I’m sitting here stunned. How can you possibly argue over the language nuances of the “Old Testament” as you read it in English?!
wtf
You can yak theology all you want, but trying to one-up each other while reading a - what? third time is a charm translitarated text? and then ping-pong over semantics?!
And sheol is not Hell. Hell is not Hades. Hades is what you read about in Homer. Hell is what you hear about in Sunday Scchool. Sheol is something that Jews don’t think about often, because there are already plenty of dark places in the living world.
It is true, the God of Christians, Jews and Muslims (one and the same) is a prick…. towards humans, that is. He simply does not like or care about humans.
He didn’t get along with the first two, he deliberately caused a fatal rife between the next two… he hated all the people because some angels were banging the women and decided to kill them all. (He later would discover a 14yo he made pregnant) To repopulate the planet, he chose a psycho-drunk. He failed to see before all his thousands of eyes the Egyptians were trying to worship him and instead decided he would pledge himself to be the sole god of the Hebrews-- who never heard of him and had no history of looking for him or acting like they even cared. He chose a fugitive murderer to convince the Hebrews to leave Egypt and follow him. Within the month he was sorry he had chosen the Hebrews and forced them to wander until the generation that had followed him had died in the desert. He wrote in stone thou shall not kill and then ignored when Moses did exactly that after breaking the tablets. He double-crossed man several times, issued the first curse, blew off the first promise, introduced jealousy and regularly encouraged war.
Besides all this, the reason I feel this said God is a “PRICK” is because:
He rewards those who are evil and those who lie.:smack:
monavis: “Your God then, is not all knowing, all loving and likes to play cruel games”
CRUEL GAMES: to pinpoint an example is the EXODUS. today, described as a repressed people, the Hebrews want to leave Egypt but cannot as Ramses will kill them. therein, Moses must persuade Ramses, who after conceding, decides to chase after them anyway.
before this god came around, Ramses was about to throw the lazy, ungrateful people out of egypt and were trying to plan how.
here comes a chance for all of them to leave and Ramses decides to stop them? why?
Because God made his heart hard!
that God, such a prankster-- he makes it so the Hebrews think they want to leave and ramses to think he wants them to stay—
imagine all that effort of the egyptian people to PROVE they worshipped gods. and here comes a god and he picks the most apathetic among them.
this god would get “it” wrong so many times, one might think he was an FBI agent.
[p.s. i challenge your spell checker for “worshiped.”]
Interesting. In the 70s and 80s I was a member of the RLDS , now called Community of Christ. Some of the doctrine that appealed to me then was the idea that even after this mortal life people would have the different glories and more opportunity to repent and grow. If I remember correctly, only those who came to a full knowledge of God and JC and still rejected them , were bound for damnation , because they chose it.
Another doctrine that appealed to me was the idea that the eternal fire was an awareness of our imperfections , if we were in God’s presence and not prepared. It seemed to me like coming into the brightest light when we’re not ready. It hurts and we can’t stand it. In that case, being away from God , until we are ready, is an act of mercy and love, not judgement and punishment.
At least, that’s how I saw it at the time. No Longer.
It never made sense to me that a good person , who actually lived a life of compassion toward his fellow humans, would be punished, while a person of mediocre character who happens to believe in Jesus goes to heaven.
I often used Gandhi as an example. He revered the teachings of Jesus, but rejected Christianity because of the horrible example set by Christians.
IMO, there’s a huge difference between hearing the words about Jesus being Savior, and the calling of our own inner voice. Using Gandhi as an example again, most of the Christians he experienced set a horrible example. Why would their testimony carry any weight or conviction? Yet , he talks about the inner voice as the voice of God and much of his life spent in pursuing the truth guided by that voice.
I don’t see it that way. After coming through Christianity to reject the idea that God would need any physical sacrifice to forgive us, I read the NT and the teachings of Jesus differently.
I think the teaching is that it is our inner selves that are known. We can hide and disguise that from each other , but not from God. I think the many comments about works tells us that our real life works, day to day, are reflective of our true inner selves, regardless of what we give lip service to. Maybe that’s what you’re saying and just phrasing it differently.
Furthermore, I think that inner self has nothing at all to do with superficial labels or the circumstances of our society. Love and compassion , are love and compassion, regardless of other details of belief. So is being judgmental, selfish, or dishonest.
Speaking of that particular verse, something occurred to me that relates to the OP.
Much of what Christ taught was that we are to reach out to those in need across all class, gender, and tribal barriers. IOW, if you know people are in need , and do nothing, you’re guilty of not following the commandments of God. It’s a basic and very clear principle of the gospels.
Now think of the OP and title. Doesn’t God know about all the need here in our mortal lives and have all the means to take care of them? Is God ignoring the principles Jesus taught?
I don’t see how a supreme being who created beings with flaws would then punish them because of their flaws. As I see it: If Genesis was the truth, then people should not be worried about suffering in an after life when the punishment for commiting the sin that Adam and Eve was supposed to have commited by eating fruit of the tree of knowledge, was death, and why a supreme being who is said to know all things would not want them to know the difference between good and evil, and then cause all living things to suffer death. And humans to suffer for all eternity; when if He knew all things then He should have known that what He created had flaws.
This supreme being is supposed to know much, much, more than a human parent, and if a human parent acted this way the children would be taken away from them!
I don’t believe it’s impossible. Depends on how much God has dealt with them in this life & how much they have resisted the Light they’d been given & whether that resistance is ingrained in their character.
I remember an old quote from the movie, Oh God. When God was asked why he allowed all the suffering that went on, he asked “Why do YOU allow it?” indicating that we have been given the resources to create a paradise and what we see around us is the result of our choices.
From a speculative spiritual sense,
What makes more sense to me, is that we are co creators, and volunteers in the temporary world of duality, good and evil.
Of course, the problem with that is it’s simply wrong. Yes, we could make the world a better place; but there’s plenty of sources of suffering that we simply don’t have the power to fix. An omnipotent God does not have that excuse.
I suppose that’s true. All of them seem to act like toddlers most of the time. One would imagine that if you had the power to save or destroy all humanity, you’d use that power a little more responsibly than any of the gods that have been put forth in history.