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Posts Tagged ‘old testament’

Ark-aeology (I crack myself up)

Posted in Religion, tagged , , , , , , on May 6, 2010| 1 Comment »

It’s old news by now (The Illitegerati: Not Breaking News), but a group of filmmakers funded by evangelists found Noah’s Ark in Turkey. Again. As everyone is reporting, these people say it’s 99.9% certain that it’s Noah’s Ark, which sounds cool and all, and even better when you realize their reasons are as follows:

1. That thingie is totally boat shaped

2. Really really want it to be Noah’s Ark

The other best part is the amount of effort the other crackpot biblical archaeologists are putting into proving this Ark a fake, because how can you not love something that uses scientific evidence then follows it up with the following ad:

Yes, Noah’s Ark is completely real! Now find out “what you don’t Noah” about the story as well as your spectacular destiny they rarely ever mention in church in this autographed No. 1 best-seller!

Looking into this story I found out that there’s a lot I don’t Noah (get it?) about proving that the Old Testament is 100% real, true and definitely happened just like they say it did. After all, the most important part of faith is using scientifically gathered evidence to ensure that you’re absolutely right about the minutest details of everything you believe.

I’ll go into the scientific explanations of Noah’s Ark another time–there are plenty, and they are good— so now we can talk about one Ron Wyatt, who keeps finding biblical stuff.

First, I should say that there are two types of biblical archaeologists. Some are archaeologists who study the same approximate time period and place of the Old Testament, and they turn up some pretty interesting stuff. For example, no one thought the Hittites were real for a long time, or that Sargon I was a real Assyrian king. But, even though people like you and me think that stuff is pretty cool, it’s not a big fucking ship.

The other kind of biblical archaeologists grabs a Bible and uses it like a Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. They do not carefully comb through records of ancient cultures written in cuneiform to discover new lineages. Oh no. They climb mountains and find arks in the morning before taking a little swim in the Red Sea and finding ancient chariot wheels in the afternoon. Right where the Bible said they’d be.

Mr. Wyatt has, thus far, found not only Noah’s Ark but Sodom and Gomorrah, Mt. Sinai, the Egyptians’ chariots in the Red Sea, and the Ark of the Covenant. For my money, Sodom and Gomorrah is the best–mainly pictures of weird rock formations with explanations that the fire of God was so hot it burned the limestone into little crumbly layers, or something like that.

The important thing here, of course, is that we prove that what we believe is 100% true and therefore worthy of being believed, so we’re going to go look for it because this book that we believe to be true says so, and we believe the book because we found this rock that… oh. Oh my head hurts.

Enjoy, and try not to giggle with delight next time that one guy you know brings up how they found the Ark.

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Ezekiel 4:9 bread

Posted in Miscellany, Religion, tagged , , , , , on July 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

Or, cooking with the Illegiterati!

This stuff was in the bread aisle when I went to Whole Foods today to pick up approximately one gallon of my favorite peanut butter:

Since I’m like a moth to the flame of anything random with a bible quote on it, I bought it, brought it home, re-read Ezekiel 4, and made a sandwich. It turns out that you couldn’t get a recipe from a much weirder biblical source. Ezekiel is one of the major prophets in the Old Testament–I like to call them the crazypants prophets–who basically used his priesthood to warn the Israelites of impending doom while they were exiled in Babylon (approx. 6th century BCE).

You’ll notice that this is pretty much the healthiest, most granola-crunching-hippie bread you can buy. It had lentils. It’s sprouted. It’s got a low glycemic index, it’s vegan, it’s organic. Already my hangnails have healed and my hair is shiny and bouncy.

Anyway, according to God’s orders, Ezekiel eats a scroll so that he can speak God’s words and goes to Tel Aviv. Then he shuts himself inside his house and binds himself with ropes. Then he takes a brick and draws a relief of the city of Jerusalem on it (how he does this while bound is unclear), then puts an iron plate between himself and the brick, and then lays siege to the brick (somehow).

Next, he lies on his left side for 390 days (to represent the number of years Israel will spend in exile), then flips over and his right side gets off easy with 40 days (how long Judah will be in exile).

(It’s turkey and fried egg. Don’t you judge me.)

Finally, we get to the part about the food. God tells him to mix wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet and spent in a big jar and then to cook it into cakes over a fire made with human poop, though Ezekiel asks real nice and gets to use cow poop instead. Basically, that’s a starvation diet–God just told him to essentially mix the dregs together and eat that to keep from dying.

And now you can buy it for only $5.69 a loaf!

I couldn’t find anything at all about the religious views of the company who makes this, sadly.  They have some doves on their homepage, so they seem vaguely Christian, though they seem to have bought the Ezekiel bread from someone else up in the Pacific Northwest. My theory is that some guy got really stoned, decided it would be fun to read the bible for a while, and then got some serious munchies around Ezekiel 4:9. It makes more sense than a marketing ploy, because I suspect the audience who would buy a bread because it’s from the Bible doesn’t overlap much with an audience who are into sprouted vegan bread.

The rest of Ezekiel (and the prophets in general) are pretty crazy and excellent rainy day reading. I can’t wait until they come out with more biblically inspired foods. Revelations bee-beast honey!

Four stars, since it’s pretty tasty (if you’re like me and the hippier the bread, the better) and good for vegans, but it does cost more for a loaf than an hour’s worth of minimum wage.

★★★★☆

Sorry for the less-than-stellar photos. I’m no Pioneer Woman.

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