The beginning of the weekly chapter "Breishit" describes the creation of the world. At the same time, in our sources there are hints of what was and what existed before the creation of the world.

Midrash on the book of Mishli (8, 22) tells us that: “7 things were created before the creation of the world: the Torah, the Throne of Glory of the Creator, the Temple, repentance (teshuva), gan eden (Garden of Eden), Gehen (hell) and the name of Moshiach.

The Torah, as stated in Mishlei (8:22): “The Lord created me at the beginning of His path, before His creatures, from time immemorial.”

The Throne of Glory of the Creator, as it is said in Tehillim (93:2): “Your throne was established from ancient times, from time immemorial You are.”

Teshuvah, as it is said in Tehillim (90, 2-3): “Before the mountains were born and You created the earth and the universe, and from everlasting to everlasting, You are G‑d! You bring a person to exhaustion and say: “Return, sons of men!”

Gan Eden, as stated in Breishit (2:8): “And the Lord planted God's garden in Eiden from the east, and placed there the man whom he had created” (in Hebrew there is a play on words MIKEDEM, this is from the east and in advance, and based on this they teach that the Garden of Eden was planted before the creation of the world).

Gehenom, as it is said in Yeshayahu (30, 33): “For the burning place has been ready since yesterday, and it has been prepared for the king, deepened and enlarged; there is fire in the fire and plenty of wood; The breath of the Lord burns in him like a stream of brimstone.”

Also in the VT treatise “Psakhim 54” these same phenomena are mentioned, but in a slightly modified order.

Another midrash in the collection Breishit Rabbah (1:4) gives a different interpretation of the phenomena created before our world. “Six phenomena preceded the creation of the world, some were created, and some existed at the level of the Divine Idea.

The Torah and the Throne of Glory of the Creator were created. The Torah, as it is said in Mishlei (8, 22): “The Lord created me at the beginning of His way, before His creatures, from the beginning” and the Throne of glory of the Creator, as it is said in Tehillim (93, 2): “Your throne was established from ancient times, from time immemorial You."

The forefathers (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), the Jewish people, the Temple and the name of Moshiach existed at the level of the Divine idea. Forefathers, as it is said by Hoshea (9, 10): “As grapes in the desert I found Israel, as the first fruit of the fig tree at the beginning of its ripening I saw your fathers; and they came to Baal-Peor and indulged in shame and became vile, as they desired.”

The Jewish people, as it is said in Tehillim (74:2) “Remember Your community, (which) You acquired from ancient times, You saved the tribe of Your inheritance, this mountain Tziyon, on which You dwell.”

The Temple, as stated in the prophecy of Yirmiyahu (17, 12): “The place of our sanctuary, the throne of Majesty, is exalted from the beginning.”

The name of Moshiach, as it is said in Tehillim (72, 17): “His name will endure forever, as long as the sun (shines), his name will forever be, and all nations will be blessed in him, they will call him happy” (there is an incorrect translation into Russian, when literal translation - before the sun (before the sun) Yanon will be his name.”

Rabbi Haava, the son of Rabbi Zeir, said that the same is true for Teshuva, as it is said: Teshuva, as it is said in Tehillim (90, 2-3): “Before the mountains were born and You created the earth and the universe, and from everlasting to everlasting You G-d! You bring man to the point of exhaustion and say: “Return, sons of men!”, but I don’t know what happened first—whether the Torah preceded the throne of glory or the throne of glory preceded the Torah.”

Rabbi Aba Bar Kaana said: “The Torah preceded the throne of glory, as it says “Mishlei” (8:22)

“The Lord created me at the beginning of His way, before His creatures from time immemorial.” And this verse precedes the verse from Tehillim (93, 2) “Thy throne was established of old, from time immemorial Thou art.”

Rabbi Huna and Rabbi Jeremiah, on behalf of Rabbi Shmuel bar Rabbi Yitzchak, said: “The thought of the Jewish people preceded everything, because if the Creator had not expected that after 26 generations of those who lived from the creation of the world, a Jewish people would be created who would receive the Torah during the Sinai revelation , he would not have written in the Torah “Command the children of Israel, tell the son of Israel.”

According to Arel Segal, the above-mentioned phenomena from Midrash in the book of Mishli hint to us at 7 stages of the final deliverance of the Jewish people - Geula.

Torah – revelation of the Creator’s qualities manifested through names in the Torah

The Throne of Glory-Temple will prepare the Jewish people for the revelation of the Creator in the world and will enable them to discern between true prophecy and false prophecy.

The Temple - the observance of halakhah by an individual, prepares him to receive divine abundance and holiness, and the observance of halakhah by the Jewish people, prepares him for the construction of the Temple.

Teshuva is the desire for Teshuva and for the return of observance of the commandment to Eretz Israel.

Gan Eden is a national return to Eretz Israel and the transformation of the desert into fertile land.

Gehenom - misfortunes and troubles occurring both in the physical and spiritual worlds, which characterize the period preceding the coming of Moshiach (Hevlei Mashiach.

The name of Moshiach is the beginning of the awakening to final deliverance in our era, a hint of the coming of the time of final liberation.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.

(Genesis 1, 1-2).

The biblical teaching about the creation of the world is briefly called Six days. Day means day. In 1823, Anglican priest George Stanley Faber (1773-1854) put forward the day-age theory. This opinion has absolutely no basis. In Hebrew to express words indefinite period of time or era there is a concept olam. Word yom in Hebrew always means day, day but never period of time. Rejecting a literal understanding of the day greatly distorts the biblical teaching about the creation of the world. If we take a day as an epoch, then how to determine evening And morning? How to apply the blessing of the seventh day and the rest in it to the era? After all, the Lord commanded rest on the seventh day of the week - Saturday, because He Himself rested: and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, for on it He rested from all His works(Genesis 2, 3). The Lord created plants on the third day, and the sun, moon and other luminaries on the fourth. If we accept the idea of ​​​​a day - an era, it turns out that for an entire era plants grew without sunlight.

The Holy Fathers understood day literally the first chapter of Genesis. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons: “Restoring this day in Himself, the Lord came to suffer on the day before the Sabbath - that is, on the sixth day of creation, on which man was created, through His suffering giving him a new creation, that is, (liberation) from death.” Saint Ephraim the Syrian: “No one should think that the six-day creation is an allegory.” Saint Basil the Great: « And there was evening, and there was morning, one day... This determines the measure of day and night and combines them into one daily time, because twenty-four hours fill the continuation of one day, if by day we mean night.” Saint John of Damascus: “From the beginning of a day to the beginning of another day is one day, for the Scripture says: and there was evening and there was morning: one day».

