First, many of the prayers I said were to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so it is the same god. Second, an alternate understanding could be the evolution of the fictional character of God, to match the ethics and scientific understanding of the believers of the time. The god of a nation who felt that massacring everyone in a conquered town was okay would feel it is okay, the god of a nation on the bad side of the massacre might be a bit more lenient.
For the Bible to represent the evolution of understanding of an actual God, you’d have to say either that God had never revealed himself in the early days, or he did and those recording the inspired words lied or misunderstood it, or that God gave different messages at different times.
Neither requires a literalist interpretation - the message we get from the stories is far more important than if the stories actually happened.
How does your response have anything to do with what I said, snarkfactor 10 or not?
I’ve explicitly said that it is irrelevant how it was put together. It doesn’t matter if it was edited by a group of Oompa Loompas and again by the editors of Newsweek and then Mad Magazine. I don’t care. That has no bearing on what it represents and how it is portrayed as a representation of religious beliefs.
Without going into the specifics, God’s bringing all those plagues to Egypt because He himself causes Pharaoh to refuse the Israelites departure covers a lot of the list.
If I can make the point without snark, “the God of the Bible” is much like “the monolithic liberal media stance” – an entity that is far more often perceived than extant.
Yeah, they all claimed to be speaking about the same Dude, YHVH Elohim, “it’s the LORD, Noah”. So, allegedly, did Mohammed, Joseph Smith Jr., Baha’ullah, and a herd of others.
My point is that (1) the perception of what God was and what He wanted evolved over several hundred years, during which a variety of authors, editors, redactors, commentators, etc., lived; (2) each of these people had a different understanding of Him and what He wants; and (3) both rabbinic tradition and the mainstream Christian Church has been alive to this truth for virtually its entire existence. The idea of a divinely dictated or quasi-verbatim inspired “Word of God” as a single monolithic entity which is a precise indicator of what the God who supposedly inspired or dictated it word for word, every jot and tittle, is a 20th Century construct. My grandfather was already a Presbyterian Deacon when The Fundamentals of the Christian Faith first saw print.
It’s possible we’re talking past each other, but I am saying Dawkins is setting up a strawman by buying into the evangelical/fundamentalist “unitary scripture” bit, and everybody is having a great deal of fun with it. And that in itself doesn’t bother me – but if you look at the history of discussion on Christianity on this board, you’ll find that there’s been a lot of presumptions that the clowns against whom Der Trihs rightfully fulminates are the sole people proper to speak for Christianity – in fact, I got it in your post, which is why the snark – and that those of us who represent the majority of Christians who don’t subscribe to their Bibliolatric doctrines, by failing to speak out against them, were somehow guilty of a sin of omission – letting the noisy fundies be taken as the sole spokesmen for Christianity. And yet when we do, we get nailed for having the temerity to suggest that the Jesus Used Car Salesmen are not the real deal, and that Christianity has a longstanding tradition of attempting to deal with rather than deny the world around us.
Oh, well. Too much to expect that a message board supposedly devoted to combatting ignorance might want to work with the facts rather than strawmen.
Question: Is the God of the Old Testament (if not of the entire Old+New)—looking at it purely in terms of literature or otherwise—portrayed consistently? Or do we see God doing things in one place that are totally out of character for how God is described in another place?
I think it’s at least apparently the latter. And as I see it, that means that either
(1) There’s a way of reconciling the apparent contradictions, which may involve re-evaluating and re-interpreting some of the passages that seem to make God look bad, and/or those that seem to make God look good, so that together they paint a coherent portrait, or
(2) We can’t talk about the God of the Old Testament, without skipping the bits that describe a different God than the one we want to talk about (which may be what Dawkins is doing, albeit no worse than some on the “other side” that want to see a God that’s all sweetness and light).
Sure there are many different takes on God by the various authors and in the various sources of the Bible.
However, there is a rather widely accepted Old Testament and a God that is referred to in that tome. Whether or not it is many authors working on their own or all of them divinely inspired, it seems to me that God exhibits a great number of the traits that Dawkins lists.
The trouble with that site, and other things like it that I’ve seen, is that they go way overboard. Rather than be content to give a few legitimate examples of Godlydickery (thanks, Shawn1767), they throw in everything they can think of and wind up with a lot of “examples” that, if you look deeper, are easily explained away, if not downright ludicrous. You get references that don’t say anything about God at all (see post #6 of this thread for example), that are taken out of context, that are based on a questionable translation or a non-standard interpretation of the passage in question, etc.
There are indeed things in the Bible that bother me, things that make God genuinely look bad. But these kinds of lists also typically go on to include lots of other things that don’t particularly bother me at all.
