I don’t think it’s necessarily all that stupid. Like it or not, fable or literal history, these are the stories and heritage most Jews and Christians freely choose to put at the center of their religion. That the portray a monster is their choice, not something anyone forced on them. I certainly don’t think I, or Dawkins in this case, are unaware that many Christians and Jews reject the literal reading of these stories. Dawkins’ point in his book, in fact, is in this section talking about why the Bible is not an especially good source of moral lessons or examples, which doesn’t require claiming that all believers MUST read the text litterally: just that they read it for insight at all.
Seriously: doesn’t it seems totally bizarre that someone would both claim that these stories are slanderously incorrect about the character of their God, and yet also put these stories at the center of their religious study citation, and so forth like no other set of texts or stories? It’s like if Jews read daily from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion all the while claiming that it is false and anti-semitic.
The thing that gets me about the Christian god, is that not only did he do all this stuff, but since he’s all-knowing (omniscient: knows all that is, was and shall be), he did it with FOREKNOWLEDGE of what was going to happen! And he still let it happen! Especially since everything happens according to god’s plan.
“Hmm… I’ll create a race of beings that I know will sin, (which I of course, hate sin), but I’ll create them anyway. I’ll know that at some point I will have to flood the entire planet, killing millions, but rather than do it right the first time around, I’ll still go through with this plan…”
I think you have a valid point here. But I think there’s also a valid point contained in (or at least suggested by) Polycarp’s post: It’s not really accurate to talk about the Old Testament as a single, consistent literary work, in which God appears as a consistent character. So, to talk about the God of the Old Testament is misleading.
Misleading for non-Christians, perhaps, but don’t most Christians accept that the Old Testament is accurately describing the actions of a single God? I was raised Catholic, and that’s what I thought! I expect that tomndebb will be in here shortly to show me that I got it all wrong.
To me, The OT God is much more unpleasant. Tarkin did what he did with a strategic objective in mind, namely to spread fear in the opposition and achieve peace in the galaxy. God kills the masses of people because of his ridiculous moral opinions, or because of their race.
I guess my point is that, if you’re going to judge God as a character in fiction (as the OP suggests), the kind of fiction we’re considering is not a novel, but a collection of writings by a variety of different authors, in a variety of different genres, written at different times under different circumstances.
You have a good point. The problem is that the God in all those seperate descriptions is considered to be the same god. We don’t get Genesis talking about God, and then move into Exodus where God II wanders in from offstage to take over. They’re meant to describe the same god. As to reasons why there are the inconsistencies, we could say that it’s a matter of interpretation on behalf of the authors, or a myriad other reasons. When we look at the OT as a whole, we arrive at a pretty unpleasant, inconsistently written character. That doesn’t mean it’s not the same character, though.
If I asked a group of people to all describe God, i’d get many different replies. If I had a believer in there, a fundamentalist believer, and a similarly fundie atheist, i’d likely end up with three entirely different characters. But I personally think that the OT God is, though patchy in parts, consistent enough that we can say there is a single character being described. IMHO of course. And i’m not all that far away from your view.
Actually, my understanding of the majority of Christians who are not wedded to Biblical literality (and Kanicbird, as a levelheaded evangelical Christian, may be able to shed some additional light on this) is that the presumptions are:
There is a real God who interacts with people.
In particular, for whatever reasons He may have had, He in particular interacted with the people who eventually came to be the Jews.
Writers expressed their understanding of His nature and character and His will for mankind through recounting what they understood Him as having said and done, sometimes reporting the legendary past, sometimes historical events seen through the filter of what the writer understood as His judgment on them, and sometimes personal internal experience expressed as Biblical prophecy. (Not, by and large, to be equated with the modern usage where “prophecy” = foretelling the future, or what the speaker thinks will be the future.)
Editors and redactors integrate disparate accounts together.
The whole thing comes to be seen with a peculiar aura of sanctity not shared by other writings.
