Religion — Page 24

The prologue to the Battle Of Gibeah is astonishing reading which mirrors the last night of Sodom And Gommorrah.

A Levite in an effort to save the man who is having an unmarried sexual relationship (concubine) with one of his neighbours daughters from being gang raped, chucks both his daughter and the concubine to the mob.

They rape the women to death and in anger the man cuts up his concubine's corpse and mails the bits to the other tribes who gang up on the whole tribe of Benjamin and kill all the males and non-virgin women (and a large number of innocent aliens).

The victors have a prayer meeting and then after consulting God hit upon this rape orgy scheme to keep the rump tribe active.

Forget Game Of Thrones.

The Bible is real X-rated stuff. 

If the Judeo-Christian God according to the most mainstream interpretations of the canonized books included the Bible is 100.100% real, then He's ultimately akin to a Lovecraftian deity: utterly alien and incomprehensible to humans (just not as indifferent to us as Azathoth and co. are) which would go a long way towards explaining why so many of His rules, regulations, and codes of conduct seem so bizarre and mutually exclusive from one another a lot of the time.

Of course, if God is so very alien to humans as to have wholey dissimilar thought processes, then the whole idea of man being "created in His image, after His likeness" kinda falls apart.

That was just a test for the angels.

The laws of God bound them first.

God makes a clay man in the image of himself and orders them to worship him.

One angel refuses God's order and becomes God's prosecuting attorney.

He is now remembered as Linda Blair's voice coach.

Bingowings said:

The prologue to the Battle Of Gibeah is astonishing reading which mirrors the last night of Sodom And Gommorrah.

A Levite in an effort to save the man who is having an unmarried sexual relationship (concubine) with one of his neighbours daughters from being gang raped, chucks both his daughter and the concubine to the mob.

They rape the women to death and in anger the man cuts up his concubine's corpse and mails the bits to the other tribes who gang up on the whole tribe of Benjamin and kill all the males and non-virgin women (and a large number of innocent aliens).

The victors have a prayer meeting and then after consulting God hit upon this rape orgy scheme to keep the rump tribe active.

Forget Game Of Thrones.

The Bible is real X-rated stuff. 

Yes, much of the Bible, particularly the OT, is pretty graphic, both sexually and violently.  That is certainly an interesting story, and one I don't know all the answers to.  I am not a skilled biblical apologist, nor do I take everything literally, so I can't claim to speak for a majority of Christians.  However, let's look at what we do have in these verses.  The consultation between God and the already unrighteous Israelites involved no prophet, as the people had none at the time.  It was their own interpretation of God's will that led them to attack, though  the author of Judges makes no dispute of their interpretation.  Second, assuming God was really speaking to them, what did he command?  Well, he told them the order to attack and gave them the go ahead, not the degree of ferocity, not any sanction of rape, no, nothing more than the go ahead.  Third, the Bible still is not clear that rape of the Benjamite women took place, only that they were captured.  It could be taken as forced marriage, and many marriages in those days were without any regard to the desires of the women, but that still does not mean a single woman was raped.

As for the man who offered his concubine to the rapists and then cut her corpse into a dozen pieces, I don't think the Bible justifies his actions either.  The Israelites are horrified when they learn about this, and look for the sicko who cut her up until he blames the Benjamites, and they then attack the whole town.  I don't think the Bible every suggested that God was pleased with this man's course of action either.  It does sound very much like the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah with Lot's less than admirable offer of his daughters.

Leonardo said:

darth_ender said:

TV's Frink said:

I can't imagine God knows something about Hitler that we don't.

I assume this means that if God had foreknowledge and thus allowed or commanded that the wicked be killed before they brought destruction the righteous, then why didn't he have Hitler killed, well the answer is obvious: he clearly wanted the History Channel to have something to talk about from 2002-2006.

In all seriousness, both in the Bible and outside of it, God still allows wicked people to live and do wicked things, even nearly wiping out God's people.  God does give the most wicked the freedom to choose, and seems to only intervene when absolutely necessary to preserve the righteous.  Often many do die.  But God still gives the wicked their freedom of choice most of the time.

