The Authorised Auto-biography of Me

The murderer is then banished from my sight. "God, if you banish me from your sight, someone will kill me." He said, on his knees he grovelled, he wasn't praying for forgiveness, he was trying to stop me from sending him outside his comfort zone, after all, he had it easy, still living at home with Mum and Dad, what more could he ask for? I had to launch him off into the world.

A question without answer: If Adam and Eve and Cain were the only people on Earth, and the UBM makes no mention of anyone else, who was going to kill Cain?

It could have been that Adam and Eve had more children but the UBM makes no mention of any others until Seth comes along to replace the recently deceased Abel, so if they claim that the UBM is the true word of Me, then there must not have been any other children than those mentioned. The only other possibility was that there were other families around at that time, but the UBM doesn't mention anyone else until Cain goes out to the land of Nod and meets a woman. Could the UBM be lying?

Okay so Cain belted Abel over the head and I banished him from my sight, an impossibility as it turns out, because I'm omnipresent and omniscient and a whole lot of other omni's, so he couldn't hide from me no matter where he went. He went off to the land of Nod and met a woman and they did the wild thing and had a kid, and so it went, AM was established and grew. Now here's what I don't understand, the UBM orders you to believe their version of events, but if you applied the power of reason that I gave you, you would see that there are holes in their version of this narrative that you could drive a truck through. I leave it up to you whether you believe this load of rubbish or not.

So Cain went off to that land to the east of Eden where he met a woman that couldn't have existed if you believe the UBM, and he slept with her, a euphemism for they fucked, and she conceived and had Enoch. For some reason Cain then built a city and named it after his son Enoch. Now why the hell would he need to build a city to house three people?

Enoch met another woman, who came from where the UBM doesn't tell us, and he had a son Irad. Irad in turn had a son Mehujael who in turn had a son Methushael, who had a son Lamech. Lamech set a precedent by finding two women Adah and Zillah, who had children by him. Adah gave birth to Jabal, the ancestor of all who live in tents and herd cattle. He had a brother named Jubal, the ancestor of all who play the lyre and flute. Zillah gave birth to Tubal-Cain, who worked the forge making bronze and iron tools. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah.

Lamech told his wives, "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man who attacked me. If Cain is avenged seven times, for Lamech it's seventy-seven." I don't know what the hell that's all about, and if you are to believe the UBM, where did that young man come from?

It was around this time that Adam and Eve had it off again and had Seth, who in turn had a son Enosh. Again who did Seth marry?

Now comes an interesting bit, the part that the UBM describes as the family tree of the human race that begins by stating that I made man to be like me in every way, and I blessed them, all of them. If that was the case how did we end up with this mob of clowns making mistake after mistake, committing sin after sin?

What followed was a whole bunch of breeding leading to Noah. Along the way we are told that there were giants in the land, the result of sons of God (?) having it off with the daughters of man, these were referred to as the 'mighty men of ancient lore', does the term 'Greek mythology' not spring to mind?. By Noah's time the people on earth had gotten out of control, there was corruption everywhere. Now this is where the UBM really gets it wrong; I was supposed to have looked down on the Earth and decided that mankind was so corrupt that I would have to destroy the whole miserable lot of them and start again, to select one good man and his family, save them and kill the rest. I chose Noah. "Noah", I said to him, "You're a good guy in a world of bad guys, I am going to flood the Earth and drown the lot of you, except for you and your family. What I want you to do is to build a boat from (and I'm paraphrasing from the Message Bible here) Teak wood. Make rooms in it and coat it with pitch, inside and out. Make it 450 feet long, seventy-five feet wide and forty-five feet high. Build a roof over it and put a window eighteen inches from the top, put a door in the side of the ship and make three decks, a lower, middle and upper."

"I am going to flood the Earth that will destroy everything alive under Heaven. Total destruction. But I'm going to establish a covenant with you. You'll board the ship, and your family will come on board with you. You are also to take two of every living creature, a male and a female, on board the ship to preserve their lives with you; two of every species of bird, mammal, and reptile -- two of everything so as to preserve their lives along with yours. Also get all the food you'll need and store it up for you and them."

Noah did as he was told.

Okay, let us look at this for a moment. There was going to be a flood, fair enough, they have been happening every so often up until that time, but this one was going to be a doosie, bigger than any in their living memory, a combination of events that happens every hundred years or so. The fact that a lot of people died in this flood is as unfortunate, as it is today, but, as it is today, this should not be recognised as an 'Act of God' any more, it is now called a 'Hundred Year Event.'

Now to the ship; In earlier versions of the UBM it tells us that it was made of gopher wood, but the Message, in an effort to give it some credibility, tells us that it was made of teak, a tree found in tropical rain forests, of which there were none anywhere near where Noah lived and he would have had no way of sourcing the amount of timber he'd need to build a ship of the required size in his life time. The other problem is that, given his knowledge of ship building (none) and the tools that he had at his disposals (not many), the likelihood of him building a ship of those dimensions that would not flex to the extent that the planks would separate, allowing the water to rush in and sink the ship, would be non-existent. Of course the UBM would say that I could make all of that happen.

