He clapped his hands. “Indeed! Indeed! Okay. So. To begin, I’d like to focus on the stupidity of your personal religion, Judaism. We may contest a generic prime-mover argument if it becomes necessary, but those metaphysical questions can get slippery. If we can establish your particular bag of myths to be demonstrably false, that should do it. Yes?”

“I suppose.”

“Very good then. I present two arguments. The first is errors in the Bible. Jews claim the Bible was written by God Himself. Therefore, hence, if even a single statement in your Bible is provably false, much less several, it cannot have been written by God and thus, falling from this central domino, all the rest of the claims of the Jewish religion, and Christianity by the way for a bonus, can be dropped in the trash bin with the banana peels. The second is an ethical argument. If the Bible is inarguably unethical, if, let’s say, it represents a Bronze Age moral compass, that too, would conclusively establish it was not written by an eternal, infallible, benevolent deity.”

The armchair I sat in, the large black headphones engulfing my ears, the microphone inches from my mouth, the studio room, the watchful eyes of Jesse the producer, Sofi the technician, and Lily the barista, the invisible, unimaginable force of a hundred thousand listeners were knives brandished upon my soul. It was all a blackness pressing in on me that I was unprepared for. Lord, grant me the wisdom to defend you, I prayed silently, and myself.

“Okay.”

“The very first thing the Bible says is the world was created in six days six thousand years ago. These are both unequivocally not true. The end. We can really stop here.”

Deep breath. “There are a lot of answers to this question,” I said. “I’m sure you know some of them. The days were not literal days but rather epochs. A physicist in Israel has an interesting theory based on a relativistic measure of time from the center. Also, the Bible is not a history book. Or a science book.”

“How convenient. The book is the literal word of God right up until it’s wrong, and then it’s poetry.” He smiled without warmth.

“Yes, but it’s worth noting the differences between the Bible’s genesis account and the other creation legends of ancient mythologies. All the other ones. The Sumerian version, Babylonian, Hindu, all of them are about different gods representing different natural forces. A sun god, a lightning god, a sea god, and so on. These gods are clearly inventions people made up to contend with overwhelming forces they didn’t understand. Genesis, on the other hand, is about a single, eternal, all-powerful prime mover bringing the universe and the earth into existence in an orderly, gradual process of increasing variation and complexity. That’s a sequence that is broadly congruent with evolutionary science. No demons and spirits and the rest of primitive myth.”

“That’s very nice, but the Bible still gives the whole thing six days. Seven if you count the nap at the end.”

“The Bible never actually says God created the world in six days. Like I said, there are ways to make a literal six-day creation work. But if you read the words carefully, that is not what they say. You don’t read the Bible in its original language. The King James Version or the NIV, all the Bibles you’ve read are English translations of Latin translations of Greek translations. That’s a real game of telephone. Which is a problem for everything you think you know about the Bible. We decipher the Bible by reading it very closely, very carefully, for which you need original text. It makes sense. That’s how you read poetry, right?”

“I don’t think we should base society on Shakespeare either.”

“Okay. But let’s at least give the Bible the same respect we give Shakespeare. If the Bible’s authorship was divinely inspired, every letter, every tense change, every implication and inference is significant. I’m not just saying this to deal with your question. Open any Jewish exegete on the Bible, the Talmud, Rashi the authoritative scholar, every single textual nuance is examined and deconstructed.”

“Aha. So, it doesn’t mean what it says, it means whatever you say it means now that Darwin actually figured it out.”

“The Bible says vegetation was created on the third day and the sun on the fourth day. That’s a problem since we know plants can’t grow without sun, right? But Rashi, in the eleventh century, seven hundred years before the discovery of photosynthesis, states the sun was actually created on the first day because of the conjunctive verb es in Genesis 1:1. ‘In the beginning, God created es the heavens.’ Es is an inclusive implying all the heavens, meaning stars, planets, the sun, were created on the first day. He makes this assertion only based on grammar. The King James Bible doesn’t have es because there is no English word for it. You don’t even know it’s there, much less what it might mean or indicate.”

“What does that have to do with claiming a fourteen-billion-year process happened in a week?”

“The verses in Genesis 1 say it was evening, it was morning, the second day, the third day, the fourth day. The most literal translation of the tense used is, “It was evening, it was morning, it was the second of.” And that would of course be—the second day of creation. If God is creating the world in six days, the second day of creation does not need to be the same thing as the second day of the baseball season. That is just a close read. Crazy, I know. Contrast that with Numbers 7 when the princes bring their sacrifices in the new tabernacle on successive days. The verses go like this: on the first day . . . on the second day . . . on the third day. It’s straightforward and precise—on the first day this happened, on the second day that happened. That is distinctly not the verbiage in Genesis 1. Also, on the first day when God created light and dark the word used is not first but rather one. As in, the events of the first day took one actual day. A different numerical tense is used for the other days, implying, perhaps, the events of the other days did not take one day. I don’t mind admitting I would be more comfortable if the Bible had said something a little more clearly indicating the passage of vast amounts of time, but the tense is odd and not used anywhere else in the Bible when listing chronologies.”

“Michael my dear, perhaps I have given you too much credit. It was evening, it was morning, the second day doesn’t mean the events described in the verse happened in a single day? If your author meant geological ages, he had the words for it. He spends three chapters on who begat whom, but the small matter of the two-hundred-million-year reign of the dinosaurs slips an omniscient narrator’s mind? You’re not reading the text anymore. You’re performing life support on it.”

“I’m glad you bring that up. The Bible actually mentions dinosaurs explicitly, another vagary of translation that eluded King James. Maybe even an explicit preemptive nod to the Darwinists. On day five, God created the ‘taninim gedolim.’ This is one whole creation day before the creation of the animal kingdom we all know and love on day six. English Bibles translate that as ‘great whales.’ Actually, it means ‘giant reptiles.’ So the Genesis account states that an age before the creation of our familiar animal kingdom, there were giant reptiles. Interesting there, that little guess, no?”

“Okay. Even if the first chapter of Genesis occurred over billions of years and you crowbar that into your text, humanity simply did not spread out from a single parent couple in a single location in the Near East six thousand years ago. There was an advanced civilization in China ten thousand years ago. And in South America. Homo sapiens have existed for a hundred thousand years, and maybe significantly longer than that. This is recent in archeological terms. The timescale is corroborated and cross-verified by multiple dating methods. Are you going to tell me the generations listed in Genesis with the years of the lives of the people listed are also not literal?”

“No, it’s literal. But there is a verse in the story of Cain and Abel where, after God curses Cain to wander the earth, Cain worries to God, ‘All who find me will kill me.’ Who ‘all’? Abel was dead. It was just Cain and Adam and Eve. He was afraid his parents were going to kill him? Like I said before, the way we read the Bible is very, very carefully. I’m not inventing this rule for the sake of answering your questions. That’s how we read it for everything. ‘All who find me’ means there were other people there. Could it be the Homo sapiens who had been around, like you say, for a hundred thousand years? Perhaps when Adam sinned and was cast out of the Garden, a higher order of intelligence, maybe even the knowledge of good and evil gained from the tree, entered into the human race at that time. Maybe self-consciousness? Free will? It just so happens writing is about six thousand years old. Another interesting coincidence for you.”

“The whole Earth was not drowned and restocked from a boat off a mountain in Turkey five thousand years ago. The fossil record is quite clear on this.”

“If Adam and his children were the beginning of a more advanced civilization, the Middle East would have been the center of that society and perhaps the only place that had become ‘evil in the eyes of the Lord.’ The destruction of The Flood could have been limited to that area and all the verses work. In fact, there is substantial geological evidence of an apocalyptic flood around that area around that time. And then the animals would have been just the local species.”