How then did the alternation of day and night occur before the creation of the luminaries, which appear on the fourth day? St. Basil the Great writes: “Then, not by the movement of the sun, but by the fact that this primeval light, in a measure determined by God, either spread out, then contracted again, day occurred and night followed” (Six Day Conversation 2).

Genesis begins with a description of the magnificent work of God - the creation of the world in six days. The Lord created the Universe with countless luminaries, the earth with its seas and mountains, man and the entire animal and plant world. The biblical revelation about the creation of the world rises above all existing cosmogonies of other religions, just as truth rises above any myth. No religion, no one philosophical doctrine could not rise to the mind-transcending idea of ​​creation from nothing: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

God is self-sufficient and absolutely complete. For His existence, He does not require anything and does not need anything. The only reason for the creation of the world was the perfect Love of God. Saint John of Damascus writes: “The good and most good God was not content with contemplating Himself, but out of His abundance of goodness He wanted something to happen that in the future would benefit from His benefits and be involved in His goodness.”

The first to be created were disembodied spirits - Angels. Although the Holy Scriptures do not contain a narrative about the creation of the angelic world, there is no doubt that Angels by their nature belong to the created world. This view is based primarily on the clear biblical understanding of God as the omnipotent Creator who laid the foundation for all that exists. Everything has a beginning, only God is beginningless. Some holy fathers see an indication of the creation invisible world Angels in words God created the sky (Genesis 1, 1). In support of this thought, Saint Philaret (Drozdov) notes that, according to the biblical narrative, the physical heaven was created on the second and fourth days.

Pristine the earth was unsettled And empty. Created from nothing, matter first appeared disordered and covered in darkness. There was darkness inevitable consequence the absence of light, which was not created as an independent element. Further, the writer of everyday life Moses writes that The Spirit of God hovered over the waters(Genesis 1, 2). Here we see an indication of the creative and life-giving participation in creation of the third Person of the Holy Trinity - the Holy Spirit. Extremely brief and precise definition- everything is from the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Water mentioned in the above verse is the most important element without which life is impossible. In the Holy Gospel, water is a symbol of the life-giving and saving teachings of Jesus Christ. In the life of the Church, water has special meaning, being the substance of the Sacrament of Baptism.

First day of creation

And God said: Let there be light. And there was light... And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness night. And there was evening and there was morning: one day(Genesis 1, 3-5).

By Divine command arose light. From further words: and God separated the light from the darkness we see that the Lord did not destroy darkness, but only established its periodic replacement with light to restore and preserve the strength of man and every creature. The Psalmist sings of this wisdom of God: You extend the darkness and there is night: during it all the forest animals roam; lions roar for prey and ask God for food for themselves. The sun rises [and] they gather and lie down in their lairs; a man goes out to his business and to his work until evening. How numerous are Your works, O Lord!(Ps 103:20-24). Poetic expression and there was evening and there was morning ends with a description of the creative activities of each of the six days. The word itself day the saints took it literally.

Light was created by the Divine in a word possessing omnipotent creative power: for He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it appeared(Ps 32:9). The Holy Fathers see here a mysterious indication of the second Person of the Holy Trinity - the Son God's Jesus Christ, whom the apostle calls In a word and at the same time says: Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being.(John 1, 3).

When describing the first day, put first evening, and then morning. For this reason, the Jews in biblical times began their day in the evening. This order was preserved in the worship of the New Testament Church.

Second day of creation

And God created the firmament...<...>and called... the firmament the sky(Genesis 1, 7, 8) and placed the sky between the water that was on the earth and the water above the earth.

On the second day God created physical sky. In a word firmament the word in the Hebrew original is conveyed, meaning prostrate, for the ancient Jews metaphorically compared the firmament to a tent: you stretch out the heavens like a tent(Ps 103:2).

When describing the second day, we also talk about water, which is found not only on the earth, but also in the atmosphere.

Third day of creation

And God gathered the waters under the sky into one place and opened the dry land. And he called the dry land earth, and the collection of waters he called seas. And God commanded that the earth should grow greenery, grass and trees bearing fruit. And the earth was covered with vegetation. The Lord separated the water from the dry land(see: Gen. 1, 9-13).

On the third day were created oceans, seas, lakes and rivers, and continents and islands. This later delighted the Psalmist: He collected like piles sea ​​waters, put the abysses in the vaults. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all who live in the universe tremble before Him, for He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it appeared(Ps 32:7-9).

On the same day God created all vegetable world. This was fundamentally new: God laid the foundation for organic life on the ground.

Produce flora Creator commanded the earth. St. Basil the Great says: “The then verb and this first command became, as it were, a natural law and remained in the earth for subsequent times, giving it the power to give birth and bear fruit” (St. Basil the Great. Six Days. Conversation 5).

The book of Genesis says that the earth brought forth greenery, grass, and trees that sowed seed according to their kind. The Holy Fathers attached fundamental importance to this, for it indicates the constancy of everything created by God: “What came out of the earth at the first creation is preserved to this day, through the preservation of the race by succession” (St. Basil the Great. Six Days. Conversation 5). As you can see, the third day was dedicated to the structure of our planet.

And God saw that it was good (Genesis 1:12). The writer of everyday life expresses in poetic language the idea that God creates wisely and perfectly.

Fourth day of creation

And God said that lights should appear in the firmament of heaven to sanctify the earth and to separate day from night. The calendar and time will now be counted based on the created luminaries. And the luminaries appeared: the sun, the moon and the stars(see: Gen. 1, 14-18).

In the description of the fourth day we see the creation of the luminaries, their purpose and their differences. From the text of the Bible we learn that light was created on the second day before the luminaries, so that, according to the explanation of St. Basil the Great, unbelievers would not consider the sun to be the only source of light. God alone is the Father of lights (see: James 1:17).

The creation of luminaries had three purposes: first, to illuminate land and everything that is on it; a distinction is established between the luminaries of the day (the sun) and the luminaries of the night (the moon and stars). Secondly, separate day from night; distinguish four time of year, organize time using calendar and keep chronology. Thirdly, to serve for signs of the end times; This is stated in the New Testament: the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken; then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven; and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn and see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory(Matthew 24:29-30).

