Or...

Or maybe God is real, I don't know. I'm equally willing to believe that something created all this as I am willing to believe we all evolved from a single atom.

All I know is that the God of the Bible isn't the God who I was taught claimed to be the embodiment of love. I've always known this. I mean, you can't actually read the Old Testament and feel like God is a heavenly father you'd want...he's one mean-ass motherfucker.  Let's look at this little gem that doesn't get much play in the pulpit, but is popular with those not inclined to take the Bible at face value:

Then [Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.  And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria. (2 Kings 2:23 – 2:25)

Uh...

Okay, on the one hand, that's pretty awful. Surely God could have dispensed with the youths in a less, I don't know, insanely violent way. Maybe spanked them with a lightening bolt or made their desserts disappear after dinner. But he had fucking bears fucking eat them. Damn, that's cold. (God is love.)

On the other hand, that is truly an awesome story. I do not want it to be true, but neither do I want Die Hard to be true, and Die Hard  is a pretty entertaining yarn for a rainy Friday night.

This is why, as an undergraduate literature major, I refused to take the class titled The Bible as Literature. I really, really wanted to, as the professor was one of my favorites and I had immensely enjoyed the Film & Literature class I'd taken with him. The problem was, I didn't want to read the textbook. I considered myself a Christian who was doing pretty okay in secular academia after a few, strange hiccups (I think I might have passively condemned a gay teacher I had in a very early composition class...or my instructor certainly thought I did. Oops), but I knew that my faith couldn't withstand a critical reading of the Bible. So I took Intro to Chinese Literature instead.

Funny thing, though, now that I'm not at all inclined to read the Bible literally, I'm more inclined to read the Bible. I'm no longer tortured by the fool's errand of mentally rectifying the serial killer God of the Old Testament; the dichotomy of a Jesus who loved the poor but preached hellfire for those who didn't fully embrace his monotheistic message; a book like Revelation that, frankly, scared the shit out of me as a child to the point that my parents would often find me cowering under the kitchen table attempting to "hide from God" because I wasn't ready for the rapture to come and rob me of my childhood.

Oh, hey, maybe I can finally read Job. I'm not sure I've ever made it through Job. I would contest that Job, a story that's not been shuttled into the closet with God's angry she-bears but is actually quite well-known, is the saddest fucking story I have ever heard. It makes Hamlet look like A Midsommer Night's Dream. To nutshell the piece, Job was a good man and Satan believed that his goodness was just a result of God treating him well, so God says, "Have at him, just don't kill him." So Job's children are killed, his livelihood is destroyed, and he's tortured with full-body skin infections; so he, because he has conversational access to God, says, "Hey, man, what's up? What did I do to deserve this?" And he was fully sincere, it should be noted--he figured he must have pissed God off on accident, wanted to make right. And so God responds by pretty much saying, "Job, my job is really hard. Do you do my job? No, no you don't, I do, so just shut up and how dare you question me. Say you're sorry." Job does, too, he says he's sorry and gets some more kids, gets a new livlihood, and his skin clears up. And the moral is: