Still Beginning II

I was a skeptical child and those incredible biblical stories I was exposed to seemed to have a lot of inconsistencies. I remember, in Sunday school, when we discussed Noah and the ark, I, who even then was an animal lover, would ask "how did Noah get llamas and buffalo from the New World and kangaroos from Australia when they hadn't been discovered?" and "what did they eat - I mean even if rabbits bred like rabbits there wouldn't have been enough to feed the lions and tigers and leopards?" The teachers would sort of pat me on the head and say "you'll understand when you're older so stop asking questions and go back and color in your Noah's Ark coloring book".

A while later it was the story of Adam and Eve and this original sin stuff that must've meant incest as near as I could figure that bothered me. I mean in the beginning, according to the bible, there was Adam and Eve and their sons Cain, Abel and Seth and some unnamed daughters. Eventually Cain and Seth (not sure about poor Abel) "knew" their wives and begat a whole lot of sons. But the only females at this time were Eve and her daughters so the brothers had had to marry their sisters - yuck! Also why was Cain marked as there was no one else in the world but his family? Were Adam, Eve and Seth so stupid that they wouldn't recognize their relative? Again with the head patting and "you'll understand when you're older". I'm older but it still doesn't make sense.

Then, during my agnostic stage, I obsessed about the story of Mary as I was teenager about her age - god gets her pregnant without so much of a "Mary will you do me the honor of bearing my child?" No it's zap she's pregnant. No wonder she and Joseph wandered around so much so no one could count the number of months she was pregnant. As a budding feminist I felt (and still feel) it was a form of violation of Mary's bodily integrity if not outright rape (just a variation of what happened to Danaë and other victims of various gods).

Xtian fundamentalists often say when they have kids they would want them to read nothing but their Bible. I've read it (not word for word but skimming along) and found it full of genocide and rape and terrible injustice. The story that really got to me was one in Judges where this guy, in order to save himself, hands over his concubine to be gang-raped to death and he himself is never punished. As a feminist I was and still am appalled and it made me even more sensitive to all the god-condoned rapes of captive women that's to be found in this book. I swear, if I had kids, the Bible would be the last book I'd want them to read at least until they were adults.