Besides, who is to say how many wicked tyrants God did remove before they actually became tyrants?  We only have hindsight.  He has the foresight.

I'll just say this: if God had killed Hitler, we would have missed on so many funny jokes... Chaplin, the Stooges, Mel Brooks.. Jeez, I'd say 40% of the internet revolves around nazi humour.

Not to mention another 40% of Hollywood villains.  It's dangerous to make a Soviet or Communist baddie nowadays for fear of offending some Obama disciple, but you can cut up Nazis like soft cheese because each and every one of them deserved it ;)

The text claims that God himself plans the battle and the rape solution.

So either the text (oral tradition written down long after the event) is written by men and reflects how they distort the truth to legitimise the eventual take over of the throne by David or it's directly translated by angels in the service of God in which case God's really weird in a bad way.

Leonardo said:

darth_ender said:

TV's Frink said:

I can't imagine God knows something about Hitler that we don't.

I assume this means that if God had foreknowledge and thus allowed or commanded that the wicked be killed before they brought destruction the righteous, then why didn't he have Hitler killed, well the answer is obvious: he clearly wanted the History Channel to have something to talk about from 2002-2006.

In all seriousness, both in the Bible and outside of it, God still allows wicked people to live and do wicked things, even nearly wiping out God's people.  God does give the most wicked the freedom to choose, and seems to only intervene when absolutely necessary to preserve the righteous.  Often many do die.  But God still gives the wicked their freedom of choice most of the time.

Besides, who is to say how many wicked tyrants God did remove before they actually became tyrants?  We only have hindsight.  He has the foresight.

I'll just say this: if God had killed Hitler, we would have missed on so many funny jokes... Chaplin, the Stooges, Mel Brooks.. Jeez, I'd say 40% of the internet revolves around nazi humour.

especially this classic: Der Fuehrer's Face

Bingowings said:

The text claims that God himself plans the battle and the rape solution.

So either the text (oral tradition written down long after the event) is written by men and reflects how they distort the truth to legitimise the eventual take over of the throne by David or it's directly translated by angels in the service of God in which case God's really weird in a bad way.

I can agree with the underlined quite easily, as I've stated in this thread before.  But I failed to interpret the text that such was God's solution.  Please provide a quote, as perhaps I am misreading it.

Judges 20 : 18 demonstrates God is literally behind the planning of the massacre.

Judges 21 : 15 the rape solution is put at the feet of God (who has made the void via his edicts and his endorsement of the battle).

As I stated earlier, it sounds like at most, God gave the go ahead, and I don't believe they would have gotten any kind of message without a prophetic leader, so that is completely suspect to me.  More likely they prayed, got the answer they wanted, and went ahead with the attack.

The latter sounds like the early Hebrew view that all things, good and bad, were what God allowed.  If a conqueror killed an entire city of the Lord's people, the Lord caused (or allowed) such to happen.  I would attribute this once again to a primitive understanding of the nature of God..."mankind's grubby fingerprints," as it seems to have come to be known.

Note the difference in the telling of 2 Samuel 24:1 vs. 1 Chronicles 21:1.  It appears in Samuel (the earlier written book) that God told David to do something that later made God angry when David followed through.  Meanwhile in Chronicles, we get the same story except that Satan told David to do it, and when David listened, God got angry.  The conceptual development of the Devil came later down the road, and therefore everything in this world, good or bad, was once attribute to God because the world was before God and everything was in his hands.  But the bad, or at least temptation, was later blamed on the Devil.  God may still allow bad things to happen, and thus one might still say "The Lord had made a gap in the tribes of Israel," but this does not mean that God actually commanded people to be wicked.

If you allow that level interpretive plasticity into scripture the whole thing is up for discussion.

You are as likely to find the truth of God in Star Wars (Gnosticism again).

This is why the Society Of Friends largely dismiss the Bible as legacy software and rely more on direct revelation from God.