“Every time the text trips, you catch it. It never once hits the floor. A book that can absorb any fact is not a strong book, it’s an empty book. It’s a kadigan. Your Bible is not surviving scrutiny, it’s being engineered to be immune to it.”

“First of all, I’m not engineering anything. This is the way it works: Torah, Mishnah, Talmud, Geonim, Rishonim, Achronim. I can’t argue with anything any rabbi said a hundred years ago, much less a thousand or two thousand years ago. I can’t make things up. Jewish bible exegesis works through rigid precedential authority. Second, God wrote one book for all people for all time. It can’t be something an Iron Age scholar couldn’t make sense of. And again, science is not the point of the book, nor is proving its authenticity through prescience. Yes, if God would have just thrown in the verse, ‘Brady’s going to win seven’ we’d all have no doubts. What you’re really saying is the fact He didn’t do that is proof the other way. I disagree.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s full of overt errors. How about the numbers in Exodus? Six hundred thousand males over twenty. You can’t poetry that away. With women, children, and the elderly what is that? A million and a half? Two million? Two million people can’t arrive somewhere all at once three and half thousand years ago without leaving a trace in the archaeological record. A population shift like that would cause a massive change in local agriculture, construction, infrastructure, everything. And the Bible says the people of the land were more numerous than the Jews. The demography points to fifty, maybe a hundred thousand people living in Canaan at that time. And that’s a high estimate. The Israelites should’ve overrun the local inhabitants in a day. With ease. Or else the Bible is claiming three million people were already living in ancient Israel at that time? Archeologically, that is completely impossible.”

“Those numbers trouble me.”

The professor pantomimed falling off his chair.

“A ray of honesty, at last!”

I rolled my head slowly from side to side. “Du shtarbt nisht fun a kasheh.”

“Don’t tell me. Du, that’s you. Shtarbt. . . die? Is that die?”

“That is die.”

“Nisht is no, fun is from. So, ‘You don’t die from’. . . kasheh? I don’t get that one.”

“That’s Aramaic. It means question. ‘You don’t die from a question.’ If the picture fits, if there are good reasons to make a certain conclusion, you can go with it. We don’t get to understand everything.”

“Maybe you don’t die, but you do lose the argument.”

“I guess we’ll let your audience decide when we’re done. But to me it’s not a game ender. For instance, those census numbers are rounded. Why wouldn’t God give exact numbers? Or if it was made up by a scribe or a priest, why wouldn’t they make up an exact number? It’s not more difficult to invent the number 46,287 as opposed to 46,000. In the middle of the massive undertaking of making up a religion and this extraordinarily complex, sophisticated book, they just got very lazy for one minute? Maybe the numbers mean something else. One explanation I’ve heard is the word elef, thousands, can mean legions or groups, perhaps groups of ten? The word is actually used that way in places in the Prophets. I don’t like it, but it’s not enough to make me throw the whole thing in the garbage. I can accept I can’t understand everything, and there is an explanation out there even if I don’t know it. And mind you, there’s no direct contradiction with the Bible and archeology, even on this. Scholars don’t know for sure how many people lived in Egypt back then, or in Israel, to say with authority the numbers are impossible. They make educated guesses. They say archaeology is like reconstructing a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with two pieces. I can live with this one unanswered question.”

“It’s more like twenty unanswered questions with partial answers to the other hundred that suck. You’re bending words, you’re rejecting the simple meaning of the text. The Bible could say ‘pigs live on the moon,’ and you would say it doesn’t mean pigs and it doesn’t mean moon, it means you should wash your hands after using the loo in obtuse metaphor and it’s a recommendation for personal hygiene. It’s ridiculous.”

“‘An eye for an eye’ doesn’t mean an eye for an eye. Would you say that’s also word bending? How about, ‘Don’t cook a goat in its mother’s milk?’ The Bible makes that strange declaration three times, from which we derive the prohibition on cheeseburgers amongst other things. Is that also reinterpretation? The Bible undeniably does not mean the literal definition of verses in many places. We have a two-thousand-year-old tradition for what these things mean. It’s not a new thing. It’s not for the sake of the question you came up with yesterday.”

“I would say I’m winning at this point.” He grinned at me evilly.

“But we’re not done yet.”

“No, we’re just getting started. Let’s see . . . how about if we switch to ethics. That’s easier. No murky textual ambiguity for you to hide behind.”

“That is easier. Wait. Let me guess. Slavery, right? That’s your first question.”

“Michael, you clever boy. How’d you guess? Yes. Please explain to me how a perfect God in His perfect book is okay with slavery.”

“First of all, if you kidnap someone and sell them into slavery, the kidnapper, the buyer, and the seller all get the death penalty. So, there are no slave ships pulling up on the shores of Africa and harvesting the locals. That is a capital offense. The only slavery the Torah talks about is when someone goes into the arrangement willingly.”

“I’m not quite the Bible expert you are Mike, but I believe the rule you quoted is just about Jewish slaves. Your morally unassailable book, as I’m sure you well know, has different rules for Jewish and non-Jewish slaves. So, Africans, being largely not Jewish, would not be included in this little bit of semi-decency.”

“The whole Bible is pretty much just about Jews. All the laws of marriage, commerce, charity, everything. It was a book given by God to the Jews for the Jews. Which everyone agrees with by the way. The Bible is not a law book for the rest of the world beyond the Noah laws. But if you want to know where the Bible’s moral compass is pointed, you can see it clearly from the penalty I quoted. And even when servitude was allowed, it was indentured service, not slavery. The Hebrew word used in the bible is eved, which literally means worker. It was a lifetime service contract. One person didn’t own another person in this evil, dehumanizing way we associate with slavery. You couldn’t harm servants. You could only give them fair work with fair hours. You had to provide for them with dignity. It was a contract people entered into voluntarily that made sense in those economic conditions. Anecdotally, there is no statute in the Bible for the runaway slaves of Jews. It does have a rule about runaway slaves from surrounding countries. The rule is that you have to take them in and protect them. What sense do you make of that one? The Bible’s servitude was ethical and voluntary as opposed to the thing you’re thinking about, which is what everyone else was doing back then.”

“You couldn’t hurt your slave? I think what the Bible says is that if you hit your slave and he died in less than three days you were guilty, but if he lived longer than that all bets are off. It’s very humanitarian. I’m sure if someone swung a bat at your head and you held on in a coma for three days before you died and thereby your killer was let off the hook, your family would be satisfied justice had been served.”

“The three-day rule is only to exempt the owner of the servant’s contract from the death penalty, from first-degree murder.”

“That makes it better? But if he strikes his Jewish slave, by the way, no three day rule. Only his non-Jewish slave.”

“In Biblical law there is no penal system. We in our moral enlightenment incarcerate five percent of the national population. They had fines, lashes, and capital punishment. That’s it. You did something wrong, you went to court, they settled the matter, the end. The reason you didn’t get the death penalty if your slave survived for three days is because that was considered evidence you didn’t intend to kill him—it established motive. Only first-degree murder carries the death penalty. Involuntary manslaughter didn’t carry the death penalty. It doesn’t in American law either by the way. The reason the logic didn’t apply to Jewish slaves is because they didn’t have a lifetime service contract, so it wouldn’t have been compelling logic. And it wasn’t okay to hit your servant. If you hit him, he goes free. Not just if you take out his eye. The verse says ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ An eye and a tooth are pretty extremely different levels of wounds. If you wound your servant in any way, he goes free. Think about it. The value of an indentured servant, a lifetime service contract for a person and any potential offspring, what do you think that’s worth? Five hundred thousand dollars in today’s money? More? The servant sells his labor to someone. He gets half a million dollars, which he gives to his poor mother. Then he antagonizes his new boss, gets decked, and he’s a free man and he keeps the money. I’d take that deal. I’d take a slug to the jaw for five hundred grand. I would hardly call that ‘the Bible lets you hit your slave as long as he doesn’t die in three days.’”

