Love me or else (Part Two) (Where is it now?)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 17:09 (4358 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO-TONY: Oi.. the hodgepodge of misunderstanding in all of this blows my mind. Abraham was not tortured, he was tested.
 
I used "torture" to cover Abraham and Job, as I would regard it as mental torture if I were told to murder my son in order to prove my devotion to God. The text doesn't actually tell us why God "tested" him (my modern version uses the word "tempt"), but his reward is God saying that "in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed [...] and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies." Your own explanation (to make sure he's worthy to start the line leading to David and ultimately to Jesus) is a good defence, though not specified anywhere in the text as far as I can see.-TONY: As for Job, YHWH didn't test Job. I am not going to bother clearing up your ignorance on this, but go back and read the account for yourself. -Satan says that Job will curse God if God takes everything away from him, and God says he's all yours. When Job's suffering becomes unbearable, God tells him how powerful he (God) is, so Job says you're right, and God rewards him by making him even richer than before. Are you claiming that God didn't test him because he got Satan to do the dirty work? That's a quibble. Why do you think God rewarded him if it wasn't because he passed the test?-Your post goes on to castigate humans for blaming God when they themselves are to blame. Your wrath is directed at hyjljyj, and perhaps I should leave him to answer for himself (HE HAS!), but I have read his posts and I cannot find a single word to justify your attack. His post is, to use his own word, a "rant" against the cruelty of the God portrayed in the Bible, and he asks the question how we can love such a figure. You always do an excellent job defending God against these accusations, but as you so rightly say in another post: "People try to spin the bible to fit their own beliefs." We all do our share of spinning, whether knowingly or unknowingly, especially when there is such a huge text in which you can find evidence for virtually any argument you like. I stand solidly behind the examples hyjljyj and I have given, and although I do agree with you that much of the suffering in the world is our own fault, I'm afraid my interpretation of past and present catastrophes is not always the same as yours. -TONY: Hy, I am not trying to be preachy. You are free to believe however you choose. All I would ask is that you educate yourself by reading the source text, cross referencing multiple translations, and getting a basic understanding about the original languages used before swallowing what people tell you. The bible is much akin to science in this one regard: if you want to get knowledge and understanding out of it you have to do the leg work. If you just swallow what everyone tells you then you will not only be ignorant of what is really there, but you will also have a lot of misplaced angst and hard feelings about something that have no basis or foundation in reality.
 
This is true, but hardly practicable. None of us can possibly make ourselves experts in all the fields that are required to form an opinion on the subjects we discuss, and in any case there is no "expert" consensus on any of them. Even you are forced to rely on scholars of Ancient Hebrew to make your judgements on what the texts really mean (although of course neither you nor they can ever know). You are, in my view, absolutely right to be sceptical when people present opinion as if it were fact. I am no physicist or cosmologist, but when an expert announces that before the Big Bang there was absolutely nothing, I am sceptical. I am not an evolutionary biologist, but when an expert announces that "Natural selection explains the whole of life", I am sceptical. And when a biblical scholar tells me that "Fear God" does not mean be afraid, and I consider the awesome power of a God who can create and destroy whole worlds at will, and I recall other passages in the same book in which he makes it clear that he will jolly well use that power, I am sceptical.
 
In your posts, you have several times used the word "ignorant", and again I can only answer for myself. I find the term completely apt. I am ignorant about Ancient Hebrew, ignorant about the origin of the universe and life, ignorant about the existence or non-existence of God, and ignorant about his nature, if he does exist. I am fortunate enough to be engaged in a discussion with several highly intelligent, highly educated, highly articulate people of various beliefs and non-beliefs, for all of whom I have the greatest respect, yourself emphatically included. I have no way of knowing how far their own ignorance on these subjects extends in proportion to my own. Unfortunately, nor have they!