My description of a cosmic tyrant is aimed at the Biblical literalists not people with a personal relationship with what they call God.

If you see scripture (and by that I mean all scripture) as myth and propaganda, not history the levels of author's intention become an obvious shield against literal reading of the text.

Bingowings said:

Why would a mosquito see the Abdominal Dr Vibes as anything less than food?

Why should I even concern myself with this God fellow if His milieu is so conceptually alien to my own? What's the scripture for if only the attuned can fathom it (surely they don't need to fathom it if they are already attuned)?

I can get my head around the notion that the grand cosmic project is a work in progress and that trillions have to suffer in ways which make no sense and seem cruel from within the mechanism to serve an ultimate goal that is perfection.

But that's not what scripture is saying.

It's saying the universe was made in six stages, It's finished. God's the boss and if you don't start feeling sorry about playing with your penises and stop it in the name of an incarnation of Himself He allowed to be nailed to a tree and die for three days you will suffer forever.

Meanwhile you faithful chosen people go over their and kill those male children and rape those women.

If God is all powerful and all knowing, all possible universes are possible to him and yet he picked the one where he knows I will be born and due to free will take qualitative umbrage at the biblical account of himself and be damned.

He made me with hell in mind.

And I'm supposed to like this chap? 

What's more he is supposed to be the same person as Jesus who is by almost every account a likable and approachable superhero with compassion, who feels empathy with the downtrodden, the sick and the bereaved.

It makes more sense to me that they aren't the same person or if they are, the act of incarnation has changed God in ways He hadn't foreseen.

If God can change he isn't always perfect.

Either the Tyrant God is perfect and the gentle Jesus is a corruption of his true self or Jesus is an upgrade Which means the scripture relating to God Mk1 needs to be re-worked.

But the acts of his fully human group of followers don't match with Jesus either. They sound more like devotees of God Mk1.

You can understand where the Gnostics got their groove from. The OT God sounds like a faker, an insecure God wannabe. A Devil (powerful but evil).

Where as Jesus sounds like a representative of a nicer God who doesn't want anyone raped but has interceded as much as he can (Good but limited).

i can see myself being convinced by a Good but limited God. I might thank him for the opportunity of life and forgive him the unavoidable crapness of some of life (mortality for example).

But the the Tyrant God He can just swivel.

     "...from my perspective" sums up the misunderstanding.

    The sad truth is, with regard to these matters, we pitiful little creatures DON'T HAVE ANYTHING THAT COULD BE CALLED A PERSPECTIVE!!! We don't even count as mosquitos in camparison to a surgeon.

     Even so, the unattuned can gain the knowledge they require. They just have to work harder for it (see The Apostle Thomas.)

     The Universe is far from finished. Scripture tells us that it is groaning. The six stages were the initial creation.

     "With great power comes great responsibility." Humans expect their high chiefs to judge and set the wrongs right. God is the only one who can fulfill that need. "Give every man as he deserves and who would scape whipping?" What if the creator doesn't want to give all of his creations what they deserve? How could he escape the imperative to condemn according to human logic (Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man.) Jesus is that way out.

       Do you know what would happen to those male children or women? Would they die in the desert or be taken by men who would give them worse treatment? What would happen to the nation that doesn't show that they mean business according to the standard of the time? Doesn't perceived weakness invariably encourage aggressors and lead to even more war and suffering? Do you know what happens to a society that plays too much with it's penises in unnatural ways? What happens if men stop caring enough about the next generation? Tear down and destroy the people who do care? History indicates it might be very bad. It might be the thing that tips the balance and drags us to totalitarianism.

       All Universes are possible? What if this universe is Logically necessary to God's knowledge? The Forger problem might have some application. If a forgery is so convincing that there is no way to distinguish it from the original, is there any meaningful distinction? What if our universe IS a part of the perfect knowledge of God? It IS God knowing. People complain that God doesn't need to put us through this because he already knows the outcome. But if the knowledge is so complete and perfect that it is indistinguishable from the history of our universe, his knowledge could BE the history of our U. There would be no need to "Do it again in reality". It may be our reality. We are knowledge in the mind of God. 