Fifth day of creation

On the fifth day, the Lord created the first living creatures living in water and flying in the air. And God said: Let the water bring forth living things; and let the birds fly over the earth. This is how the inhabitants of the waters appeared, aquatic animals, insects, reptiles and fish appeared, and birds flew through the airspace(see: Gen. 1, 20-21).

At the beginning of the fifth day God turns His creative word to water ( let the water produce), while on the third day - to the ground. Word water taken in this place in more in a broad sense, denoting not only ordinary water, but also the atmosphere, which the sacred writer also calls water.

On the fifth day, God creates a higher form of life than plants. By God's command, representatives of the water element appeared (fish, whales, reptiles, amphibians and other inhabitants of the waters), as well as birds, insects and everything living in the air.

The Creator creates the first beings of each kind (“according to kind”). He blesses them to be fruitful and multiply.

Sixth day of creation

On the sixth day of creation, God created animals living on earth and man in His image and likeness(see: Gen. 1, 24-31).

Description sixth creative day Prophet Moses begins with the same words as the previous days (third and fifth): let it produce...God commands the earth to create all the animals on earth (living soul according to its kind). God created everything in a certain sequence increasing perfection.

And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils breath of life, and man became a living soul (see: Gen. 1:26-28).

The last, as the crown of creation, was man was created. He was created in a special way. The Holy Fathers first of all note that his creation was preceded by the Divine Council between all Persons Holy Trinity: let's create man. Man is distinguished from the entire created world by the way the Lord creates him. Although his bodily composition was taken from the earth, the Lord does not command the earth to produce man (as was the case with other creatures), but He Himself creates him directly. The psalmist says, addressing the Creator: Your hands created me and formed me(Ps 119:73).

God said that it's not good for a person to be alone.

And the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and when he fell asleep, he took one of his ribs and covered that place with flesh. And the Lord God created a wife from a rib taken from a man, and brought her to the man(Genesis 2:21-22).

The Lord, of course, could have created not only one married couple, but several and produced from them the entire human race, but He wanted all the people of the earth to be one in Adam. After all, even Eve was taken from her husband. The Apostle Paul says: From one blood He brought forth the entire human race to live on all the face of the earth.(Acts 17:26). And that's why we are all relatives.

At dawn human history God established marriage as a permanent life union between a man and a woman. He blessed him and tied him with the closest bonds: they will be one flesh(Genesis 2:24).

Having created human body, God blew into his face breath of life and man became a living soul. The most important distinctive feature man is that he the soul is godlike. God said: Let us make man in Our image [and] after Our likeness(Genesis 1:26). About what it is the image of God in man, we talked earlier. When God created man, He brought all the animals and birds to him, and man gave them all names. The naming of names was a sign of man's dominance over all creation.

With the creation of man, the six-day creation of the world ends. God created the world perfect. The hand of the Creator did not bring any evil into him. This doctrine of the original goodness of all creation is a sublime theological truth.

At the end of times will the perfection of the world has been restored. According to the testimony of the seer, the holy Apostle John the Theologian, there will be a new heaven and a new Earth(see: Rev. 21, 1).

Seventh day

And God finished on the seventh day His work which He had done, and on the seventh day He rested from all His work which He had done.(Genesis 2, 2).

Having completed the creation of the world, God rested from His works. The writer of everyday life uses a metaphor here, for God does not need rest. This indicates the secret of true peace that awaits people in eternal life. Before the arrival of this blessed time, already in earthly life we ​​see a prototype of this state - the peace of the blessed seventh day, which in Old Testament was Saturday, and for Christians it is a day Sunday.

In the protracted and so far equal dispute between creationists and evolutionists, a serious advantage has emerged. Some, as you know, adhere to the theory of supernatural intervention in the processes of the universe. They believe that the Universe is the work of God. Others take a position of materialism. And they prove that there is no God, and the Universe appeared on its own as a result of the so-called Big Bang. Creationists say that in the beginning there was the Word. Evolutionists have some incredibly dense point called singularity. Like, the Universe arose from it and expanded to its current size.

Both ideas are absolutely equivalent in the strength of their argumentation. Neither side has yet found 100% convincing arguments. Except that the evolutionists are a little ahead of their opponents. Because if we believe observations and interpret them accordingly, then the Universe is still expanding. Which indirectly confirms materialistic ideas.

When they want to get the better of creationist-idealists, they build a simple logical chain. “Well,” they say, “God created everything around. And who created God?

Creationists are angry and confused. But the most advanced and educated ones find something to cover. And they ask their opponents a “symmetrical” question: “What happened before the Big Bang?”

The standard answer that had to be given a couple of weeks ago - that there was nothing: neither space, nor time - naturally did not suit the debaters.

And then it happened. The godless evolutionists seem to have beaten the creationists. Some still do not know who created God. And others have already understood what happened before the Big Bang.

A LONG TIME AGO, IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE...

There was another Universe before ours. Previous This conclusion was reached by Roger Penrose from Oxford and Vahan Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physical Institute. Both are not some kind of home-based dreamers, but world-famous scientists. They studied the so-called relict radiation - the microwave background left after the Big Bang and preserving information about the origin of the Universe and its development. And against this background, they discovered strange irregularities that looked like concentric circles.

Penrose and Gurzadyan believe: circles are not from our space-time. These are the gravitational signatures of the collision of colossal, supermassive black holes that formed in the previous Universe at the end of its existence. That is, before “our” Big Bang.

According to scientists, universes arise in sequence - one after another. And the end of the previous one becomes the beginning of the next one.

The main conclusion: the universe is cyclical.

In the future, our Universe will return to the state it was in at the time of the Big Bang, says Penrose. - It will become homogeneous. And from infinitely large it will again turn into infinitely small. And black holes will evaporate.

By the way, astrophysicists Paul Steinhardt from Princeton and Neil Turok from Cambridge share a similar opinion. And they prove that the Universe first expands and then contracts. And the problem just didn’t start. Because the Universe goes through the same cycle. It collapses and immediately recovers.

Who knows, maybe God is cyclical? One, for example, ends his existence, the other immediately begins along with the Universe he created. Then the traces discovered by Penrose and Gurzadyan are imprints of events that happened to the previous God?

"DARK STREAM" TO ANOTHER WORLD

But what if the universes don’t just go one after another, one replacing the other? Do they appear and disappear en masse, like bubbles in boiling water? And such suspicions arise. At a minimum, there is some other Universe next to ours.

