If God's in charge, He's in the process of shutting down the operation

I prefer if you refer to procrastination as "working in mysterious ways". That's what I'll do from now on.

'Aside from the many obvious inconsistencies' were my first words.

The fish thing is something rarely considered and usually leaves dogmatic Christians with their mouth gaping like a fish for a moment as they try to think of an answer (of which there is none).

The Jehovah's Witness guy in my work explained it away (or thought he did) by saying the fish that survived adapted. To which I said 'You mean evolution?'

He, of course, said adaptation is not evolution. The hoop jumping continues.

The bible describes a global flood that covers the highest mountains, so that would not be possible. All freshwater would be subsumed by salt water.

Could also be pirate space monkeys came and saved all the fish and then returned them after. It’s really fun to make up situations where the fish didn’t die in the story. We can even give Noah a staff and special powers as long they justify our view of the world.

Yahweh evolved out of existing Canaanite polytheism.

El was the highest god of this pantheon, Ashera was his wife/consort and chief goddess, Ba'al was their child, god of storms and fertility, amongst others gods like Anat and Astarte.

The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, mostly switches between referring to 'God' as El, and 'The Lord', Adonai, Elohim, which is actually plural and means 'The Gods', and YHWH.

Adonai was originally a title given to Ba'al.

Yahwism basically started as a cult, in Canaan, that amalgomated Ba'al and El together into a single God, originally referenced Ashera but then wrote her out of the religion, and then just smashed many of the stories about or involving El and Ba'al together, causing the incongruous naming scheme and duplicatative, often directly adjacent, stories in the hebrew Torah, which are largely the same general plot, but have inconsistent details.

This is why Yahweh is jealous and demands destruction of idols to his predecessors in Canaan, and seems to acknowledge that other gods do actually exist, but he is the best and most powerful.

This is why you get Exodus 6:3

https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm

Where God basically retcons his name. You see I used to go by El, but now my name is Yahweh!

Its integral to establishing the mythic history that Yahweh and his flock are actually not from Canaan, they're escapees from Egypt, and Yahweh promised them Canaan...

While in reality, the Exodus story is completely impossible as described (would have been something like 2-3 million people leaving Egypt, at a point in history where that was comparable.to the total population of lower Egypt), there is 0 archaeological evidence for anything like that ever occuring... but having a unifying myth is useful for justifying conquering some of your small neighboring Canaanites, even if the stories about thag are also largely mythic and exagerated.

...

Something somewhat analagous seems to have happened something like 600-700 years earlier in Egypt, when Akhenaten decided that actually, Aten was the best and only important god, that the others had died or grown weak.

This attempt at either monotheism or monolatrism didn't work out so well, it was so unpopular that shortly after Akhenaten's death, polytheism was reinstated, Akhenaten's name was removed from official historical records, his monuments were destroyed, and the dynasty that came after him reffered to him as 'the enemy' or 'the criminal'.

What's the sedentarism connection? I thought maybe I misunderstood the definition, but it means what I thought and I guess I've never heard of the idea.

I don't think monotheism was a big thing before. I just suspect that early religions were created with a respect and fear of nature and that the deities served as a foil for all the forces of nature around humans. Our way of life was to live among divinity, and in reverence to it. Then monotheism arrives, alongside so called "civilization", sedentarism allows dominion over nature, and a new philosophy comes. This philosophy is a dogmatical undermining of the creative forces of nature (mostly represented as femme) in favour of a pragmatical and extractive view ("you will not have any god other than me") allowing for a disrespect of natural resources that a direct connection to our current climate change problem.

It was a direct attempt at removing the ancient values of coexistence with nature, starting with oppressing femmininity and undermining what they historically and spiritually represented.

I am not throwing out monotheistic religion, I am not throwing out religion at all. You are right in saying I'm "exchanging" one religious view from another, but my feeling is that the original meaning of spirituality has been tainted by ancient propaganda.

This is all speculation, I'd be lying if I said otherwise, but in seeing the powers that be today and the way they act, and think...it just all seems so convenient to say that humanity is "naturally" inclined to fuck up their land. I do not believe that. I believe that humanity is naturally inclined to be gullible, and that someone made us believe we were above nature and should destroy and make violence to it, exactly what we are taught to do with women and feminility in general.

I just don't believe it is a coincidence

Isn't god supposed to be a "supreme being" not a "supreme human"?