is the practice when asked a question?  Certainly the killing of three innocent animals seems of no consequence considering how many were drowned to death in the Flood, but one has to wonder why spilt blood satisfies the palate of the Lord so.

Abram Deceives Pharaoh, So God Punishes Pharaoh

Gen 12 11-20

The tale of Abram and his wife Sarai venturing into Egypt provides an additional example of God's abysmal morality, which apparently is based more on whim than a set of principles.  Abram, a descendent of Noah and the future father of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), travels with his wife to Egypt to escape a famine.  Before they arrive, Abram tells Sarai that the Egyptians would kill him if they discovered him to be her husband, due to her beauty, and therefore should pretend to be his sister.  Sarai obeys, and once in Egypt, her beauty impresses the Egyptians.  She is taken into Pharaoh's house, and Pharaoh rewards Abram for bringing her to his land, never suspecting Abram of his deceit.

Then "holy" "God" intervenes, and sends "great plagues" upon Pharaoh and his house for taking in another man's wife.  Despite the Pharaoh's complete innocence in the matter, being utterly convinced by Sarai and Abram of their sibling relationship, God decides to punish him anyway (perhaps he was bored).  Pharaoh then casts Abram and Sarai out of his land, and they're off on their merry way.

The moral of the story: God is a racist and needed an excuse to strike the Egyptians.  Maybe not.  Wait, I have it!  Give "God" an excuse to torment innocent people.

The Tower of Babel, or Another Example of Genesis Absurdity

Gen 11 1-9: And the whole earth was of one language...And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth...And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.  Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.  So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

We have another origin story, this one explaining why there are so many peoples on the earth with different languages (clearly this is not the way humans developed different languages and cultures!).  Yet here is another example of absurd crap:  God discovers that man has realized the power of his mind - which He gave him.  Man has discovered that he can achieve greatness through the application of his skills and learned knowledge, and even finds that collaborating peacefully with his fellow man will only help in achieving his goals. In other words, man has discovered science, and a rather utopian world in which man works with man in peace in the pursuit of human advancement.  Inexplicably, God will have none of it.  God decrees that, should Man be allowed to continue unabated, there's no limit to what he could achieve!  So, through divine intervention man is scattered, his progress and unity extinguished, his communication with his neighbors confused.  How dare man live and work peacefully with his fellow man!  

Here is perhaps the first battle in the war on science, and another example of God's man-made character.  Only a human being, especially one quite uneducated and ignorant about the world in which he lived, could conceive of a god so contradictory in his nature that he could at one time create the cosmos, and yet become nervous about mankind's attempt to build a grand tower - of brick and mortar.  Who can believe such piffle?  Who can believe that the creator of the universe's nebulae and galaxies could ever entertain the slightest notion of fear at what Bronze Age Man could accomplish should they collaborate and exercise their minds?  

One explanation is that God wanted to teach Man humility, to punish him for believing that he could reach God's level, or become godlike in any way.  Man should know his place, and worship his Lord who created him.  This is utter garbage, and an excuse for a god who would have his creations live as slaves in social, cultural, and technological stagnation, lest God be the one to grant Man these improvements!  Who could worship such a low thing?  It is also a prime example of religion's assault on Man's self-esteem.  Man is not to achieve anything on his own: he must give all credit and glory to God.  Man is only capable of folly and wickedness, and any achievement of his must be due to his creator, not himself.  What a crude, paranoid, self-obsessed, shallow god this is.

Man Shall Not Live More than 120 Years - Nevermind!

Gen 6:3-4  And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.  There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Gen 9:29 And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.

The Genesis of Genocide: Noah and the Flood

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, 'I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth that I have made them.'" But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Gen 6:5-8

In Genesis 6: 5-8, God finally musters the will to make good on his earlier threat to kill all those who defy him (having earlier threatened Adam and Eve yet refusing to follow through with his own threat - did God just sin against himself?), and even all animal life (perhaps as some sort of mass-killing dessert) by flooding the Earth. Humanity is too wicked, it must be wiped out, deems the creator of humanity. However, before his judgment is final, God finds one man who is worthy of rescue (notice it's not a woman). So God tells Noah he must do one task in order to save himself and his family from God's entire-world-destroying wrath: he must collect two (or is it seven?) of every species of living thing and gather them onto a ship big enough to hold them, which he must build himself.

Genesis reports that Noah succeeds in his task: apparently, he collects two of every species of living thing, which must include dinosaurs, elephants, lions, tigers, jaguars, cheetahs, snakes, hummingbirds, eagles, hawks, tarantulas, crickets, those tiny little red bugs that you see on your driveway, ticks, termites, gnats, leeches, wasps, gorillas, penguins, ostrichs, prairie dogs, etc., and let's not forget the wooly mammoth. And, he must have built a ship that could hold all of them without breaking. (No clue is given on what ship he used to sail to Australia to collect its kangaroos, or when he traveled to the Arctic to gather the polar bears)

Yes, we must believe this, because the Bible tells it so. Additionally, after Noah boards his zoo ship, we must believe that God willingly sent a flood which covered the entire earth, including the highest mountaintop, drowning every last living thing on Earth not aboard the Ark.

To believe this, we must believe the following: God purposefully drowned mothers caring for their children, breastfeeding their babies to quiet their cries of hunger, coaxing their infants to speak their first words, or laying them down for their naps. Families must have desperately clinged to each other in the rising waters only to watch each other sink to their deaths, one by one. Children losing their tiny grips on their parents' forearms, swept away by massive waves to die alone, screaming as only children can scream, uncontrollably heaving soul-shaking cries of panic while taking in lethal amounts of water as their bodies strain for air, drowning far away from their dear parents, their great protectors, who couldn't protect them from their god. Mothers and fathers watching their children drown in tremendous panic and horror, screaming and diving into the roiling depths, drowning while attempting to rescue their kids. We must believe this and worship the god who chose to do this. Who chose to drown children.