“Stop. Stop. The institution of slavery is evil. Period. Do you want to be someone’s slave? Do you? Even with all this humanitarian eye for an eye crap. Are you shitting me?”

“Why? We have this twisted ethic of equity. Not only does everyone have to be equal in their human rights, everyone has to have the same stuff. I think it’s a moral perversion. No one is content with what they have or where they are and it’s created a culture of greed and misery. We only see what we don’t have or didn’t get, what someone else has. The Bible is okay with people having different stations in life. Some people are landowners, some are landworkers. Upward mobility is a great development. I’m happy our society doesn’t need to have servants anymore. But the underlying ethical principle is only that it’s okay for different people in a society to have different roles. I’m really okay with that.”

Sofi came in and handed the professor a cup of coffee. He took a sip and I took a long swallow of mine.

“This is really good, by the way,” I said to her, raising my mug in her direction. She smiled at me and I looked back and forth from her to the professor meaningfully and he gave me a dark scowl.

“I think part of the difference,” I continued, “Is that in the Bible’s opinion, life has transcendent meaning. If you’re here or there, or have this or that, it’s not that important. Everyone had safety and dignity, love and family. In our society, where nothing has any meaning, where we’ve all gotten smarter than God, the only thing we have is materialism and self-gratification. For us, the fact that a ‘slave’ did not have the ability of boundless self-actualization and the potential gluttony of wealth accrual is the greatest transgression of human rights. Because that’s the only thing that matters in our narcissistic, morally bankrupt, dystopian world. If what counts in life is not wealth or status, or even being your truest self, but spiritual growth and helping others, and everything else is a long second place, what station you have in life becomes significantly less important. It’s emancipating. The custodian, if he lives well, has as much achievement in life as the billionaire tech genius, and everyone sees it that way. In our world, we cannot escape from feeling low-wage earners are inferior since they have less stuff because materialism is our Bible. That is not a better system.”

“The captive woman.”

“I figured that would be next.”

“If you’re gay, the Bible’s fine saying you cannot have satisfaction for your entire life, but if you go to war and you see something you like, knock yourself out. I think we can agree this is barbaric. I’m not conceding slavery, I just want to get it all out there. Raping captive women cannot possibly be the law of a just God.”

“Again, those were different times. A nation went to war with another nation, it was usually a war to the death for either side. When one side won, they took spoils. They took everything of value the other nation had, including their possessions and their land. And yes, they took their women. And their children. The Jews had to treat the people captured in war according to all the rules of conduct in the other parts of the Bible. That’s why you had to marry the captive woman if you wanted to sleep with her. What other thing should God tell them to do?”

“What if the captive woman didn’t want to marry you? The moral reasoning is that it’s okay to rape her as long as you force her to marry you first?”

“First of all, you didn’t just have to marry her. You had to shave her head and wait thirty days.”

“Oh, that’s not dehumanizing at all.”

“It was to quench your ardor. It was understood, I think we can understand, that the madness of war is overwhelming. Look at the history of scandals in the US Army. And I’m sure we don’t know a tenth of what really goes on. Taking a weapon of death and training with it and getting strong and going out to the battlefield and killing and being killed is very bad for your mental health. I don’t know that God should’ve told the Jews, ‘When you go to war, if you win, just let the other guy’s stuff alone. His wife, his kids, his possessions are to remain unmolested. Just win the war if you can, and then head home and call it a day.’ That’s just not how human beings work. However, in the Torah, unlike all the other cultures back then, or ever, if you took a woman in war and you wanted to be with her in that way, you had to marry her. You couldn’t use her and throw her away. And it doesn’t say anywhere that you could force her to do anything. The Bible doesn’t discuss the contingency of her resistance. If she didn’t want to marry you, you probably had to figure out something else to do with her.”

“Killing the rebellious child.”

“It never happened.”

He snorted. “The Bible says it just for the hell of it? That’s a novel apologetic.”

“It can never happen. The conditions can never be met for the sentence to apply. The Talmud says it’s allegory.”

“What the hell can you learn from killing children for being disobedient? Even theoretically.”

“Theoretically? Sure. The verses say: If a child is rebellious, antisocial, belligerent, his parents must bring him to his death sentence. That is the explicit instruction. I think the simple interpretation of the instruction is that, as a parent, if you don’t raise your children well, it is like you are killing them. That sounds usefully homiletic to me.”

“Infanticide.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The wars against the Midianites and the Amalekites and the Canaanites and the Jerichites. Kill the men, women, and children, except sometimes the slaves you want to abuse. Sometimes even kill the animals. You remember those parts, I’m sure.”

“What’s the question?”

“I’m sorry?” he mimicked me.

“Is the question why did God do it, or is this supposed to be a proof that God is bad, the Bible is bad, or the Jews are bad?”

“All of those?”

“It was, just factually speaking, an anomaly in Jewish history.”

“The residents of Gaza might disagree.”

“Everything the Gazans do is factoring in an absolute faith in the Jewish reverence for human life and that the Israelis are going to pull their punches. If they tried this crap on anyone else, they would all be dead overnight and everyone would be fine with it.”

“Yay. The Jews are the best.” He clapped his hands with scorn.

“That’s not the point. The point is we are the posterity of that book. And yet, despite the war with the Amalekites, it would not be a stretch to say Jews, generally speaking, care about human life, shall we say, at the very least, not less so than other groups of people in the world. So, when you ask me a question about an ancient war, I say, whatever your question is, it is not about how the Bible regards the value of human life, e.g. the rest of the Bible, e.g. the Jews who follow the Bible.”

“And a good God commands his special nation to commit genocide because . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the Amalekites were just that bad.”

“To kill the women and the children???”

“Maybe. If, let’s just say for the sake of argument, the Amalekites, one and all, were committed to the complete destruction of the Jewish people. And they raised their children from birth to embrace and pursue and perpetuate this obsession. Let’s say it had been this way for generations to the point where genocidal Jew hatred practically became the ethos of the civilization. In a war, anyone you leave alive will inevitably continue the death cult. You can try to repatriate them, but chances are high anything less than total eradication will just mean more dead Jews down the road. According to the story, the Jews didn’t hate the Amalekites or want to destroy them for some extrinsic reason. They hated the Jews. They wanted to destroy the Jews. They chose a war to the death. I don’t think this scenario could exist today because our societies are so diffuse, but back in the day of impenetrable, homogeneous nation states, I can conceive of a reality where a generational war to the death can only end one way.”

“That’s good logic Michael. Maybe that’s even what the Nazis told themselves in 1939.”

“If the Jews would have spent the hundred years preceding the Holocaust preaching death to Germany in their synagogues and building underground militias and blowing up busses and restaurants and killing every single German they could get their hands on, the world would have had a lot less sympathy for the Jews in the aftermath. Probably none actually.”

“Isn’t that essentially what the Germans thought? That the Jews were trying to take over the world and destroy German society?”

“But they were wrong. And more than that, they were lying. They weren’t even lying. It was cartoonish propaganda.”

“That’s a pretty arbitrary line you’re drawing between good genocide and bad genocide,” he said.

“At some point you have to take responsibility for your soul and decide what is right and what is wrong in the world. It’s a decision you can’t deflect forever to the safety of political philosophy.”

“How about if we decide that genocide is inexcusably evil no matter what the justification.”

“Maybe that’s the right answer for our morally euthanized age. But theoretically, I think there can be virtue in rising to kill the person that is trying to kill you. I can definitely conceive of a moral framework where that course of action is more just than the one we have today, which seems to be take the side of the weaker party and don’t consider anything else.”

He drummed his fingernails on the table, and then he said, “The Ten Commandments.”

“Yes.”

“They are utter nonsense.”

I took out a cigarette, lit it, took a drag, tapped the ashes in Sofi’s ashtray. “Is there any way I could get another cup of coffee?” I waved at her through the glass and she gave me a thumbs up sign.

