minimal expectations from eternal benevolence
So, I just passed a bearded old man with a HUGE sign sticking up over his head reading, “1 man, 1 woman, 1 marriage, God’s way”. Doing so in a generally liberal university area, he is clearly looking for attention. And I’m sure the old dear will be satisfied that, as promised in the Bible, he is ‘hated’ for doing the Christian god God’s ‘work’.
But his sign got me thinking. What are the minimal expectations human beings can have of a benevolent creator?
I would think that given the complexity of our lives, of situations, and of butterfly effects, guidance could only be restricted to encouraging us to live our lives avoiding harm to sentient earthly beings, including ourselves.
However, Christians seem more than happy to reconcile their belief in a benevolent creator god with any and all random rules, the breaking of which has often been punishable by earthly torment and/or death, followed by eternal torment. Would this be a fitting destiny for most of a created sentient group of beings, on behalf of eternal benevolence? I shouldn’t think so.
Let’s look at a few of these random rules:
A couple of thousand years ago, the god, God, was disgusted by the idea of people eating pigs. Now he’s more than happy for humans to feast on the flesh of these highly intelligent creatures, farming them in appalling conditions to do so. That’s random.
A couple of thousand years ago, the god, God, was disgusted by people who had sex outside of one perfect marriage, to the extent that raped women were forced to marry their rapist (after a suitable fine was paid). Now his followers happily divorce and remarry as often as their mood suits them. That’s random too.
A couple of thousand years ago, the god, God, was disgusted by people who didn’t obey him. He routinely ordered his followers to indiscriminately slaughter vast groups of people, with specific references to brutally killing pregnant women and children. Now his followers want us to believe he respects human life to such an extent that he would want to force women at any stage of pregnancy to give birth, regardless of their situation. That’s really random.
A couple of thousand years ago, the son of this god, God, (who is the god God) came to live as a man on our planet urging people not to judge one another, to pay taxes, to help the poor and to heal the sick. Now he’s happy for his followers to judge other people’s relationships and who they choose to marry (with no biblical references), and he’s concerned that taxes be kept as low as possible so that poor people can’t routinely access community aid or receive medical care.
My minimal expectations for eternal benevolence aren’t reached when it comes to the Christian religion, both in terms of the words in the Bible and in terms of the actions of its followers. As for the old bearded man and his odd obsession with other people’s relationships, I’m sorry that’s what his life is about. I’m sorry that he, and others like him, don’t allow themselves to have higher expectations of eternal benevolence.
And I’m not back, just ranting …
Hi violetW
Two ques. for your consideration.
1. What makes you think the ‘bearded old man’ is christian?
2. You wrote: —As for the old bearded man and his odd obsession with other people’s relationships, I’m sorry that’s what his life is about.—
Uh violet, with all due respect, perhaps this same question should be asked to your atheist friends whose blog sites are completely dedicated to the ridiculing, the character assassinations, the contempt of scripture, the so called superiority of unbelievers interpretation of God, and the incessant obsession with people of faith, so much so, that vile, vice, and villainry are everyday occurrences, and proved by anybody willing to be judicious in temperament.
The evidence of miscreantcy abounds. But good rant by you.
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I believe in traditional biblical marriage:
One man and his sister
One man and his dead brother’s wife
One man and one woman and her servants.
One man and his rape victim
One man and many women
One man and 700 women and 300 concubines
One man and one woman and her slaves
One man and his virgin prisoners
…Just not one man and one man. That would be immoral.
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You have forfeited ALL credibility, hint hint, your vile suggestions of late as far as I am concerned.
This was addressed to the hostess btw.
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Are you doubting these references to Traditional Biblical Marriage, John?
Really?
Would you like chapter and verse? I can give you that, no problem.
And I forgot to add, traditional biblical marriage also calls for cheating wives to be murdered.
