I hadn’t made this connection before, and now that I have, I find this god character even more repellent.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I hadn’t made this connection before, and now that I have, I find this god character even more repellent.
Errrrh, Abe predated Jebus in the mythology, so Abe couldn’t’ve known about Jebus.
Maybe it should’ve been reworded a bit & set in Heaven? But Jewish mythology doesn’t have a Heaven. And Christians wouldn’t believe that Abe could get into Heaven, ‘cos he didn’t believe in Jebus as Saviour.
I can’t see a magical fix to this, but it still kind of works.
@Nullifidian #1:
Abe was a prophet, so he could have known about Jebus. And you can bet he wouldn’t be happy with God killing off one of Abe’s own descendants.
There, see, it all makes sense now.
???? I’m somewhat shocked this hadn’t occurred to you before. It’s usually a feature in most Christian theology. Meaning that the Abraham-Isaac story is meant to foreshadow the Jesus’ atonement. And for the record God doesn’t conclude it would have been awful for Abraham to go through with killing Isaac. It was only unnecessary after Abraham show his willingness to do so.
Still a creepy, creepy story.
Rich, thanks. I’d forgotten the prophet bit. It does all make sense.
Ahhhh, the miracle of magic.
[political spin]
yet God convinced Abe that “following Gawd’s will was, by definition, the good thing to do (so don’t listen to everybody else)”.
and when he saw Abe was about to do it, HE changed his mind. To say ‘gotcha, psych!’, and snatched the blade out of Abe’s hand as it scratched the boy.
[the spin is]:
very similar to what Drumph is barfing about, that .
seems Drumph is modeling himself on that ~~ *barf*
and *gulp* , only to fill it deeper with the sludge he convinced us he would clean out.
*double barf*
gosh, I’m just trying to propagate the latest octothorpe (aka ‘hashtag’) #RESIST
#RESIST
#RESIST
#RESIST
coining: #DumpTrump [oooh it rhymes]
According to one book on the Bible that I read a few years ago, there are linguistic indications that the bit about the lamb in the bushes is an interpolation. If you read the story without that part, Abraham goes up the mountain with Isaac, leaving their servants. When Abraham returns to the servants, he’s alone.
robro, that interpretation makes me think of Abraham as a mob boss, doing in Isaac because he`s been working with a rival mobster, or something.
Bible stories are nice and uplifting as long as you don’t think too much
#8 Bible stories are nice and uplifting as lone as you cant read. There’s good reasons behind early translations being regarded as heretical.
Nullifidian @1:
Luke 16: 22-23
@10: oh, Rob, you and your textual evidence! That was obviously a different Abraham, one who did the Jesus’s love thing.
Or something. I’m not sure how religious people actually go about reconciling conflicting things like that – is it just pure doublethink, or what? I’ve never been religious, so I really don’t know here.
Caitie Cat @11: Actually, this isn’t much of a stretch for most Christians. Abraham wouldn’t have gone straight to heaven when he died, because Jesus. But after Jesus died, he went to hell and saved the “righteous” who had died before he did. Hey, it’s in the Catechism of the Catholic Church;
Mileage varies by denomination, but I think most of them subscribe to something like this. Seems reasonable, but they told me in Sunday school that my dog wouldn’t go to heaven, so fuck them.
Rob, thanks. I wasn’t sure about whether there was a “get out of jail” card for non-Xians, who’d behaved themselves. I can now recall something about Pagans who couldn’t possibly have heard about Jebus, people such as Socrates, could get into Heaven through the back door.
But some Protestants, Calvinists, I think, believe that only the Elect can get into Heaven. If you’re not on the list when you’re born, it doesn’t matter how many good works you do, the old Bible Bogey won’t let you in.
Christopher Hitchens pointed out that Abraham was ready to barbecue his own son, and so is revered by all three major monotheistic religions.
Wonderful thing, Faith.
Well, this is conflating several different ideas. The Catholic line is that basically all sins are (ultimately) forgivable… just don’t talk shit about the Holy Spirit and you’re gold. Non-Christians can (at death) be forgiven and go to heaven, and similar pre-Christian people only had to wait until after Jesus’ resurrection, which is at least less worrisome than eternal punishment but still makes no sense.
So, you and everybody else can become one of the “Elect” in the afterlife (though Catholics wouldn’t use that term), no matter what you do in life. This isn’t due to a belief in Calvinist predestination but essentially because it don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that swang: in the end you can be forgiven anyway, if you weren’t doing good works in life.
But note that “doing good works in life” in this context doesn’t just mean not murdering people and not lying and not stealing and so forth (Socrates would generally be okay on that account). It also involves all of the usual hate that Christians obsess about. Homophobia, misogyny, etc., are “good” things you may have done in life (as well as having faith, proselytizing and assorted other nonsense), and if not you will need to “repent” for the “sin” of not being sufficiently hateful. (Less clear how Socrates is doing in that sense … he mostly fails but occasionally engages in the same shit. I’d like to think that if pressed, he would drink the hemlock again and tell God/Jesus/HS to go fuck themselves.)
