How odd of God

I've covered the lunatics who believe the New Testament requires them to pick up poisonous snakes and dance around with them in church. The believe the Bible requires this sort of action. In other words, they think God mandated this sort of nutty behavior.

But how odd of God to do this. How can a god, who is supposedly the god of the entire planent, mandate something which is impossible to do in various places of the world. You couldn't follow this rule in New Zealand for instance. No serpents at all, let alone poisonous ones. Yet they have the same New Testament. How negligent of God to command they "take up serpents" and then forget to provide serpents. Some Christins will point to the camel' s hump as God's design allowing a camel to survive in a dry climate. Fine, but why did God remember the camel while forgetting he told his followers to dunk each other in pools of water which he neglected to provide?

Of course they don't mean just any serpent but poisonous ones. Again you run into trouble. God forgot to put poisonous snakes in Maine, Alaska and Hawaii as well. It gets a bit more confusing with Ireland. One sect says God wants you to pick up snakes but another, the Irish Catholics, said St. Patrick, under the power of God chased them out. No poisonous snakes in Ireland either. In the UK it is very difficult to see any snake at all let alone waltz with them in church. In fact there are various places around where, even if there are snakes, they are so rare and difficult to find that obey God's command would be almost impossible.

Take the "ordinance" (or sacrament if Catholic) of baptism. Now most fundamentalists want to dunk you completely under. Yet there are places in the world where finding that much water in one spot would be damn difficult. You can survive but accumulating that much water is not an easy thing. Today it's not so difficult since we have modern plumbing and so forth. But when God issued the orders that wasn't the case making it more difficult.

Another thing to consider is the issue of communion. Here we have wine, for most people, or grape juice for the fun-hating fundamentalists. Either way you can't have wine or grape juice without grapes and for that you need vineyards. But not all regions of the world are endowed with vineyards. Of course international trade now makes such things available everywhere. But there was a time when a Christian couldn't rush down to the grocery store for the "fruit of the vine" to follow the commands of God.

In many ways God was negligent. He really didn't think things through very well. He comes up with his "word". I don't care if you mean Old Testament, New Testament or Qu'ran. Take any of them it doesn't change the point. So here he has his "word" and he wants people to read it. So what does he do? He brings it out at a time when almost no one reads and there was no easy way to publish it. And even if people could read it wouldn't make difference since there was nothing for them to read. It took the invention of the printing press to make books affordable and easily reproduceable.

So why would God put his word in a book at a time when producing books was extremely difficult?

If God had just waited until the printing press came along, or had given that invention a bit of a push himself, then the distribution of his word would have been much easier. Apparently he didn't think of that.

He supposedly send his son down to preach before there was any means of accurately recording what he said. Now imagine you are God and you want your son's message to get round. Would you send him to some backwater region of the world to preach in an enviroment where the accurate recording of his message was nigh unto impossible? Surely he should have waited until television or at least motion pictures were invented. Then we could get an accurate record of what he really did say. But again it appears Jehovah didn't think of that. And if a god is this negligent in his duties well, can one really call him a god?