God. A biography - Some weird stuff

Miles is moving into the Abraham story. I often feel empathy with Abraham, at least the one who turns his back on 'Babylon' and heads with his family to the desert. When I watch TV, I feel this; when I see how marketers are given wealth and prestige to lure children--and all off us--away from what I think is precious; when I watch a professional football game and think how much these men earn, how much money is thrown into this pipeline by so many people. Often.

But Miles points out, though ostensibly this is a justification for the origin of 'the nation of Israel,' whatever that means, its more about the Hebrew god learning about what sex means to him, and then getting his thing to fall into line.

And it has some weird stories about sex and procreation: A god promises and promises and promises and promises that this man's sexual act will produce a child. A god finds it important that men mutilate their penises; Abraham offers his wife to Pharaoh as a concubine; Lot offers his virginal daughters to a crowd of men to keep them off of his god; Lot's daughters lure him into incest; Abraham's wife offers his servant up to her husband for sex and his god makes it fruitful; Abraham and Sarah do it for a hundred years and finally she gets pregnant. Abraham, without a bit of evident psychology, raises his knife to slit the throat of his child.

All this to get to Israel.