Yeah but, Jesus is God. If you’re a trinitarian. So God killed himself, in his avatar as his son. That’s why the whole ‘Sent his only son for our sins’ is double (triple) bullshit, first human sacrifice to atone for wrongs of others doesn’t work as a moral rule and if Jesus was a god-man, he was god, the father is the son is the ghost…..Also, god created the universe, if he aint happy with the outcome, he needs a mirror, not eternally punish those he created, also, if he has an end in mind for his creation, he’s immoral as using people to an end is immoral….But we knew this already.
I was in a church play once that was all about this very typological point (alas, by the time I finally figured out what this word meant, I had no use for it any more). The play ends with Isaac saying he had a vision where someone helped him off the altar and then took his place, saying “You and your dad were the dress rehearsal. My father and I — we had to go through with it.”
It was a dramatic line, and all very right and proper from a theological perspective. But you’re right — there are all these passages where the God character talks about himself as if he’s just like an earthly parent, and then all these other passages where he does things that would get a parent arrested.
@#15, consciousness razor:
Nope, #13 was right — Calvinism (which Catholicism definitely is not) declares that God has pre-chosen The Elect, who are Saved and are relatively few in number. If you aren’t a member of The Elect, then it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re going to Hell. Calvinism is interesting, because it was an attempt (by Jean Chauvin, anglicized to John Calvin) to take everything the Christian bible says about judgement and damnation and come up with an explanation which made rational sense of all of it. As far as I know, it is the only form of Christianity which doesn’t involve stuffing your fingers in your ears and yelling “la la la I can’t hear you” when people bring up certain statements on those subjects — but it does so at the expense of treating other parts of the Christian bible as lies, mostly those having to do with mercy and compassion (to Calvin, pity and compassion for the suffering are not virtues — if they’re The Elect, it’s presumptuous, and if they’re damned, it’s undeserved), as well as all non-biblical Christian doctrine (not to put to fine a point on it: Catholicism). Which is to say: even the closest attempt ever made failed to provide a logical system which encompasses everything the Christian bible says without contradiction.
It’s a very… status-quo-preserving set of ideas. The Elect are sober, uncomplaining, content with whatever they have, self-sacrificing… if you desire change, then you are not behaving like a member of The Elect, which means you must be damned, and so your desire for change must be evil and should be resisted. Those in authority must have been deliberately put there by god, so even if the authorities are damned you shouldn’t resist them… sort of by definition, Calvinism is a very conservative philosophy.
Rob @12,
So by this interpretation, all the Jews were in Hell until Jesus got there, but the righteous Jews like Lazarus got to shelter in Abraham’s bosom, which was, like…fireproof? And air-conditioned? Whereas Dives and the other wicked folks were stuck out there roasting without the benefit of bosomly climate control?
That’s a sweet bosom. Wish mine worked like that.
The great German dramatist Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller–only a little less famous than Goethe–already made this joke in his play Don Carlo, which he wrote some time in the 1780s.
Verdi based an amazing opera on the play. Change “AICH-TEE-TEE-PEE-ESS” to “https”, and change “-DOT-” to a dot (both times), and watch the following, it’ll blow your mind:
AICH-TEE-TEE-PEE-ESS://www-DOT-youtube-DOT-com/watch?v=Ph6p1Mtpp18&t=626s
“Memoirs of God” by M. Smith provides a good insight of the gradual evolution of the Caananite proto-jewish religion to the monotheistic religion of the hellenistic era.
It was known that the Romans claimed the caananite Carthagians practised child sacrifice, -a claim lately supported by archaeology.
So it makes sense that Abe started off as a child killer and the story later got retconned into the current version.
Likewise, “the satan” was originally Yaweh’s enforcer, but later versions of judaism found him too nasty to be a likely follower of the “good” lord.
The anthropocentric fragments remaining in the OT match known caananite descriptions of gods, like in the clay tables preserved in Ugarit.
Here it is. It makes disturbing reading to say the least.
Have some sympathy for Abraham – remember that he was dealing with an extremely dangerous psychopath (this happens just after the Lord wipes out a couple of cities, and turns Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt).
Christians, Jews and Muslims all revere Abraham for his faith – he conscientiously prepares to exterminate his own son, as per instructions, and this is somehow seen as being virtuous. Quite how this could reflect well on Abraham is beyond me, but that’s religion for you. A more realistic explanation is that he was scared shitless, and was principally interested in saving his own skin, thus ready to sacrifice his son’s life in order to save his own.
Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
22:3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.