Two years ago, a group of NASA specialists led by astrophysicist Alexander Kashlinsky, studying microwave and X-ray radiation, discovered strange behavior in about 800 distant galaxy clusters. It turned out that they were all flying in the same direction - towards a certain part of space - at a speed of 1000 kilometers per second. This universal movement was called the "dark stream."

Recently it turned out that the “dark stream” covers as many as 1,400 galaxy clusters. And carries them to an area located at the visible borders of our Universe.

According to one of the assumptions, somewhere out there - beyond the limits of observation - there is a huge mass that attracts matter. But this contradicts the existing theory, according to which the matter after the Big Bang, which gave birth to our Universe, was distributed more or less evenly. This means that there cannot be concentrations of masses possessing such fantastic power. Then what's there?

An amazing hypothesis was proposed by Laura Mersini-Houghton from the University of North Carolina. According to her calculations, it turns out that our galaxies are being sucked into another Universe located nearby.

It’s interesting that Laura came up with her ideas back in 2006 - before the “dark stream” was discovered. In fact, she predicted it. But if there are several universes, then what about God in this case? Is there one in each? Or is there just one for everything?

INSTEAD OF A COMMENT

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society of London:

“We will never understand how the Universe works”

The leader of British scientists, astrophysicist and part-time royal astronomer doubted the intellectual abilities of human civilization. Like, we don’t understand the laws of the universe. And you will never know how the Universe came into being and what awaits it. And hypotheses, for example, about the Big Bang, which allegedly gave birth to the world around us, or that many others can exist in parallel with our Universe, will remain unproven assumptions.

Undoubtedly, there are explanations for everything, says Lord Rees, but there are no geniuses who could understand them. The human mind is limited. And he reached his limit.

Indeed, physicists and cosmologists have been trying in vain for several decades to create a Theory of Everything. Or the so-called Unified Theory. Albert Einstein worked on it. But I didn’t finish it. He ordered subsequent generations to finish it. But they pass.

The generally accepted so-called Standard Model of the Universe implies that there are four fundamental forces in it: electromagnetic force, the strong force, which exists in the atomic nucleus, the weak force, which controls radioactive decay, and gravity. Today's scientists have managed to link the first three forces. And the fourth - gravity - cannot be attached to the theory. As well as understand its nature.

We are as far from understanding the microstructure of vacuum as fish in an aquarium, which have absolutely no idea how the environment in which they live works, the astronomer royal figuratively conveys the bitter truth.

For example, I have reason to suspect that space has a cellular structure,” continues Lord Rees. - And each of its cells is trillions of trillions of times smaller than an atom. But we cannot prove or disprove this or understand how such a design works. The task is too difficult, prohibitive for human mind. Like Einstein's theory of relativity is for a monkey.

As a result, the lord concludes: they say, I believe that Unified theory in principle exists. But to create it, no human mind is enough. Moreover, all applicants for such authorship are likely to be mistaken.

Eat. Yaroslavsky

The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers

From the publisher

A book by the talented anti-religious propagandist Em. Yaroslavsky’s “The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers” first began to be published in the form of separate articles in the newspaper “Bezbozhnik” at the end of 1922. Since that time, it has gone through ten editions in Russian, the last of which was published in 1938. The book has gained wide popularity among readers . Many believers who broke with religion indicated that reading the “Bible for Believers and Non-Believers” played a decisive role in overcoming their religious prejudices. The book also provided great assistance to propagandists and agitators in conducting anti-religious propaganda.

According to the author, this book was conceived by him even before the Great October Socialist Revolution. “When propagating the teachings of communism among workers and peasants,” he writes in the preface, “I very often came across the fact that what prevents the worker and peasant from correctly accepting the teachings of communism is the religious dope that envelops his consciousness.” This book serves the task of liberating workers from religious prejudices.

The great advantage of “The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers” is that it comprehensively criticizes the Bible in witty, figurative and colorful language - “ holy book» Christians, contradictions and absurdity are revealed biblical stories about the world. Yaroslavsky convincingly proves that a careful study of the Bible allows us to conclude that there is a complete absence of anything “sacred” in it, that it is a collection of the most diverse works of many ancient writers, created by them in different time, as well as fairy tales and legends of various peoples. The Bible is by no means the most ancient book, as the churchmen claim: there are even more ancient books among various nations that tell differently about the creation of the world and man. As in the Bible, these books glorify the deities revered by these peoples - Buddha, Brahma, Shiva, etc., and the religious teachings set forth in them are considered the only true ones. Biblical myths, the author concludes, are “the invention of a savage, dark, ignorant,” who could not rely on the achievements of science and did not have astronomical instruments to study celestial space.

The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers reveals the non-scientific nature of biblical stories about the origin of the world, the solar system, the Earth, plants, animals and humans. These tales, the author notes, reflect naive ideas primitive people about the world around them.

By revising biblical teaching about society, the author shows its hostility to the interests of the working people. The Bible justifies the enslavement of people, declares the division of society into exploiters and exploited inviolable, legitimizes the existence of relations of domination and subordination and social inequality. Therefore, the exploiting classes, says Yaroslavsky, perfectly understand the meaning of the Bible; they use it to cover up the oppression and exploitation of the working masses, inciting national enmity and hatred, robberies and wars with reference to “God’s will.”

Religion stifles free, creative thought, an inquisitive mind, demanding humility and submission to the will of a non-existent deity. It hinders the working people in their struggle for their liberation and slows down the progressive development of society. Only Marxist-Leninist ideology, Yaroslavsky emphasizes, provides a scientific understanding of the world, “teaches not only how to explain the world, but also how to change it for the benefit of all mankind.”

Having thrown off the yoke of exploitation and built a socialist society, man became a creator, the creator of his life. He learned to control social phenomena, subjugate the forces of nature, and penetrates deeper into the secrets of the universe. Science, having become the property of millions of working people, helps them put an end to the naive, savage fairy tale about gods - the creators and rulers of the universe.

“The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers” is a valuable tool in anti-religious propaganda; it will help believers free themselves from the religious dope.

This edition of the book is based on Em. Yaroslavsky “The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers” is taken from the 1938 edition. Minor editorial changes have been made to the text.

Preface (1)

I conceived this book even before the revolution. While promoting the teachings of communism among workers and peasants, I very often came across the fact that what prevents the worker and peasant from correctly perceiving the teachings of communism is the religious dope that envelops his consciousness. This religious intoxication has been inflicted since childhood, when the child is powerless to fight those deceptive and sometimes wild concepts about the world that were, and often are still, driven into his head by his educators.

