The difference is like a very amateurish meshing of two very different deities.
Just because a punishment may be just, that doesn’t mean it should always (or ever) be applied. Sometimes mercy is a better way.
Or our understanding of God was completely turned on its head when God actually became a man and lived with us.
Zeus did it all the time without causing sea changes in that religion. BTW, if he is all that powerful, he wouldn’t have to go through all that convoluted and piss-poorly documented stuff to get ghis point across.
edited to add: And it doesn’t explain the sudden change from KILLGOD to lovegod.
Obviously murder is always just; that goes without saying. Jaywalking? Murder. Talking back? Murder. Sneezing? Murder. That eye-for-eye business is anarchist nonsense; under true godly justice if you take an eye we take your whole head. That’s how it’s done and nobody’s questioning that.
But we weren’t talking about justice. We were talking about morality.
Why have god’s morals changed so much that he no longer feels morally obligated to murder people merely because the laws he made up allow him to? Previously he thought murdering people was the moral thing to do. Now he seems not to, what with the fact there are christians who aren’t in jail. That’s a change in God’s personal morals - and of course this being God his personal morals are the morals for us all.
It must be a change in his morality, elsewise when he was murdering people before it wasn’t a moral thing for him to do, or alternatively his current mercy is immorally lax.
Are you saying that the numerous parts of the OT that presented God as a murderous rage beast are non-canon?
You’d think an ‘god’ could write a book that didn’t need an interpreter…but you’d be wrong, apparently.
CMC fnord!
Which is always interesting to me - in the books they decided to leave out - including the ‘Gospel of Thomas’, etc.
They picked and chose then only that which supported ‘their’ view of ‘the faith’ - and people continue to ‘pick and choose’ and ‘re-interpret’ to this day from that.
Its a ridiculous endeavor when it gets right down to it.
Unless you’re requiring a human sacrifice to ‘atone’ for ‘sins’ - then its ‘to the cross with him’.
Well, glad that’s cleared up. I’m curious, though - how do you reconcile this belief with the fact that people have disagreed on morality, both from place to place and at different times in history? Do you think that there’s a universal and unchanging morality out there, but we just don’t have access to what it actually is, so we’re left to bicker and argue?
What do you say to the guy who agrees but says that his interpreter is his pastor in the Bible Church in a run-down suburban strip mall?
I hate to break it to you, but Zeus did not exist in the flesh on earth at a point in time.
The ancient Greek religion is one based on myth and implied truth. It is not based around a human person who lived in a particular place at a particular time as Christianity is.
I don’t know what he would have to/choose to go through to get his point across. How can anyone say?
I disagree with your use of the word “sudden”. By the very definition of “God”, he cannot change. Therefore, the thing that changed was human perception and understanding.
:dubious: Judaism predates Jesus. Unless your version of Christianity is purely philosophical, there’s a deity included and that deity existed for at least ~900 years before Jesus every showed up.
This is nonsensical. There are so many false premises in there that I don’t even know where to begin.
I’m saying that the longer you are in a relationship with someone, interacting with them, learning from them, studying them, etc., the more understanding you will have about that person’s nature.
That God is a straw man.
Sooooo…He didn’t drown all those supposedly guilty people and all those probably innocent animals.
It was just an extreme baptism.
I would say probably the same thing you would. People disagree because they are shaped by so many outside factors. I think that there is a universal and unchanging morality, and we do have access to it. It’s found in the teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church.
I would ask him who made his pastor the interpreter.
So, Jesus death upon the cross was not required?
.
I would quibble with this a little bit. The Judaism that we know of today in which there are no animal sacrifices involved did not begin until the temple was destroyed in AD 70.
But regardless, Christianity teaches that Jesus is God, the same God from the OT (YHWH or “I am”).
I don’t know if the flood was directly caused by God or not, or if it even happened the way it is described in Genesis. I know that the main purpose of the flood story is to teach about both God’s hatred for wickedness and his mercy to the righteous.