I’m okay with admitting that organized religion served a purpose at some point. I don’t see why we still need it, though.
Wait wait wait wait wait, OP, take it from the top. Who says the god of the Bible is the only god ?
Not himself, that’s for sure. It’s even in the first commandment : “I am the Lord thy god, […] you shall have no other gods before me”. Which I read as “you worship me, fuckface, not any of them other losers, *entiendes *?”. There are quite a few other bits of the book where god is credited as being super awesome and the most coolest god of them all, waaaay better than the god of these bastards over there - but it doesn’t deny their existence. At best you can infer that they’re lower or less powerful gods, since they weren’t the ones who created the whole thing ; meaning that Yahweh must have created them too and one might as well worship numbah one instead of the blokes lower on the totem pole.
Then there’s the issue of the devil, an immortal being who supposedly can speak to people in their minds and influence their actions, cribs in his own parallel dimension and lives for the day he’ll raid god’s own parallel dimension. That’s sort of godlike in itself, isn’t it ? It sure is miles above our own sorry paygrade.
As for omnipotence, that too is something biblically disputable - Yawheh got stumped by the chariots of iron of that mountain tribe the name of which I forget. Maybe he’s like the shidhe and cold iron is his kryptonite ;).
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
The persistence of Hinduism is admittedly a puzzle.
[/QUOTE]
You say that like it’s the only form of paganism that resisted the persistent drone of the missionaries - but Shinto’s still going strong, as is Buddhism, as are quite a number of African animist cults. Basically, wherever monotheists couldn’t just kill everyone they didn’t convert, or at least coerce them to become monotheists themselves, the local faith sticks around.
That would make you an Agnostic or Pragmatic theist. Apatheism - Wikipedia
Agreed, which would make me an adherent of…
ETA: Works for me!
Six days of hard work does it, too.
A nitpick: In the Hebrew translation, it reads more like “abstained”, or “did not continue/do”.
So basically, he stopped. There’s nothing in there that says he was tired.
That has always been my position. Yahweh stopped working because he was done, not because he didn’t have any more in him.
Unfortunately, that does nothing to explain the iron chariots thing (which, I note, was assiduously skipped over by my Biblical literalist church in the “read the bible through in a year” thing we did in Sunday school once.
It sounds like Judah could not drive out…not…HaShem literally could not.
The whole book of Judges deals with the Israelites suffering for turning away from God. As you read the chapter, you’ll see that many peoples were not ‘driven out’.
v 2:3
etc etc
Yep.
Not to me. Here’s the exact verse taken from your own cite:
*19 And the LORD was with Judah; and he drove out the inhabitants of the hill-country; for he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron. *
The antecedent of he seems to be “the Lord,” not Judah. And even if it is, it makes no difference. If Yahweh is omnipotent and “with” Judah, then why could not Judah drive out warriors using iron chariots?
The Lord was with Judah because Judah was righteous and the Lord was with the Israelites, anyway.
But you can see if you keep reading that the Lord was with Benjamin, and Manasseh, and everyone else too and they did not succeed in driving everyone out (as was their punishment).
The Shoftim on Chabad.org has ‘he’ to ‘they’. I don’t know how it was originally written or if the verb/noun agreement is appropriate…maybe a native Hebrew speaker with knowledge of Biblical Hebrew could help with that one.
At the time, Judah was a tribe, not a person (the patriarch having died some 400 years earlier), so “he” wouldn’t make much sense if it referred to Judah.
The verse specifically said that the Lord could not defeat the enemy because they had iron chariots.
You are, of course, correct. I thought so anyway but was too lazy to verify.
The verse I just cited said that they could not defeat the enemy because the enemy had iron chariots.
Plus it just wouldn’t be very good PR for Israelites/Hebrews/Jews to carry on this verse for hundreds - thousands - of years of a God who was stopped by iron.
There’s a future precedent for it in Mark 6, where it says Jesus couldn’t perform any mighty works in his home town, because the people who knew him didn’t believe he was holy.
Yeah, but I’m not Christian and I don’t buy the ‘precedents’ Christians claim are in my Tenakh.
The incident brock mentioned doesn’t matter anyway, even if you were arguing from a Christian perspective. There’s no such thing as “future precedent”; the two terms are warring with one another.
It was a deliberate oxymoron, but the point is that it is possible for something that makes your God look weak to survive in your scriptures for thousands of years.
It just seems rather counter-productive.