Or "What Happens When You Take Your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Too Seriously"

Picture this: You're scrolling through ancient Mesopotamian Netflix circa 2100 BCE, and you stumble upon this absolute banger called "The Epic of Gilgamesh." Great story—friendship, mortality, a guy who builds a boat to survive a massive flood. Classic stuff. You think, "Wow, this is some premium content. I should totally write my own version."

Fast forward a few centuries, and some Hebrew scribes are sitting around going, "You know what this Gilgamesh flood story needs? More moral lecturing and a guy named Noah." So they take the same plot, swap out the characters, add some dietary restrictions, and boom—suddenly it's not entertainment anymore, it's divine revelation.

But here's where it gets really wild: Instead of saying "Hey, great story, borrowed it from the Babylonians," they go with "God personally dictated this to us." Which is like claiming you invented Star Wars because you wrote fan fiction about Luke Skywalker's cousin.

The Linguistics of Convenient Amnesia

Now, let's talk about the word games. When someone uses "antisemitism" to mean "hatred of Jews," they're technically committing linguistic fraud. Arabic is a Semitic language. Hebrew is a Semitic language. Palestinians speak Arabic. Israelis speak Hebrew. So Palestinians are literally as Semitic as it gets. But somehow, criticizing the bombing of Gaza makes you "antisemitic"?

That's like calling someone "anti-automotive" for criticizing Ford while they're driving a Chevy. It's word magic—the kind of semantic sleight-of-hand that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter.

The Archaeological Awkwardness

Here's my favorite part: According to their own book, the Israelites weren't even the original inhabitants of the land. The Hebrew Bible literally has God telling them to commit genocide against the Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, and basically anyone whose name ended in "-ites." It's like a Bronze Age ethnic cleansing manual.

But wait, there's more! Modern archaeology suggests the Israelites probably were Canaanites—just hill-dwelling Canaanites who developed a different religious identity over time. So the "conquest" narrative might be ancient historical fiction written by people trying to explain their own cultural evolution. It's like writing a story about how your family conquered your own house from yourselves.

And that Egyptian slavery thing? The one where 600,000 Hebrew families (roughly 2 million people) were enslaved in Egypt and then wandered the desert for 40 years? Yeah, there's zero archaeological evidence for any of that. None. It's like claiming your great-grandfather was a secret agent, but there are no records, no witnesses, and he apparently vanished without a trace along with two million of his closest friends.

The Fanfiction That Conquered the World

So we've established that much of the Hebrew Bible appears to be a creative remix of earlier Mesopotamian hits, seasoned with some local political mythology and a dash of historical revisionism. Fine. Ancient people wrote fiction. They had imaginations. They told stories to make sense of their world.

But here's where it gets insane: Somehow, these Bronze Age campfire stories became the justification for modern warfare, ethnic cleansing, and geopolitical domination. We're literally watching people kill each other over what amounts to ancient fan fiction.

It's like if, 3,000 years from now, future civilizations discovered Marvel Comics and decided that anyone who looked like Thor had a divine right to invade Norway. "But the sacred texts clearly show that Asgardians are the chosen people of Midgard! It says so right here in The Mighty Thor #143!"

The Zoroastrian Blues

Meanwhile, poor Zoroaster—who actually came up with half the concepts that Judaism and Christianity later "borrowed" (heaven, hell, final judgment, cosmic battle between good and evil)—gets exactly zero evangelical megachurches. No one's invading countries in the name of Ahura Mazda. No one's building settlements because the Avesta told them to.

Why? Because Zoroastrianism didn't get the right marketing team. It didn't align with the right empires at the right time. It's the Betamax of ancient religions—technically superior, historically prior, but it lost the format war.

The Gilgamesh Test

Here's a thought experiment I call the Gilgamesh Test: Why isn't anyone bombing cities in the name of Enkidu? The Epic of Gilgamesh deals with friendship, mortality, the meaning of existence, and the relationship between civilization and nature. These are timeless, universal themes that speak to the human condition.

But you don't see Gilgamesh fundamentalists flying planes into buildings or bulldozing olive groves because their ancient text told them to. You don't have Mesopotamian reconstructionists claiming that Uruk belongs to them because it says so in cuneiform.

The difference? Gilgamesh is safely categorized as "mythology." It's ancient literature we can appreciate without having to pretend it's a real estate deed from God.

The Divine Real Estate Scam

And that's really what this is all about, isn't it? Real estate. Land. Resources. Power. The religion is just the marketing department for what amounts to the world's longest-running property dispute.

"God gave us this land!" they say, waving around a book that also says you shouldn't eat shellfish and that selling your daughter into slavery is totally fine under certain circumstances. Somehow, they manage to keep the genocide parts while quietly dropping the no-cheeseburger clauses.

It's the most selective reading since college students highlighting textbooks—keep the parts that justify what you wanted to do anyway, ignore the inconvenient bits about loving your enemies or turning the other cheek.

The Punchline That Isn't Funny

The tragic irony is that most of these religious traditions, stripped of their political weaponization, actually contain some decent moral teachings. Love your neighbor. Care for the stranger. Don't murder people. Pretty solid advice.

But somehow, "don't murder people" gets translated into "don't murder people unless they're living on land we want, in which case, murder away—God said it's cool."

It's like taking the message "be excellent to each other" from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and using it to justify invading California because the movie was filmed there.

The Gods Must Be Laughing

If there are any actual deities watching this cosmic joke unfold, they must be absolutely hysterical. Here are humans, the species they supposedly created in their own image, mass-producing suffering and death while claiming it's what God wants.

"Hey God, should we feed the hungry?" "Nah, let's argue about who owns Jerusalem instead."

"Hey God, should we heal the sick?" "Better idea: let's debate whether you can eat bacon."

"Hey God, should we stop killing each other?" "Only after we figure out whose ancient fan fiction is more historically accurate."

The real miracle isn't that someone survived three days in a whale or turned water into wine. The real miracle is that humans managed to take stories about love, compassion, and transcendence and turn them into justifications for hatred, violence, and oppression.

Now that's what I call divine comedy.

P.S. - To any actual supreme beings reading this: We're sorry. We know you probably meant well. We just got a little carried away with the whole "free will" thing. Maybe next time, consider more explicit instructions? Like, "DON'T USE THESE STORIES TO KILL PEOPLE" in 72-point font across every page. I'm just sayin'.

om tat sat