“If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife — with the wife of his neighbor — both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.” – Leviticus 20:10
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Oh, and raping slaves to ensure your bloodline is continued is also a part of Traditional Biblical Marriage
“… so [Sarai] said to Abram, ‘The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.’ Abram agreed to what Sarai said.” – Genesis 16:2
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John,
From the book of Genesis we know that traditional marriage between one man and one woman exemplifies the nature and image of God.
Your list of bizarre mismatches is an example of you blaming God, once again, for the perversities of man.
The aspirant reader of the Bible needs to first get a brain that is capable of separating apples from oranges.
Apples and oranges.
Yes, that’s a metaphor for understanding that things with different properties or natures, like God and man, can’t be lumped together compared using the same set of standards.
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From the Book of Genesis (Genesis 16:2) we see that Traditional Biblical Marriage includes raping your wife’s slaves, with your wife’s blessing.
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John,
Who’s “we,” you and the rat in your pocket?
I explained that you are blaming God for the evil that men do and then you went and did it again.
Making atheism work out for you must be getting more and more difficult.
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Royal “We.” Respect my Queen or we’ll burn down your white house, again.
So, you’re saying Abraham wasn’t virtuous? Wasn’t he Yhwh’s favourite of all time? In the Qur’an he’s called Yhwh’s Best Friend Forever.
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John,
Jesus the Savior, descended from King David, a murderer and adulterer and not surprisingly, one of God’s favorites.
“We,” meaning you, and I and the rest of humanity, should not blame God for the evil that men do.
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Errrrum, but Yhwh loved Abraham so much that he entered into a covenant with him. They were best buddies, BFF’s, so it’s kinda’ clear that Abraham raping his wife’s slaves was not frowned upon by Yhwh. In fact, it made it into his book as an example for others. God-Breathed, right?
So, Traditional Biblical Marriage includes raping your wife’s slaves. It’s why its there, in the Good Book.
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John,
One of the great lessons of the Bible is God’s unconditional love for us.
But God’s unconditional love for us doesn’t mean he condones our perversities.
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@Silenceofmind, how exactly was Jesus “descended from King David”? More importantly how is that relevant to this discussion and infact to anything at all?
You clearly got this all wrong, and I do not know how that is possible, as you spend so much time discussing the very issue with us atheists – No atheist blames imaginary gods for anything. That is impossible. You do not blame Allah for the behaviour of Muslims do you? Or do you believe Allah exists?
Who wrote the Torah? Who wrote the Bible? Who wrote the Qur’an? Are those writers in no way responsible for how people do evil things when they sincerely take these books as authorization for the evil they do? If indeed there was some god who oversaw and inspired the writers, how did that particular god, wich ever one we are talking about, botch the communication so utterly, that most people who read these attempts at contact, seem not to be able to agree on just about anything what these books actually say? if our lives are only given to us for this alledgedly already all knowing god to sift out those of us who shall refuse to be hoodwinked by the evil, this god alledgedly allows to lie to us, then what on earth is that test for? It makes no sense at all. Does it?
How do we know when we are engaged in evil? By blindly believing the commands in these so called holy books alledgedly from the utmost authority, while we have absolutely no evidence at all to support the claim that any of these books have anything at all to do with any divinities, let alone evidence that divinities even exist?
How should we evaluate wether the gods in these books are benevolent or not? Or should we just do what most of humanity does and accept in blind faith the particular culturally relevant religion as handed down to us by the cultural heritage of each and everyone of us? Is that your story as well?
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rautakyy,
Since Zande was the one who brought up the subject why don’t you question him about being irrelevant?
We evaluate whether God is good by simply reading text and then thinking rationally about it.
Unfortunately, atheists bring a lot of hate and bias to everything they read, write or think.
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@Silenceofmind, John did not bring up the heritage line of Jesus. Jesus is irrelevant on the model of Christian marriage, because as far as I know, the Jesus character did not marry at any given time. He was not descendant of king David as other than trhough his adopted father, but even if we count that the relationship make no difference to any traditional Christian marriage. Does it?
It might very well be that atheists bring their bias to evaluation of any religious text. Are you saying that for example Hindus, Jews, Christians, or Muslims do not?
