This thread was inspired by another recently posted here called Excuses, Excuses, where it calls out, what I later identified as a typical believer's simple attempt to try to convince themselves through rationalizations to address their own cognitive dissonance when confronted with the stark contradiction of the differing presentations of God within scripture.
For instance from the New Testament,
The Path of Love Jesus
Vengeful Payback For All Your Wrongs Jesus
You can find examples of this same irreconcilable difference in character attributed to God throughout the Old Testament books as well. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a split personality, one day Absolute Love, Grace, and Forgiveness, and the next day be filled with a lust of absolute destruction of human beings who dare pollute his holy perfection!? These cannot exist together in any experience of reality we can live with, without it cause damage to our minds and souls if we were to be subjected to that from the same person of trust in our lives. Even if they never would do that to us, they would do that to others and that make them a monster, or us a monster for condoning it.
While I don't like to identify as following any particular religion, my background is in Christianity where I first learned the myths and was taught to believe them as literal and factual truths, and that to doubt them was to open yourself to deception of the devil trying to steal your faith from you. Nonetheless, the love for truth that was in my heart compelled me to question these contractory things I was hearing and being presented as a Divine Revelation not to be questioned.
Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater. Not everything in Christian faith is this wrath-filled angry God image that should scare the hell out of everyone of us. Those were the bits that really smelled "off" to me. But I clung to as best I could the good bits, like Jesus in the Beatitudes, quoted above, in order to swim in that stream with them for the sake of trying to find myself and grow spirituality. But who the heck is that frightening monster in Revelation? And why did that seem okay to them?
So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan. The last book I just finished reading of his is, How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Is God Violent? I found it speak to me as a postmodernist to integralist thinking person, who happens to have a great deal of interior work in my own personal spirituality and faith, as it were. Rationally, and emotionally, I could never except the "excuses", the quasi-rational arguments as justification for accepting such contradictory positions of character. God becomes unpredictable and terrifying, that he could both be the God of Love, and be absolutely amoral at the same time as to be responsible for the atrocities attributed to him by various biblical authors, both Old and New Testaments.
In a quick nutshell, his historical research and cross-disciplinary scholarship takes note of a shift in the various images of God arising at one time under surrounding circumstances set in the ancient Near East, as a Priestly image of God as one of non-violent, distributive justice, where all receive fair share of the bounty, to a radical shift to the Deuteronomic image of God as a violent, God of retributive justice, punishing, threatening, and cursing. He details all the verses and the scholarship behind the authors and their times. The contrast is plain to see, as in the above verses about Jesus I included.
His observation, and I'd call it a very, very good one, is that this swing between the non-violent God of distributive justice, and the violent God retributive justice pulses back and forth in what he terms "the biblical heartbeat". You see this swing of culture everywhere actually, all the way to today. We swing from the progressive, to regressive, to progressive, etc., patterns in cyclical patterns, as we are even today in our social and political climates. That was no different then. And what you see in the Bible, is simply a wonderful collections of writings reflecting those social and cultural swings, that cyclical pattern, that we see today.
I find that view he has unearthed changes the way in which someone who has a connection with the Christian faith, yet finds the image of God portrayed at times both contradictory and genuinely troublesome, that this helps takes away this created mythological image of the Bible as some "single message about God". That "Biblical Inerrancy" claim, is a modern mythology, which is purely a matter of faith without adequate evidential support. People of ancient times would never have thought in those terms. They were never think of these things in the terms we do today, especially those of modern apologists. Trying to use modern reason, to read a collection of mythologies of the various periods of time and place they were birthed out of, as some single roadmap to understanding God, is a deeply flawed, and impossible thing to do.
For those interested, I found this presentation he did about his book from a few years back where he covers these points in greater detail.
For instance from the New Testament,
The Path of Love Jesus
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Vengeful Payback For All Your Wrongs Jesus
His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
....
The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [180 miles].
...
And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”
....
The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia [180 miles].
...
And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.”
You can find examples of this same irreconcilable difference in character attributed to God throughout the Old Testament books as well. Is God a Jekyll and Hyde with a split personality, one day Absolute Love, Grace, and Forgiveness, and the next day be filled with a lust of absolute destruction of human beings who dare pollute his holy perfection!? These cannot exist together in any experience of reality we can live with, without it cause damage to our minds and souls if we were to be subjected to that from the same person of trust in our lives. Even if they never would do that to us, they would do that to others and that make them a monster, or us a monster for condoning it.
While I don't like to identify as following any particular religion, my background is in Christianity where I first learned the myths and was taught to believe them as literal and factual truths, and that to doubt them was to open yourself to deception of the devil trying to steal your faith from you. Nonetheless, the love for truth that was in my heart compelled me to question these contractory things I was hearing and being presented as a Divine Revelation not to be questioned.
Very, very long story short, after a long time of distancing myself from Christianity and exploring more critical understandings of the world through modern sciences and research, I've taken an interest in what I would call attempting to rescue the Baby from the bathwater. Not everything in Christian faith is this wrath-filled angry God image that should scare the hell out of everyone of us. Those were the bits that really smelled "off" to me. But I clung to as best I could the good bits, like Jesus in the Beatitudes, quoted above, in order to swim in that stream with them for the sake of trying to find myself and grow spirituality. But who the heck is that frightening monster in Revelation? And why did that seem okay to them?
So anyways, I've be reading from a very well respected, at times controversial modern historian and former Catholic monk, John Dominic Crossan. The last book I just finished reading of his is, How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian: Is God Violent? I found it speak to me as a postmodernist to integralist thinking person, who happens to have a great deal of interior work in my own personal spirituality and faith, as it were. Rationally, and emotionally, I could never except the "excuses", the quasi-rational arguments as justification for accepting such contradictory positions of character. God becomes unpredictable and terrifying, that he could both be the God of Love, and be absolutely amoral at the same time as to be responsible for the atrocities attributed to him by various biblical authors, both Old and New Testaments.
In a quick nutshell, his historical research and cross-disciplinary scholarship takes note of a shift in the various images of God arising at one time under surrounding circumstances set in the ancient Near East, as a Priestly image of God as one of non-violent, distributive justice, where all receive fair share of the bounty, to a radical shift to the Deuteronomic image of God as a violent, God of retributive justice, punishing, threatening, and cursing. He details all the verses and the scholarship behind the authors and their times. The contrast is plain to see, as in the above verses about Jesus I included.
His observation, and I'd call it a very, very good one, is that this swing between the non-violent God of distributive justice, and the violent God retributive justice pulses back and forth in what he terms "the biblical heartbeat". You see this swing of culture everywhere actually, all the way to today. We swing from the progressive, to regressive, to progressive, etc., patterns in cyclical patterns, as we are even today in our social and political climates. That was no different then. And what you see in the Bible, is simply a wonderful collections of writings reflecting those social and cultural swings, that cyclical pattern, that we see today.
I find that view he has unearthed changes the way in which someone who has a connection with the Christian faith, yet finds the image of God portrayed at times both contradictory and genuinely troublesome, that this helps takes away this created mythological image of the Bible as some "single message about God". That "Biblical Inerrancy" claim, is a modern mythology, which is purely a matter of faith without adequate evidential support. People of ancient times would never have thought in those terms. They were never think of these things in the terms we do today, especially those of modern apologists. Trying to use modern reason, to read a collection of mythologies of the various periods of time and place they were birthed out of, as some single roadmap to understanding God, is a deeply flawed, and impossible thing to do.
For those interested, I found this presentation he did about his book from a few years back where he covers these points in greater detail.
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