He said, “I’ll give you ‘Don’t kill’ and ‘Don’t steal.’ Those are good. But ‘Don’t covet’? ‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain’? ‘Keep the Sabbath’? These are the ten most important rules of the universe? How about don’t have slaves? Or don’t rape? Oh, those are okay actually. Right.”

Sofi came out with a mug of steaming coffee and smiled at me. It calmed me down. I fixed it with the milk and sugar, took a sip, and noticed the mug was a Proud Atheist mug with, next to the words “The Proud Atheist,” an upside down rainbow-colored penis with the balls hanging down from the top so it resembled a cross. I held the mug up, picture facing outward.

“Thank you for this mental image, Professor.”

“That’s for you to take home, Mike.”

“My mother will love it.”

“Explain to me why not worshipping idols is the second-most important rule in the universe.”

“That’s an easy one. I’m glad we’re starting with that. It’s very simple. Everybody serves something.”

“Like Dylan said.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Explain. What do you mean everyone serves something? I don’t serve anything.”

“And yet on your coffee mug you have a picture of a penis which is meant to look like a religious symbol. I’d say that’s serving something.”

“Touché Mike! That is very good! But I don’t serve the penis. Okay, maybe I do. You might have me on this one.” He laughed, but it sounded a little forced to me.

“Look around the world,” I said. “Nobody believes in nothing and is then free to go on their merry way enjoying themselves in a boundless, inconsequential, godless world. Atheism becomes the new religion. Socialism, nationalism. Now it’s progressivism. Or oppressionism. I don’t even know what you would call it.”

He waved his hand in the air to brush away the inconvenient point. “‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’ That is the third-most important rule in the universe?”

“Not taking the Lord’s name in vain is not some stupid hang-up where God gets bent out of shape if someone says goddamn when they hit their thumb with a hammer when they’re hanging a painting. You know a lot of the questions you’ve asked me are sort of contemptuous. I don’t mind. I’m not offended. I’m happy to answer these questions because they’re easy to answer. But, let me put it this way, are you familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”

“Yes.”

“One of the most important equations in quantum mechanics, right? Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?” I looked around and Sofi materialized with a pencil and notepad.

“Thanks.” I drew on the paper:

I turned it around to show the professor. “This is the formula for the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more you know one thing, the less you know the other, right? Have you ever seen anything more stupid? Triangle x and triangle p? Two slices of pizza, an x and a p are bigger than or equal to an h on top of a 4 and some kind of strange, crooked table. Great piece of math there. That’s an idiotic critique. But if you look at it like an ignorant, stupid child, that’s what you get. If your null hypothesis is there’s no God and your alternative hypothesis is that there is a God but he’s a petty, insecure, megalomaniacal nine year old, there isn’t that much to debate. The argument we’re having is whether or not the Bible was written by God. You can’t look at something the Bible says in a perfunctory, superficial way and then declare it’s stupid.”

“What other way is there to look at a commandment that says, ‘Thou shalt not take my name in vain?’ I’m treating God like a petulant child because He’s acting like one.”

“If you understand the instruction as being intended for His sake as opposed to ours. Not taking God’s name in vain is a guiding principle about the way we’re supposed to relate to God. We’re not supposed to treat Him like one of the guys. You can’t even say His name in vain. This is not for the atheist. That was the first two commandments. This is for those who believe absolutely in God’s existence. Recognizing that God is God guides how we relate to Him, and therefore how we interact with Him. It’s not a commandment for its own sake in the sense of making this or that thoughtless word into a big deal, it’s a commandment that instructs us to relate to God in a reverential way. It contextualizes our whole relationship with Him, with religious spirituality, with our observance of the Bible. It’s not frivolous at all, and it’s certainly not for God’s sake. There is no coherent theology where the God who created time and space has a personal stake in the careless words of a single human being.”

“I guess I can give you ‘Honor your parents.’ That one’s okay. ‘Keep the Sabbath’? How does that figure in here as even being minimally important to humanity.”

“Another cookie. Sabbath is a day of prayer, spending time with family, and Torah study, which is about spirituality and self-improvement. You’re meant to take a break from the chaos of life and remember what’s important. Taking off one day a week to reflect anchors the rest of your week, and therefore by extension your month, your year, your whole life. And because everyone does it, meaning all the families in the community, it also anchors society. It’s an incredible cultural phenomenon. Many Jews who grow up secular and discover their religious birthright later in life say Sabbath observance is the best part of it. It affects the biggest change in their lives.”

“Okay, that sounds nice, but what about all the stupid rules? Spending a day in meditation and reflection I can get on board with, but don’t work, don’t drive, don’t use money, don’t cook? It’s asinine.”

“I think I explained how Sabbath is pretty important already, but in terms of the minutiae, I’ll give you one small example. Because of all those little rules, we come out with a very different kind of Sabbath day versus the rest of the week. We don’t just stay home and have a big meal. It’s not Thanksgiving. The heartbeat of the day is different; it feels special, even sacred. From one of those picayune details, the rabbis extrapolated a restriction against using electronics on Shabbos. No electronics means no TV, no tablet, no laptop, no cell phone. All the orthodox Jews take their phones and turn them off and don’t touch them for one day a week no matter who’s playing Friday night or what important thing your boss needs to send you. That’s turning into a pretty big deal in terms of mental health and relationships.”

“Not using your cell phone one day a week is very sweet. The death penalty is where your Sabbath laws run into trouble for me. Let’s see, the next one, ‘Don’t kill.’ No objection there. First one on your list that actually makes sense. Adultery I’m not so sure about. I get that deceiving your partner is bad. The part I don’t understand is why there is so much in the Bible about this. Whole chapters. Lists of laws. Why does God care so much about what we do when we’re naked with another consenting adult?”

“Well, we care a pretty good deal about it too, wouldn’t you say? Pretty much every book, movie, song, story is about this subject. A majority of adult human attention maybe? Not less than a third for sure. I certainly think it’s enough of an issue for humanity for God to pay some attention to it.”

He brushed a hand through his hair and laid his palm on the table. Scratched his chin. He was getting agitated. “‘Don’t steal’ is fine,” he said a little peckishly. “‘Don’t bear false witness.’ If the testimony of witnesses was the basis of the legal system before the discovery of forensic evidence, I guess it’s important enough. ‘Don’t covet’? Come on. That one is stupid.”

“I hope you’re starting to realize by this point that your questions are all coming from the same basic place of treating the Bible like a children’s book and going from there, and you haven’t really thought any of these things through.”

He tried to laugh, but it came out like a grimace. I was glad he was taking it so well.

“Let’s hear Rabbi Fireworker. How is ‘Don’t covet’ the tenth-most important rule in the world?”

“Because when you and your neighbor’s wife have been watching each other with lust for five years, not much is going to stand in the way of the next phase in the relationship. If you think all the time about the things you don’t have, and you look with envy at the clothes and the cars richer people have, there are all kinds of unpleasant consequences. ‘Don’t kill,’ ‘Don’t steal,’ ‘Don’t adulterize,’ ‘Don’t bear false witness’—at the end of all these things, the Bible tells you ‘Don’t covet’ because that is how decent people come to commit all these sins. It is the linchpin of the other nine commandments. Like I said, it’s pretty basic when you think about it.”

I took a studied sip of my coffee.

“Okay,” I said. “You went through the commandments, you went through your science questions and your moral objections. How about it’s my turn now.”

“Your turn?”

“Yeah. You made a promise too.”

He laughed again, but I think it wasn’t my imagination that it sounded a little forced. “Okay rabbi, the floor is yours.”

“The first proof I would start with for the Jewish Bible is prophecy.”

