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

or whatever the hell they could get their hands that would hold blood/ink/lead and protected it like you would your favorite tackle box on the way to a bass tournament. And, don’t get me wrong I learned a lot from reading this thing, but I think I learned more of what not to do and believe in life than what to do and believe in.

That, and I now require the services of sedatives in order to sleep at night.

On my worst days when I would rather sit in my home, beat my dog with a tire iron, and drink myself into a coma, I still don’t want you to go through all the turmoil I did in reading this Bible. I don’t want you to get your hands on this thing either, with it’s typical leather bound cover and gold glitter writing with cutesy very-old-woman-skin-thin paper, beckoning you to “find the missing link” within. They should put skull and cross bones on the cover if you ask me.

What kind of person gives someone a big box on Christmas morning that says Bass Pro Shops on the outside and then fill it with jig saw puzzle pieces that, when put together, have David Hasselholf lying on the beach in a thong? Really, how cruel would that be?

So, go ahead and stock up on some beer, buy a tin of Skoal, a carton of cigarettes, and let’s go through this here Bible. Uncle CornFed will tell you what this thing is all about. I’ve always been told “What the Bible Really Says” and everyone said something different. I’m just gonna tell you what this country minded boy came up with when he read it and it’s definitely going to be different; perhaps even downright funny. And definitely irreverent.


Book 0 – A Little Introduction to What the Bible Really Says

So, let’s back up a minute and start with the first question I had when I started reading this thing. Why does a book have a bunch of other little books in it to begin with? Today, in the year 2009, we refer to sections of a book that resemble each other as “Chapters”. But since the Bible is, as you will find out as we go along here, so disjointed in it’s coherency, someone figured it was just a bunch of books that were put together so they could keep it all in one binder. Think of it like this. Remember all those book reports you wrote in highschool? Pretend each one you wrote was a book and then put them all together into a single folder and write on the cover, in permanent black hog marker, BIBLE. Something like that.

And to make things a bit more confusing, we have the one book with many little books broken down into sentences that have numbers next to them. My daddy always told me that my ego would get me in trouble one day but I’ll be damned if I ever numbered my book reports so the teacher could more easily call to the attention of the class the greatness of line 44. Lastly, in our treasure hunt for some kind of understanding, we have a book that contains many books with every sentence numbered AND it’s broken into 2 larger sections, called testaments.

There is the New Testament and the Old Testament. Testament, in Dead Eye Dick speak, means “a way of seeing and doing things.” So, we have the old way-of-seeing-and-doing-things in the first ¾ of the bible and then we have the new way-of-seeing-and-doing-things in the last ¼ of the bible. Personally, I think we need a new-new-way-of-seeing-and-doing-things, as I don’t think anyone took some of this stuff into account when creating all these religions.

I digress.

So, now that I’ve come full circle and have decided to thrust my mind and soul upon the Bible, I’m faced with a few dilemmas. For starters, there are several versions of this thing out there, called “Tranlsations”. What paraphrase means, and allow me to borrow from Mr. Webster himself on this, is

“Something said a certain way based on an interpretation of said interpreter”.

My grandpa had the same kind of habit. He is the only man I have ever known who could interpret a fart as a handshake, constantly asking me if I would “pull my finger” every time I met him.

Along those same lines, we have quite a few translations of the Bible. Now, without getting into all the details of why and how these came to be, let’s just say that one group of people didn’t quite understand the current translation put in front of their faces while their kin folk were being murdered by the religions of a certain translation. So, they decided they would take the original language (a mix of Hebrew, Greek, and Russian I think) and decipher the phrases into a language that made more sense for them.

For example, we have the King James Version, which has more “thees” and “thou’s” in it to make enough people get a little bit hesitant to venture further into the verses. On the other end if the spectrum, you have the Living Translation, which puts things into better English, using words that make sense to most modern men and women. They even have a Children’s Version which uses pictures to help kids get through the tough parts, like venereal diseases and massive death swarms of locusts eating dogs and cats, leaving nothing but their little feetsies gripping the barren earth.

