Love me or else (Where is it now?)

by dhw, Saturday, December 15, 2012, 20:07 (4362 days ago) @ hyjyljyj

Dhw: Can we love what we fear? Imagine being told by your father: "Love me, or I'll beat you to a pulp."-Hyjyljyj: And that fragment of brilliance constitutes virtually the most concise expression possible of the utter failure of Christianity and Abrahamic religion in general.-Thank you once more for your close reading of the "brief guide" and your enthusiastic response to some of my comments. I really appreciate the support, as most of the time we agnostics come under fire from both sides of the fence!-DAVID: I don't view Judaism as a failure. And as Talmudic scholars reinterpreted the OT as allegory, the nastiness of the OT God takes on a different hue. He is basically teaching ethics and morality and explaining the meaning of life.-I was brought up as a Liberal Jew, and hated every minute of the attempted indoctrination. In those days, we were not taught that the OT was an allegory, but frankly I can't see any allegorical ethics, morality or philosophy, let alone love, in a flood that indiscriminately destroys virtually every man, woman, child and beast; or a God who hardens Pharaoh's heart and then punishes the Egyptians because the Pharaoh said no; or in God's torture of his best mates Abraham and Job.-DAVID: Our OT god doesn't threaten us if we don't love him.
 
"Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name. Ye shall not go after other gods...(For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the Lord thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth" (Deut. 6, 13-15 ... and elsewhere in this non-allegorical masterpiece of terror.) It's good to hear that the Talmudic scholars are trying to change God's image, but I'm with hyjyljyj every inch of the way. Love has to be earned, not commanded. I loved my parents because they were good people, not because I was ordered to love them. And if my father had told me to prove how much I loved him by murdering one of my sons, I'd have told him to go to hell.-DAVID: "But what we are looking at are the human mistakes in trying to create religions."-I agree, but we can't do anything else. You have created your own religion, but you are still reading God's intentions into his works, just as other believers do, and when your wife says that "Jesus didn't ask for churches, he asked just to follow his example", where does she get such information from, if not from the man-made accounts she has read? If, as you repeatedly say, it is God's choice to stay hidden, what are we supposed to love? Only the subjective image which we create for ourselves, or which has been created by our equally subjective and equally fallible fellow humans. Maybe God never made man at all, but man made God.