The proper question is not “What does the Old Testament say about the nature of God?” – the only possible answer is that He’s a schizophrenic paranoid megalomaniac with some redeeming qualities of compassion sporadically expressed. Rather, it’s “What do the Yahwist, the Chronicler, Qoheleth, Second Isaiah, each individually say about the nature of God?” And what conclusions can we draw from that?
The Bible, if it is anything other than a collection of one people’s religious literature, is the history of the evolution of Jewish and early-Christian understanding of God. It’s not that He changed; it’s rather that over time, they refined their understanding of him, from the mysterious spirit the nomads told stories about around the campfire to the entity who worked through Isaiah, Josiah, Cyrus, Jesus, etc.
This is perhaps best seen in the New Testament (granted that that is outside the Dawkins issue of the OP), where widely divergent understandings of how God worked through Jesus and His followers are reported by a dozen or so writers operating mostly within the same 50-year period. But you get much the same picture, relative to the OT, in considering the writers operating just before, during and just after the Exile – a 100 year period in which perhaps 40% of the Old Testament was composed or was reshaped into its modern form.
Yes, but it’s also the same God as the New Testament God. I could raise the same objection about the very title of this thread. If you can distinguish between “the God of the Old Testament” and, say, the God of the New Testament, why not distinguish between, say, the God of this chapter of Genesis and the God of that chapter of Exodus?
I don’t think breaking up the record into layers helps much either. Whatever the layer, the picture is still dismal and evil made worse by the fact that it is presented as just and was certainly worshiped and treated as just by most Jews and Christians until very recently, and STILL is by many. If we believe in a benevolent and just God, the conclusions we can draw from that seem to be that they didn’t understand God very well at all: in fact, they understood about as badly as it is possible to understand anything.
The question then becomes: why look to these PARTICULAR records above and beyond all others? Especially when there are a host of alternative sources of spiritual communion with God that paint a picture of God far closer to what progressive Christians believe God is. Certainly HISTORICALLY there is a progression: progressive Christians may not believe in hell, but historically many of their beliefs about a relation towards God and the afterlife seem to bear the shapings of having developed from a theology that once included it.
And mind you, this is really just a question for what I think is still a minority of Christians who DO think the OT God is unjust and evil and wouldn’t defend or try to interpret stories of genocide into lessons.
One of Dawkins’ most chilling examples of this is a research project where someone collected Israeli children’s take on Joshua’s genocidal behavior. The vast majority thought that it was justified and correct. When a similar cohort was told the same story only being told that it was about a Chinese warlord rather than Joshua of the Chosen, they all found the conduct evil and horrifying.
The problem, again, is that there are a lot of people who seem to have encountered a God far nicer and more benevolent. And yet it is the bloody, cruel tradition that is still being claimed as the core body of insight and development. The losers are forgotten, however more peaceful or insightful they be: the heretics are not revived and restored, but left to rot.
Furthermore, even for progressives, the evolution stops dead Revelations, at least in terms of the core canon. That makes perfect sense for literalists of course. But if you see these insights as an evolution, the persistence of the Bible itself is a strange way to honor that conviction.
This may be true with liberal Protestant churches, and is certainly true in Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish academic traditions, but evangelical Christians argue that the Bible is “the Word of God”, and Fundmentalists assert that it is a literal history. Personally, I have problems with both approaches; if it is a non-literal and interpretive tome, how (given the dearth of correlating historical information) to use it to justify the alleged existance and seemingly arbitrary rules of this unseen and untestable God? (Appealing to vague notions of “God’s Plan for you” and the unknowable mystery thereof does not give this argument any more substance than talking about fat jolly Santa Claus being able to magically fit down a chimney.) If it is a literal history, why is it so at odds with both itself and the world around us as we observe it?
