The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible on whether or not God Lies:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/god_lie.html
He wouldn’t even make it as an open miker.
Misdirection on both sides. Eating the forbidden fruit will bring them death - but not immediately. YHWH makes the threat more dire than it is, treating his creatures as children who will not understand nuance, and the Serpent takes advantage of that.
God both lies and never lies. How convenient.
Downright divine and ineffable.
And this is from the skeptics, mind.
I found the analysis in the link a bit disturbing. Sort of like God invoking plausible deniability. :dubious:
Kinda like:
“I honestly had no idea that the CIA would take things that far.”
-or-
“I’m gonna hafta send Vinnie to have a little chat wit’ ye”
Yeah, those are real thigh-slappers!
Actually, this was okay, 'cuz after the bet was paid up, He gave Job brand new kids to replace his dead ones.
Well he told mankind for several thousand years that they needed to hack off bits of their dick to get in Heaven.
Ha-HAH!
When Christ calls Peter ‘the rock on which I will build my church’ he makes a pun on petros [rock] (whether it works as well in Aramaic instead of Greek I don’t know)
Technically (since this is still in GQ, after all), God’s covenant with Abraham, which is where circumcision was required, said nothing about getting into Heaven, which is a concept that appears little if at all in the Old Testament.
It’s not the same thing as what the OP asks, but Cecil has addressed Are there any jokes in the Bible?
(There have also been threads discussing this column.)
Rubbish. As it says,
[QUOTE= Genesis Ch. 2]
15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
[/QUOTE]
Now, it’s possible that the transcribers and translators have somewhere gotten it wrong, and the original verse never said or meant “that day,” but consider also this:
[QUOTE=Genesis 3]
22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
[/QUOTE]
Adam and Eve would not live forever without eating from the tree of life – this apparently was not forbidden but it was not certain, either. Had God meant for them to live forever, Adam and Eve would have been created immortal, or directed to eat from the tree of life. As it was, they were going to die anyway. So God lied about the fruit - it neither killed them immediately nor was it the cause of their mortality.
It’s still possible that the hair-splitting SOB meant “in the day that you eat from it, your death will become a certainty (whereas you presently have a shot at immortality that I haven’t told you about, and won’t mention now).” Since there was a chance that they might eat from the tree of life first, and then from the tree of knowledge, this interpretation is also a lie. What he really meant was that if they ate, he would curse them and their children until the end of time, and the only reason he didn’t just say that was either because he wanted them to fail, or because he hated telling the truth.
So, either he was using rhetorical tricks to manipulate the crowd, or he was cracking jokes. I prefer the latter, but agree it’s a bit of a stretch.
I would suggest that the sense of humor current among the people alive at the time of Jesus, and in the time of the old testament, was most likely more along the lines of the Three Stooges than anything modern sophisticates would call humorous. And remember there are still many, many people–not all adolescents–who find slapstick and toilet humor hilarious. I find it entirely possible that an ancient audience might have found the story of Job funny. Or Lot’s wife. “Stupid b****! Hahahaha!”
The god character wasn’t written for humor, more sci-fi / drama I think.
…
[QUOTE=PS 2]
4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.
[/QUOTE]
It appears He felt remorse after the flood thing.
Not letting people eat bacon is pretty hilarious.
How is that hilarious? I’m not seeing the humor in any of the above except maybe the foreskin bit.