A reading from the Book of 2nd Kings (or, WTF?)

[Hugabear]

2 Kings 2:23-25

23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

25 And he went from thence to mount Carmel, and from thence he returned to Samaria.

Seems like God might be suffering from multiple personalities. How can he go from slaughtering children and ordering the wholesale genocide of "heathen" tribes to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "turn the other cheek"?

[acmavm]

1. Don't mix up your Gods. As Lewis Black says, the New Testament

God is a really great guy. The Old Testament God is a real prick.

[NAO]

34. The NT god is WAY worse than the OT god

Sure, the OT god went on genocidal massacres. He inflicted wars and floods and plagues and famine...BUT...when the OT god killed you, you were dead, and your suffering was over.

In contrast, with the NT god, death is NOT the end, but rather the beginning of suffering that HAS NO END!!

"Eternal torment", "weeping and gnashing of teeth", "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched" just to quote a few favorite slogans of NT god's (alleged) earthly representative JC.

The final desiny of enemies of the NT god (who incidentally was complicit, even planned, the murder of his own son) is the Lake of Fire.

"The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night." Revelation 14:10

[selador]

2. yes

few people realize the new testament god got sponsored by decaf coffee: "when you absolutely positively want to stop smiting..."

old testament god all jacked on crystal meth, mountain dew and ho-ho's

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. The Bible is not a single-authorship continuous narrative

It's a collection by different authors, and the Kings is some seven hundred years older than any of the New Testament.

As you move through the Bible, which is arranged roughly in chronological order (except that Deuteronomy was a retelling of the story of Moses inserted into the Torah after the return from Babylon), God becomes less tribal and vengeful and more into universal justice.

[Hugabear]

4. But we're supposed to believe that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever

At least, that's what the fundies always taught me.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. God, but not the way people interpreted God

Fundamentalism is a recent perversion of Biblical interpretation, based on an ignorant over-reaction to Darwin and recently encouraged by the right-wing for its anti-intellectualism. The ancients, including the early Christians (This Lent, I've taken an informal course in reading some of the earliest surviving non-Biblical Christian writings) treated Scripture as allegory in ways that seem over the top to us. I'm not even talking about the Gnostic Gospels, either, but about the orthodox "church father" types.

[varkam]

11. But then what I've always wondered is this...

assuming that there is a god, who is to say which interpretation is the correct one - or if the correct interpretation is even in circulation?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

13. Well, we don't know and no one has the complete picture

We can't understand the force behind the Universe any more than a paramecium can understand us.

If you look at the core beliefs (not the cultural overlays) of all the world's religions, though, you see peace, love, justice, and integrity as virtues.

[varkam]

14. Those virtues were also present in ancient Greek philosophy...

which didn't necessarily rely on appeals to god(s).

But if we can't understand the force behind the universe, assuming there is such a thing, then why bother? Why assume that one interpretation is correct when it could be just as likely that another is, or for that matter that none are?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. I've said before in this forum that religion is experiential, not logical

I've had the experiences, and I've chosen culturally congenial ways to deal with them. Other people's mileage may vary.

The Greeks did it their way, the many varieties of Buddhists did it their way, the ancient Hebrews did it their way, the Hindus did it their way, the Muslims did it their way.

I follow a northern European variety of Christianity, one that blends liturgical formalism with liberal theology. My parish enjoys friendly relations with other mainstream Christians, Jews, and Muslims in town. It hosts a Center for Religious Inquiry, which has held courses in both Christian topics and other religions (taught by representatives of those religions).

The fundamentalists reject us, and even rail against us--even my parish in particular--on their cable access programs, because they think we're "soft on gays."

[varkam]

17. I didn't mean to come off as attacking you.

The question I phrased wasn't directed at you in particular, but rather it is a broader question that I've been trying (for years now) to get some sort of an answer to.

The fundies think you're soft on gays, and you (and myself) think that they are full of shit - but the problem is that there's not exactly anything that we (in a collective sense) can appeal to in order to prove it as we're using the same source material but just following different interpretations. In a sense, they've had the experiences and have chosen their own culturally congenial ways to deal with them. I think that history has shown that the only way such differences are ever truly "solved" is with bloodshed, in that the fellow who is wrong is the fellow who is in the ground.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. I didn't take it as an insult

Anyway, the difference in conclusions is the result of a different methodology, rather than different interpretations. The fundamentalists take everything literally (homosexuality is "an abomination") except when they don't (as in not keeping spare livestock around for sacrifices after they've sinned). Since they're basically authoritarian, they're afraid of anything that challenges their absolutes.

