God’s Temper Tantrums And General Bad Behaviour
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Assuming there may be a God and assuming that the Bible is God’s phrase and a historical report of His activities (and you won’t pay attention to the contrary in church and from other formal Christian religious firms). The standard hype you pay attention to, the standard picture projected of God (and son) tends to be ‘warm and fuzzy.’ It’s all approximately love, compassion, mercy, kindness, and forgivingness, no longer hell, fireplace, and brimstone. There’s as a minimum one Bible-orientated Internet website that gives you a “verse-of-the-day” that’s always ‘warm and fuzzy’ – a Biblical verse you’d whisper for your loss of life grandmother. However, if the church, spiritual enterprises, even Biblical Internet websites stuck to a ‘wrath of God’ message, they might be manner greater intellectually honest. Alas, human beings need to listen to ‘heat and fuzzy’ not ‘wrath.’
Well, Adam and Eve get booted out of the Garden of Eden by you understand who. Now, this is infrequently the movement of an awesome host, particularly, whilst there wasn’t a without problems to be had hotel room down the street as an alternative for our original loving couple. There’s no mercy, compassion, or forgiveness here.
Then God drowns almost the entire human race with forty days and nights of torrential rain. Only Noah and some of his relatives, plus a few selected animals, ever get to see dry land again. Now, if that is not genocide, I do not regard what’s! Hitler could have mentioned this as a precedent for his own extermination philosophies. One interesting puzzle here is if God singled out Noah and a few of his family members to continue to exist that flood, then Noah and his family ought to be God’s chosen human beings. Therefore their descendants ought to also be God’s selected peoples. Alas, seeing that those descendants repopulated the planet, and because not all of that repopulation were favored using God, then some thing’s screwy someplace.
Then we come to the Tower of Babel. People construct a tower (early prototype of the skyscraper) upwards towards the sky (i.E. – Heaven). God is apparently terrified via this motion and retaliates with the aid of growing and fostering several languages on these upstarts so that the architects and builders, and many others. They cannot talk, given that all of them talk now in different tongues. How that is achieved is not safely defined. Still, it’s as a substitute painless manner of gaining knowledge of an overseas language even at the expense of forgetting your own native tongue. Further, to ensure that no correspondence may be entered into, absolutely everyone gets scattered to the four corners of the globe – did God rent a fleet of jumbo jets to transport them? Even the tallest modern terrestrial systems do not remotely reach Heaven; God is concerned needlessly. It’s frequently stated that “God works in mysterious approaches.” My translation of that pithy, however, copout statement (something that explains nothing) is that God is as loony because of the Mad Hatter. God wishes not simplest to chill however is in determined need of a few severe remedies.
God then, having gotten up on the incorrect facet of the bed once more, terrifies negative Abraham and almost gives him a heart assault by way of ordering him to execute his son, Isaac. An animal is substituted at the remaining minute, and so God says, “ha-ha, fooled you, I was handiest gambling a little joke.” However, the damage was done, and that type of comic story is hardly appropriate PR designed to command loving respect. Ask yourself, is that this the way an actual loving God would behave? Would you appreciate being on the receiving end of God’s little funny story?
After another horrific hair day, God offers Sodom & Gomorrah the A-bomb remedy because the coolest folks in the dual cities do not meet God’s ethical standards – moral standards? Talk about casting the primary stone! God did this sort of right activity of destruction right here that no trace of the dual towns has ever been observed to these days! Some alchemy is also practiced as the complicated multi-element biochemistry of Lot’s spouse’s human body is converted right into a pure compound of just two elements – sodium and chlorine. A neat trick, that one.
Throughout Genesis, God’s composure is whatever, however cool, calm, and amassed. Without a doubt, he needs an aspirin and an amazing lie down at this point, and we are only thru simply the primary Biblical ebook. What are horrors yet in store?
Ancient Egypt is floor zero, for starters, while God inflicts the 10 plagues on the Egyptians (manifestly no longer His chosen humans). Those plagues blanketed mass murder of the primary-born as the grand finale.
God’s non-public Constitution is then imposed on His personal Chosen People, the Israelites. That Constitution is more widely known then and now as the Ten Commandments; however, God exempts Himself, particularly the bit approximately “Thou shall not kill.”
LEVITICUS info a potful more of God’s ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ and ‘otherwise’s.’ God loves laying down the regulation – as lengthy because it’s His law. In every other context, He’d be considered a bully at best or a dictator at worst. He’s surely now not into making legal guidelines thru the idea properly called democracy.
NUMBERS maintains the ‘do this’ and ‘do not do this’ parade, but additionally carries a few bits not fit for kids’ TV viewing – violence!
There is dissension inside the Chosen People’s ranks within the Sinai desert, and so there’s mutiny afoot. The Biblical equal of Captain Bligh (i.E. – God) will no longer be denied His wrath. Actually, there had been associated mutinies. The first and minor mutiny ends with a whimper and no longer a bang. The 2d and predominant mutiny ends with a bang and not a whimper. It ends whilst God kills many of His Chosen People with a pandemic (love the one’s germs) and an earthquake (shake, rattle, and roll) as punishment for rumblings inside the ranks. Further, on down the wilderness track, we have the episode of the ‘golden calf’ mark II (i.E. Greater idols; greater idle worship). So God, understanding that His Chosen People didn’t increase sufficient immunity from His final plague, sends every other – the nearby undertaker receives to bury any other 24,000 Israelites.
Somewhere along the line here, a pissed-off God does an about-face. Instead of leading His Chosen People to the Promised Land thru a pillar-of-fireplace via the night and a pillar-of-a-cloud via a day in brief-clever style as in Exodus, He now dooms the Israelites to wander approximately aimlessly inside the barren region desolate tract for forty years as a substitute. Not even the Spartan navy toughened up its recruits through living-off-the-land survival schooling in this sort of barbaric way. Who’d need to be an Israelite? So with ‘pals’ like God hanging around looking after you: who desires enemies! But enemies there were.