Tetherd Cow Ahead

The Continuing Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~

#39: The Excised Extremities.

Ever wondered why SGM is always depicted without hands? Well, here’s a shot from early in his career.

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Another SGM found & photographed by Atlas. Thanks again buddy!

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Well Faithful Acowlytes it’s fast approaching the time of year when we once again remember the only good thing that Christians have ever done for the world, namely, the active keeping alive of the pagan traditions of the Yuletide. The antecedents of the Yule predate Christianity by an unknown period of time, but it is bedded much more deeply in reality and meaning than the johnny-come-lately fairy story spun by the Christian Church will ever manage. ((The pagan tradition of the Yule was so strong that the Early Christians knew they didn’t have an ice-cube’s chance in Hell of getting their prospective converts to ditch it. So, politically and cynically in my view, they contrived the birth date of Christ to occur at exactly the same time as the already entrenched festival. Seriously – why do so many people fail to see through this deceitful and manipulative behaviour?)) Try as they might, the Christians have never quite succeeded in dampening down the original excesses of the festival, which was pretty much all about feasting, drinking and having a jolly good time – or, as the Norse Grettis Saga puts it: a time of ‘greatest mirth and joyance among men.’ This excessive indulgence and pleasure continues to be a great annoyance to Christians who routinely whinge about ‘the true meaning of Christmas being lost’. Well, pals, you don’t know the true meaning of Christmas from your ass. You can chuck ‘Christ’ in there if you want, but it’s still just Yuletide-by-another-name to those of us who haven’t drunk the Kool Aid. People continue to eat, drink and be merry just like the pagans did, and for most of the same reasons. ((About the only valid addition to the Yuletide sentiment has been the introduction of a desire for ‘Peace on Earth’. And, whilst admirable, that’s not really worked out well for most Christian countries, has it? (Israel and Palestine? Still at one another’s throats?) And yet, the Norse countries are doing pretty OK these days, having gotten the raping and pillaging out of their systems like grown-ups a couple of thousand years ago. Do I need to draw a more detailed picture?))

Anyhoo, all that aside, the other main reason for the season, as you know, is to indulge in commercial excess, and keep our ailing banks and their managers living high on the hog. Life’s been tough for them this year, and they probably had to sell one of their Mercs, so make sure you make the effort to spend that extra dollar that you can’t afford! Preferably in the newly opened Tetherd Cow Ahead Shoppe! Yes Acowlytes, you’re accustomed to having The Cow with your morning coffee – now you can have the coffee in a Cow cup (plus a whole lot of other things, and more to come!) Look for the easy-to-click portal to Zazzle in the side bar, and remember, every purchase you make helps keep the Reverend in whisky!

Go on, what are you doing still reading? Click on it now!

(But please don’t spend your money on this. You have been warned).

OK, so where were we? Oh, that’s right, God had just made the fish and the birds and was patting himself on the back. Again. Crikey – what is it with all the self-congratulation? How annoying does that make God sound? Aside from anything, it shows a distinctly un-Godly lack of humility.

Day 6:

~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

~ And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Jesus Christ! There He goes again! With no-one to cast a critical eye over the proceedings, God might have been able to convince Himself that all his handiwork was the bees knees, but if you ask me He could have used a good supervisor. If we were concerned with the Truth, in a proper accounting of things somewhere about here there would be a passage that read something like:

~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth cancer and leprosy, cockroaches and merchant bankers and Scientologists. Let there be abundant flooding and drought, and earthquakes and plagues of mites. Let there be hydrocephalic children, hemophiliacs and fatally conjoined twins. And behold, it was so. And God looked on all that he had done and saw that it truly sucked big time.

Where are the passages like that, eh? Funnily enough, not in Genesis. Or anywhere for that matter. God happily takes credit for all things bright and beautiful, but all things ugly and screwed-up are conveniently ignored or blamed on someone else. ((Satan or humans, typically)) Hands up who amongst us doesn’t recognize that kind of person in the workplace?

And, as I mentioned last episode, it’s here we start to see God’s preoccupation with ‘creeping things’. There’s more:

~ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

God seems obsessed with creeping things in much the same way as Fundamentalist Christians are fixated on atheists and homosexuals. It’s almost like He made the damned things but can’t quite believe they exist.

You will also notice that in that previous passage ((I’m reproducing all these verses from Genesis in order, with no excisions, lest you think I’m being partisan)) God creates man, bizarrely lapsing into the possessive plural personal pronoun. ‘Let Us make man in Our image’? There’s someone else around? Who the crap is that? Are they the ones responsible for the water, maybe? Or is it, perhaps, that, in the manner of all those who abrogate responsibility, God is just trying to avoid taking the whole blame for making humans?