I can not help it, but when I read any so called holy texts, and rationally think about them I come to different conclusions than the Hindus, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. What sort of god could be called benevolent, if it did not try to correct me in my inability to come to the right conclusion? Is it not a minimal expectation of benevolence, from an alledgedly maximally powerfull entity, to acheive a text that was comprehensive enough for us all to come to the same conclusion? Or is it purposefully a god of confusion? How do you recon that is in any way benevolent?
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Minimal expectation of benevolence?
I hear John lovett saying “lower your standards”
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Be back. Isn’t it Spring up there?
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Jz, you chased him off.poor widdle puddy tat
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Of all creatures on Earth, man is the only one who is not able to live according to his nature.
That is because man does not know his own nature.
If man does not know his own nature, it follows that he cannot know the nature of God.
So how is it that violentwisp is able to judge God and not laugh herself to scorn?
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Cross Hadrian’s Wall and you’ll get all the answers you seek, SOM.
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John,
Did you know that one flew over the cuckoo’s nest?
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If you want a larger British target, try Christian Concern. Their main concern is LGBT and the wickedness thereof, but they were quoted in the Telegraph recently saying that a canon of York Minster introducing Zen meditation there “disrespected Jesus”.
The point of burning heretics in the middle ages and after was to burn away the sin, so that they might not burn in Hell- so I understand.
This was on the Quaker Renewal UK facebook group. Long, but worth a read:
We used to believe in God.
We knew that there was a Person who made us, loved us, and cared for us. God knew everything and could do anything, and his goodness was without limit. God was like the best possible parent you could imagine, but infinitely better. Whatever happened, we knew that everything was all right – when things went wrong it was only temporary, because God would put it right in the end. We were strong and courageous, because we shared in God’s infinite strength. God spoke to us and told us what to do, and our greatest delight was to do the will of God.
Then God died.
God was choked by all the suffering in the world. The world we found ourselves in seemed, as far as we could tell, not to care for us at all. In fact, it was constantly trying to kill us, often in very unpleasant ways. It was a dangerous world and none of us got out of it alive. So what was God doing? Why had God put us in a world like this, if he cared for us so much? Why didn’t God step in and stop our suffering? Perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he didn’t choose to – because he didn’t care.
God froze to death in the enormous spaces of the Universe. We could tell that there were countless multitudes of stars, and we were on a small planet circling just one of them. We knew that our lives were very short, and the life of the Universe was inconceivably long. When people told us that God had made the Universe for our sake, we laughed at them.
God fell silent. We no longer knew what to do next, because God no longer spoke to us. We had to make up our own lives out of nothing, because there was nobody to tell us how to live.
So we found ourselves alone, orphaned. We were conscious beings, in a Universe that was unconscious. We were loving beings, in a Universe that was hostile or indifferent. We were meaning-seeking beings, in a Universe without meaning. We were a contradiction, an absurdity. All we could do was to face up to our predicament, as bravely as we could, and not make things even worse by trying to pretend they were different. The more we tried to deny the truth, the worse it would be for us when the truth eventually became impossible to deny.
But then, God rose from the dead.
We stopped seeing ourselves as separate from our world.
Instead, we started to understand that we were woven into the fabric of our world.
Life emerged within this world of ours. We were caught up in a web or net that was pulsing with life.
The world was trying very hard to kill us, true – but equally, it had worked very hard to bring us to life. You could say that the world was hostile or indifferent. But you could say with equal validity that the world was gracious.
Everything that mattered to us – consciousness, meaning, purpose, love, goodness – had likewise emerged within this world, and hence was a property of the world, not just of ourselves. And so too the divine, the sacred, the holy. Out of the middle of the world, God was reborn.
We became aware of ourselves, and of the world. It was a wonder and a mystery to us that there should be anything at all – not how the world was, but that it was. Every creature that existed took part in and bore witness to this mystery. God was the name of this mystery.