“Oh whew. I was afraid you were going to say something smart. Every religion has prophecy claims, in case you didn’t know. Vague predictions sloppily superimposed on later events, a mode of prophecy favored both by Bibles and tarot-card readers. It’s never a prediction before the fact that’s useful and falsifiable, and then turns out to be true. Like, ‘Buy Microsoft in the eighties’ or ‘There’s going to be a very bad storm in Louisiana at the end of the summer of 2005, so build up the levees.’ It’s all ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ soothsaying. Is that a prophecy that computer nerds would one day replace brawny, axe-swinging alpha males as all-powerful in society? Maybe. I don’t know that I would call that prophecy. The Quran has tons of these.”

“I’m obviously not here to defend the prophecies of Islam and Christianity, but the suffering and the persecution God predicts for the Jews in Leviticus and Deuteronomy are chilling when you look back at Jewish history and all we’ve been through. The Tochacha, what we call the Rebuke, or you could maybe call the Warning, is by far the most significant prophecy in the Bible. It’s not obscure, and it takes up whole chapters. There are other prophecies in the Bible, but that’s the one with the most print space. They don’t come out and admit it, but that’s why guys like Wellhausen try to date the Bible as late as possible. If you put it after the Babylonian exile in 586 BC, you can explain at least some of those dire predictions as reporting on the past instead of knowledge of the future, although you’d still have to explain why they thought it would keep happening. But if the Bible was written before the first exile, you’ve got an incontrovertible, unambiguous, hugely relevant, and completely counterintuitive prophecy to deal with. The kind of prophecy that doesn’t just demonstrate foreknowledge but also control. That’s a big part of it. God’s not predicting something that would be logical to expect to happen naturally, that the Jews would be so singularly persecuted throughout history.”

“I’ve always been under the impression the final version of the Pentateuch came together through the various editors sometime in the first century BC. That would be long after the Assyrians and the Babylonians and various other unfriendly neighbors wreaked a good deal of havoc on the chosen people.”

“I don’t know where anyone could get the first century. The Septuagint, the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, is confirmed to the third century BC. It’s referenced in contemporaneous writings. That historiography is not up for any kind of debate.”

“Even the third century is still after hundreds of years of turmoil in the promised land. There was plenty of fodder for bleak prophecies for the Jews by that time.”

“Yeah, but the Septuagint was a translation. The original could not have been codified a half a century before. Here’s a new book from some obscure religion no one ever heard of. I know, says the king of the most powerful empire in the world, let’s get seventy scholars to translate it into Greek. That’s absurd. The Bible was a known, ancient, venerated document in the third century. And the Jews themselves had to have been significant enough, cohesive enough, that their Bible warranted attention. No version of this story works if the Bible is some kind of organic collection of old legends that coalesced at or around that time to a group of people that did not already have an established identity. How would we have no record, no historical memory, no mention, by anyone anywhere, of Bible redactors or of the formulation of the completed version? No, the Bible, the Five Books of Moses, in its current form, word for word what we have today, or at least very nearly so, the source document of the Septuagint, had to have existed for many hundreds of years before the third century.”

“So when would you date it?” he asked. “I know what the Bible claims for itself, that it was written by Moses in fifteen hundred BC, but that’s legend. Maybe you’re right Bible critics want to postdate it, but traditionalists want to predate it without any corroborative evidence.”

“In the sixth century, a quarter of the Jews were exiled to Babylon. We have this from Babylonian records. That was six hundred miles away from the rest of the Jews in Israel. That’s a long way in the ancient world. There are no phones, no cars, and no printing press. There’s no way the Bible could have come together then and just been accepted unanimously by everyone all at once in these different places so much they remained a cohesive group. With no record of it happening. Like I said, this is already the time of written histories. The Babylonians wrote a ton and we have their records. It could not have happened.”

“What, you’re trying to put the Bible’s authorship in the sixth century?”

“Not even that. Because again, if it came together five minutes earlier, it could not have proliferated. A Bible cannot be written and a religion subsequently created in the midst of war and chaos so successfully that the people form such a monolithic community around it. Without even a whisper of this national formulation being remembered or mentioned or recorded by anyone. They didn’t have bookstores and schools. Everybody wouldn’t know it and accept it, all the while they’re being killed and exiled. It’s not reasonable. The Bible, as we have it, the Five Books at least, could not have been codified less than a hundred years before this first great upheaval in Jewish history; we’re talking eighth century BC, maybe, maybe seventh, as the latest plausible time when the Five Books could have been canonized. At least a hundred years before the first exile. The prophecies of the trials and sufferings of the Jews should keep an honest atheist up at night.”

“This may come as quite a shock to you Mike, but every holy book predicts dire consequences for the infidels who don’t follow the scripture. If you obey, you get the kingdom of heaven. If you rebel you earn the wrath of God. That type of vague bullying is all over the Quran and the New Testament too. Follow, or else! That’s the playbook.”

“It’s not vague. Read the Bible. It literally describes the Holocaust. And there’s a very important difference between the Bible and the prophecies of reward and punishment in the Quran and New Testament. Those books predict reward and punishment almost exclusively in the afterlife. Which makes sense since what lunatic would promise future reward and punishment in the corporeal world when he’s trying to start a religion? The whole thing would last one generation. As soon as the prophecy doesn’t come true, that’s the end of the cult. Declaring the fruits of obedience and disobedience for the next world is much safer. Christians have their treasure in heaven and the Muslims have their virgins. Ours is the only book that promises reward and punishment right here. And it’s been terrifyingly accurate.”

“Predictions of suffering don’t impress me. Even very bad suffering. For a nation that was constantly suffering especially. Before the Babylonians there were the Assyrians and before them the Philistines and the Amorites and a host of others. Read Judges. It was happening before the eighth century too.”

“Okay, what about more specific predictions of calamity? The Bible tells the Jews they will remain few in number. In the first century CE there were two hundred million people in the entire world and four million Jews. These are extrabiblical numbers. Now there are eight billion people in the world and fifteen million Jews. We’ve multiplied by four and everyone else has multiplied by forty. That’s because we get culled every few generations. That’s not a vague, just kind of generally ominous prophecy. Even if that was written two thousand years ago instead of three thousand years ago it’s a hell of a call to make.”

“Small then, small now,” he said. “That could easily be an intuitive guess. The Zoroastrians stayed small too, somehow, without your God’s special arrangements.”

“‘God will scatter you from one end of the earth to the other,’ and amongst the nations ‘there will be no peace and no rest for the sole of your foot.’ You know that has never happened to anyone else in all of human history, right? No other people have been scattered across the world. It’s impossible because when nations are conquered, they become absorbed by their conquerors and disappear. And ‘no rest.’ The persecution of Jews has happened in every place, in every age, again and again throughout history and throughout the world. These things happened centuries after the latest possible dating of the Bible. The Torah says the land of Israel will remain desolate. God tells the Jews no one will have their land, and it will lay barren until their return. That’s insane. The Jews were thrown out of Israel two thousand years ago. In all those years, no one settled our land. Just nomads. Bedouins. There was never a sovereign polity or any kind of organized state in the land of Israel for two thousand years. How is that vague?”

“It’s a tiny piece of useless desert. No one wanted it. We have deserts in America too twenty times the landmass of Israel and no one wants to live there either.”

“They sure want it now.”

That one landed. I went on, “Jewish history itself is even more supernatural. You were talking about comparing religions, and for this I think the comparative religion perspective makes the Jewish story much more compelling. First, compare the history of Judaism to Hinduism. They started around the same time. We know the origins of Hinduism. We know there were different mythologies that were blended together; we know when the Vedas and the Puranas were written. We know Hindu god figures have cross-pollination with Germanic gods and Greek gods. There are multiple sects of Hinduism that reflect the sort of blended quality of the religion. How did Judaism get started? Why don’t we have a story from neighboring nations and the archeological record that indicates an evolution of the religion other than the singular narrative of the Old Testament? People say there is an absence of evidence for the biblical narrative, but there’s also a deafening silence of an alternative explanation.”