And before the revolution, it was the case that almost all of us were subjected to religious indoctrination at school and at home. We still knew nothing about the world, we did not know the laws of our country and did not know who creates and in whose interests these laws are created, but they stubbornly hammered into us that there is a supreme judge, a supreme ruler, a supreme being in heaven, who has millions of servants , saints, angels and devils. And from childhood we were taught that the whole world was created according to the word of this supreme being.

The basis of this teaching, both for Christians of different faiths and for Jews, is the Bible, and even the Mohammedan Koran takes nine-tenths of its teaching from the same Bible. And now almost half the world is brought up from childhood on these stories from the Bible. And priests explain not only the “creation” of the world, but also all the events of human history on the basis of the Bible.

The priests convinced and continue to convince us that the Bible is a holy book, that it is a revelation of God himself, given to people. But when they began to study it more carefully, when the history of the Jews, in whose language it was written, was sufficiently studied, it turned out that the Bible is a collection of a wide variety of works, compiled at different times by many writers. It contains many fairy tales and legends that can be found among any pastoral and agricultural people. The Bible also contains some fragmentary information from actual Jewish history, but over the centuries these stories were passed on from mouth to mouth, copied by illiterate scribes, supplemented by later inserts, often completely fictitious, so that it is difficult to even distinguish where the fiction is. In the Bible there are war songs, and tender love songs like Solomon’s “Song of Songs,” and descriptions of nature, and codes of laws of different times, genealogies and chronicles, descriptions of rituals and a collection of sayings, stories, novels and parables, reflections on the past and future, letters and hymns. And for some reason all this is called “ sacred history" Why?

The Hebrew Bible is very ancient, but many other peoples have the same, even more ancient books of the same nature, and they also have their own stories about the creation of the world and sacred hymns, etc. And the Hindu believer, for example, believes that only his books, which tell about Buddha, Bodisattva, Brahma, Shivu and other deities - only the teaching of such books is a real holy teaching, only they contain the real truth.

When man was first able to make fire, he probably thought it wonderful. The fire warmed him, protected him from wild animals, saved him from the horrors of the dark night in the forest, in the cave. At one time, a person could get by with a torch and illuminate his wretched home with some greasy bowl, but now not every peasant is satisfied with kerosene lamps, and he wants to have electric light. For millions of people, the brain is still illuminated by the primitive ray of light. This primeval beam smokes and smokes and makes it difficult to see at any distance. Religion and the Bible cloud the consciousness of the worker and peasant. They do not lead forward, but call to the past, to the wild, to an obsolete state, they intimidate with the formidable will of the almighty Jehovah. The Bible fetters the will of man with the image of an “omniscient and omnipresent” God, without whose will “a hair from a man’s head will not fall” and who, however, is powerless before the devil he created. From cradle to grave, Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan and other priests entangle a person’s life with witchcraft rituals, sacraments and intimidate him with pictures “ doomsday"and eternal torment in hell for the slightest deviation from all those absurd, wild demands that religion makes.

A person brought up in the spirit of religion becomes incapable of fighting for the reconstruction of the world. Religion teaches submission to slave owners and exploiters; religion kills bold thought, an inquisitive mind, it requires humility of the human spirit, its admiration before the will of a non-existent deity. Thousands of years of slavery were sanctified by religion, the greatest crimes were committed in the name of God. The most unbridled forms of terror and oppression of the exploiters over the working people in all countries are sanctified by all religions and churches. The Bible was the guide, the reference book for the greatest villains the world has ever known. Tens of millions of people were killed in the name of God, in the name of religion. Religion covered up the crimes of the ruling classes, kings, nobles, just as it now covers up the crimes of capitalists and landowners all over the world. Religion was and remains a whip, a bridle, a cunningly woven network that has kept and still holds the peoples of the world in deep slavery.

Life on earth never remains the same, and one rightly said Greek philosopher: "Everything flows, everything changes". The surface of the earth is changing, the climate is changing, animals and plants are changing, people are changing, their way of obtaining a livelihood is changing: from primitive hunting - to cattle breeding, from cattle breeding - to agriculture, from agriculture - to crafts, from crafts - to industry, from simple sticks and stones - to stone, bronze and iron weapons and tools of production, from simple tools of production - to complex machines, steam and electric engines. Language changes, morals change. Changes government structure: from a wild primitive herd, from a primitive hunting group, from a primitive tribal community - to tribal unions, to a feudal state, to a bourgeois monarchy, to a democratic republic, to a Soviet republic.

The exploiters, who from ancient times made religion an instrument of their domination over the masses, are now trying to adapt their religious teachings to the conditions of modern times. The exploiters and their priests, the clergy of the whole world, know well that the power of religion is a strong intoxication, it is the opium of the people, as the teacher of communism Karl Marx rightly said. Slowly, with with great difficulty, the masses of the people are freed from this dope. Working people are freeing themselves faster from the religious dope in our country, where godlessness is growing as socialism grows. The religious dope still hangs heavily over the consciousness of hundreds of millions of working people in capitalist and colonial countries, slowing down their struggle for liberation. But even in the Land of Soviets, the country of socialism, the damned, moribund past tenaciously grabs hold of the living things moving forward and pulls us back to the old slavery. The exploiters of all countries know that as faith in the gods collapses and faith in the so-called Holy Bible, they will lose one of the forces with which they dominate. The exploiting classes know this very well. Among themselves, they are sometimes even ready to allow freethinking, but for the people they consider it necessary to abandon religion, to keep God in reserve to curb the people. Their philosophers, like Voltaire, sometimes laugh at faith in God and say: as for us, we can do without God, but the people need God like a whip. “And if there were no God,” they say, “then it would be necessary to invent him.” And only when a new revolutionary class was born - the proletariat, which reveals all the secrets of existence, which breaks all slave chains, no matter who they were created, which, freeing itself, liberates the entire world of workers, which is interested in creating a classless society - The proletariat pulls the gods from heaven and does not want to accept the fairy tales of humanity’s distant childhood as the basis for understanding the world. He created a new understanding of the world - scientific. This understanding of the world teaches not only how to explain the world, but also how to change it for the benefit of all humanity.