      God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same entity viewed from different human perspectives at different points in time. God doesn't change. Humanity changes. The way you relate to a small child in the past will be quite different from the way you relate to a spouse today or that same child in the future. We can judge human conduct to some degree, but we don't have the most minute part of the information necessary to judge our creator.

      A Surgeon does radical, invasive, harmful, violative things to his patient. Is it therefore "evil"?

      These human jackals who come in the name of "compassion" are most often horrifying tyrants. Depravity is a cruel sort of tyranny. Why should you prefer their tyranny? 

Bingowings said:

If you allow that level interpretive plasticity into scripture the whole thing is up for discussion.

You are as likely to find the truth of God in Star Wars (Gnosticism again).

This is why the Society Of Friends largely dismiss the Bible as legacy software and rely more on direct revelation from God.

My description of a cosmic tyrant is aimed at the Biblical literalists not people with a personal relationship with what they call God.

If you see scripture (and by that I mean all scripture) as myth and propaganda, not history the levels of author's intention become an obvious shield against literal reading of the text.

You should reread my most recent discussion with CP3S and see why I see things the way I do, with sort of a duplicate view.  Of course the Bible has plasticity in its interpretation, else we wouldn't see so many different denominations and takes.  Historically speaking, many biblical scholars see it as an inaccurate history.  To try and fit it to one mold or another does it and the reader a disservice.

_ender, my Hitler comment was in response to this:

mrbenja0618 said:

But as far as the rest I had to ask myself the question: Is it possible that God knows something I don't know? Is it possible he allowed this person and that person to be killed because he knew something about the person that we didn't know? Maybe they would have done terrible things, maybe not. Maybe he knew that person would never turn back to Him. Maybe it's something none of us can even fathom. (Probably so.)

I don't believe that God allowed Hitler to live, nor do I believe that God allowed everyone he killed to die.  I believe that it's something that happened because Hitler was a monster, end of story.

The idea that "everything happens for a reason" is a load of bull in my mind.  I don't believe there is any reason we lost our first child, other than random stupid crappy chance.

thejediknighthusezni said:

     "...from my perspective" sums up the misunderstanding.

    The sad truth is, with regard to these matters, we pitiful little creatures DON'T HAVE ANYTHING THAT COULD BE CALLED A PERSPECTIVE!!! We don't even count as mosquitos in camparison to a surgeon.

     Even so, the unattuned can gain the knowledge they require. They just have to work harder for it (see The Apostle Thomas.)

     The Universe is far from finished. Scripture tells us that it is groaning. The six stages were the initial creation.

     "With great power comes great responsibility." Humans expect their high chiefs to judge and set the wrongs right. God is the only one who can fulfill that need. "Give every man as he deserves and who would scape whipping?" What if the creator doesn't want to give all of his creations what they deserve? How could he escape the imperative to condemn according to human logic (Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man.) Jesus is that way out.

       Do you know what would happen to those male children or women? Would they die in the desert or be taken by men who would give them worse treatment? What would happen to the nation that doesn't show that they mean business according to the standard of the time? Doesn't perceived weakness invariably encourage aggressors and lead to even more war and suffering? Do you know what happens to a society that plays too much with it's penises in unnatural ways? What happens if men stop caring enough about the next generation? Tear down and destroy the people who do care? History indicates it might be very bad. It might be the thing that tips the balance and drags us to totalitarianism.

       All Universes are possible? What if this universe is Logically necessary to God's knowledge? The Forger problem might have some application. If a forgery is so convincing that there is no way to distinguish it from the original, is there any meaningful distinction? What if our universe IS a part of the perfect knowledge of God? It IS God knowing. People complain that God doesn't need to put us through this because he already knows the outcome. But if the knowledge is so complete and perfect that it is indistinguishable from the history of our universe, his knowledge could BE the history of our U. There would be no need to "Do it again in reality". It may be our reality. We are knowledge in the mind of God. 