Every human creature – every living thing – was a different expression of the world. You could not love a person in isolation. When you loved a person, you loved the world in them, and them in the world.
The demonic was also an emergent property of the world. There was an ocean of darkness as well as an ocean of light. It seemed that destruction was the shadow that was cast by creation, and that creation could not escape its shadow. But the destructive power tended to destroy itself; while the creative power tended to sustain itself in being, thereby inevitably making a space for the destructive power also. The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.
God was no longer a Person. But God was relational. We knew God in and through our connections with one another and with the world. Sometimes you could relate to God as if God was a person. We started to talk to God again.
Once more we tried to find the will of God – though we knew that this, too, was a metaphor. Imagine a surveyor looking at a flood plain, and saying, where does the water want to go? Likewise, we looked at the world and asked, where does God want to go?
And so it was that we came up through the flaming sword to the paradise of God, and all things were made new for us.
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That old man on the bench is my uncle Jake. He used to drink and womanize a lot, but now he’s just angry because he has old wrinkly balls now, is divorced, and can’t find any purpose for his life.
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It seems to me, that when religious people say their god is benevolent, what they are actually expressing is a kind of wish, that the entity they really know nothing about, but they think has absolute might over them and their loved ones, without any chance for rebellion. That kind of reveals their suspicion of this entity not really being fair.
I suppose that is why they often do not grasp the fact, that atheists do not believe the god exists, but rather see atheists as if we were in some futile attempt to rebell against impossible odds.
All religions have this idea of bargaining with the gods or what ever invisible powers that they can not controll otherwise. Magic and prayer are both attempts to change reality through superstitious rituals of appealing to something outside nature – and ultimately outside reality.
As for the rebellion against impossible odds, even if I thought, that the god of the Bible was true – wich I honestly can not – I could not deem it worthy of praise, adoration, nor worship. On the contrary, I would be in rebellion against the moral monster depicted in the book, but then my rebellion would take a completely different form, than trying to deny the existance of my enemy. Sometimes the only way to keep to one’s own integrity is to defy all odds, for what is right.
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Hi Violet, you make a pretty good point here. You’re basically saying something along these lines? – How can the Christian consider their God to be benevolent when he makes incredibly random rules changes to random rules for which the punishment for breaking them is really awful and possibly eternal?
If so, here are some thoughts:
1. The punishment in question could simply be death i.e. separation from God (who is the source of life), the end of existence. The bible actually doesn’t make it 100% clear, I don’t think.
2. What if it’s not about punishment? What if it’s just God giving us what we ask i.e. we outright reject him, so he gives us what we want, our autonomy.
3. How is it that Christians seem to be cool with the way the rules of the bible are seemingly so random and are additionally so randomly changed?
In the end it all boils down to who you think Jesus was. The christian Bible is read very, very differently depending on who you think Jesus was. If one does not think that Jesus was God come to earth to redeem it – then of course you are right to reject the bible as a crazy mix of stuff, including random rules, which are randomly broken.
However if one thinks that Jesus was God and he did something that redeemed creation, then all parts of the bible make a heck of a lot more sense. Christians can and do reconcile God’s goodness, mercy, love, faithfulness, kindness etc. (which I guess you summarise as benevolent?) with the seemingly randomness of the ‘rules’.
How? I’ll use your first example to illustrate a little.
What’s with the food laws and why were they ditched? In the OT ceremonial purity and cleanliness (e.g. only eating certain food and not others) was a prerequisite for approaching a holy God i.e. ceremonial purity and cleanliness made clear a very important point: human beings are spiritually unclean and cannot go into God’s presence without purification. But even in OT times many writers understood that this system pointed forwards (e.g. 1 Sam 15:21-22; Psalm 50:12-15; Hosea 6:6). When Christ appeared he declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19) and ignored the OT cleanliness laws in other ways e.g. touching lepers and dead bodies. Why? When he died it is reported that the veil in the temple that stood between the people and the ‘presence of God’ was torn, from top to bottom, showing that the entire sacrificial system with all its cleanliness laws was now obsolete.