“There’s more than an absence of evidence. If we’re talking about archeological evidence to the Old Testament narrative, there’s quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.”

“There’s no evidence to the contrary. That is a lie. But that’s not my point. My point is that other revelation stories all consist of a claim of revelation to one person who then espoused doctrine, purportedly did some miracles, had disciples who spread the tale, and there’s your religion. But if you were not actually a prophet or a god and were going about creating a religion, claiming you had a revelation, and convincing a core group of followers, and then those followers going out into the world and spreading your gospel is how it would happen. The Jewish Bible, on the other hand, tells fifteen hundred years of national history.”

“It’s a collection of ancient legend.”

“Except no one else’s bible goes like that. They’re just the brief story of a revelation followed by doctrine. Joseph Smith found golden plates in upstate New York. Cut, paste. We know how the religions spread. Constantine forced the Roman Empire to adopt Christianity and Muhammed converted the Arabian Peninsula by the sword. Christians don’t think their ancestors heard Jesus speak or saw his miracles. They just have a story in a book, and they try and find historical evidence to corroborate that story; the empty tomb, whatever. The Muslims try to prove divinity from the Quran itself. You can make your own judgement of the strength of their evidence. But how can you explain the formulation of a people? What are we even? We’re not a religion. Jews who are secular and don’t keep the commandments are just as Jewish as Chassidim. It’s not an ethnicity. Ethiopian Jews are African, Middle Eastern Jews are Semitic, European Jews are Caucasian. We’re not a nationality. The Jews were just as Jewish before returning to Israel in the twentieth century. What are we?”

“Yes. What are you?”

“We’re the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob like the Bible says. We’re the smallest nation, but the biggest family. Except no other families from three thousand years ago are still around. Only us. We are the anvil of history, as Mark Twain said. You think a story made up out of old legends could have created us and held us together through all that?”

“I don’t know. The Jews were masticated by all these empires, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans. In all that destruction and fragmentation, a primeval myth could have taken root in a collective unconscious that was understandably desperate to believe God would save them one day. That scenario would also date the Bible much later than you want to.”

“That’s an unrealistic hypothesis.”

“I think Occam’s razor would favor that implausibility over the existence of an invisible super being.”

“That’s because you assume there should be an office of God somewhere on Main Street with the angel Gabriel working behind the counter, and if we need any miraculous healing or relationship advice we can just go there. It’s illogical to us that God would make Himself so seemingly inaccessible and undetectable. ‘Divine hiddenness.’ I’m sure you feel this way about science in the Bible too. If God was God, why did He begin the Bible with a story about a snake and an apple and not the recipe for antibiotics. We imagine the stuff that matters was all discovered by us. The Bible is full of stories and fairy tales and if a real God who knew everything in the universe about physics and biology actually wrote a book for us, wouldn’t He write something a little more helpful? I think that logic is as much at the heart of the atheists’ rejection of the Bible as skepticism of truth claims.”

“Yes. Thank you for making this cogent point. If God wrote a Bible for us, why didn’t He write something that matters like science and math instead of a bunch of morally obtuse fairy tales about floods and mythical towers and fratricide?”

I said, “Because science and math really don’t matter that much. Ask a scientist what matters more, his relationship with his wife and kids, or his science. If he’s not a sociopath, he will say his family and that it’s not close. That’s what the Bible is about. Our moral lives are infinitely more important than science and technology. To us, forget about to God. It’s no great wonder that God is not impressed by science. He doesn’t need a quantum computer. He knows the law of relativity without our help. What He doesn’t know is whether you or I will choose to help an old lady get on the bus when we’re in a rush. That’s the only thing He doesn’t know. And that’s what matters the most to Him. And if we’re honest with ourselves, that’s what matters the most to us too.”

“It’s just too bad five million children dying under the age of five every year isn’t also what matters most to Him. Which subdivides to thirteen thousand eight hundred a day, or ten every minute or one every six seconds. Since we started this conversation, it’s been around an hour and a half, about nine hundred children under five have died around the world. How can there be a God? How do you escape from the simplest calculation that either He can’t help or He doesn’t want to? Either way, I don’t want to be on His team.”

“That is the great question,” I said. “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

“It’s really more why do bad things happen so damn much. To good people like you or wicked sodomites like me. Or innocent starving children of indiscriminate denomination. And a thousand years ago it was a thousand times worse. The amount of suffering and innocent death in the time before modern medicine and running water is the most damning evidence against the God hypothesis.”

“That’s not an argument. That’s atheism of the gaps. If I can’t understand human suffering, it’s proof there’s no God. If God created the heavens and the earth, and the fine-tuning of the cosmos, and the infinite complexity of the cell and the subatomic world of forces and particles, it’s entirely possible He knows something we don’t. You presume a right to know rather than, what makes a lot more sense, the inability of the creation to comprehend the Creator’s mind.”

“But we should understand that He’s good?” he said sarcastically. “So, some things about God we understand and some things we don’t. What’s your distribution system? Which things do we understand and which things do we acknowledge humbly are beyond our meager mortal comprehension? We know God wants us to keep the Sabbath, but for congenital heart disease we accept ignorance of God’s plan. Going with basic logic, if a creator created a world with endless unimaginable suffering from one end to the other, he’s not good.”

“But isn’t he? Is that really what logic concludes? If we look at the world without predisposition, we see endless beauty, endless wonder, endless order. We see many more children not dying under the age of five than dying. We see the inherent undeservingness and exquisiteness of the gift of life. Did you do something to deserve to be alive? No. Do you like that you’re alive, that you can experience all the perplexing, spectacular—sure, good and bad—experiences of life? Yes, you do. If we were just the result of a quantum fluctuation, life would not have the almost unbearable value it has.”

“Too many people in the world suffer too terribly for the joy of life to be a convincing argument. It all looks random. Terribly, cruelly random.”

“People who find meaning in their suffering don’t think so. Are you speaking for them?” I asked him.

“If I’m speaking just for the children who can’t speak for themselves, it’s enough.”

“Human suffering is the best argument on the no-God side, I admit that,” I said. “But, you know, it’s kind of weird that everything of value in our world, and in our personal lives too, comes from triumph over adversity. That’s kind of an interesting phenomenon. Break a dog’s leg, it doesn’t become a better dog, a more sensitive dog, a nicer dog. If you leave it alone it will just die. So, that’s a strange dynamic to find with something you designate as the worst thing in the world and the best proof there’s no God.”

He shook his head. “Are you done? Any other proofs?”

“Yes. Good and evil. For every human being who ever lived, man, woman, rich, poor, smart, dumb, you, me, the moral and ethical challenge is the most essential experience of life. That makes no sense at all in a natural-science model.”

“Evolution naturally selects for survival-positive behaviors,” he replied. “It makes lots of sense. Our race learned to be generous and honest because that is what enabled us to survive. At this point it’s baked into our DNA. No God is necessary for there to be a moral-adjacent dimension to the human condition.”

“Then why is it difficult?” I asked him. “If evolution taught us to be nice to each other and honest and humble for the purpose of the survival of our species, why is it a struggle? Why are good and evil the axes our lives, and the entire world really, revolve around? How exactly did evolution naturally select for that? And why don’t animals have some version of moral struggle? Why is there no species in between human and animal that has some intelligence and some choice? An entire world of randomly developed creatures, only one of which has advanced thinking and the struggle between good and evil? You don’t think that stretches the theory of randomness just a little? You don’t think that looks set up?”

“You propose believing in God comes down to evil itself? You know, you never fail to surprise me, Michael.”

“It comes down to stepping back and letting your eyes unfocus on any one specific detail and trying to perceive a larger picture. Can an intellectually honest person get out of the cosmological argument? Maybe. And the fine-tuning argument? With some creative thinking. And the complexity and diversity of organic life? Stretching now. But all of them? And the undeniable spiritual dimension of the human condition? Now we’re starting to see an image form.”

