Sounds like somebody’s heart is a little on the hardened side…
Damn, you think I’m due a Plague ? Crap. I don’t have locust insurance.
I think I just found a new insurance [del]scam[/del] business, get the Moses costume and practice your “inflicting plagues” speeches. After you go to the door and curse them we’ll conveniently come up an hour later and sell them insurance against the plague.
It’s foolproof!
True, but I said enslave AND inflict cruel labor. There are people today who are slaves to others, held in bondage by debt, fear, etc, that bondage holds them in servitude. Jesus teaches us to be kind to them as we too have a master in heaven.
Then the Israelites forsake the Lord and the Lord Bitchslaps them pretty much wipes them out, go back into bondage, this pattern repeats many times.
The pattern seems to be God frees a oppressed people from bondage, those people get fat and happy and forsake God, God then frees the people they have oppressed. This is in contrast to the system before the flood, where God let the system run till man was just totally wicked.
[channeling Jackie Mason] They were Jews. They kvetched. (shrug)[/Jackie Mason]
It was a story. You wanna keep the kiddies awake to get the message. Do you say, “He Who Must Not Be Named caused Pharaoh to fall asleep and the Israelites slipped away in the night, like a family on the Lower East Side three months behind on their rent?” Or do you spice it up? (Sorry, but Jackie Mason possessed me again. Not that effectively, either. Oy, goyim can’t transmit humor for bupkis.)
Skald You’re missing the point that God isn’t like a jail warden punishing people. As Kanicbird pointed out the children are bound by the sins of their Fathers because they are born into the results of their Fathers’ choices. Generally this idea that God is a cruel bastard is predicated on the idea that God is cruel for allowing his children the freedom to fuck up.
Are you sure of this? Makes much more sense, if we are a prison planet. Think about it.
Was this meant for me? I used Nephilim in a manner indicative of plurality.
The way I read it is that the planet is actually paradise and that we cut down the trees and mined the ore to build the bars ourselves. That kind of seems to be the overriding point in Christianity.
“You’re under my protection unless you eat from THAT tree.”,
They eat from the tree. “ZOMG I’m FUCKING NAKED, THINGS CAN HURT ME!”
“Yeah well, you chose to step outside of the bounds of my protection, now you have to live with that!”
“You’re a bastard!”
“Actually I’m uncreated I don’t have a Mother either.”
“What?”
“Oh Nevermind, I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
I think creating people for the soul purpose of cruelly using them as just an example, never giving them a chance to be better, points out exactly what kind of asshole this “god” is.
I could be living to the best of my abilities, and this “god” could give me tons of crap just so that I could serve as some sort of lesson for someone else? Some of us have been picked to be the “Red Shirts”, and we don’t have any choice in the matter?
You’re taking free will out of the equation. Saying that the Egyptians had no responsibility in their own situation.
The instant that this “god” decided to draw out the punishment for the Egyptians “just to prove a point”, he took free will out the the equation.
And will someone please tell me what exactly the responsibilities are for the first born sons of Egypt, again?
Besides being “Red Shirts”, that is.
How is YHWH smiting the first born sons of Eygpt any different than his smiting of everyone? It’s not like everyone else gets to live forever, we’re all gonna die to. YHWH smites innocent babies all the time, for no reason that we can see.
If you believe in YHWH, that is. The real reason innocent babies die of cancer is that there’s no such things as gods. But if we take the existance of gods as a premise, and decide that things that happen here on earth happen because the gods want them to happen, then the smiting of the first born is pretty much just in a day’s work for the gods.
They were given several warnings.
Let my people go! -The former President of the NRA
You’re still thinking as an individualist and not a tribalist. Besides, death in and of itself is not a bad thing from a biblical perspective. The punishment wasn’t of the first born it was of their parents.
There’s a valid point here.
What does it matter WHEN someone dies?
No, it was meant for **kanicbird **who wrote about the “Nephilums”. But you’re so vain, you’re so vain you think that snark’s about you 
Knowledge of good and evil, right. They had those trees.
Can’t be literal.
I’m finding all the posts about why the ancient Israelites told these stories to be very interesting (I’d never heard of henotheism before - thanks), but that’s not the difficult question. The difficult question is why people now can read these stories and not think God is a psychopath. Surely some of them have done more thinking than ‘he works in mysterious ways’? At least kanicbird is explaining his/her own reasoning behind these inconsistencies rather than just shrugging and dismissing them.
And after each warning, Pharoah - the only one who had the power to do anything about it - decided to let the Hebrews go, only to have his heart hardened so that he didn’t let the Hebrews go, leading to another warning.
And of the first born.
For the definitive answer, e-mail questions@gracethrufaith.com. You can also find answers at their web-site www.gracethrufaith.com.