I have. You can find the entire text online at several places, but perhaps the best is the Skeptic's Annotated Bible. Unlike Falwell and other fundamentalists, I do actually read the book in question, if only to remind myself that I am not making this stuff up! (I wish I were.)
Most of the rambling texts that make up the Bible are either distractingly inaccurate, shamelessly anthropocentric, immoral, or just plain weird. How is knowing the names and years lived of all the supposed descendants of Adam and Eve supposed to help me be a better person? Am I supposed to be wowed by the fact that Adam was a 130-year-old father (when he father Seth, who himself lived for 912 years)? Really? What should I do with this information exactly?
Why should I be awed at the fact that Yahweh moved upon the waters to create life if only a few chapters later, he was so offended at the "imagination" of man that he decided to kill everything he had so painstakingly created? Reading Genesis is like reading a moving account of a father lovingly overseeing the birth of his children, knowing that later in the same account, he will murder almost all of them (and their pets, who did him no harm).
Then what does it mean when that same deity, after going through all the trouble to create then destroy the world, changes his mind once again and sort of forgives men their imagination - AFTER the flood has destroyed most life? And since we now know that 90% of life lives in water, how would a flood destroy them exactly? Why was Noah not hypoxic or frozen if the level of the water rose to above the level of Mount Everest? How did two of every creature on the planet survive on a craft 450' long and not eat each other or Noah? How did all reproduce successfully? How was there room for rhinos and elephants? How could he feed them all?
If zoos have trouble keeping animals alive in captivity, how could an untrained nomad?
It just makes no senses. It is beyond insulting to a modern reader. It is like telling a Marine recruit he must clean a latrine with a tooth brush - the ridiculousness of the task speaks to the level of unquestioning obedience demanded by those who pass these stories off as either accurate or useful.
And what, pray tell, is the moral of this story?
That we should be prepared? Any Boyscout could tell me that without fabricating stories of impossibly overcrowded boats built by a man with no expertise in ship-building or animal husbandry or hunting (he would have had to capture a number of these animals after all).
That god is prone to temper tantrums so he should be feared? Fair enough, but why not just make it a really bad flood? Or an earthquake? Why this ridiculous yarn?
Those who wrote the Bible doubtless had no idea about the height of Mount Everest or the size of the Earth. If so, they apparently were mathematically challenged, unable to calculate that the amount of water required for such a deluge was impossibly high.
They also didn't understand that the moon is simply reflecting the light of the sun, and that our sun is one of many stars (Genesis claims erroneously the stars were created last, after the Earth, sun, and moon, more or less in that order (Genesis 1:16).) They had no idea how old the Earth or the universe were, nor did they understand that the Earth was much younger than the universe. They apparently never bothered to dissect a body and count the number of ribs in men and women to know that they were equal, so the idea of the rib of Adam being removed to create Eve (Genesis 2:23) was nonsensical. They didn't apparently understand photosynthesis, which is surprising since they were agrarian, so the creation of grains and plants (Genesis 1:16) before the creation of the sun would have been an impossibility, as of course would the production of light (Genesis 1:3) without a light-generating sun or star (Genesis 1:16).
For those who want to wow us with their supposed knowledge of the mind of god, this is pretty amateurish, weak stuff. The first chapter of a well-written physics textbook is far more awe-inspiring than this rambling narrative of one man begetting another (women are generally nameless and faceless and ageless in this account).
Note to anyone out there interested in starting a new religion: if you are going to make a prediction, make sure it is about something that we can never prove or disprove in the future or you will just look silly. Or worse.
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