He created us with the capacity to go against his wishes and thus to suffer: he wants it. Or are you arguing that are things that can happen that are not your god’s will? :dubious:
You should read the whole book one of these days…or is the version of Genesis that we have also filled with incorrect versions of the real story?
That is the same thing as saying the accounts are incorrect.
In two successive posts you say that the bible isn’t a reliable source, and then directly quote it as a source.
It’s either a reliable source, or it’s not. Especially since your supposed god quote is something that nobody could possibly have witnessed - if the ancient writer weren’t literally always magically correct about all this crazy stuff they couldn’t possibly know about, then quoting that exact stuff is the height of cognitive dissonance.
Yes…
Does not follow, anymore than parents bringing a child into the world want their child to suffer; even knowing that the world is full of hardship and suffering, and potentially even horrific tragedy.
There is a distinction between active will and permissive/passive will.
I never said it’s not a reliable source. It depends on what you’re relying on it for, and it depends on which portion of the Bible you are referring to.
That said, much of the way we understand the Old Testament is through the lens of the New Testament.
Y’now, I’m pretty sure that the authors of the Old Testament didn’t write down what the did with the understanding that it wouldn’t make a lick of sense until a few thousand years later.
No; you’re wrong to try and compare or conflate the two. Your god created all the possibilities that human could have. No human parent of a child has that capacity. Human parents can’t make any choice about the innate qualities of their child: your god can choose anything at all. And he chose to make us disobedient. He chose to punish us for that. He chose suffering. Everything that happens in the universe, according to your dogma, is the direct responsibility of your god, because he created the game and the rules and the pieces. Do you agree?
Not in the case of an all-powerful being there isn’t. He knows everything that is happening, and nothing can happen except that he made it able to happen. If I throw a bowling ball down the alley, I’m responsible for knocking over the pins it hits, right? I set it in motion, after all. And if I created the bowling ball myself, of course I’m responsible for how it rolls, etc.
I hate this argument that your all-powerful god is some kind of cosmic deadbeat dad that isn’t responsible for his creations. He created all of it, even the conditions of the game: he caused it, all of it. Foisting that responsibility (and the punishment) on his hapless creations is not only sadistic, it’s downright evil IMO.
No, I definitely would not put it that way.
Well, take it up with him then. I for one am glad he made the universe the way he did, as I’m sure he made the best one possible. I think the way he set it up is more than fair. The suffering we experience in this life is nothing when compared to the infinite bliss that he offers us. Also, he has provided all of the tools we need to attain bliss and avoid hell.
“It depends on what you’re relying on it for”
Yeah, it apparently does. If you’re relying on it to argue against EscAlaMike, then it’s an unreliable source and can be dismissed. If you ARE EscAlaMike, it’s rock-solid and can’t be refuted.
That’s how it’s been playing out in this thread, anyway.
Suffice to say I’m not really down with that approach - can you blame me? So I use it like what it is - a sloppy mixed bag of myths and history, stirred so much that even the history is tainted. It’s only a reliable source for one thing - what the characters within are like within the story within, which is as good as fiction. (Very bad fiction.)
I can understand the frustration.
But from my perspective, those arguing against me use Scripture to put God in a box.
The written word can only tell us so much about a person. I could read posts by begbert2 and Czarcasm all day, and it will tell me a little bit about them. But it wouldn’t even be close to the experience of sitting down face to face over drinks.
When God became a man and interacted with us face to face, on our level, it was an entirely new revelation and put things into a completely different perspective.
The creation account in Genesis is a myth in that, regardless of the historicity of the events depicted, it points to truth. Namely, God created the universe as good. God created man and woman as good. Then, man decided he wanted to be a god, and in so doing, damaged the bond between God and man. Those truths are confirmed through what we know about Jesus.