Of course the UBM makes no mention of what the living conditions would have been on a ship of that size with no ventilation filled with pissing and crapping animals of all kinds for a hundred and fifty days. The stench would have been horrendous, not to mention the problem of keeping the necessary food fresh and safe to eat. Then there was the fact that they would have lived in almost total darkness for the duration and they couldn't have lit a candle or else the methane gas that would have built up would have exploded and blown the whole box and dice sky high. So many things unexplained, it's lucky that it never happened that way.

On Zogg a similar hundred year event took place, but in their case the agramons all moved to higher ground for the duration and drew on their food stores to compensate for the lost crops and animals, not that many as it turned out, a few could not be moved to higher ground in time and perished.

Then came the rain, lots and lots of it. In forty days and forty nights enough rain fell and enough water bubbled up from the ground (little if any) to raise the water level on Earth at least 5,000 plus metres (16,800 feet) , this being the height of Mt Ararat. Now let's do the math. The rate of rainfall needed to cover Mt Ararat (that being the highest peak in the region) would be around 5.5 metres an hour. The cloud cover needed to produce that kind of rainfall would be hundreds of kilometres thick, so thick in fact that it would have totally obscured the sun, day would become night and they would not have been able to tell the time. (The Rolex was millennia away) I know I can produce the odd miracle but this is not only impossible but un-necessary, all I would have wanted was a large scale flood that covered a large amount of the land so that Noah and his crew could not see land, an area of a couple of hundred square kilometres would have done the trick. I managed this by combining the melt water from the mountains to the north at the headwaters of the River Euphrates, with a monsoonal type deluge. Melt water from a mini Ice Age provided most of the waters that flooded down the river, not water bubbling up from the ground as the UBM speculates.

Many world civilisations have an inundation myth, but the UBM is the only one to turn it into a morality tale, one of an angry God punishing mankind for their disobedience.

The UBM gets specific as to when this all began; Noah was in his 600th year (could it have been the measure of time was a lunar month making Noah around 50 years of age, a little more realistic? The lunar cycle could have been a year in those pre-Calender times.). We are told it began on the seventeenth day of the second month and lasted for 150 days. On the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark touched down on the Ararat mountain range, it doesn't say specifically on Mt Ararat, and the water kept receding until the tops of the mountains came into view. Hang on a minute; if they had already grounded the ark, how come they couldn't see the tops of the mountains, why did it take another couple of months for them to see land?

Now we come to a bit that confuses me; Noah sends out a raven from the already grounded ark but it can't find land. He then sent out a dove, and this too couldn't find land on the first attempt. A week later he sent it out again and it returned with an olive leaf in its beak. Then he did something strange, a week later he sent it out again and it didn't return What did the other dove do about procreation?

Noah waited another seven days before he and his family and all of the animals and birds left the ark. Now this is where I say something that has been ignored throughout the history of the descendants of Noah, and this includes Christians; I told Noah that, because I was aware that mankind was evil from his very beginning, I would never again destroy every living thing. (Presumably this included mankind) Then I said to him; 'For as long as Earth lasts, planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never stop.' Even I have to admit to some confusion here, on one hand I am saying that I'm not going to destroy every living thing on Earth because of man's sinning, while on the other hand I'm leaving open the option of blowing the whole catastrophe to hell and gone. Am I going to destroy them or not? Having made man to be less than perfect and given him a taste of what will happen if he continues in disobedience do you really believe that I will destroy the Earth in some sort of apocalyptic conflagration because of man's sins?

Actually all of this is academic because it didn't happen the way the UBM portrays it at all. Sure there was a flood of major proportions, larger than the normal flood, and why? What is the purpose of a flood? It is to replace the sub-soil moisture and replenish the nutrients of the soils in floodplains so that man can grow better crops and feed a growing population. I also needed man to learn from the floods; if he doesn't want to lose his house and possessions, he should build above the flood level. Right throughout the history of mankind I have placed him in situations where he has to make a similar decision; if he lives on a floodplain should he build where the flood won't destroy his house, or build there and wear the consequences of having to rebuild on a regular basis. Just as the soils of the floodplains are rich in nutrients, the soils near a volcano are also rich in nutrients, but living there incurs the risk of destruction when the volcano erupts. Building in a forest carries with it the risk of destruction by fire, but that same fire is necessary for the germination of some plants and to replenish the soil nutrients and destroy those plants that would themselves destroy the forest. The choice is either to not build there or take the necessary precautions to protect your house. These are the life lessons behind this and other stories, not that one promulgated by the UBM, that I'm a vengeful God who will destroy the imperfect man I created just for being imperfect.

To be continued.