Why should anyone worship a deity who calls this justice? Other than fear, I mean. But I should think you’d want a god at least measurably better than Darkseid.
Skald, give it up, seriously, you’ll hurt your brain and tank your neuron count faster than if you were to go on an all Jack Daniel’s diet. You’re arguing with the fu… fundamentaly reality-challenged person who thinks when man builds an irrigation ditch, God witholds the rain in retaliation, and free will is a sin that represents slavery to mankind and is a plan of Satan, which exists for realz, and his demons, who exist for realz and walk the Earth as we speak.
You can’t wedge reason in there. It’s clouds & cuckoos, as far as the eye can see.
I think we’re missing the most important point in Exodus; the much-discussed passage in 7;
Bolding mine, obviously.
Wait, what?! Basically the Egyptians are doomed one way or the other. No matter what Moses/Aaron says to Pharaoh he won’t listen to it because God’s forcing him not to listen? And that’s not even starting on the plagues.
For some of the plagues Pharaoh is noted as hardening his own heart. For the locusts (Exodus 10), though, we get this;
Here we have Pharaoh begging for fogiveness, but God manipulates him so that he still is not able to release the Israelites!
Then you get the most morally dubious act. Granted, it is not our place to judge, but reconciling this passage with the idea of a loving merciful God is difficult:
(From Exodus 11)
Bolding mine - what could they possibly have done? Because, at best, of their ruler’s stubbornness and at worst God’s will every single first born is condemned to death through no fault of their own.
Again God makes it clear what will happen;
(Exodus 11)
Why is he telling Moses and Aaron to keep asking Pharaoh, if He already knows he will never acquiesce to their request, by His own doing?
Once Pharaoh finally releases the Israelites there’s another example of God directly interfering with free will;
(Exodus 12)
So not only are all the Egyptian’s first born dead, they also get brainwashed to give away all their stuff because they are not God’s chosen people?
The Egyptian’s aren’t in the clear after this (Exodus 14):
God hardens Pharaoh’s hear again so that the army pursues them. Then we have the Red Sea parting. Even after the Egyptians release that God isn’t going to let them capture the Israelites after he makes the wheels of the chariots fall off and retreat, he waits until the whole army is in his trap and then springs it, wiping them out.
Exodus is by far one of the trickiest parts of the Bible ethically. What could the Egyptians have done to deserve God’s wrath? Did He create them just to punish them? The answer and therefore moral of Exodus is probably right in front of us; God states it numerous times; the Egyptians “…and that you may know that I am the LORD.” I.e., the only God, the only power, against whose will there is no argument, no resistance. God states in the first quote that hardening Pharaoh’s heart is a way to demonstrate His wonder multiple times. Clearly He knows this is the only way to prove the above point - the last quote especially makes it clear that He is using the Egyptians as a way of demonstrating His power - “I will gain glory for myself…”.
Of course, if you’re not God’s chosen people, you’re up slack alley.
You say you want to be an evil genius and here you are dissing God, the greatest evil genius of them all. I mean, if an evil genius were at his level, he could wipe out a city and have the people say it was all the fault of the inhabitants.
Yes, but Skald doesn’t expect people to love him and his flying monkeys, nor does he pretend to love the victims of his crazy capers.
I suppose you could argue Skald should have respect and feel kinship with the better, eviler Overlord, but there’s obviously also competition between them 
Bold mine. And I don’t mean if the egyptians were nephilum, as nephilums are 1/2 human (actually fully human/fully demon, but I’m not going into this one), and God is going to save His children which are humans.
The purpose of the flood was to undo the wickedness of mankind, not nephiium kind, no where does it say to destroy the nephilum.
To answer your question as to how the Egyptians could be demons, one would have to understand how a human could enslave another and inflict cruel labor, in short they in themselves can not sustain this treatment against another person, they are not designed to do that, as they would be overcome with the pain of their sin. But inflicting such pain on another opens up a door (a foothold as expressed in the NT) for demons to enter, at which point the the demons are the ones that inflict that cruelty on the Israelite.
So even thought the Egyptians may have been real humans, the Israelites could not access their humanity and only interact with and only be oppressed by demons.
We interrupt the scheduled eyerolls for a nitpick : Nephilim is already a plural. One Nephilim, two Nephilim, the Nephilim in general. Same goes for Anakim, Elohim, Selenim etc…
Thank you for your attention. Keep on crazin’
I think it’s totally understandable how one human could enslave another. All the instructions for it are right there in the bible.
So to make sure we all have the time line right:
- The Egyptians enslave their neighbors, the Israelites.
- God bitch slaps the Egyptians for enslaving the Israelites, pretty much wipes them out.
- God tells the Israelites to enslave their neighbors.
- Israelites enslave their neighbors.
Where exactly is the moral high ground supposed to be? I’m confused. The moral relativism displayed here is shocking.
Not to mention another logical problem:
You’re looking at this from the perspective of a modern American who has been told all his/her life that slavery is bad, m’kay?
Not that I disagree with this, but. To the people in those days, the issue wasn’t slavery itself, but how the slaves were treated.
You have to look at it from the perspective of an ancient person.