~ And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Again with the creeping things. And back into the singular personal pronoun. God is supposed to have created an entire universe and He’s still shit at grammar? It’s obviously a manifestation of ‘omnipotence’ which excludes language skills.

Genesis 1 ends at this point, with the newly-made sun setting on Day 6 (which is really Day 3 if you’re talking about days actually being determined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun) and we take up Genesis 2 with:

Day 7:

~ And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

God is so knackered from all that creatin’ that he’s done that he has to put his feet up. But people – HE’S OMNIPOTENT! Why the fuck does He need to REST? Does it occur to anyone else that this is pure unadulterated baloney?

Seriously, you can’t have it both ways – God is either omnipotent and can do anything he likes with no restriction, or HE’S NOT. You can’t be Almighty God and be ‘kind of’ omnipotent. Do Christian people who believe in the Bible never think about these things? ((God demonstrates his lack of omnipotence numerous times in the Old Testament. For instance, a few paragraphs from where we are in Genesis 2, after Adam and Eve have eaten of the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, realised that they are naked, and so hidden themselves from God, He walks through the Garden of Eden calling out ‘Where art thou?’ Well, of course he already knows this, obviously, so it’s quite plain that he’s just being a bastard.))

Anyway, Week 2 continues on much as Week 1, with God creating man again (it’s there in writing, I’m not making it up) and straightaway telling him: ‘I’ve made all this stuff, but you can’t play with it unless I say so!’ – quickly assuming a petulant and vindictive tone that doesn’t let up for most of the Old Testament. Oh, He also creates woman too, pretty much as an afterthought, and not until after Adam has named every living creature on the planet (and after He has created them for the second time too):

~ And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

I imagine it to have gone something like this:

God: Hey look at this Adam. Whaddya think?

Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘rabbit’!

God: Righty-ho! So it shall be! What about this?

Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘spotted toad’.

God: Brilliant! I would NEVER have thought of that! What about this? I think this is quite good, if I do say so myself. And I do, often.

Adam: I think that should be called a ‘procompsognathus’.

God: Hahaha! Awesome. that should keep the Creationists on their toes! What about this?

Adam: Oh, I dunno. Er, a ‘wallaby’? No, how about a ‘squid’? Look, how long is this going to take? I’m kind of tired. I’m not omnipotent like some people.

God: Chin up, Skipper, we’re just getting started! Look at this! It’s really quite well crafted – I think you should call it a ‘sea cucumber’. But it’s up to you of course! Don’t let me sway you!

Adam: You really need a girlfriend. Come to think of it, so do I.

I don’t think I need to point out to you, faithful Acowlytes, that, as we’re in Week 2 with God still creating stuff, it kind of makes nonsense of the claim that He did it all in seven days. He quite explicitly did not. But for the moment I will leave God and Adam naming the siphonophores and the echinoderms, as we ponder what God has been doing ever since those first couple of enthusiastic weeks.

Mostly making a nuisance of Himself, is my opinion.

Day 3 (cont):

~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

~ And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good

In other words, God made all the plants. And felt mighty pleased with himself. Then he remembered that maybe the plants would all DIE if they had no sunlight (at least they had plenty of water), so when he went home that night he obviously scribbled up a few ideas for the next day’s chores.

Day 4:

~ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

~ And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

OK, so I just want to go over that. In the first verse it says God made some lights in the firmament, and then in the next one he made the sun and the moon and the stars. What the fuck is the person who wrote this smoking? If he made lights in the firmament, what were they if they weren’t the stars? And didn’t he already make light anyway? Where the hell was that coming from if it wasn’t from the sun or the moon or the stars? ((Out of his ass is the obvious answer. OK, I guess if anyone can claim that the sun shines out of his ass, it’s God, come to think of it))

If these verses tell us anything, it is that God is very fucking badly organized. Why the crap didn’t he do the sun & the stars and so forth before he did the Earth? It’s like he was doing this for the first time or something. Oh, right.

Anyway, God set the sun & stars in place…

…to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Here he is acting smug again, even though he’s royally screwed up Day 4. Can it possibly get any worse?

Day 5:

~ And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

~ And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

On the Fifth Day we find God creating winged fowl and whales. The most astute of you will have already noticed that God’s To Do List for Day 5 specifically describes ‘Birds and Fish’ and so again he has fucked up from the get-go by creating whales, which as anyone knows are mammals and not fish. As for the fowl, he has given them free reign to flap around the firmament, which, as we learned from the last installment he designated as Heaven. Yes, that’s right – Heaven is full of chickens.