“That’s a nice argument, but in the end your claim comes down to believing we all go somewhere else after we die with special rules and requirements for entry and therefore we should all live our lives according to the rules of your book. And I just say—no. There is no evidence such a place exists. God says, ‘Here everyone, you have to believe in Me. You have to do what it says in My book, but I’m not going to give you the means to verify its authenticity. Or Mine.’ If anyone other than God did that, you’d say he was screwing with you. And let’s not forget, we also need to figure out of the ten thousand world religions, this one is the true one and their holy book is God’s real word and the books all the other guys are saying is God’s real word are just to trick us. If I die and wake up to find God standing in front of the pearly gates tapping his godly foot and asking me why I was a wicked sodomite, I’m going to tell him He ought to have done a better job letting me know there was a game on, much less letting me know there were rules to the game, much less those rules making any sense.”

“We all know in our hearts when we lie or steal, even if nobody knows, we release a little spiritual fart into the universe. And alternatively, when we do something kind or honest, even when nobody sees, maybe even more so when nobody sees, it’s a little burst of spiritual sunlight on the earth. We all know this. If believing there’s no additional reward and punishment after life for these choices makes you feel better, I’m sure God is okay with it.”

“Christianity and Islam both teach if you don’t believe in their doctrine, you go to hell for eternity. I’d say that sounds like God expecting us to pick the right flavor of religious ice cream.”

“Well, all good people go to heaven according to us. Any religion, no religion, whatever. God does not expect us to be dishonest with ourselves, or to pretend to believe something we don’t believe. The Talmud calls our era since the destruction of the Temple two thousand years ago a time of hester panim. That means God’s face is hidden from us. He knows some of us can’t see Him too good. He knows what we are and how we think, what world we live in.”

“That’s very considerate of Him and gracious of you to admit it. So I win. You concede the impossibility of knowledge of God.”

“I’m not saying for everybody. Some people are fortunate and they find God easily and naturally. Some people never think about it at all. I’m saying for you, Professor Matthew Harrison the atheist, God’s okay for you to go wherever your honest inquiry leads you. The whole oppositional way you approach the God question is a result of these proselytizing religions, Christianity and Islam, who made their hay by convincing people to follow them. It’s an understandable impression since Christians and Muslims make up ninety-nine percent of religious people in the Western world. Those religions only spread through conversion. That’s just historically how it happened. And since they had to convince people to follow them, they had to have carrots and sticks. They had to say, if you follow us you get paradise and if you don’t you go to hell. How else do you convince someone to do something other than with promises of reward and punishment? The astute reader will note there is not one whiff of heaven and hell in the Five Books of Moses. Now, if you want to read the Bible, if for whatever reason you decide you’re curious about this supposed holy book, go ahead and read it. Read the Vedas and the New Testament and the Quran too. Make your own judgement. Go wherever your honest inquiry takes you. God doesn’t expect you to believe something you think is untrue.”

“Well, you’ll be relieved to know I have read all those books and they’re all a bunch of mixed-up, made-up bullshit. I have these conversations, I do the podcast, because I worry about the murderous zealotry that has haunted my community for nearly as long as it has hunted yours. And besides for the special-interest groups, there’s just the general rivers of blood religions have spilled in the brief history of modern civilization. And I can’t help but worry, based on the way we’re going, if the inevitable epilogue of all these fanatical fairy tales is mutual annihilation and the end of humanity altogether, an outcome that would unfortunately kill the gays along with all the crazy servants of loving God. That’s why I talk about it. In the vain hope I’ll get through to somebody and something will change, that people will stop believing in the superstitious doctrines that tell them they are mortally opposed to everyone who believes in a made-up nonsense that’s different than their made-up nonsense.”

“Good. Fine,” I said. “God gets this. I think He thinks you can figure it out if you want to, but he’s okay if you just do good and don’t hurt people and leave the rest to Him. The Bible, in the Ten Commandments, doesn’t say ‘Thou shalt’ for that all-important first rule. The verse just says, ‘I am God.’ That’s because of the obvious point you’ve made. If you don’t believe in God, who is there to say, ‘You must believe?’ For the Jews, we experienced God’s direct revelation, so that lesser devotion doesn’t work for us. That’s why it specifies the commandment, ‘I am God who took you out of Egypt.’”

“And the rest of us can bugger each other to our hearts’ content? You just might be convincing me after all.”

“Most people in the world report the sense of some spiritual something tickling the back of their souls. It follows if there is a God who created the world, he likely had a reason, and if he had a reason he may have sent some instructions about it. You can explore the various extant traditions if you’re curious. If you’re sincere in your inquiry, you’ll probably come out with something that works, probably something that’s at least extrapolated from the Mosaic tradition if not the book itself.”

He shrugged and said, “Alternatively, you can buy a telescope at Walmart for fifty bucks and realize this one tiny little unexceptional planet in the ass back end of the universe is objectively insignificant. We’re a speck of dust in a speck of time. Believing we’re God’s whole point requires the kind of childish ignorance one would expect from a Bronze Age thinker.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what religion tells us. Not only is our world the center of the universe, but each of us individually is the center of the world. The Talmud says, ‘Every person should say to himself—the entire world was created just for me.’ Not in a stupid way. Not in an ignorant or arrogant way. The Torah says what you, Matt Harrison, do, is the most important thing in the world. Not just to you and not just to God, but to the universe. It’s a pretty Cartesian kind of perspective. But you know, why shouldn’t it be? God doesn’t have a problem paying complete attention to a trillion things at once. Or creating a world where each self-conscious being has cosmic significance.”

“Unless I died when I was three,” he said. “Then it’s hard to understand how my life would have mattered to the universe.”

“But it would. Our lives have spiritual value. The indentured servant, remember him? He can know God put him on this world in his circumstance to fulfill his unique spiritual purpose, live the best he can, touch lives and do good deeds and serve God in a unique way, and his role is just as important to God as anyone else’s. Or if you lose a child, or are the child, or don’t have a child. On one hand you think with horror that God could do that to you on purpose. On the other hand, it is the most comforting thought. And it is, for many people who go through these kinds of tragedies. They take great solace from the idea their suffering is not random, it’s not chance, and most of all it’s not meaningless. There is a purpose to it all.”

“What purpose? What purpose can there be for suffering? A child is born deformed, lives a few years in excruciating pain, and then dies. And the parents never recover. What purpose can that possibly have? And how does God decide who this should happen to? Some get a silver spoon and others have no shoes. It’s all so blatantly, cruelly, obviously arbitrary.”

“How God decides which souls should be born in Venezuela or Zimbabwe,” I answered, “or in Denmark or New Zealand is a calculation we can comfortably relinquish to His divine accounting department. But that there is a profound, meaningful, consequential, and winnable challenge for all of us through our struggles changes everything. The Bible is a guide to live by, to understand yourself by, to understand the world by, to enrich your life thereby. And sometimes to struggle with, sometimes to transgress. Muhammed was perfect. Jesus was God. Moses had a speech impediment. He struggled; he failed. God is interested in you, in your individuality and your unique struggles and successes and failures and kindnesses and all the hosts of heaven are cheering you on in your personal journey. It’s not quite so sadistic when you think about it that way.”

“It sounds pretty sadistic to me. Not only do you lose your life savings to an insurance scam, but God did it to you on purpose. And He could give the money back to you with a mere wave of his heavenly hand. He just doesn’t care to. Or how’s about if God said you could never have a relationship, emotional or physical, with a woman for your entire life. But women are everywhere. All your life you live beside them, beside their allure and their magic. But engagement is not allowed. Even fantasy is forbidden by the godly thought police. I think over the long days and years of your life, you would find that to be monstrously sadistic.”

