I’ve always enjoyed putting notes, corrections and doodles in the margins.
Yes, It’s a little-known second edition.
Or the God Elision, which can be read out much more quickly because it’s all slurred together.
Or the God Delicious, a treatise on transubstantiation.
At the risk of sounding bitchy (oh well, it IS the Pit), it is getting mighty crowded up on that cross.
Perhaps you did indeed want to debate – and the question as to whether religious documents are appropriate fodder for hotel nightstands is a reasonable debate topic – but your OP read as something I would expect in the Pit rather than GD.
You do have a reputation for being stridently anti-religion. You made that reputation all by yourself. If you don’t want that reputation, work to change it. If you don’t care that you have the reputation or are in fact pleased by it, don’t gripe when you’re called on being stridently anti-religion. I realize that personal responsibility should be against everything my religion stands for, but I’m pretty big on it.
You have every right to offense, but nobody here has the right to demand a one-sided rant in Great Debates and cry foul when people disagree with your argument and your thread placement.
There’s a great bit in Screwtape where the old devil is advising young Wormwood of the joys of getting his patient to play this game where he gets into the mindset where he’s saying things with the clear intention of giving offence and yet he’s genuinely outraged when offence is actually taken.
Any resemblance to posters alive or dead is entirely intentional.
Actually, I would say there’s a pretty significant difference between “allowing awful things to happen to people who don’t deserve them” and “specifically stepping in to cause an awful thing that would not occur otherwise to happen to people who don’t deserve them”. I would say that hypothetically you could very well accept that it is reasonable for bad things to happen to good people yet keep God as good (thanks to the free will explanation, which I think is fine), yet consider God actually deliberatly causing such harm to be a bit of a sticking point. IOW, that’s not “IOW”.
Thanks Revenant Threshold, that’s pretty much it. Bad things didn’t “just happen” to Job’s original family, God deliberately wiped them off the face of the Earth in order to test Job.
More accurately, according to the story (assuming I’m remembering this correctly), God bragged about Job, Satan messed with God’s head and tempted him, God being gullible and fallible and all :rolleyes: fell for it hook, line and sinker, and killed the whole bunch. Just to show Satan that Job was still his boy no matter what kind of shit God dumped on him.
For the record, I do believe in a Creator/God. Just not the limited and flawed versions corrupted by men and presented as truth in their “holy” books.
It’s been a while since I read the myth, but didn’t God simply fail to stop the Devil from killing Job’s family? That’s different than God actively killing them himself. The active bad guy here is the Devil. As I remember it, the Devil kept saying “If I do this, Job will curse you”, God replies “No he won’t”, the Devil does it and Job remains faithful. When the Devil finally gives up, God steps in a rewards Job for keeping the faith with a red haired girl in a Chevrolet.
Just look upon it as another ad, put there to sell you something you don’t want. Every American tolerates hundreds of unwanted ads every day, it’s a way of life. The Bible was written hundreds of years ago, things change, just ignore it like I do.
Well, yes: in the book, it’s Satan who directly does the bad things (i.e. killing off Job’s family), after God gives him explicit permission. People have been discussing and arguing over the book for centuries, so we’re not going to settle on the correct interpretation here. For anyone who’s really interested in Job, I enjoyed this book by William Safire, which summarizes some of the ways various commentators have read and interpreted the book.
Yet Jesus calls that God “Father” and claims to be His Representative.
I beg to differ. If someone asks you for permission to kill your children, and you say, “Go ahead,” does that make you innocent?
It wouldn’t make you an innocent, but it would, as Weirddave said, be different than actively killing them yourself.
I call this the Charles Manson defense to the Book of Job.
In what way is it morally different?
It’s different, agreed, but if I could effortlessly prevent the killing of my children but chose not to because of what is essentially a wager, it would be hard to argue any moral superiority to someone who actively killed his children.
Plus God created Satan with full, prescient knowledge of everything Satan would do, so everything Satan does is God’s responsibility – his idea even.
By the way, it deserves to be mentioned that Satan is not an evil character in the Hebrew Bible (and in Judaism in general). he is a serveant of God. He does nothing except on God’s behalf and request.
I’d say it’s easy to argue his moral superiority to the guy who actually does the killing. Arguing his morality in general, on the other hand, would be a much harder sell. But I think there is a clear moral difference between comitting an evil act, and allowing an act to be committed through your own inaction. Neither is a good thing, but one is definitly more evil than the other.
The problem with Satan being responsible for Job’s many, many, many misfortunes is that when the Lord speaks directly to Job out of the storm, he doesn’t say “Satan did it, not me” or “I’m deeply, truly sorry about all of this, I know you must have suffered greatly”, but “I’m God, I created the universe, I can do whatever I want, so shut your face.” And Job does, and gets his reward.
So the message is, weirdly enough, like Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek’ in a way: lots of bad shit goes down in people’s lives, sometimes permitted by–or caused by–God. But as long as you keep believing and have faith in God, no matter whatever happens–sometimes in defiance of all logic and reason–good stuff will eventually happen.
It’s a really difficult, uncomfortable book, looking back on it (I hauled out my copy a minute ago). I’d like to pick up that book Thudlow Boink linked to earlier.
It’s not just inaction, but explicit permission. Is pimping a child morally superior to raping a child?
When I was working in Cairo, I wanted to get a bumper sticker (in Arabic) that said “Honk if you love Jesus”. It would have driven the poor buggers nuts. The security officer vetoed the idea.
I’m not sure that granting permission counts as inaction. It’s certainly an act, rather than the lack of one.
We’ll just have to disagree. At least, unless you mean that one is infinitesimally more evil than the other (and don’t think that you do.) Especially when the one permitting the murders is the Arbiter of Justice in the Universe.