Guided by the revolutionary teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the working class of our country, under the leadership of the Communist Party, is rebuilding the world in a new way and has built a basically socialist society. The working class leads the broad masses of the peasantry, guiding and helping them in the socialist reorganization of agriculture. The peasantry, its working strata, in bourgeois countries are exploited by landowners, capitalists, and kulaks. With the help of religion and the church, the ruling classes cloud the consciousness of the workers and working layers of the peasantry, turning them into obedient slaves of capitalist, landlord and kulak exploitation. In the Soviet country, millions of collective farmers, consciously participating in the struggle for the construction of socialism, have already broken with religion, realizing its harm to the working people. But there are still many who believe in priestly and kulak religious tales, both in the city and in the countryside. Therefore, a lot of work needs to be done to convince believers that biblical tales are unscientific and harmful.

The Bible for Believers and Unbelievers serves this purpose.

What is the bible

To the question of what the Bible is, theologians (or, more simply, priests and priests), Jewish and Christian, give the answer: it is Holy Scripture, a divine book compiled, if not by God himself, then by his confidant - Moses, to whom he dictated this book on Mount Sinai. One believing sectarian sent me a very angry letter regarding the first chapter of the “Bible for Believers and Unbelievers,” in which he writes to me: “These books (the Bible) were written by God himself, these are the books that existed before the Babylonian captivity.” This is how things stood, according to some priests. But when we turn to other nations, we will see, firstly, that the Hebrew Bible (“Torah”) - not at all the oldest, most ancient book, that other peoples have preserved written monuments and books that are much more ancient than the Hebrew Bible; secondly, the bible was compiled in different time and is a mixture of various works, little and artificially connected with each other.

Most of all, religious preachers try to prove that the Pentateuch was written by Moses from the words of God. There is not a word about this in the Pentateuch itself. Deuteronomy (XXXIV, 5-6) (2) describes the death and funeral of Moses. Of course, Moses, if he really lived and wrote the Bible, could not have described his own death and your funeral. This would be tantamount to believing that Moses walked behind his own tomb. The description ends with the words: “And no one knows the place of his burial even to this day.” This could only be written by the one who wrote about the death of the fabulous Moses. Or, for example, in the book of Numbers, XII, 3, we read: “Moses was the meekest man of all the people on earth.” Could Moses have written this about himself?

This and many other examples indicate that the Pentateuch was not written by some Moses, but much later than the time when this fabulous biblical hero allegedly lived.

The same can be said about many other biblical books attributed to one author or another.

This is the Bible on which they build their religious doctrine Jewish, Christian and other priests.

Part one

world creation

Chapter first

God before the creation of the world

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis, I, 1). Thus begins the book of Genesis, not written before 2500 years ago. When was this biblical “in the beginning”? Believers in what is written in the Bible calculate the existence of the world “from the beginning of the creation of the world” to today at 7445 years old.

Let’s believe it for a moment too. But the inquisitive human mind cannot rest on this. If 7445 years ago God began to create heaven and earth, then what happened before that time? The synodal edition of the Bible responds to this: “The earth was formless and empty, and darkness was upon the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the waters” (Genesis, I, 2).

There are many translations of the Bible, which was originally written in Hebrew. These translations are sometimes very different from one another. These translations were revised by a dozen eminent professors of theology, headed by Professor Couch. And after this check and comparison with the Jewish originals, it turned out that this passage of the Bible should be read like this: “ The earth was empty and deserted(in Hebrew: togu vabogu), and darkness lay (hung) on ​​the ocean (in Hebrew: tag), and the spirit of God (in Hebrew: ruach Elohim) hovered over the water (hamayim).” A more accurate translation of the words “togu wabogu” gives us the following picture of the earth: “ The earth was a primitive surface of water" This means that there was a primeval surface of water, and above this surface the “ruach Elohim” hovered, that is, the breath, the spirit of the god Elohim, hovered (later we will see that this was only one of the many gods in which the ancient Jews believed).

Where was this spirit of Elohim, or the spirit of God? He rushed in the same darkness that hung over the Earth and over the abyss. This means that the picture was as they say in the comic story about the creation of the world: in the middle there was an abyss, and at the edges it was empty. And above this emptiness, above the primeval sea of ​​our planet rushed around(and he wasn’t tired of this empty activity!) the spirit of God.

If the beginning of peacemaking was 7445 years ago, then what did this very spirit of the god Elohim do before this beginning? How many years, how many thousands of years, did he rush over the abyss? Where did this very spirit of God come from? Where did you come from? bible god?

The priests are very fond of asking us atheists questions: where did the world come from, where did matter come from, what gave rise to movement? These are very serious and necessary questions, which we, atheists, answer and will answer. But priests really don’t like it when we answer that matter has existed forever. At the same time, they consider it possible to deceive believers with a tale about some kind of “spirit” of God, the spirit of the Jewish god Elohim, the spirit of one of the thousands of gods created by the human imagination of a half-savage, half-shepherd, half-nomad, the Spirit of Elohim, who has been hovering over the “empty abyss” for billions of years " Well, isn’t this same ruach Elohim empty after that?! Isn’t this a soap bubble that bursts as soon as you touch it, as soon as you bring the light of science to it?!

From the further account of the creation of the world in the book of Genesis, we will see that the Hebrew god Elohim, who later became the father god of the god son Jesus, indulged in this boring activity of flying over the abyss simply because he didn’t know whether anything good would come of it if he changed this order, or rather disorder. But still, as the Bible says and as the priests assure, about 7445 years ago this same god suddenly spoke. Had he said anything before? We don’t know anything from the Bible or any other books. How did it become known what the earth was like before its construction? Who saw how the spirit of God hovered over the world before the creation of the world itself? Who heard these first words of the god Elohim? Isn’t it clear that both the first words of God and this whole story were invented, invented? To this the churchmen answer: the Bible (in this case we mean the so-called “Moses’ Pentateuch”) is the revelation of God, everything that is written in it is the record that Moses made on Mount Sinai. We will dwell on this more than once and let's go to Mount Sinai and see what Moses was doing there, how many stenographers he had to record the stories of Jehovah God.

In the meantime, let's see how God begins to create the world.

The Book of Genesis says:

“And God said: Let there be light. And there was light.

And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

And God called the light day and the darkness night.

And there was evening, and there was morning: one day” (Genesis, I, 3-5).

Has it ever occurred to you, believers, that this very eternal god knew absolutely nothing? He didn't even know the light was good. How could he know when he had never seen the light? Has it ever occurred to you: how is it so - this god rushed around for billions, trillions, quadrillions of years, forever rushed in the darkness, who only had to say a word for it to become light, and did not say it?!

