Country Boy's Guide To Understanding the Bible - CornFed (best book recommendations TXT) 📗

A Good Place to Start

Hello, my name is CornFed. And I will be your host this evening.

It’s not with any special training I bring to you that proves my ability to dissect and deliver a profound and embellished synopsis of the one book that has sold more copies than any Lionel Richie and Willie Nelson album combined. I possess nothing more than a 3 year Junior High degree with a minor in Social Studies and a major in killing things with either my truck or my gun. When it comes to things of the preacher, as my daddy would say, “I’m about as qualified for consumption as a hotdog without the mustard and relish.”

However, like with any kind soul I see stranded in the ditch at 2 AM, it is my duty as someone who’s been there, to assist in any way I can to put the car back on the highway and to help the driver understand the road is unmarked and not paved for a reason. And anyone who attempts to read the Bible is not excused from my humanitarian efforts. I have fell into the ditch of what the Bible really says more than once.

It all started with a visit to the Second Baptist Church of Small Town Georgia. Admittedly, I was a bit nervous on this particular evening, as it was during a week where a “revival” was being conducted at the Church. Revival is a code word that hides the true meaning of why they wanted in Church that week.

“You are going to Hell. Ticket to heaven inside”

is really what the advertisements should have read.

As the service started, with the blue haird ladies singing like a flock of buzzards and the old man banging on the piano without any good country lyrics behind it, I nearly walked myself out the door. That was until the preacher man stood behind the podium and started pointing fingers at the me. I know what finger pointing means and I’m not one to miss a chance at a good fight.

But there was no fight, just a bunch of preaching from this big book laid out on his podium one minute and being raised in his right hand the next. This book, as he said it, was the one thing that spawned the mere building of this church, the words and music behind the hymns, and the entire message he was delivering to us hell-bound folks.

Everything he said that night during his sermons was, and I quote,

“…is what the Bible really says…”

And so, not being one to give in to just anything without proper investigation, I took my fanny home and started reading the Bible. I had one in the house that someone had given me as a kid. The pictures really helped too. I had heard of some people reading “a chapter a day” and getting finished in “humpteen hundred years”. I suspect some have gotten called up before they got to the part in the Bible where they get called up.

With nothing but a keen desire to know what the Bible says, I decided to skip all the chapter-a-day-shit and jump right into it. And I was going to need supplies for this venture.

Cigarettes. Check
Jack Daniels. Check
Cheetos. Check
Coke. Check
Bud Light. Check

It was a meager list, something I figured would be enough to get me through a non-stop session of finding out what the Bible really says. By the end of the first day, I realized that I was going to need more help.

RedBull. Check
Coffee. Check

And then as I really got into some of the disturbing aspects of the Bible, I decided I had under estimated it’s potentional and affect on my life.

Xanax. Check
Horse Tranquilizer. Check
More Cigarettes. Check
JohnnyWalkerBlack. Check
Bigger drinking glasses. Check

And eventually, it became obscenely obvious that the residual effects of what I am undertaking was going to just require a complete overhaul of my psyche and emotions.

Book on Meditation. Check
Ticket to India. Check
1 month stay in Ashram. Check

I could keep going on and on with the list of things I had to acquire to really get my head and heart around what the Bible was really saying. I even bought books to figure out just where in the hell this thing came from, who wrote it, and why in the shit-fire they would cover some of the material they did. I took up Greek translations. I looked for narrations, devotionals, and everything who could tell me what the Bible was really saying.

And everyone said it said something different.

And I want to throw my own two cents worth in there if I could.

First off, the bible is really a book of paradoxes. For those unlearned in the ways of words longer than 2 syllables, a “paradox” is something that is opposite of it’s supposed meaning but can be taken to mean something else entirely also, depending on how you see it.

For example, let’s say you have an aunt weighing 90 pounds who is wheel-chair bound and you refer to her as “Fat-Man Walking” This would be a paradox in the fact that the words mean the opposite of the reality. Your aunt is not fat and she’s not walking. She’s in a wheel chair and drinking Ensure to keep her weight up. Get my drift so far?

And it’s even a bigger paradox if the person to whom this paradox was attached to, was in fact a woman. You call her Fat-Man Walking. Well, your aunt is a woman so calling her a man is a paradox. Combine the fact she’s not fat, that she’s not a man, and that she has no intention of walking, and you have what I’d like to call a “paradox tres”, a triple whammy of paradoxes.