      God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same entity viewed from different human perspectives at different points in time. God doesn't change. Humanity changes. The way you relate to a small child in the past will be quite different from the way you relate to a spouse today or that same child in the future. We can judge human conduct to some degree, but we don't have the most minute part of the information necessary to judge our creator.

      A Surgeon does radical, invasive, harmful, violative things to his patient. Is it therefore "evil"?

      These human jackals who come in the name of "compassion" are most often horrifying tyrants. Depravity is a cruel sort of tyranny. Why should you prefer their tyranny? 

The main problem with this literal approach to religious literature is that if God is so heteroclite why bother with books at all?

Isn't prose all a bit too prosaic?

If the Bible is literally truth it is instantly redundant.

If God is such an unpersonable alien force in the universe what need does He need of me or you?

What do I get out of worshiping such an entity and what does it in turn get out of my genuflections?

Surely scripture if it has a purpose at all is to serve as a bridge between God and creation if the bridge cannot possibly work because one end is tied to a dimension in which no man may hope to step, what is the point of attempting to cross it?

It's like those aliens leaving messages in corn circles.

What an outrageously flamboyant waste of time. 

@walkingdork, yes, the phrasing was a joke, calling Obama a Communist was a joke, referring to his constituents as disciples was a joke (for most), and saying that Hollywood never has Communists as the enemy is a joke (e.g. Indy 4). It follows a couple of previous jokes. However, to say it was all a 100% joke is untrue. In Hollywood today, anyone can get away with making the villains Nazis because, let's face it, no one like 'em. It's harder to get away with Communists because there are many who do sympathize, and far more of our nation is part of a Communist-related party than a Nazi-style party. I remember a conversation with several coworkers at a former behavioral health job where one said, "I think Communism is a great idea and I would be a Communist except that it doesn't ever seem to work," to which there was much agreement. I know there are purer (if overly-idealistic in my estimation) ideals to Communism (equality for all and such), but the ideology is also historically tied to several abominable acts and the stifling of independent thought and religious expression. In order for it to truly work (as my coworker pointed out, it doesn't) would require the forcible allocation of resources and suppression of individual expression and ambition. That's the only way such "equality" could be obtained, of course imposed by an elite group of above-equal dictators. Aside from all this, it is a lot harder to criticize them on film without blowback.

Ah, can't respond fast enough. Walkingdork, not everyone who reads the Bible interprets that Ghandi will go to hell. And for you and Bingowings, the worship of God is for our benefit, not his. God's reasoning is far above ours, but that does not make him alien or unknowable--he is only as alien as someone you've never taken the time to get to know, perhaps never heard about. Once you invest the time, you develop a relationship, and though you cannot know all his purposes with everyone human, you can start to understand his plans for you.

Doshin the Giant is another such God Sim.

He is a giant yellow jellybaby in the daytime and helps people but at night he turns into a red demon thing and squashes things and then in the morning tries to make it up to you by helping again.

A bit like marrying a drunk.

This has to be my last post of the day, but what does God get by receiving our prayers and praise? From them, nothing. Just the knowledge that we've turned to him, want to be with him, and have chosen to accept him. God is the epitome of altruism. Of course we all know of references to God as a "jealous God" and such, but in reality, his whole reason for asking us to worship him is so that we may learn to perfect ourselves and one day join him.

Besides, one day he is hoping we will pass the Great Barrier and bring him a starship ;)

      ^I would think that any entity who has a conception of mercy and decency that is anything like the human kind would be willing to offer some sort of an escape to the little creatures under it's power who are found worthy.

       What does God get (aside from the spaceship;) from the worship and praise?

        Scriptural and Natural Revelations are targeted at HUMANS. They are not meant for wombats or seagulls or the nibjiks of galaxy 374. It is there to strike a chord within and guide HUMANS. The wombat revelations would probably be quite different.

        Perhaps the question "What does God get from the worship?" is exactly 180 degrees out of phase. Perhaps the important question is "What do humans get from learning to worship God?" Perhaps it is what humans gain from worship that permits God to logicaly and justly spare us.