Mithrae wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 1:48 am
theophile wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:24 pm
We may have to agree to disagree on this, or go to the next level of what God is, and what it means to be spirit. i.e., I think the bible shows a God whose power changes across the narrative. God goes from powerless spirit in Genesis 1 to all-in-all and all-powerful at the end, when death itself is conquered (as Paul says somewhere). This means that at any point between God is somewhere on that trajectory, and may still be at the beginning for all we know, with no power committed to God's cause.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the day and night, the sun and stars. It doesn't get much more powerful than that. Fixating on a dubious understanding of a single word in that story to come up with completely the opposite interpretation seems, shall we say, questionable at the best. One could surely say that the authors were simply hyperbolizing in their veneration of the seven-day week or were simply wrong in their traditions about how their world came to be, but pretending to glean from Genesis 1 the revelation that God was a "powerless spirit" seems little short of dishonest.
I get your point, but it's more than just one word. e.g., there's also the word
tehom in verse 1:2 that the
ruach elohim hovers over. Most don't acknowledge this, but she's a key part of creation and present from the beginning with God. It's not interpretive gymnastics as you later suggest but a pretty clear seed-womb / male-female setup from the get-go. And we all know who holds the power and does all the real work in such relationships, right? (To put it bluntly, all that God brings to this is the word / seed...)
And that's just the first two verses that start to poke holes in the traditional, patriarchal, 'potent-man' reading of this text and the bible more broadly, which is all I'm really arguing for, i.e.,
an opening for my view. I don't think creation is as clear-cut, 'act-of-divine-fiat' as you're making it out, as obvious as that may seem at first blush.
Mithrae wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 1:48 am
theophile wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:24 pm
Everything has a time and place, even something like genocide. The removal of oppressive orders that would suppress life's various kinds is consistent with the affirmation of life, I think, and something I have no problem seeing the morality of, assuming the extremity of the conditions warrant it.
As for the capricious genocides that follow, I would tend to agree. The problem here (among many perhaps) is that these are the words and actions of men. Some in the bible like Joshua are taken for heroes but they're not, and we should recognize they're not, even if they're doing what they say God says.
It seems like you're dipping your toes into three of the four most common/obvious responses to the bible's divine immorality while studiously avoiding the fourth:
- They're not really divine
- They're not really immoral
- They're not really
choices, God was limited by X (ie, kind of divine and kind of immoral, but passing the buck on
responsibility)
- God was indeed immoral, or at least scarcely any better than the bronze-age communities he was learning from
The first and most obvious I'd certainly agree with you on; it's likely that little or nothing from the bible was directly commanded or inspired by any kind of real deity! The third (while pretty common when apologists talk about the inevitability of an inherited sin nature or the like) is particularly... ah... creative in your approach, essentially outright denying the most obvious and prominent aspects of the bible's portrayal of God from Genesis 1 onwards, yet still pretending that you're talking about the biblical God
But then you go even further into the absurd, like other apologists bending over backwards to say that black is white, that the most evil things in human history like genocide or slavery are somehow
good at the right times. Why not just deny that those (like the other genocides) were done by God at all? I'm not even sure which genocides you think were "good" - the one which wiped out not only 'evil' humanity but virtually all other life as well?* The one which in which God specifically hardened a guy onto an evil course in order to "show his power" by targeting the innocent children?
Bear with me on this, but I think I treat the bible as a far more subtle and complex piece of literature than you. Does that mean I'm reading too much into it and taking it in absurd directions? Maybe. But I do think it needs to be read into. I think the obvious reading and what
seems to be going on is misleading, and intentionally so. The book is full of ambiguous terms, wordplay, complex literary structures, parables, etc., all of which are meant to confuse. You might think that makes no sense, and that God or the writers should have been as clear as possible in what they said, but they weren't, and I see a didactic purpose behind it all. i.e., The bible tries to challenge our discernment, and it does so because even if we have a sure basis for morality there's still not always an easy answer to what's right and wrong. There's still going to be hard situations that require difficult calls, with no certainty on the path forward. So spoon-feeding us answers wouldn't exactly prepare us or give us the moral edification we need to handle such moments, you know?