But what is really important here is that now there is a Country Boy’s Version, sanctioned by the American Beer Drinkers Association (ABDA), the Gun Shooting Consortium of South Georgia (GSCSG) and me, CornFed (CF). I didn’t really have access to the original texts as they are stored up in some kind of vault somewhere next to Marilyn Monroe’s panties, but I did manage to obtain copies of the “best of breed” translations that many churches use here in the United States and craft this special little Bible just for you.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to grab myself a shot of Crown and get this translating road show moving along.


Book 1 – Genesis and the Story of Why You Can Fish and Hunt

I always loved books that took the obvious and stated it in plain English just to see how stupid the reader really is. So, the first book in the Bible, the story of how it all begain, starts with, guess what,

“In the beginning…”

Masterful literature straight out of Dr. Seuss I tell you. And what’s even more, I always loved books that had a title that meant something dirty in a foreign language. Come to find out, “Genesis” translates to “Bereshith” in Hebrew. How about that? With a little creativity, and consulting my Uncle Donald, who knows a lot about words since he actually graduated highschool, "Bereshith" sounds similar to the story about a bear in the woods shitting and wiping his butt with a hare wandering nearby. Looking at it from this standpoint can definitely make it more easily digestible for your mind, as Genesis is the story about how the bear and the hare got created, along with all digestive functions.

Now, for those of you who have heard the words “evolution”, “creationism”, “die evolutionist”, and “die creationist”, this book is really the beginning of all the hoopla we have today over how in the world we got here and how the world that we live in, got here as well. Basically, the book Genesis says something like the following in the first chapter

“God made all the crap you can see, feel, and touch along with your ability to see, feel, and touch all that crap, crap included.”

Really, maybe I’m a brainiac or something, but it didn’t take me but a few minutes to reduce a thousand words to that little gem. However, I’d be leaving out some pretty cool stuff if I left it at that.

For example, Genesis goes into the number of days it took God, our first main character in this book, to create everything we see. Now, God apparently worked in “days”, just like we do. You know, on Monday I do laundry. On Tuesday, I go fishing. On Wednesday, I bang the wife. Linear shit like that. It’s easier to understand if you sort of see that God liked to work in some sort of linear pattern as well.

And so, to just jump into Genesis without much further ado, God created the land you drive your truck on, the sun that makes you freckle up in the summer, the stars you stare at when you’re drinking, and the water where you park your bass boat, all in about 4 days flat. Not bad eh?

But, there’s a problem here.

Just because you have land, sun, stars, and water doesn’t mean you have fish to catch, birds to shoot, bucks to hunt, and all those other things that we love so much. So, in keeping with the linear thinking model, Goddie-Pooh decided that it was time to create some living things that would fit in just fine with all the sun, stars, land, and water that was created previously. And on the 5’th day, probably during lunch hour, God made all the birds of the sky and all the fishies of the water, including those stupid ass sharks we keep seeing in the movies. I know what you’re thinking and I thought the same thing.

“You mean when I go to a dove shoot or go bass fishing, God made those things in a single day?”

You got it. On the same damned day! Day 5 to be exact. Tis some amazing shit we have here friends. However, the game warden who writes you a ticket for all that fun comes later.

This next part is where I would have loved to had been a locust on a pine tree. Can you imagine God’s thought processes as the consideration of what to do next is brought on the table? Think about it, you have land but no animals that can walk on it. That’s like getting a boob job but not letting anyone touch it.

So, somewhere along the way, right before day 6 started, God got Himself good and liquored up and does what country boys do best. God did what you and I have always wanted to do. And I think this is more the reason God is referred to as a “He” than anything else. He created a big ole’ wild life preserve. I mean, this Guy really did a number on the planet.

Remember all those deer killed last year in your state? Yep. God created the original ones in a single day. Those squirrels? Yep, day 6. The possum you smashed on the highway. You guessed it…a day 6 creature also. I don’t know where turtles, or those catfish that seem to live for days without water, fit into this equation but they were either created on day 5 or on day 6 or perhaps they were a drunken thought at midnight between the two days. I’m not sure.

But then God figured it wasn’t any good to have all these animals running around, all these fishies swimming around, and all the birds flying around without some Big Bad Ass shooting at them or trying to kill them. And so, God decided to make himself a man.

Now, they don’t go into much detail about the rationale behind why God created man first and woman second.