Later accounts from Genesis such as Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt, mentioned by Czarcasm, serve a different purpose. Maybe there was a historical Lot, and maybe his wife did die in a strange way after looking back while they were fleeing Sodom; but given what we know about God now, post-incarnation, it seems like it would be out of character for God to have actively turned her into a pillar of salt for one act of disobedience.
You’ve said something interesting - you are selectively rejecting your scriptural source based on (personal?) assessments of whether the actions described are “in character”.
This pretty handily describes why the efforts to point out you’re wrong about God’s biblical character are failing - you automatically reject all the evidence because you’re basically presuming your conclusion. You can’t be wrong about God’s character, therefore anything that says you are must be wrong, no matter how authoritative it is.
So - what is God’s character, and how do you know?
This line of questioning is indicative of the difficulty of Catholic v. Atheist dialogue within a throughly Protestant milieu (I consider Mormonism, though distinct in and of itself, more a subset of Protestantism due to Smith being a former Protestant who was shaped by a Protestant worldview and a Protestant view re: the nature of Scripture).
By putting forth a Catholic perspective on OT interpretation, I am accused of “selectively rejecting” Scripture. I do not reject any Scripture, but I recognize that the OT books were written for a specific audience for a specific time and place. The OT portrayals of God are necessarily incomplete, even primitive in some cases due to the phenomenon of progressive revelation.
Human family relationships show the same principle. Think of the common trope of a child not understanding his parents’ restrictions or discipline. The child may see their parent as unfair or unreasonable. Later as the child matures and has children of his own, he begins to understand that what he thought was harsh or unfair was ultimately for his own good.
As I said before, the character of God is best exemplified in the person of Jesus, who is God incarnate.
Medieval philosophers like Aquinas built on what they knew of Jesus to further understand what God is. The ultimate good. Everything in this world that is good, is good because it has a little bit of the “divine spark” in it, so to speak.
ETA: Every depiction of God in the OT must be understood through the lens of who Jesus is.
A Muslim would say the same thing. “Jesus’ messages were fine for the crude minds of those primitive individuals, living under the yoke of the Roman Empire, but it is Muhammad who best exemplifies God because he spoke directly to him”.
By your very own “phenomenon of progressive revelation” shouldn’t we conclude Muhammad is who we should listen to rather than Jesus?
I’ve been watching the mental gymnastics with amusement, but I have to stop you right there. No Biblical scholar believes that the disciples whose names are attached to the Gospels actually wrote them. They were traditionally assigned to them by Church fathers decades later. The anonymous nature of them is explained in the forward to almost any Bible you pick up. So now how do you claim that they are eyewitness accounts?
^^^
He’s answered that for me elsewhere. He relies on a book by Christian apologist Brant Pitre entitled The Case For Christ and in the second chapter consisting of about 12 pages, he makes a case for all the scholarship to the contrary, that the names just had to be on there all along.
It hasn’t caught on.
How does that follow? If you’re a Trinitarian. Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus are the same. Moses, Joshua and company were doing just that, following god’s orders. Many times this biblical god orders, commits and approves mass genocide and other dastardly deeds. They are one and the same.
I would imagine because there’s zero evidence to support it. Much like the god hypothesis.
Progressive revelation? Also know as retconning. I can see it if it only involved revealing new information but you are using it to explain false parts of the Bible.
Does the Church reject the Sodom story? Has it always rejected it? If not, when did the Church change its mind?
BTW I found something from the Archdiocese of Baltimore admitting that the Garden of Eden never existed, but I found lots of other Catholic sources saying it did, so I wonder what the official doctrine is these days.
With the latter, the cardinals voted in 1948 that it was no longer necessary to treat Genesis 1-3 literal, and that Adam and Eve would no longer have to be considered as actual historical people. In 1901, that wasn’t the case. I’ve quoted a longer version elsewhere to him about this. I think he’s still up in the air about those two waiting for the Church to help guide him.
Much of the short discourses I’ve read from EscAlaMike seem to be relying on revelation, tradition and authority, mostly the dogma of the Catholic Church.