Job 40-42

[wolfpurplemoon]

God is describing monsters, fire breathing(?) monsters. But whatever it was it convinces Job that God is great and then God gives him back twice as much stuff as he had at the beginning.

I'm not sure you require faith in a God that pops by for a chat (not blind faith anyway), in fact Job says that it is the fact that he's seen God that has convinced him to take back any of the mean stuff he said.

And so Job lived to 140 and had a great rest of his life, glad it turned out OK in the end...

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Imponderable may not be the best term to use. After all, they're the philosopher's stock and trade!

Sorry to have taken so long in responding, but I realized the fundamental error in my earlier draft: we aren't speaking from a common frame of reference. I was a Christian for fifty years, but I don't recognize your conception of God. My tradition did not share the image of, "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you...", to quote old Jonathan Edwards.

The attributes of your God seem to be petty jealousy, insecurity, unremitting rage, and paranoid psychopathy. You seem to be describing a being so dependent upon "faith" (another term on which I'm not sure we agree - yours sounds rather more like groveling servility) that torture is required to prove his subjects' fidelity.

And yet, at the same time, you're describing a being who creates universes and crashes whirling galaxies into each other. How can he be betrayed? How can he be resisted? How can he be rebelled against? How can he survive these inherent contradictions?

I can betray and rebel against my father. I cannot rebel against a mountain, or an ocean, or a star. How can you speak of betraying the creator of all? Imagine what deluded arrogance I'd have to possess to think that I'm capable of doing anything that could affect God in the slightest way.

And let us say that I did betray and rebel against my father. Would he ever be justified in killing my children?

No! It is barbaric, immoral, insane. Such a God cannot be called good, let alone all-good. Such a God cannot be called holy. Such a God cannot be called almighty. Such a God can only be called the creation of tales told around the smoking campfires of late Bronze-age goat-herders. He is the night fears of a people dwelling in the hostile wilderness. He is the ancient legends and just-so stories of great floods and giants in the earth. He is the foil of heroic tribal ancestors who boasted that they wrestled with him all night, or claimed to look up from a cleft in the rock and see his ass as he passed by.

I truly wish I had more time, but discussing how many angels can sit on the end of a pin is going to get tedious. (Measure the pin. Measure the angel's butts. You can do the math.) The simple fact is that I see no evidence for the existence of either angels or gods. We're debating the qualities of the imaginary, and we're not even imagining the same thing.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I am sorry to be so petty on phraseology.

My conception of God is neither here nor there. The conception of God that I have had to construct for this discussion, namely, the God that seems apparent from the Old Testament, is and should be entirely different from the Christian God. The Christian God seems to like love, grace, injustice, and the like quite a bit more than his older version. I realize my terminology has not been the clearest, and I do apologize for that.

I wouldn't say that he's dependent on faith, for how could such a creator being be dependent on anything? He does seem to crave it to a degree that at times borders on the psychotic. And again, I'm not sure how anything this God would choose to do could be petty; unwarranted perhaps, but probably not petty. Unremitting rage seems rather strong too; he would seem to stop short every now and again in his rampages. And I think that anything resembling paranoia could be justifiably ascribed to the being. I grant that it is hardly a pleasant picture, but there is no reason the picture should be pleasant. The question has always been about morality, not pleasantness.

I see no inherent contradiction in a being that is all-powerful and betray-able. A possible explanation for this being's paranoia and jealousy would be that when he created mankind, he made himself vulnerable to the will of man. For all his less pleasant attributes, it would seem that this Old Testament God did create humans to fulfill a purpose that would be pleasing to him. For some reason, he seems to have thrown free will in there too, so that it is possible for mankind to rob God of pleasure. And, so too, did God rob himself of a form of omnipotence that I'm not sure he ever claimed to have. As such, this creator is very thwartable/betrayable/resistable by his creation.

I fail to see the similarity between the Old Testament God and an ocean, mountain, or star. Neither the ocean, mountain, nor star contain will or personality. I've always thought of mankind as somewhat arrogant; I know I am. And I previously mentioned how it would be possible for a single human(for numbers hardly matter when it comes to divine pleasure, it seems) to influence God.

I doubt he would; assuming that your father and you lived in a relatively recent Western culture. I can easily imagine a society in which such behavior would be acceptable. However, since I hope I can safely assume that neither you nor your father live in such a society, I hope I can say that your father would definitely not be justified in such an action. I know my father wouldn't. However, I fail to see what current Western morality has to do with anything. We're not talking about a recent God; we're talking about an old one. To apply recent morality to an old entity would simply be to whine that things have changed in a couple thousand years. So, if all you're trying to say is that the God of the Old Testament doesn't act like you do, I agree completely. I find that idea that you and your culture are the sole arbiters of all that could ever be moral somewhat arrogant and offensive, but that is hardly an issue in this discussion.

Barbaric? Perhaps. Immoral? Hardly, when measured by the morality that can properly be applied to the situation. Insane? I fail to see how insanity comes into play at all. Of course he can be called good and all-good; he just can't be called "Bill's good"(I assume that's your name; my apologies if I was either wrong or somehow impolite) As that "holy" and "divine" are fairly good synonyms...I fail to see why not. I fail to see anything in your remarks that strips this being of any power. And that comment about campfire tales is historically false.

Angel anus measuring has nothing to do with this discussion whatsoever. Further, evidence for such a God has also not come up in this conversation(as far as I recall). If you would like to begin such a discussion, I would be more than willing to do so, so long as our host has not grown tired of our squabbles. I don't recall imagining much of anything; all I did was remember, as best I could, how the Old Testament God acts, and some old Sunday School lessons on him.

[vequenor.livejournal.com]

Ah, that reminds me. Since you were kind enough to tell me a bit about your background, I should probably reciprocate. I was raised by an associate minister of what could be called a highly conservative church. They were kind enough to stop just short of full-fledged fundamentalism, thank goodness. Then I went to college, discovered that several other concepts made much more sense than what I had been raised with, realized that determining the nature of the universe and beyond is a somewhat difficult task, and therefore began to style myself as an agnostic. I know that was probably more detail than you wanted, but I'm a wordy fellow.