Stay tuned to Tetherd Cow Ahead for Episode 3 of ‘What God Did’, where we find out what God got up to on Day 6, and examine in depth his obsession with ‘creeping things’.

As Reverend of the Church of the Tetherd Cow, one of my many duties is to ponder the Big Questions of Life so that I may duly pass my received wisdom onto you, my flock of faithful Acowlytes. Recently, I found my mind wandering onto one of the biggest puzzles of them all – that of the Creation of the Universe. Specifically, the kind of Creation as taught primarily (but by no means exclusively) by those who advocate the Christian view of things.

In case your Sunday School lessons have receded a bit too far into the foggy haze of memory, here’s a quick refresher on how the Almighty got things under way:

In the beginning there was nothing at all. Except, self-evidently, for God Himself. ((There may also have been a lot of water – see later)) This must have been deadly dull for dear old God. Imagine the most boring day you’ve ever had and then multiply that by ten gazillion. There wasn’t even so much as a crossword to fill in or some paint to watch dry. There was just a whole big heap of nothingness. Just God sitting in a chair, on his ass, wondering what to do with himself. No, wait, there wasn’t even a chair.

So God decided to bring the universe and everything we know into existence. ((Why He did this all of a sudden is anybody’s guess.)) The conventional wisdom has it that he did this over seven days. Well, technically six, but more of that in a bit. This was the To Do list:

Day 1: Light.
Day 2: Separation of the Waters.
Day 3: The Earth
Day 4: The Sky.
Day 5: Birds and Fish.
Day 6: The Animals including Humans.
Day 7: Rest.

Day 7 wouldn’t count as a working day in any job I’ve ever had, so we can only assume God filled in His timesheet something like this:

But really, if you start to scrutinize God’s first week of work, some interesting questions arise…

Day 1: How long, exactly, does it take to create Light? It’s not like you can carve it out of something, or cobble it out of stuff to hand – there isn’t anything. So you’ve got to conjure it up from scratch. To you and me this sounds rather daunting but it is of course no real problem for God, since He is omnipotent. This means he could easily whip up a whole batch of light in a good 8 hour day. But waiddaminute… if he’s omnipotent, why spend a whole day on it? He could do it in half an hour. A minute. A second even. Just what was God doing all that first day? Is it possible he rocked up to work, zapped light into existence, grabbed a cup of hot java ((OK, I guess he couldn’t have done that – he hadn’t created coffee beans yet)) and then sat on his fat ass all day? Are you with me here? Alright. Then, the very next thing that happened was: ((All biblical references are from the King James Bible, ‘cos I’m an old fashioned kinda Reverend and I don’t hold with these modern ‘interpretations’ of the Holy Bible where some joker has gone ‘I know God said that, but this is what he really meant’.))

~And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Whoa! Wait just one damn minute there Big fella! Everyone knows that night and day are the result of the earth’s rotation ((Anyone going to argue with me over that? No? I thought not.)), and the Earth doesn’t get created until Day 3, according to the List. What the crap is going on here pal? You’ve got days, but you ain’t got rotation! Or even a planet. How the heck does that work?

Day 2: To me, creating Light sounds pretty damn tricky, but that’s a snack compared to what God did next:

~ And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

~ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

OK, now did you get that? It seems there was a lot of water (I don’t exactly know where that came from, because there is no mention of it actually being created, as such. The water was just there.) and God divided it into two portions, separated by a firmament – a sort of watery firmament sandwich. God then called the firmament Heaven. Just so you’ve got a visual picture here, there’s Heaven, with a whole lot of water above it, sitting in a whole lot of water. I trust that God made sure Heaven has good caulking.

Day 3:

~ God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

From here on in, there is no mention at all of the waters that float somewhere above Heaven. Like it doesn’t matter. What bothers me is if this supra-water was not important, then why bring it up it in the first place… What has it got to do with ANYTHING? And, as far as I know, we never again hear about this extra water in the whole course of the Bible! ((Although I guess God had to get the water for the Great Flood from somewhere…))

Well, I’ll leave you to ponder that until the next installment, when we will learn some more about the Creation of the Earth and then about the Sky, including the Sun and the Moon (Yes, yes – I know we have days already without the Sun being in place… if you think that’s daffy, wait till you see God make all the trees and plants and then the Sun. Talk about workflow inefficency.)