I think there’s a third option. Inconsistency has levels. If I talk about Hamlet the decisive warmaker, then I think everyone would agree i’m talking about a totally different character than the original. Only superficial similarities would remain. With God, OTOH, the inconsistencies aren’t so character-shattering. If he was described in one part as the omnipotent Lord of all, and then in another as a small mallard duck, I think it’d be reasonable for us to take them as two seperate characters. But if we have the God of one section being the omnipotent Lord who isn’t bothered about inter-ethnic marriage, and the omnipotent Lord who’s very much against it, I don’t think that’s a large enough inconsistency that we can’t talk about them as the same general character.
There’s also the point that inconsistencies themselves may be the only things we can’t generalise. I mean, in each book God’s still the all-powerful guy upstairs. If I say “The God of the OT is all-powerful” i’d say that was a reasonable thing to say. Like you suggest, I might not be able to say “The God of the OT is for/against this specific thing” but we can still generalise characeristics from those things which aren’t inconsistent.
darn, came in here just to mention that. I should have known it would already be in there. It’s a great reference for specifically these kinds of things.
I must have misunderstood who turned Lot’s wife into salt? Who decided that a person worthy to be saved from the destruction visited upon Soddomites is one who would offer up his daughters to be raped? One might exclude the incest from having any bearing upon God, since it isn’t clear that he approved or disapproved, as far as I know, except to say that they weren’t smoted. But clearly, God, as depicted in that story, values (or at least excuses) offering one’s daughters for rape, and believes that a just punishment for curiousity is death by crystalization.
But those things might bother someone else, so by including every little nitpicky complaint about the bible, everyone can find something they are interested in. Some people, such as those who know a biblical literalist, care about minor textual inconsistencies.
That second story has nothing to do with Lot, but appears to be a somewhat confused retelling of the account of the Levite’s concubine in Judges, chapter 19. (Not that I’d justify either story as particularly moral.) This dates to several hundred years after Lot in Sodom – how many, depends on what dating system you subscribe to for the “captivity in Egypt” (if in fact you believe that was factual) and the timing of the Exodus and rule by the Judges.
No big huhu relative to the rest of the thread, but a factual correction worth noting.
Well the character of God according to most Christians is that of a loving father. That Father may occasionally have to smack a disobedient child, but the character remains a loving Father.
Now contrast that with the God of the OT, who kills and tortures innocents, condones rape and slavery and demands geneocide. Those are not the actions of a being that is a loving father to humanity. Hell he didn’t even act like a loving father towards towards the Israelites.
The only way that you coudl say that God wasn;t atcing out of character is by refusing to say what his character is. I’ll throw out a challenge: You describe what you believe to be the character of God and I will find you an example in the Bible of God acting contray to that character. Up for it?
What about the God of one section being the omnipotent Lord, and the God of another section being unable to defeat iron chariots?
What about the God who is so powerful that no man can not look at his face without dying in one chapter, and the God of another section having tea and biscuits with with a man?
What about the God who never changes his mind in one section, and then in the next section changes his mind again, and again and again?
To me these aren’t trivial distnctions, they are major discrepancies between the characters every bit as dramatic as Hamlet the decisive warmaker. It seems to me that if we can excuse (or more often try to explain away) these sorts of discrepancies then we might as well say that any two characters in fiction are the same provided they are the same species.
Except in all those cases where he clearly isn’t, like his inability to defeat iron chariots, or his inabilty to expunge original sin without sacrifice.
Now you will probbaly tell me that you can explain those discrepancies away, but the problem is that you need to create tortuous extra-textual methods of doing so. If we allow that then Aragorn and the Artful Doger are the same basic character, we just need to epxlain away those few discrepancies between the characters.
Can you list 8 characteristics that you can generalise from the OT that aren’t inconsistent with other section of the Bible?
I say 8 because “male”, “favours Jews pending messiah” and “misogynistic” are gimmes. That leaves just 5 other generalisations for you to draw.
One may take the view that the Bible is the word of God, written via His inspiration in the hearts and minds of various men and therefore stamped with His authority. Or one may take the view that the Bible is a miscellaneous selection of old texts, each of which is a mortal writer’s imperfect recollection or impression of some historical events that may or may not have happened. If one takes the former view, then the indictments stand as listed in this thread, and it is not difficult to show that God indeed has the characteristics ascribed to Him by Dawkins and others. If one takes the latter view, then there is no reason to regard the Bible as either accurate or authoritative, either historically or as the source book for a moral code of any relevance to contemporary life. You cannot have it both ways, opting to worship the ‘nice bits’ God and ignoring the ‘nasty bits’ God. Or rather, you can, but only by knowingly choosing to adopt beliefs that are internally inconsistent and therefore make no sense.
I must have misunderstood who turned Lot’s wife into salt? Who decided that a person worthy to be saved from the destruction visited upon Soddomites is one who would offer up his daughters to be raped? One might exclude the incest from having any bearing upon God, since it isn’t clear that he approved or disapproved, as far as I know, except to say that they weren’t smoted. But clearly, God, as depicted in that story, values (or at least excuses) offering one’s daughters for rape, and believes that a just punishment for curiousity is death by crystalization.