The Bible Tells Me So
Religion was confusing. Every Sunday morning, I heard stories from the Bible — a book so Holy I wasn’t allowed to set any other book on top of it.
In some stories, God seemed like a really nice guy. He gave two women, Elizabeth and Mary, magical children. During the grown-up part of the church service I heard the preacher say that Elizabeth was barren, but then God opened her womb and put John the Baptist in there.
I leaned toward Daddy and whispered, “What’s a womb?” He thumped me on the back of the head. Daddy’s arm was always resting on the back of the pew with his thick fingers curled into thumping position. There was no talking allowed during church.
At Christmas time, I found out that Mary got the baby Jesus using something called an immaculate conception, which, I decided, meant that she didn’t need Joseph for anything except to lead the donkey into the stable. I hadn’t heard a story about whether Mary wanted a baby, or if God just decided to surprise her with Jesus. But that probably didn’t matter because Mary became the Blessed Virgin and the most famous woman in the Bible.
God was also a nice guy when the Israelites were wandering around in the desert for forty years. In one story, He turned solid rock into a water faucet when His “chosen” people were thirsty. I asked the Sunday School teacher why God didn’t just give them directions to the end of the desert. That’s when I found out that I was not supposed to question the choices God made. The teacher told me, “He has His reasons.”
And what’s with all the capital letters? I wondered. But I didn’t ask about that.
In other stories, God was mean. Very mean. He smote and cursed people. He killed them with plagues. He didn’t do anything to stop all the first-born babies from being slaughtered with swords. Since I was born first, that story terrified me.
The story that scared me the most, however, was when God told Abraham to kill his son, Isaac. Isaac was also a first-born child and the only son of Abraham and Sarah. He was born when they were really old — like in their nineties, although I wasn’t sure why that was such a big deal. But anyway, God ordered Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.
At first, I didn’t get it. All I knew about offerings was the gold-colored plates that were passed around at the end of Sunday services. People in the congregation were supposed to put money into those plates and never take any out. But I forgot all about offering plates during the next part of the story: Abraham built a rock altar and piled wood on it. He tied Isaac to the top of the wood pile and then grabbed his knife!
I could barely breathe! This story didn’t make any sense. Some invisible guy told Abraham to kill his only child and he’s getting ready to actually do it?
I didn’t care about the next part where God said, Just kidding. Here’s a ram you can kill and burn up instead. What if God told Daddy to tie me to wood and burn me up and then what if God didn’t say, Just kidding! Would Daddy slit my throat with that knife and turn me into a burnt offering?
I wanted to ask the Sunday School teacher about all this. But I didn’t because I thought she’d just give me that God-knows-what-He’s-doing answer again.
The story of Noah and the Flood made my brain hurt. Did God really drown everyone on the earth except for Noah’s family? What about all the puppies and kittens? My imagination showed me frightened babies — tiny people who’d never had a chance to do anything wrong — eyes wide, thrashing and crying, gulping water when there was no more air for them to breathe.
I had so many questions about this story:
How did Noah keep the lions from eating all the other animals for forty days and forty nights? Who rounded up two mosquitoes and confirmed that they were one male and one female? Why didn’t any of the birds on the Ark snap those two mosquitoes out of the air? And why did God decide to keep mosquitoes and ticks and poisonous spiders and snakes at all? And bats? Grandma Grace went to church three times a week, but one night she beat a bat to death with a broom just because it was flying around in the back bedroom of her house. Bats must be terrible creatures, I thought. So, why did they get to live while the innocent babies drown?
And what about rabbits? A while back, we went to visit our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Treadwell. They had rabbits on their farm. I heard them say that rabbits make baby rabbits “faster than you can say Jack Robinson.” I said Jack Robinson a few times, just to try it out. It didn’t take long. So, then I wondered how The Ark had enough room for all the baby bunnies. You could say Jack Robinson thousands of times in forty days and forty nights and all the days after that when they were waiting for dry land to appear. Because Noah had to get two rabbits of each kind of rabbit, right? I saw a lot of different rabbits at the Treadwell’s farm: large gray rabbits, little white rabbits, brown rabbits with black spots, black rabbits with white spots…
From what I learned about math in school, it wouldn’t take long for multiplication to capsize Noah’s Ark, especially considering all the food they’d need. And the poop. I’ve shoveled mountains of poop out of Uncle Bud’s barn, all of which dropped out of only one pony and one cow.