I’m so tired I can’t think straight, so that’ll do from me for now. Does that give you a little bit of an idea as to how a christian can reconcile God’s goodness and his ‘weird/awful’ laws?
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Hi, myisleofserenity. You make an interresting point. What I find especially curious about your perspective, is that infact, the Bible does not really make a claim, that Jesus is a god. It is a notion inferred obviously a lot later when the Church organized and the earliest herecies were rooted out in a competition of power between the leaders of the movement, from a need to rationalaze, that the Jesus character had allready been worshipped as a god, or at least a demigod, for wich the Jewish notion of singular god (typical to nomadic cultures) could not accomodate. It seems like a result of having the original meaning lost in translation.
In the NT the Jesus character is referred to as a son of the Jewish god. The very same title as given for Abraham, Moses and a bunch of other OT patriarchs simply for having followed the Mosaic law, or the will of their god (wether assumed from the set of Hebrew laws – an obvious copy from the laws of Hammurabi and other Levant rulers older than the Biblical texts – or by voices inside their heads). Where those dudes also god? No? What actually in the story makes you believe Jesus was a god?
The oldest written form of NT is in Greek. To the contemporary Greeks and all the other contemporary Mediterranean and Levant civic and rural people when someone was referred to as a son of a god, it was understood in a literal form, like Horus, Achilles, Heracles, Hercules and a number of other gods and demigods. The few first generation Christians were mostly not Jews and they certainly were not the conservative religious Jews and there simply was no consensus, not to mention doctrine about this stuff.
The concept of Trinity is not once mentioned in the NT. Did the writers not consider it an important enough concept, even to bother to mention it? Or is it more likely, that the entire idea is an after the fact attempt to reasoning, the Jewish concept of singular god to the typical idea of flesh and blood sons of gods.
Now, for a person to take Jesus as anything more than a character in a story, that may or may not be based on actual events and an actual person is quite a leap, abandonig reason far behind. Though it may not seem like that when one has been taught from childhood to assume Jesus is something more than for what the evidence around the story really gives credit for.
There is a reason why we do not discuss here wether if Achilleus was an actual son of an actual god. The only difference between him and Jesus is that the Jesus story survived as a religion, while Achilleus never was an item or religuous worship and the worship of his father god was banned by the worshippers of the father god of Jesus. Both are characters who might be based on actual people, both alledgedly did wondrous things in actual historical sites and both were said to be the sons of some particular god. That is about the extent of what we really are warranted to say about either of these storybook characters through rigorous historical study. What other difference is there?
However, the topic post was in my view put forward granting the possibility that Jesus and the abrahamic god are actual entities, rather than just storybook characters. I for one find it hard to percieve this particular notion of a god any better, or even reaching minimal expectations to be called “benevolent” at all. If it exists, it is a god of confusion and utter chaos, or simply a very inadequate god for the job it has taken on, as it obviously has some serious communication problems. It only seems to reach people, who think faith is a virtue, wich it obviously is not, and even those people who claim to have been reached and understood the core message, seem totally unable to agree on just about any other issue exept on doctrinal excuses how a singular god could have a son, by being that son and the son alledgedly communicating with that god through prayer. It makes very little sense to anyone looking at it with a critical eye. Does it?
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What happened to archaeopteryx1? If I might ask.
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I don’t know. I’m pretending that Violet is actively blogging, so am commenting on a month-old post.
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Violet appears to be back now.
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Hi Tiribulus, not sure what you mean. I asked him to leave my blog probably a year ago after he was intolerably rude to Clare. I think he’s still around though, I saw a comment on Nan’s blog recently.
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I’m sorry to hear that. I actually like the guy. Seriously.
I was just going to see if he’d made any progress on the definition of probability.
How’s the new baby? (not so new anymore)
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Well, you can find him here if you fancy a chat:
And yes, my new baby is now a toddler. How time flies …. You still racing around defending Becky’s honour as required? 😀
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