Haven’t the believers thought what it was like for this very god or the spirit of God, doomed to forever rush around in emptiness and darkness, how bored he was, how he had no one to exchange a word with. One can imagine what an unbearable life it was: to endure chaos and darkness forever, how empty and meaningless was the life of this Jewish god, who poked in all directions in the darkness, like a blind kitten, until he stammered only three words: let there be light!

Chapter two

Let there be light!

So, from the first chapter of the book of Genesis we learn that the Jewish god Elohim, after billions of years of complete idleness (after all, one cannot call it a matter that the “spirit” of this god “hovered over the abyss”), after an eternal stay in chaos, in darkness, after eternal loneliness and forced silence, finally began to create the world 7445 years ago. And on the first day of creation he created light. He separated the light from the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness night. I saw that the light was good.

Can such a fairy tale really satisfy a person? Meanwhile, millions of people believe this because they know nothing about the origin and development of our planet - the Earth on which we live and which is constantly changing, like all other worlds.

But let's return to the Bible. Let us believe the impossible: let us believe that 7445 years ago light was first created according to the word of the Jewish god Elohim. What kind of light was it? Solar? Lunar? Some other star, some other sun? Which one? Or maybe the god Elohim lit a fire and, by the light of the fire, began his creative work? Or lit electric or gas lamps? Alas, the Jewish god had neither electric stations nor gas plants, for all this was created by man, like the Jewish god Elohim himself.

According to the Bible, the sun, moon and stars were created on the fourth day of creation. It turns out that for the first three days day and night alternated on Earth without the Sun, Moon and other stars! What is the change of day and night? Why does the change of day and night occur? Every schoolchild now knows that change day And nights occurs because our spherical planet, the Earth, rotates in space around its own axis. During the day, that is, within 24 hours, the Earth makes a full rotation around its axis. During these 24 hours, each individual part of the globe is temporarily illuminated by the sun's rays; When it is night on one half of the globe, it is day on the other at the same time. When it is morning on one hemisphere, it is evening on the other. If it were not for the Sun, whose light illuminates the Earth, there would be no light on the Earth, and there would not be such changes of day and night, the Earth itself would not exist. Day and night on earth alternate only because there is the Sun, around which the Earth revolves throughout the year, making a complete revolution around its own axis in 24 hours. Therefore, the biblical tale that God created some kind of light on Earth before the Earth was illuminated by the Sun is an absurdity, an invention of a savage, a dark, ignorant person. A fairy tale, a fiction, as if on the “first, second, and third days” the Earth was illuminated in some other way, not with the same light as in the following days.

What is this fairy tale based on? It is based on the fact that before people, without studying the Earth, without exploring the “celestial”, i.e., world spaces, without having either telescopes (3) or other astronomical instruments (4), imagined the device in a completely different way Earth and sky. The Earth seemed motionless to them (while others thought that the Earth stood on three whales; still others believed that the Earth floated like a pancake in butter in the expanse of water). The sky seemed to them like a crystal dome resting on the edges of the Earth. And the light on Earth, as they thought, may not come from the Sun. After all, it can be light on days when the sun is not visible! After all, it becomes light in the morning long before the sun appears on the horizon!

But this understanding of the structure of the world was subsequently replaced by a more correct one, although still far from the truth. Observing the change of seasons and the movement of the stars from year to year, people finally began to understand that the change of seasons, like the change of days and nights, depends precisely on the luminaries. As a result of this, another story about the creation of light was subsequently created, described in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.

"14. And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to illuminate the earth and to separate the day from the night, and for signs, and times, and days, and years;

15. And let them be lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light on the earth. And so it became.

16. And God created two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars;

17. And God placed them in the firmament of the sky to give light on the earth.

18. And rule the day and the night, and separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

19. And there was evening, and there was morning: the fourth day.”

This is what the writers of the Bible say. And this absurd fairy tale about the creation of the world was hammered into the heads of millions of children in schools by priests before the revolution; half a billion of humanity is forced to believe it! They drive this tale into their heads everywhere.

These stories are nothing more than evidence of a very imperfect, incorrect understanding of the structure of the world. The ancients thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and everything else was created only to serve the Earth. To prevent darkness on earth, God seems to light lamps: larger ones during the day, smaller ones at night. These lamps seem to be immovably attached to the “firmament of heaven,” just as lamps are nailed to a wall.

And again the old Jewish god Elohim, having pinned up these lamps, which he shook out of his pockets, just as a magician in a booth shakes out the objects previously hidden there from his sleeve - again he saw that it was good only when he did it. Before that, I didn’t know whether it would be good or not. And this is an omniscient and omnipotent God! Truly pitiful is this Elohim, who climbs the firmament of heaven with a ladder, nails and bundles of stars and nails the luminaries on the heavenly dome!

According to the Bible, the greatest luminary is the Sun, which illuminates the Earth. And we now know that our Sun is just one of millions of other suns and that many of these suns are much brighter. There are stars (Betelgeuse, Antares, etc.) that are many millions of times larger than our sun! We know that our planet, the Earth, with its companion the Moon, constitutes only a small part of the solar system (with the central body - the Sun), and the whole solar system- just a small grain of sand in a huge space filled with other worlds, other suns. And they want to force us to believe what the ignorant Jewish shepherds and Assyro-Babylonian farmers believed, that a small Earth is the center of the world.

Last years characterized by enormous successes in electrification. Man gradually, through enormous efforts, achieved that he understood many natural phenomena and learned to subjugate, although still to a small extent, some of the forces of nature. He penetrated into the depths of the earth and from these depths extracts peat, oil, coal - the remains of huge forests once buried in the ground with everything that then inhabited the Earth. He knows that in these depths there is a reserve of solar energy - heat and light - once absorbed by animals and plants. He learned, burning these remnants of the former life, extract the buried solar energy bound in these remnants - light, motor and so on. He turns it into electricity and closes this force into a complex network of wires and currents. He controls them.

Who is he - a great scientist, philosopher, sage? - A simple worker. Recent slave For centuries it was oppressed by slave owners, feudal landowners, and capitalists. He was deprived of knowledge. But he won them. He is the creator. Having just been born, he becomes a giant. He locks lightning from the sky into the wires of power plants, and he fetters the movement of wind and the movement of water and, in general, any movement of matter in the screws and turns of levers, turbines, gears, and motors. And in the dead of night, when there is darkness all around, when neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars illuminate our home, he - the proletarian - creates light! He approaches the lever, the station switch. Beneath him, in the dungeons, like chained animals, dynamos hum, in which every screw, every lever is provided in advance, calculated in advance, every movement is calculated in advance.