Bad things happened constantly. Why did those bad things happen? Because the gods or God willed it to be so. Ancient people didn’t expect gods to be fair, just look at Greek mythology. Some people were helped by the gods, some people were screwed over by the gods. Sometimes the people who were helped deserved to be helped because of their kindness or good qualities, but sometimes they were just helped on a whim. And some people who were punished deserved to be punished, other times they just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ancient people believed that gods were capricious and arbitrary because that’s the way life was. In other words, their theories about the properties of the gods were based on observation of life, rather than observation of the gods themselves. Sometimes a tree falls over and crushes your house, and obviously some god did it for some reason, but that doesn’t mean you deserved to have your house crushed, or that the god that crushed your house was being fair.
And the same standards applied to the ancient Isrealites. They didn’t expect YHWH to be fair, they expected him to do whatever he did, and whatever he did humanity had to live with the consequences. Saying that YHWH hardened Pharoah’s heart is just another way of saying that Pharaoh’s heart was hard. Sending plagues is just another one of those things that YHWH does. The ancient Israelites knew that YHWH sent plagues for his own inscrutable reasons, and the plagues fell on the just and unjust alike. Therefore, sending a plague against the Egyptians isn’t out of character for YHWH, it’s just that in this case they had a story for why YHWH sent this particular plague.
So for the ancient Isrealites, the Exodus story isn’t problematic at all, any more than the story of the Golden Apples leading to the Trojan War wasn’t problematic for the ancient Greeks. They didn’t expect supernatural entities to play fair, they expected them to have human-like qualities including being a bit of a dick sometimes, because that’s how life was.
Actually, re-reading the text, I stand corrected re: the whole repentance thing. The real answer is clear:
God is being a dick to the Egyptians, on purpose.
He’s drawing out the punishment to make a point that will last for many generations:
http://nasb.scripturetext.com/exodus/10.htm
God apparently felt that a quick “Poof! You’re free!” wouldn’t drive the point home. He knows that his people are dense and prone to forgetting Him, so He wanted to make this a rousing good story, one which includes the long, slow humiliation and torture of His people’s hated oppressors, so that they will remember and tell their children’s children about how badass the Lord really is.
This is entirely correct, but doesn’t explain why modern people *still *worship a random dick god, or rather why those people maintain that their random dick god is just, universally loving and so forth. Or how they reconcile the NT god with the OT god.
Y’know what ? Maybe he’s not the same god at all, but an entirely separate one capitalizing on the old one’s cred. gasp OMG Jesus is New Coke ! 
Haven’t read my sig in a while, I take it.
shucks, I liked the Evil Overlord thing.
Sorry. I was tired of it. You can take over the mantle if you wish.
To the people in those days, there was nothing wrong with eating pork. Or harvesting all the grain from your field. Or planting two crops in the same field. Or hundreds of other things. But the Israelites were still forbidden from doing these things. Why? To set them apart from their neighbors. What a golden opportunity for the loving, merciful, compassionate God to make a statement about the evils of slavery, by forbidding the Israelites from owning slaves. But he didn’t take that opportunity. Time after time, God tells the Israelites that they have to follow a certain law to remind them of when they were slaves in Egypt. Wouldn’t that have been a natural fit? To tell them they couldn’t have slaves so they would remember how sucky it was when they were slaves? Why didn’t he do that? I suspect it is because the person making up the story had slaves himself, and didn’t want to take the financial hit.
You realize that, in this particular mythic cycle, the Isrealites were empowered to rape captive women whose homes they had just destroyed and whose families they had just massacred, so long as the women were virginal before the rape, right?
There is a school of thought (I first encountered it on a History Channel special, Bible Battles I think, but it’s not limited to there) that reconciles the slave rules. It explained that given the Israelites histories as, well quite frankly badass warlords, up to and after that point they weren’t enslaved so much as mercenaries that got screwed over in their contracts, and the language used in the text probably morphed over time to make them more sympathetic.
The general supporting facts were things such as the Egyptians letting them walk out armed, after they pillaged an entire town. I mean, God softening hearts or not, who lets slaves walk around armed and pillage a whole town. Even if you do accept the heart-softening, why would a bunch of slaves know how to effectively wield weapons in the first place? The only other point I really remember was the pillars of smoke/fire being a fairly accurate description of “beacons” used to lead large armies in those days (during the day you used smoke, and during the night you used fire. The fire is especially effective because once you get in battle if the enemies had been following you by looking straight at it their eyes weren’t as acclimated to the dark), some old Egyptian texts have been dug up that have generals leading people with things that look suspiciously like what was described.
The theory on how they got screwed over (which I admit I don’t remember, my version sounds a little illogical so I’m probably misremembering something) was that they were hired to defend Egypt from hostiles near a certain border, but they were a little TOO good and the Pharoah began to feel threatened so he kept moving them more inland and giving them “upkeep” work in the towns (which I believe citizens were required to do as a sort of tax). So they weren’t captured slaves so much as hired mercenaries who were doing a bunch of superfluous work and nothing in the original agreement. So God wasn’t so much pissed at slavery as he was at contract-breaking (which I think is a big-time no-no in the Bible, right? Could be wrong).
Anyway, I didn’t really do the theory justice, but it does allow for an interesting twist on the story that still makes some sense in context. (Still doesn’t reconcile the plagues/heart hardening thing though, just the slavery one).