The liberal approach is to inform one's reading of Scripture with knowledge of the context in which it was written. In my particular denomination, we've long declared a reliance on "Scripture, tradition, and reason."

The whole multiple authorship of the Torah? That's old news to us. (I first learned about it in a required religion class at a Lutheran college.) The parallels between Noah's ark and the Epic of Gilgamesh? Also old news. This stuff and more has been taught in mainline seminaries for about 150 years.

The contextual approach means that we can look at the passage in Leviticus that condemns homosexuality and note that it's part of a list that includes having sex with a woman during her period or sacrificing one's children to Moloch. Other "abominations" include violating the dietary laws, by eating pork, for example.

All in all, Leviticus reads more like an anthropological account of an ancient tribe than like a guide for modern life. Even Orthodox Jews no longer follow all the rules in it.

It's late at night, so I'll just sum things up by saying that the difference is not in interpretation but in methodology. Fundamentalists take their pet passages literally and ignore the rest, even to the point of ignoring the fact that there are two consecutive creation stories and two consecutive Noah's ark stories in Genesis. Liberals try to figure out a passage in terms of what it meant to the people who wrote it, what the historical context was, whether it's to be interpreted literally or allegorically (and allegorical interpretation has a long history in the church), and so on.

I hope that answers your question.

[jjray7]

52. "orthodox" church fathers

Well said Lydia. One quibble though. Prior to the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., there was no such thing as "orthodox" in the early Christian Church. Much diversity of thought in the Christian church and none of it was, at the time, considered heretical by any a central authority. Gnostics (which is an umbrella term encompassing a wide difference of belief) were part of an established part of the Christian community prior to Nicea. No central church authority really existed after James the Just was murdered and then the Jerusalem Christian community wiped out during the Jewish revolt against Rome started in 66 CE (culminating in the destruction of the 2nd temple in 70 CE). Paul had been a figure of minor authority within the church until the decapitation of the Christian church's leadership in Jerusalem. Each Christian community elected its own bishop at this time. Some of these bishops espoused beliefs that are considered heretical today (i.e., a large minority of bishops did not believe in the divinity of Jesus prior to 325 A.D.).

Some of the people one may think of as "Church fathers" (most notably Valentinus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentinus_%28Gnostic%29 ) taught things that are now called gnostic. Even a pillar of the church such as Origen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen taught reincarnation, now considered heretical and associated with the gnosticism.

[OlderButWiser]

8. That's so nice...

"God becomes less tribal and vengeful and more into universal justice."

Did he get some counseling or something? A little anger management, maybe?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. Sigh

You know very well what I meant.

[Igel]

6. An evergreen topic.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x307141
This thread, the more recent, can be disregarded.

In more detail and outrage/argumentation, one can peruse this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x47115

See posts 131 and 70 in the second thread for possible non-outraged and non-knee-jerk responses.

Since we now Google DU and don't need stars, more than ever, Google is your friend.

[Sanctified]

7. He does not suffer from multiple personalities.

You list two separate issues, one God did smite those who offended Him like those in 2nd Kings 2:23-25 no getting around it but the "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "turn the other cheek" were how we are to live, we are not gods and thus do not get to go around judging the faith of others and smiting them if we feel that they are an offense to God, that is Gods job.

Now there are some debates on whether these were actual children, teenage males or men without faith all of which the Hebrew word used to describe them could imply. But it does not really matter for even if you are a small child you do not mock a prophet of God for it is pretty close to mocking God Himself and will likely bring His wrath down upon you in full force.

[OlderButWiser]

9. Another nice example of ....

...how we can conveniently choose what the words really mean.

"Now there are some debates on whether these were actual children, teenage males or men without faith all of which the Hebrew word used to describe them could imply."

[Sanctified]

10. It's not a convenient way to choose the meaning for the outcome would have been the same,

no matter if they were infants, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, adults or the elderly they would have faced God's wrath so debating their age is pointless.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

39. But for some reason you felt the need to muddy the waters on that aspect.

I wonder why?

[Silent3]

48. Your God...

...is a f*cking asshole. Since I think it's vanishingly unlikely that such a deity actually exists, that you choose to believe in this god and embrace such an evil tyrant, making excuses about being "unworthy" to pass judgment on his atrocities, says more about you than it does about the hideous fiction you bow down to.