Let us not forget the animals, however...

We must believe that God deliberately sent the waters to drown every last animal and their young. As the waters rose, as the rains poured down, dogs and cats paddled on, along with their young, desperately searching for some type of perch. Their muscles pumped, their legs thrashed, and their heads pointed toward the sky, desperate to stay above their deaths, but their bodies held out for only so long. Their hearts could pound only so hard before they burst, their bodies' will to live causing their hearts to usher in their own death.  Eventually, the waters smothered them to death. The same for every species. Perhaps the birds were luckier, no, only the adult flying ones. Yet they would still have had to endure the trauma of watching their young perish, before perishing themselves, for God would not rescind the rains until every last living thing had drowned.

Do not despair, however, for 4000 years afterward this sadist god revealed that he is actually loving, and infinitely so!
(Except the messenger sent by the Lord to prove his infinite love for mankind stood by and watched mankind drown at the hands of this same Lord [John 1 1-3])


"

And just how did the kangaroos get back to Australia?  Once again, we're left to our imaginations...

Women in Genesis, Cain's mysterious wife

The creation of Adam and Eve is quite interesting, for Adam is created directly from the dust of the earth, and Eve is created from Adam's rib. Therefore, Eve's creation is totally dependent on Adam's existence. Quite telling of the patriarchal society in which Genesis was written, and of the nature of the Bible in general; that is, it's man-made. Further evidence is found in chapter 4 of Genesis, when the 3rd and 4th human beings arrive: Cain and Abel. Adam and Eve bear Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel, and is cast out of the land by God. Mysteriously, once banished, we find Cain with a wife. Here we see that the woman's existence is not worth mentioning until she has something to do with a man, Cain, just as Eve was not worth creating until Adam realized he needed a suitable companion. Now, where in the hell did this woman come from? There's no explanation. And why should we expect one? In the previous chapter a talking animal outwits an adult human being and convinces her to disobey the creator of the very world in which she lives. By tempting her to eat fruit. Fruit which dispenses moral knowledge. And what is the first moral lesson revealed to Adam and Eve from the ingestion of the fruit? That nudity is shameful. Their unclothed genitals, crafted by God himself, somehow comprise a moral shame revealed to them by fruit containing the knowledge of good and evil, plucked from a tree deliberately placed within their reach by God the creator himself.

If only the problem stemmed from a loss in translation.

"The Beginning" and God's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Morality

The third chapter of the Bible brings forth the absolute worst form of morality ever to be conceived in the history of mankind. God warns Adam, who then tells Eve, that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is forbidden, and that breaking this commandment will result in sure death. Scholars debate whether this was meant as instantaneous death, or that Adam and Eve's lives would merely be made finite as punishment for the transgression. The problem with the latter notion is that later (Gen 3:22) God explains that eating of the Tree of Life would grant eternal life to Adam and Eve. Hence we can assume that they were not endowed with eternal life from the get-go.

Therefore we have God falsely warning that he would kill Adam, and presumably Eve (although God explicitly warns Adam only), if they should eat from the TOTKOGAE. Well, Eve listens to the talking snake in the Garden and bites the fruit, leads Adam to do the same, and consequently sin against God.

God's reaction is also his creation of the worst form of morality. God inexplicably does not kill Adam nor Eve, perhaps forgetting his earlier threat, and does something infinitely more ghastly. Instead, he chooses to punish EVERY FUTURE GENERATION of the human race for the actions committed by two lone individuals, Adam and Eve.

Gen 3:16-19 "Unto the woman he said- 'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said- "...cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground..."

These punishments are clearly literary devices used to explain why mankind must work to get its food and the painful experience of childbirth. But to the believer, they are simply literal consequences for Man's first sin. If they are meant as literal punishments, then we must analyze the moral implications of these punishments, which are ghastly. Here we see a god willing to transfix these curses not solely upon the transgressors who have committed the aforementioned sin, but also on countless human beings who took no part in disobeying the Genesis god. What are we to make of such a god? What are we to make of such a morality where mankind not only suffers the consequences of his own actions (later on, even this will be perverted by the invention of "scapegoating," in which Man piles upon a goat all his sins and drives the goat out into the desert to die of hunger and thirst, thereby miraculously and horrendously "cleansing" Man of his sins), but also suffers the consequences for actions he did not even commit?

Here we see the introduction of a perverse morality of which divine whim and rage forms the foundation, and not personal responsibility. Who today would say that it is right, and good (as the Genesis god so loved to say) that a person should suffer for another's actions? This, I would imagine, is the introduction of the doctrine of Original Sin, whereby every descendant of Adam and Eve are considered sinful even before they make their first consciously-chosen action.

There is no answer that could repair this broken morality.

It's Morning Again in America

Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States. Hope, intelligence, aspiration and determination have overcome a disgusting opposition campaign of lies, deceit, character assassination, and the lowest example of the American character. Not even a lifetime ago a black man was prohibited by law from sharing the same water fountain as a white man - now, the nation founded on freedom and individual rights for all will be led by a black president. This is a watershed event in America, a domestic Berlin Wall moment in which the American people tore down the barrier erected not only by our racial past, but also by the abhorrent politics brought to Washington DC by President Bush and the modern Republican party, in which American was pitted against American, culture vs culture, a purposeful reversal of the foundational American ideal of a "melting pot" nation where all are welcome to join and assimilate into a singular American people. Barack Obama will have ended this shameful episode in American politics so long as he stays true to his inspirational words. May we finally begin to heal as a nation in this new century.