To address your point above, that includes keeping us on our toes as to whether various characters -- God included -- are right or wrong, and showing characters we're meant to revere do bad things... It's all part of the process, and so we'd have to look at each one individually before we judge what's going on. But as to whether flooding the earth was the right thing to do, I do think the context provided makes it justified. As to the plagues God sets upon Egypt, I would say the same: chattel slavery by definition is oppressive to life, and I can see situations where extreme measures like the plagues could be called for.
(When it comes to God hardening pharaoh's heart, I think there is a lot of basic psychology at play in the bible that is helpful to relate. Like, what is the common reaction if you try to take something away from someone, as God does here? It's not hard to predict they'll pull back. That their heart will harden and they'll try to keep the item for themselves... So this isn't God magically hardening pharaoh's heart to setup an even more impressive display, but just God showing God knows how pharaoh would react...)
Mithrae wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 1:48 amMeanwhile the fourth approach is one which seems to have philosophical merit irrespective of any religion - how
would any god start out with any understanding of morality as seen by mortal social creatures? - and thus seems the obvious answer
if one takes the dubious step of assuming that anything in the bible (let alone its most heinous acts) is associated with a real deity at all. The bible itself pretty heavily suggests various instances of repentence, changing his mind and changing his moral priorities. I guess I'm just having a hard time understanding what kind of priorities or reasoning would lead to this approach; it seems to keep the worst problems of traditional apologetics, trying to defend the indefensible, while losing all of traditionalists' dogmatic confidence/supposed biblical authority, and adding whole new vistas of hermeneutic doublespeak and interpretative gymnastics on top!
I'm not against God making mistakes, changing God's mind, learning, or anything like that. That's essential. It's a fight every step of the way trying to figure out the right path. We need to challenge each other and wrestle with each other to discern it. That's why God chooses Jacob and calls him Israel. Because he wrestles with God. But it's always with one end in mind, which is the important thing (again, the furtherance of life).
Also, I would take your point on God's moral development and say something similar about God's power. How could any god start out with such power you think the bible describes? It makes no sense. So either the bible makes no sense, if such an idea is critical to its narrative, or something else is going on.. It's much simpler and realistic to assume a non-powerful spirit, right? Especially if the power can be shown to come from somewhere else? (See
tehom referenced above...)
Mithrae wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 1:48 am
* Edit: I'm going to try and steelman this one by suggesting that (since the Flood never actually happened) one could interpret it as an allegory for any kind of natural disaster, and of particular interest those such as the five natural mass extinctions which preceded humanity. By wiping out or severely curtailing the established species dominating various ecological niches, these mass extinctions were often followed by a renewed flourishing of biodiversity. Most famously, if an asteroid hadn't wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, most mammal species and in particular humanity almost certainly would have never had the opportunity to evolve. Of course that interpretation would run headlong into your prior characterization of God as more or less impotent; mass extinctions and natural disasters can't be viewed as having any positive or negative moral value unless actively caused or allowed. And it's still difficult to see how it could be considered
good for any being to actively cause such devastation - even against animals, let alone intelligent people - regardless of what kind of silver linings might be proposed in retrospect.
I think the writers of the flood meant to show intention and end behind God's action; it wasn't an allegory for natural disaster. To get it I think you have to really get into the extremity of the situation, and just how evil and far gone things were according to the story. How things were so bad that even the children and animals had become corrupted. Perhaps even future generations, as impossible as that sounds... We can understand such a corrupting effect, can't we? We see real examples of it all the time, like children killing children and other unbelievable things like that...
So what I take the story to be asking, is if the world
really was that far gone, if such an extremity was possible, then wouldn't flooding the earth be the right thing for life? Your real-world examples suggest the answer is yes.
(I find it's both helpful and harmful to think of God as a Thanos-type, which is why I mentioned Yahweh before. The basic concept itself is not ridiculous, i.e., some powerful being capable of amazing things, and it's helpful because this is what the flood story shows, i.e., one like Thanos showing up at earth, looking down upon it, and thinking about what to do. It's
harmful thinking about God this way because God isn't a singular being like Thanos. God is just a spirit in God's original, fundamental form...)
."