[trotsky]

40. You see because if they're just "men without faith" well by golly

they DESERVED to be ripped to shreds by a bear. Duh!

[Hugabear]

23. Sorry, still doesn't cut it in my book

Still seems kinda extreme to sic bears on a group of kids and rip them to shreds, even if what they did was "pretty close to mocking God himself".

There's a lot of nasty stuff in the Old Testament, where God condones - and even orders - wholesale ethnic cleansing.

[John Gauger]

24. Are you actually defending that passage?

Why is it acceptable for god to just kill anyone he pleases? Why should there be different rules for god than the rules god expects us to live by?

[Sanctified]

27. Yes I am defending the passage.

We are not gods and thus we do not get to set the rules, God gave us life and because of that He gets to set the rules.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

38. I am SO happy to live an ocean away from you. -nt

[Meshuga]

41. Well,

Ele tá mais perto de mim do que de ti, eu acho. Mas que bom que a distância ainda é boa. Bom, não poderia ser longe o suficiente, já que o dito cujo é aparentemente um bitolado! :scared:



PS. your profile says you live in Rio de Janeiro so my assumption is that you know Portuguese (or that it might even be your native language). My apologies if that is not the case. :-)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

45. É o caso.

:hi:

[WhollyHeretic]

43. God sounds like an abusive homicidal parent

[Warpy]

44. Or a ghetto gangsta

You dis his homies, he's gonna cap yo ass.

[struggle4progress]

16. It offends you that children are torn apart? If so, you might find many

contemporary examples, where your concern might actually make some difference

[varkam]

18. So are you saying that we should not discuss such things? eom

[struggle4progress]

19. As I find it difficult to believe that your reading skills so poor that you find such meaning

in what I write, so suspect you play some disingenuous game

But sighing or gritting my teeth (whichever you prefer to imagine), I shall allow you the full benefit of the doubt and shall therefore explain with extended tedium what I just said clearly (and so much more briefly!) in my prior post:

You are a person who claims an interest in the real material world. You say you have little regard for ancient stories like this one of the prophet and the children and the bears. You will, in fact, readily dismiss such tales, insofar as one does really not know exactly when or where it was supposed to occur or who the supposed victims are. Not matter what else one might say, the account comes from a time far from living memory: whoever might once have claimed to have had second or third or fourth hand knowledge of it, was long ago laid in the dust. Surely a practical modern realist, who is attentive to the actual world and who is outraged by the prospect of children being torn to bits, notices that children are torn to bits every day: is it natural, then, to fume with outrage about this story in an old book?

[varkam]

21. So sorry.

I did not realize that asking a question would put you out so much - I certainly will try not to do so in the future.

But another question (only if I may, and only if it will not so offend you as to respond with such acrimony) - hypothetically speaking, people who frequent the R/T forum might actually have regard for such ancient stories (contrary to your assertion) especially if they come from a book that is purported to be a moral guide on how we should live our lives. So, why do you assume that people here have little regard for such ancient stories?

And, with respect to your original post, it was lacking any sort of a conclusion - and so it was left up to the reader to try to divine what you meant. Given that you seemed to give little regard to the OP in your message, and juxtaposed that with current affairs, I was left with the impression that you felt such topics were not worthy of discussion. I thought this as the OP said nothing about finding children being torn apart offensive per se, but rather made the following remark:

Seems like God might be suffering from multiple personalities. How can he go from slaughtering children and ordering the wholesale genocide of "heathen" tribes to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "turn the other cheek"?

That gave me the impression that the OP was more interested in examining the apparent contradictions inherent in the bible, as opposed to hand-wringing over children being torn apart.

In the future, you could try to be a little more clear (for the ignoramuses like myself) as opposed to responding to simple inquiries by spraying piss and vinegar all over people that wish to engage you in discussion.

:hi:

[PassingFair]

51. Why aren't you doing anything about GUNS IN SCHOOLS!!11!!!

Sorry, I was temporarily channeling
that state senator from Illinois.....

:crazy:

[John Gauger]

25. I agree. The Christian religion is beneath contempt.

Let's not even waste our time discussing it.

:eyes:

[struggle4progress]

26. Inability to read accurately appears to be contagious

[varkam]

28. Yes. It is everyone else who is stupid.

It has nothing to do with you :hi:

[struggle4progress]

29. You know I never said anyone was stupid

[varkam]

30. Perhaps it is simply that I cannot understand the written word, then.

:hi:

[crawfish]

42. Yes...that type of thing should never be allowed on a THEOLOGY board.

:)

[Meshuga]

22. My two cents

Seems like God might be suffering from multiple personalities. How can he go from slaughtering children and ordering the wholesale genocide of "heathen" tribes to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and "turn the other cheek"?