I think Dawkins argument is fundamentally not about religion per se, but about faith; once you start accepting claims strictly on faith without any means of ever testing them and potentially in conflict with physical observations, you throw out any sense of objectivity or rationality. You believe what you have been taught by some authority and have to retcon everything else to sustain these beliefs, or be prepared to shift belief systems on a dime.
Note that the latter isn’t really a problem; the ability to shift paradigms from one system to a second incompatable system underlies quantum mechanics (albeit, at least in this case both systems have the virtue of satisfying physical observations). The problem comes when you start insisting to others that your set of contrafactural beliefs trump others beliefs or worse yet physical laws. Such an attitude, extended to the “logical” extreme, leads to persecution, suppression, and anti-intellectualism, and most Western religions have at one point developed into a state akin to fascism, with rigid dogma imposed by the threat of violence, exile, or death. That many are more liberal now indicates the flexibility of the human imagination, but does not offer any more rigor or credence to these beliefs.
Methinks Dawkins charges over the hill on the issue of religion–he clearly has a very personal axe to grind on the point–but his observations on the God described in the text that is the fundamental basis for the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is accurate; he’s a spiteful, inconsistant, petty, jealous, brutal, mysogynistic psychopath with delusions of grandeur and the manners of a pig. How much you take offense at such a description depends upon how literally you believe in the descriptions of this character from the Bible.
If you were living in Old Testament times, you would probably describe Life itself (or Nature, or The Way Things Are) in many of the terms being used here to describe The Old Testament God (unjust, infanticidal, misogynistic, capriciously malevolent bully, etc.). It’s pretty obvious that life isn’t fair; that disasters happen; that people die (including the innocent, babies, young children, whole groups of people, etc.). And if God is in charge, then God must cause or, at the very least, allow these things.
And in the Old Testament we see the Jewish people’s attempts to wrestle with these realities and to reconcile them with a God who can, in some ultimate sense, be called good and just and worthy of worship.
I think the reason we tend to seperate by testament and not book is that (and this is purely in my experience) in general Christians seem reasonably happy to say “Yes, the God described in the NT is my God”. It’s in the NT that most and mainstream Christians seem to find the greater truth. And hey, it’s got all the Jesus stuff in. So I think the reason we tend to look at the OT as a whole rather than a set of books is that generally the NT seems to be seen as a whole.
Looking at it purely in terms of literature, there’s no reason to look at the God of the OT or NT over the God of Genesis or Matthew. But there isn’t really any reason why not to, either; after all, it’s all the Bible, and it all purports to talk about the same character. I think you could legitimately compare the God of any particular section to the God of any other section.
Pure nonsense. I can point out that the God of the bible did things that any half-rate Institutional Review Board would immediately forbid today, or that would violate any number of laws without having anything to say about the inconsistencies or factual basis of that record. That is simply because, like it or not, the Bible has not changed, regardless of what you would have us believe about the understanding of God. I can’t say anything about people’s understanding of God because there is no common record to evaluate.
But the Good Book persists as a sacred text, worthy of swearing oaths of office and truthful testimony upon. It is held up as the standard by which many judge others’ behaviors, and determine that homosexuals and non-believers shall roast in hell. Words and phrases are routinely cut and pasted - I see many of them every day on signs with interchangable plastic letters out in front of churches.
So, you tell me which God is which, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, and your denial of the bible as an important reflection of current beliefs about God really doesn’t match with the reality of the presentation of religion, at least in America.
I don’t think the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible has been referenced yet in this thread. You should find everything you want cross-referenced there under headings like cruelty, injustice, intolerance, absurdity, contradictions, women, science, sex…
On God vs. Tarkin: Tarkin’s actions must be viewed from a galactic perspective. Blowing up one planet amongst hundreds/thousands is the moral equivalent to blowing up one city. Compare that to God’s eradication by flood of all known life, save a handful!
So I think the reason we tend to look at the OT as a whole rather than a set of books is that generally the NT seems to be seen as a whole.