The October Socialist Revolution in our country opened up enormous opportunities for the broadest development of scientific knowledge and the application of science in the reconstruction of the world. The workers of our country, freed from the exploiters, created large-scale industry and large-scale mechanized agriculture, built huge power plants, of which the power of the Dnieper alone is over a million horsepower.

Scientific knowledge In our country, cities and villages have become the property of millions of working people. They - these millions of working people - recognize themselves as the real creators of the new world and therefore discard all sorts of naive, savage tales about gods - the creators of the world.

"Let there be light!" - says the proletarian. And turns the lever, the switch, the plug. And for hundreds of kilometers around, light flashes over cities and villages. It would be in vain for a miner from the underground to pray to the heavenly gods to illuminate his dungeons, drifts, and galleries. No! He knows that these gods are powerless because they do not exist. And even though all the priests of the globe prayed to their gods for this, this miracle will not happen. No, a miner from the underground approaches a telephone receiver made by the same proletarian, he speaks to the same proletarian tens, hundreds of miles away. And they hear him at the station. He does not offer prayers, does not bow - he demands: “Give me light!” And the proletarian answers him: “Let there be light in your dungeon too!” And instantly, large and small suns light up in the underground depths. At the bottom of the sea he can light these suns, he can warm with this light, give life to plants and animals, replace the hen over the eggs, the sun for plants and animals. He moves railroad trains, and mighty ocean ships, and light steel birds - airplanes crossing the clouds, and plows on arable land, and millions of spindles and machine tools, drills, cuts, saws, melts steel. Heals the lame and the blind, rheumatics and other sick people.

How pitiful is the biblical Elohim before this liberated proletarian - a recent slave who uses all the greatest achievements of science and technology!

Millions of workers in our country, taking advantage of these achievements of science and technology, are actively participating in the struggle for new world, for socialism.

Chapter Three

Chapter first

God before the creation of the world

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis, I, 1). This is how the book of Genesis begins, written no earlier than 2500 years ago. When was this biblical “in the beginning”? Believers in what is written in the Bible calculate the existence of the world “from the beginning of the creation of the world” to the present day at 7445 years.
Let’s believe it for a moment too. But the inquisitive human mind cannot rest on this. If 7445 years ago God began to create heaven and earth, then what happened before that time? The synodal edition of the Bible responds to this: “The earth was formless and empty, and darkness was upon the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the waters” (Genesis, I, 2).
There are many translations of the Bible, which was originally written in Hebrew. These translations are sometimes very different from one another. These translations were revised by a dozen eminent professors of theology, headed by Professor Couch. And after this check and comparison with the Jewish originals, it turned out that this passage of the Bible should be read like this: “The earth was empty and desolate (in Hebrew: togu vabogu), and darkness lay (hung) on ​​the ocean (in Hebrew: tagem ), and the spirit of God (in Hebrew: ruach Elohim) hovered over the waters (hamayim).” A more accurate translation of the words “togu vabogu” gives us the following picture of the earth: “The earth was a primeval expanse of water.” This means that there was a primeval surface of water, and above this surface the “ruach Elohim” hovered, that is, the breath, the spirit of the god Elohim, hovered (later we will see that this was only one of the many gods in which the ancient Jews believed).
Where was this spirit of Elohim, or the spirit of God? He rushed in the same darkness that hung over the Earth and over the abyss. This means that the picture was as they say in the comic story about the creation of the world: in the middle there was an abyss, and at the edges it was empty. And above this emptiness, above the primeval sea of ​​our planet, hovered (and he was not tired of this empty occupation!) the spirit of God.
If the beginning of peacemaking was 7445 years ago, then what did this very spirit of the god Elohim do before this beginning? How many years, how many thousands of years, did he rush over the abyss? Where did this very spirit of God come from? Where did the biblical god himself come from?
The priests are very fond of asking us atheists questions: where did the world come from, where did matter come from, what gave rise to movement? These are very serious and necessary questions, which we, atheists, answer and will answer. But priests really don’t like it when we answer that matter has existed forever. At the same time, they consider it possible to deceive believers with a tale about some kind of “spirit” of God, the spirit of the Jewish god Elohim, the spirit of one of the thousands of gods created by the human imagination of a half-savage, half-shepherd, half-nomad, the Spirit of Elohim, who has been hovering over the “empty abyss” for billions of years " Well, isn’t this same ruach Elohim empty after that?! Isn’t this a soap bubble that bursts as soon as you touch it, as soon as you bring the light of science to it?!
From the further account of the creation of the world in the book of Genesis, we will see that the Hebrew god Elohim, who later became the father god of the god son Jesus, indulged in this boring activity of flying over the abyss simply because he did not know whether anything good would come of him if he changed this order, or rather disorder. But still, as the Bible tells and as the priests assure, about 7445 years ago this very god suddenly spoke. Had he said anything before? We don’t know anything from the Bible or any other books. How did it become known what the earth was like before its construction? Who saw how the spirit of God hovered over the world before the creation of the world itself? Who heard these first words of the god Elohim? Isn’t it clear that both the first words of God and this whole story were invented, invented? To this the churchmen answer: the Bible (in this case we mean the so-called “Moses’ Pentateuch”) is the revelation of God, everything that is written in it is the record that Moses made on Mount Sinai. We will dwell on this more than once and let's go to Mount Sinai and see what Moses was doing there, how many stenographers he had to record the stories of Jehovah God.
In the meantime, let's see how God begins to create the world.
The Book of Genesis says:
“And God said: Let there be light. And there was light.
And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.
And God called the light day and the darkness night.
And there was evening, and there was morning: one day” (Genesis, I, 3-5).
Has it ever occurred to you, believers, that this same eternal god knew absolutely nothing? He didn't even know the light was good. How could he know when he had never seen the light? Has it ever occurred to you: how can it be that this god rushed around for billions, trillions, quadrillions of years, forever rushing around in the darkness, who only had to say a word for it to become light, and did not say it?!
Haven’t the believers thought what it was like for this very god or the spirit of God, doomed to forever rush around in emptiness and darkness, how bored he was, how he had no one to exchange a word with. One can imagine what an unbearable life it was: to endure chaos and darkness forever, how empty and meaningless was the life of this Jewish god, who poked in all directions in the darkness, like a blind kitten, until he stammered only three words: let there be light! "

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