I finally had to stop thinking about Noah’s Ark.
Easter made my stomach hurt. It wasn’t the kind of hurt that happened when I ate too much cake. It was a sharp pain that stabbed into my tummy when I looked at pictures of Jesus hanging on the cross with blood dripping down his face and nails poking out of his hands and feet. Why did God make him die that way even after Jesus knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked, politely, to be spared from that terrible fate?
Daddy said No most of the time when I asked him for anything. But what if I had begged him not to send me off to be killed by soldiers? He wouldn’t make me go, would he? Sometimes I thought that Our Heavenly Father and my daddy acted a little bit the same — like the wrath that happened when his seven children fought and whined while he drove the car.
Parts of Easter Sunday were kind of nice. I felt happy when people said I looked pretty in the new dress Mommy had sewed for me. And the bouquets of spring flowers in the church were always beautiful. But then I’d peek up at Jesus hanging on the cross and my stomach would get all twisty and nauseous. This turned out to be the wrong attitude, though.
The preacher said were supposed to feel happy about the crucifixion because Jesus came out of his grave to show us Eternal Life. His mother, Mary, was really happy when he rose from the dead! But I wondered why God couldn’t just skip the terrible death part. Why couldn’t He just kill Jesus fast, with a lightning bolt, or something? Jesus could still have died for everyone’s sins, risen on the third day, and then appeared to his disciples. I think they would have still been impressed.
And then we could have an actual “Good” Friday without all the thorns and the stabbing and the hammering of nails and the awful agony that went on and on. That would make Easter a lot more fun. As it was, I had to push all that violence out of my head before I could enjoy eating all the yummy food Mommy and Grandma Grace put on the Easter Sunday dinner table.
The worst Sunday school story of all, though, is the one that showed people rising up out of their graves. Our Aunt Fae gave us a set of Seventh Day Adventist Bible story books with lots of pictures in them. A picture in the last book, Volume 10, showed men and women and children standing halfway out of the ground in a cemetery. They were reaching up toward Jesus, who was floating above them in the sky. And all the grownups were young and beautiful. What!? The people I knew who died were all decrepit and wrinkly before they went into a casket. Also, everyone rising out of the ground in the picture looked like they’d just had a bath and put on brand-new clothes. There was no dirt on anybody.
But, I guess that’s what’s in the Bible — stories about stuff that doesn’t ever happen in real life. I guess that’s why the preachers are always telling us to have faith. Faith is the biggest power in religion. If we have faith in God, they say, He can make our brains believe all the crazy stories in the Bible. Without faith, nobody will go to church and the preachers won’t have any congregation to preach at or anyone to put money into the offering plates. And people like my Uncle Bud won’t know what to do with all the extra hours in their week if they don’t read the Holy Bible and go to Sunday morning and Sunday evening worship services and Wednesday evening prayer meetings.
Uncle Bud read the Bible every day. He loved Jesus. After losing two dads when he was a kid — one to a gun and one to Betty — I guess maybe he needed someone to tell him what to do. Uncle Bud was sure that Jesus saved him from his sins, and he talked to Jesus every day. Maybe he also liked the long list of religious rules that told him exactly what to do if he didn’t want to burn in Hell for All Eternity.
Sometimes it’s easier to decide what to do if you know the rules.
When I stayed overnight with my cousins, Uncle Bud’s rule was that I had to kneel, in my nightgown, on the cold wooden floor and pray to God for what seemed like forever before I was allowed to crawl under the blankets. One time I suggested that I could pray just as well, and probably for a lot longer, if I were in the bed. But my uncle ignored me.
That’s when I began to realize that religion was too confusing for me to deal with, and that logic, a thing my daddy always told me is so important, does not mix with religion — sort of like what happened in science class when we poured oil into a bowl of water.