The Hebrew Bible is meshed together as a collection of God ideas from ancient people who used a deity to solve their problems. So you will see God the problem solver for a semi-nomadic people who solved problems for them via patriarchs. There was a God who was the problem solver for people in the wilderness who solved problem for these people via a prophet. When these people settled in a land there was the God who appointed kings via his prophets to solve issues like war, conquest, and protection for these people from their enemies. There was a God who "communicated" with prophets demanding social action and ethical behavior from the people preferring these topics over religious rites. However, there was the God of the priestly class at the Temple who cared mostly about religious rites and, for example, gave a good harvest and protection to these people who brought him offerings. And there are more God ideas that I obviously missed that describe the God idea of whoever was the author of a specific passage.

Depending on the politics, geography, on the era, the oppressor, the enemies, the issues, etc. of the time, you will see a God idea expressing the interest of a specific group of people within this nation marking the time and circumstances that these stories were put together. It is only natural to see contradictions.

However, if one sees that these books are literal and believe in a literal Biblical God then I think it is a very fair question to ask what is up with the contradictions attributed to this deity who many times falls short of his own moral expectations so far as to need humans talk him out of doing something we see as immoral.

[NAO]

31. I'll TOP that with a reading from Numbers, ch 31

Ok, here's my favorite OT atrocity passage:

Numbers 31:17-18

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Genocidal massacre PLUS underage war booty. WooHoo!

***

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Yep, that's YHVH to a tee.

[struggle4progress]

32. Whoa! Dawkins has surveyed all fiction? I had no idea! Where is this survey published?

It must run to thousands and thousands of pages

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

37. Stop playing dumb. You saw the word "arguably" in there as well as everybody.

You are trying to defend the indefensible. Simple as that.

[struggle4progress]

49. Dawkins engages in overblown bullshit rhetoric. So what if he uses the word "arguably"?

[PATRICK]

33. Sounds like the old crank Elisha

who seemed in the habit of personal curses. Maybe from being always second to Elijah whose grandiose masscres included the prophet competition losers. There is a long historical stretch to Jesus of Nazareth who took upon himself this price of doing business with human violence and grudges. Jesus was also a daring scriptural critic though never getting into all the various wonders of OT "divine" vengeance.

Now to imagine a Jesus on the defensive over this verse would be to imagine him confronting a very untypical audience. Maybe a rapier response like noting that God didn't say he sent the bears. Or something about respecting God's word and the unknown future. Jonah's attitude and other disagreeable things are never so important as the positive message and more directly dicine teachings. So i imagine nothing much would come up about Elisha other than a caveat that if such a trivial thing was punished for respect of the prophet what about the higher teachings? The old duck and turnabout but I don't think one can fault too much about Jesus' direct confrontation on behalf of compassion and mercy.

Mark Twain has better examples to arouse both amusement and indignation.

[Georgie_92]

35. The Bible was written in those

times FOR those times, by men who wanted to instill fear. Just my two cents.

[PATRICK]

36. A time of war, crisis and uncertainty

about survival. And a warning about what to normally expect from the Israel of today facing its own radical and brutalizing crisis. It was a time of moving from Confederation liberties to standard oriental kingship- and all the attendant dangerous alliances and evils.

In short a time of setting aside the harrowing trust in Providence- not bloodily decisive enough- for pragmatic violence entirely of human making. Once the Kings come in the prophets are free to inveigh against the "World" now institutionalized in tragic Jewish history. As far as authority and security it is really too much for the people, any people, to cast their vulvnerability into total faith.

[On the Road]

46. If You Think That's Something

try the Books of Genesis and Judges. Plenty of lurid stories there. They never fail to fascinate:

Genesis 38: The story of Tamar, who disguised herself as a prostiture and seduced her father-in-law in order to become pregnant.

Judges 19-21: A "Levite" who allowed his his wife to be gang raped and murdered, and then carried out a campaign of genocide on the whole region where it took place.

Judges 10-11: The story of Jephthah, which appears to describe child sacrifice of a family member.

[TCJ70]

47. As a balding person...

...I find this passage filled with hope.

[PassingFair]

50. LOL n/t