Summary Of The Bible
The Bible opens with a story of how God created the universe, the earth, animals and people on the earth, and pretty much everything. He makes two people, Adam and Eve, a man and a woman, respectively. God, Adam ,Eve, and all the animals inhabit the Garden of Eden, a paradise in which the couple can live under only one stipulation: They must not eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or they shall surely die. Of course, since the book was written by a man, the woman screws everything up, with a bit of prompting from a snake. When God finds out that Adam and Eve have eaten the apple fruit (that may or may not have been an apple), he decides to make them suffer and eventually die and kicks them out of the garden he made for them. The only people worth talking about at this point were inbred from this first couple.
Adam and Eve have two sons: Cain and Abel. To please God, both children make sacrifices; Cain offers fruits and stuff, while Abel slaughters lambs. God is not a vegetarian, so he is more pleased with Abel. Because he cannot handle rejection, Cain does the only rational thing and murders his brother. He is sentenced to exile and Eve bears another son, Seth. Seth kind of gets the whole human race thing going, but God gets kind of pissy, because the people become perverse, committing ghastly atrocities. God sends a flood to wipe out the entire population, with exception to an alcoholic named Noah and his family. Then Noah and his wife get down to another round of inbreeding, and all modern humans can trace their lineage to them. Within a few more thousand years all the different races of humanity have diverged, and all the plants, animals, insects, etc. have repopulated the earth.
Adam and Eve have two sons: Cain and Abel. To please God, both children make sacrifices; Cain offers fruits and stuff, while Abel slaughters lambs. God is not a vegetarian, so he is more pleased with Abel. Because he cannot handle rejection, Cain does the only rational thing and murders his brother. He is sentenced to exile and Eve bears another son, Seth. Seth kind of gets the whole human race thing going, but God gets kind of pissy, because the people become perverse, committing ghastly atrocities. God sends a flood to wipe out the entire population, with exception to an alcoholic named Noah and his family. Then Noah and his wife get down to another round of inbreeding, and all modern humans can trace their lineage to them. Within a few more thousand years all the different races of humanity have diverged, and all the plants, animals, insects, etc. have repopulated the earth.
Years later, one of the descendants of Noah, Abraham, is called by God to father the entire race of the Jews. He has a kid named Isaac, and Isaac becomes the father of Israel/Jacob, and Israel/Jacob becomes the father of Joseph, the first real main character. Joseph is abused by his brothers for having a pretty coat. He goes to work for the Egyptian Pharaoh because he can magically tell the future by reading people's dreams. This puts Joseph and the Hebrews into repute with the Pharaoh, until another Pharaoh who does not know of Joseph takes the throne. He enslaves all the Hebrews in Egypt. The next main character is an orphaned, Hebrew murderer named Moses, who was raised by the Egyptian royalty. He leads a resistance and eventually escapes Egypt with his people, God introduces this lengthy set of laws and customs, and then everyone wanders around the desert for a while, and after Moses dies his people go on to create Israel without him. A bunch of crappy stuff happens to the Jews, until Jesus is introduced.
Jesus, whose mother was a virgin, is the son of God. He came along and told people that they should believe in him, because he was the only way into this awesome new paradise in Heaven. He proved all this, and that he wasn't faking, by doing magic tricks for any people who would stop and listen to him, and running rhetorical circles around his strawmen adversaries. Then some hateful Jews (or possibly Romans, depending upon which part of the New Testament you believe) came along and got him killed, because they thought his teachings were a threat to the temple. (Besides, this was God's divine plan all along.) Then he goes on to an underworld full of pain and suffering. However, a few days later he crawls back out, halo intact, and Jesus rolls away a rock and scares two poor innocent women, then joins the people he taught, and has them poke fingers in him, and tells spooky stories about the afterlife. He reiterates that everyone had to believe in him or they wouldn't make it to the happy afterlife. After this, Jesus goes up to heaven, and his students are left on Earth without him, waiting for the day when Jesus said he would come back, which he said would be "within a generation."
Reference: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bible
Jesus, whose mother was a virgin, is the son of God. He came along and told people that they should believe in him, because he was the only way into this awesome new paradise in Heaven. He proved all this, and that he wasn't faking, by doing magic tricks for any people who would stop and listen to him, and running rhetorical circles around his strawmen adversaries. Then some hateful Jews (or possibly Romans, depending upon which part of the New Testament you believe) came along and got him killed, because they thought his teachings were a threat to the temple. (Besides, this was God's divine plan all along.) Then he goes on to an underworld full of pain and suffering. However, a few days later he crawls back out, halo intact, and Jesus rolls away a rock and scares two poor innocent women, then joins the people he taught, and has them poke fingers in him, and tells spooky stories about the afterlife. He reiterates that everyone had to believe in him or they wouldn't make it to the happy afterlife. After this, Jesus goes up to heaven, and his students are left on Earth without him, waiting for the day when Jesus said he would come back, which he said would be "within a generation."
Reference: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bible
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