To make matters more confusing, if you told your friends that Fat-Man Walking was staying at your house and they showed up and saw your skinny aunt in a wheelchair, they would be super confused. You would have to sit each of them down and explain to them the meaning of paradoxes and what you were actually trying to say.

The wheelchair bound aunt thing is probably a bad example as I do not make fun of anyone who cannot walk but the Bible doesn’t necessary discriminate so I figure I would keep the words true to form.

The Bible, in the way it tries to convey its story, is sort of like the paradox concept I mentioned above. In some places it’s just a simple ole paradox. For example, you may read in the Bible “God loves children”. Sounds like a simple fact if you ask me. But, when you read about God burning down kids in the next sentence, well, that’s a paradox. God cannot love children while burning them down.

In other places, it’s a “paradox tres”, like the Fat-Man Walking reference above. For example, you may read in the Bible that “God loves puppies and children and deer” but in the next sentence you may read “and then God drowned them in a flood of salt water.” That would be a paradox tres. God cannot love puppies, children, and deer while they are being drowned in a tub of salt water.

For me personally, I had to continually reach for a 12 pack of beer just to keep my head from spinning off my shoulders and rolling down a hill so don’t feel bad if you don’t grasp the concept just yet.

Secondly, on top of the paradox-thing, the bible is a downright disgusting book in many places. I don’t mean disgusting like “I saw vomit on the floor” disgusting. I’m talking this thing takes your mind places that it has probably never been before, unless you served in some kind of armed forces and spent the weekends docking in Thailand. God forbid if you knew someone that some of this stuff actually happened to.

About the least disgusting thing it mentions is stuff like a woman’s menstrual cycle (called “bitch days” where I’m from) and what to do with her during those murderous 7 days of hell (Daddy usually just bought mama flowers and locked her in the shed now and again). If only the bible would stop there!

Oh no, it’s got murder, rape, talking animals, death, mayhem, salt licks made from humans (not the kind you feed the cows), prostitution, venereal diseases (that means stuff that makes your pee-pee hurt), shit-eating, along with a host of things that has taken many a 90 day stay in AA just to get back on their feet again. Just ask my Uncle Jimmy.

Thirdly, as if shit eating isn’t enough, the cast of characters described in this book makes a night at the Gangland Bar’n’Grill in Compton California feel like a choir of blue-haired ladies singing “Amazing Grace.” There are men in there with triple digit quantity of wives (that’s greater than 1,000 for those who failed math), dudes who play the damned harp, psychics worse than the ones you find at Panama City Beach, kings who like to sick lions on people instead of just putting them in the county lock-up, wife stealers from within the family (I think that’s called in-law in-breeding), executioners, kings that kill because of the day of the week, men who give up their family for death, thieves, prostitutes, johns (that’s the owner or owners of said prostitutes), incestual family members (not so uncommon where I’m from though), drunkards, nudists, socialists, fascists, communists, Democrats, Republicans, demons, angels, and what not.

Basically, take every prison in America, mix it with Washington DC, throw in the Chicago Union of past headed by Jimmy Hoffa, round up all the homeless in California, open the gates at all the zoo’s, top it with all of the Mexican construction workers and painters, insert the frequent members of the Hedonism club in Jamaica, add a few corporate executives, don’t check passports for a year at the airport, add in a a very minutely populated Human Resource Department and you have yourselves the predominant types of people this book is about.

There are a few Good Ole Boy standouts, sort of like your cousin Earl who could always hold himself at a pool table and a fighting contest while still loving his grandmother with all his heart, but they don’t get the most press. I pretty much called my Mom every now and again after a bad dream because of this book.

But why a Bible though? Why does such a piece of literature exist that has spawned all these wars, churches, and late night cable television shows?

At the end of the day, there is supposedly some kind of great spiritual moral code interweaved through the whole entire book. That’s why we have all the various religions floating around, each of them basing their by-laws on interpretations of this part of the bible and that part of the bible. Eventually, these by-laws are passed to the in-laws and you are only a lawyer away from having yourself a tax-deductible bonafide religion.

But the real reason behind it’s large following, is the fact that it’s been said that God directly influenced the writers to write what they wrote when they wrote it on whatever they could write it on. That’s why it was supposedly written on fig leaves,