“It’s interesting that some people think about the concept of God and find the whole thing abhorrent: He’s a policeman in the sky watching everything we do, even everything we think, and he’s taking notes and he’s going to punish us if we step wrong, arm cocked back and ready to swing. What a horrible concept. What an unsettling, anxiety producing, and even a little narcissistic proposition. And what a monster God is. Another person will look at the same idea of God in heaven watching over him with the greatest joy, with the greatest feeling of comfort and reassurance. God is there for me. God is helping me. God is listening to my prayers. Don’t tell God how big your problems are, tell your problems how big your God is. That kind of thing. What’s the difference between these two people? Who’s right? Not who’s right about ‘is there a God?’ Who’s right about ‘what does there being a God mean to us?’ That God is the greatest source of comfort or the greatest source of anxiety? That God is the limitless forgiver and acceptor, or the merciless punisher? That the challenges of our lives are opportunities or that the challenges of our lives are so much getting kicked in the face repeatedly by an angry donkey to whose backside God has cruelly tied us. Is there really a right or wrong answer to this question? And if not, what does that tell you?”

“If I believed Brad Pitt was about to walk through the door and declare for all the world he was gay and also madly in love with me and would I agree to go to his private jet with him, straight from the studio, and fly to Las Vegas to elope, I would be very happy. Nothing could possibly make me happier in this moment than believing that was about to happen. But that doesn’t make it true. And, I’m sorry for bringing this nice fairy tale back to reality, but what is true is what we are debating here, not whether or not religion is a useful fiction.”

“Right,” I said. “And the truth is if you really believed Brad Pitt was about to show up at the studio with flowers for you, you wouldn’t be happy, you’d be crazy. And, being crazy, you would not be happier. Your net quality of life would not be improved by your delusion even though the fantasy itself would be pleasant. On the other hand, religion has quite the opposite effect on us. Interestingly, it’s the only ‘fiction’ which has a net positive effect on us, on humanity itself. Study after study shows religion makes life better in nearly every measurable index: longer life, better relationships, more wealth even, better job satisfaction, better physical health, better mental health, better marriages.”

“Unless you are a homosexual. Then your marriage will not be so good because the kind rabbis will hang you both. I think the word used in God’s holy book is abomination. Also not so good if you cross-dress, another capital offense in the eyes of the Lord. Is it your opinion, Rabbi Fireworker, that the world would be a better place if we brought all the queers to the guillotine? Off with their heads? Or do you maybe want to take your little magic eraser back out again for another few inconvenient verses?”

It was the argument I had feared having with him most. Cautiously, I said, “Things get lost in translation. The Hebrew word is to’evah, which the Bible also uses to describe eating pork and cheating in commerce. It does not mean what people think it means.”

“What does it mean?” he said coldly.

“To’evah, abomination, has the same root as the word ta’avah, which means desire or hunger. As in the natural desire for food or rest. Or sex. I think the word is used when there is a strong desire for things that God wants us not to do, and He wants us to recognize that it’s going to be difficult.”

“Why does God want us to not do it?” he said flatly.

“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one bit of important Bible philosophy. There’s a paragraph in Deuteronomy that’s essential to understanding anything in the Bible:

“The Torah is for our benefit, not for God’s. Even if you consider religion in the most superficial and unsophisticated way, how could it possibly matter to God Himself who we decide to boink, or what we decide to eat, or even who we decide to kill? The concept of a being powerful enough to create the cosmos in all its staggering immensity having personal skin in this kind of game doesn’t compute. That’s not what we think—that God needs our good deeds or our compliance for some mysterious but personal reason. All the instructions in the Torah, things to do, things not to do, stories, history, are all a kind of self-help guide. The Bible is a self-help book for humans and for human society written by our designer. No one knows how a machine works as well as the one who designed it, built it, built the parts, fashioned the material the parts are made from. When there are punishments or words like to’evah, what they mean, with different levels of nuance, is that this particular transgression, this thing God is telling you not to do, is especially bad for you.”

I looked at him as I said this, knowing I was treading on pretty thin ice with him. I wanted to stand up and pace. I settled for lighting another cigarette.

“Look,” I said exhaling, “the Mishnah says a court that killed one person in seventy years was a bloody court. The conditions for a capital punishment to actually be handed out were nearly impossible to fulfill. There had to be two witnesses who also warned you beforehand, you need to be of sound mind and not in a state of agitation, you have to be clear on all laws and conditions and consequences that pertain to whatever it is you’re doing. And then you have to do it. And then the witnesses have to come to court and go through a grueling cross-examination before their testimony is accepted. When the Torah says a transgression carries the death penalty, it’s not about the punishment so much as a literary device for God saying this thing, this particular activity, is really, really bad for you. It’s like your mother telling you not to sneak candy and not to run in the street in different tones of voice, the latter being naturally more emphatic.”

“That’s very nice,” he said. “So why is it bad for you? For me, let’s say.”

The question hung in the air between us like a physical thing. The professor seemed outwardly cool and calm, but I noticed he was breathing through his nose.

“Look at San Francisco.”

“What about San Francisco?”

“San Francisco was ground zero for the progressive revolution. If you go there now, it looks like plain ground zero. One of the most beautiful cities in the country, with the most perfect weather, filled with wealth and surrounded by industry, somehow turned into dystopia. The city is overrun with crime and drugs and poverty and misery. That’s just, like, a coincidence? That’s not God, that’s us. The angel-struck sulfur and fire of Sodom and Gomorrah is a metaphor. God says, ‘Don’t do this. I know you really want to. Don’t do it anyway. Trust me.’ We say, ‘God’s a bigot. He just wants to spoil our fun.’ No. He made the world and us, and He’s telling us how it works. Take His instructions or disregard them at your own peril. Look at our world. We have more wealth and comfort and convenience and security than any generation in history by orders of magnitude and we are the most miserable by the same order. We have so much and yet we are consumed with need. Why? Why should that be? What are we doing wrong? Nearly every dimension of public and private life is broken in the world right now. If you’re going to tell me it’s because of the bigotry of conservatives, you’re just an idiot. Look. Look at us. I stayed in the hospital for a week with my grandmother last year when she had pneumonia. Nobody cared. Nobody. The doctors, the nurses. Out of the two dozen people I interacted with, there was one PA who saw us as human beings. Equal liberals and conservatives on this. Go to the mall, or to a ball game. Nobody cares about anything, just their idiot phones and this vague, self-devouring hunger for something they are clearly not getting. It’s terrifying. Coincidentally, correlation doesn’t equal causation, we have completely abandoned the Bible and God. We’ve abandoned the instructions in the Bible and we have functionally abandoned its principles. Like, for example, Don’t gossip. That would be the end of all social media. We’re enlightened. We’re liberated. Science has freed us from the tyranny of ancient superstition! Our world is so free it feels like it will collapse under the simple weight of its own spiritual decay long before the environment, runaway technology, or international conflict with superweapons have a chance to even warm up their engines.”

My cigarette lying in the ashtray had burned itself out. The length of gray ash cracked in the middle and the blackened filter rolled off the table. I picked it up and tossed it in with the others.

I looked up. The professor was watching me strangely. And then he said, “I was in San Francisco a few months ago and I did not find it to be quite the apocalyptic wasteland you describe, although I admit there are some problems there. Your take on the state of the world leaves aside a good deal of progress and improvement since the good old biblical days of slavery and genocide. Women have rights, it’s mostly acceptable to be gay, just to name the first two things that come to mind your God continues to struggle with. But I say to you, again, even after your moving sermon: to establish the existence of a thing we can’t touch, see, feel, taste, or hear, you have to prove it. And I will let our listeners decide if you have. Thank you Mike. This was a good one. Thank you my dear listeners and subscribers and nonsubscribers and future subscribers. Stay wild, and always remember to think.”