People seem to get all their information about the Bible from other people, and even works of fiction, instead of just looking that shit up themselves. I mean, the Bible is fucking EVERYWHERE. It is not hard to find. There are even searchable online versions. Look shit up before making half-remembered stuff the core tenets of your philosophy.

Not saying there won’t be a definite article in the Greek, just saying, I could swear it was plural.

The best part is possibly the fact that it’s no more bizarre than the rest of Revelation. Seriously, I defy anyone to read that and not think the writer was either high on something, or having way, way too much fun being creatively obtuse. It’s like it was purposefully designed to be impenetrably “symbolic”.

As a piece of historically popular literature at least, it certainly shows nobody had any illusions even then, about humans being in any way perfect.

Now, depending on what part you’re talking about…

1.) A good chunk of the Old Testament (aka Torah), such as Leviticus, is just rules for the Hebrews to follow; these are laws and regulations of a particular ancient culture. They don’t disprove the idea that humans are flawed, because if we weren’t seen as flawed, they wouldn’t felt the need to regulate their behavior. (Note: not that I agree with all the things they saw as “flaws”; a lot of the regulations allow for some pretty nasty things such as slavery, are way harsher on women – including rape victims – than men, and punish things like “being disobedient of your parents” with stoning. Nonetheless, they saw “flaws” and arguably even looking at them with a modern eye picks up some horrors in the laws themselves that reveal flaws about the lawmakers; ergo, does not disprove “humans are flawed”).

2.) Look at their vision, in the early chapters of Genesis, of what the human race is and how it has become what it is today: their idea of a paradise is one where you can be lazy and chill all day without fear of starving or having pain, and in the very earliest chapters, humans screw it up by doing literally the one thing they were told not to do. Then! Then, the very secondmost generation of humans commits fratricide… over jealousy. Over jealousy at Sky Daddy preferring one gift over the other. Humans aren’t flawed? Really? Seems to me the whole point of Genesis is “See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Because we’re stupid assholes.”

3.) Other parts of the Old Testament feature such lovely things as corpse desecration (that whole bit about the Philistine foreskins as a wedding gift), bitches lying to try and steal another woman’s baby, genocide, religious warfare, and sexual depravity up to and including pretending to be your someone else’s husband to hook up with them (somewhere in the story of Jacob, I believe), pretending to be a whore to seduce your own husband, and sleeping with your own father after getting him drunk to the point of non-consent (Lot’s daughters). In fact, that last one happens because an entire pair of cities is seen as completely wicked – and shown to be pretty bad as well, seeing as they threaten to rape an angel on the premise that (per ancient belief systems) they might gain part of its supernatural powers. If the two cities hadn’t been supposedly so awful, they wouldn’t have been destroyed, and Lot’s wife wouldn’t have been turned (allegedly) into a pillar of salt, and his dumbass daughters wouldn’t have thought that he’d need to boink them in order to propagate his line. (Yeah, that part is… pretty WTF, really.) Again: whether you are looking at this with the eyes of the ancient people who passed it down the generations, or with modern eyes, it’s not painting a very pretty picture of humanity.

4.) The story of Job, people. Sure, God’s a dick in that story, but so are all the people who look down on and avoid Job because he’s unlucky. Everyone who isn’t Job, humans included, is an asshole in that story. The point of the story is to find a way to justify or explain away how bad things can happen to good people, but in the process they point out that when bad things happen to good people, people assume they somehow deserve it (as opposed to themselves of course, who have NEVER done anything to deserve misfortune, surely) and are petty, selfish assholes around them. Gee, wonder how this could possibly be relevant to today?

5.) Even if we skip on ahead to the New Testament, a majority of the parables attributed to Jesus involve human stupidity, selfishness, and asshattery. The parable of the Talents for instance, is thought by scholars to be about how even if you do the right thing (keeping his master’s money safely buried to be able to return it to him, rather than lending it out at usurious rates, what with usury being forbidden in Hebrew law), you will often be punished unfairly in this life (weirdly this story is commonly misunderstood by conservatives nowadays, who think it is actually about how you should be smart and invest because you will make more money that way. It really wasn’t supposed to mean that).

Other tales of his alleged exploits include overturning the tables of the moneylenders in the temples (because they were corrupting the system), preventing people from stoning an adulteress (because it’s hypocritical to judge someone else so heavily for a sin when you yourself are sinful by nature of Being Human), healing sick people that nobody else was kind or brave enough to go near, accepting prostitutes and beggars as real people (wouldn’t have been in there if people were generally accepting of such people, as it wouldn’t have been a sign of how remarkable he supposedly was), and, oh yes, allowing himself to be brutally tortured and publicly executed for purely political reasons. Yes, humans are such delightful creatures, that Jesus was supposed to be the exception.

In fact, it might do you some good to realize that the Bible in fact tends to OVERLY criticize humans – for such things as curiosity (forbidden fruit), religious tolerance (“Thou shalt not have any other Gods before me”/ethnic cleansing that is seen as okay because it’s against people other religions/destruction of others’ religious symbols such as Asherah poles), for menstruating, for daring to think a woman is equal to a man, and for daring to have sexual impulses.

And if looked at with modern eyes, the fact that so many people did and in surprisingly many cases still do find such a text to be an example of how to live “right”, is itself also proof that humans are far from saintly.

Really, as a piece of literature, it’s quite revealing about the people who wrote it down and edited it (I say “and edited” because there’s evidence of AT LEAST three quite different texts that were mixed and matched to form the Torah/Old Testament, and the version that comes down to us now is pretty much defined by what was decided on at the Council of Nicea about 1700 years ago, which from what I understand, excluded versions that indicated Jesus may have just been a normal but righteous human, and texts that indicated that Hell would only be proportionate punishment to your sins rather than permanent, both of which are pretty drastic differences obviously from the final text. But I digress).

It’s actually a pretty damn cynical text when you get down to it. I can sum it up with “Humans are stupid bastards most of the time.”