4 ms·

Is the lord here just a dick? Why would he do that?

by fartcannon 6y ago

rangibaby 6y ago
“God does something just because he can” is a running theme throughout the Old Testament.
- WJW 6y ago
  “Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?” — Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”
danharaj 6y ago
Why do monsoons knock down trees? God shouldn't be thought of like a very powerful human.
- theamk 6y ago
  Monsoons knock down the trees because they have no choice. Lacking any intelligence, they have to follow warm air and pressure differentials. Is this how you see your god?
  - Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
    Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.). You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.) But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
    - paulryanrogers 6y ago
      > Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
    - Miraste 6y ago
      I don't see why being upset that a monsoon ruined your life requires magical thinking.
      - chongli 6y ago
        I think the point is that religious people may be quicker to move through grief to acceptance in disaster situations such as monsoons. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this but it’s an interesting hypothesis to test.
  - danharaj 6y ago
    They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor. God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      At the Passover seder, one topic my relative get hung up on many years is "Why did God 'harden Pharaoh's heart'?" My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart. Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.
RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
The point of the story is that the humans should know their place. Aspiring to accomplish great things through cooperation, rather than prayer to god, is presented as hubris. Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture. Tyrants hate collectivism more than anything.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Reminds me of the implied echo in Greek Mythology. The Titans created the Gods. They tyranized them out of fear and were later near entirety overthrown except for the collaborators or most merciful among them. The Titans shaped man and the Gods breathed life into Man. The Gods tyranized man out of fear of them.... Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
I highly recommend watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on youtube called "Biblical Series". They (attempt to) explain this and similar questions from Christianity to people who are typically smart and approach the world intellectually, who will usually have trouble with these concepts and the meaning of the stories. Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom. To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message. Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it. And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.
- lowdose 6y ago
  Than you really have to stretch the principle of charity beyond what it reasonable. Just read the first of the ten commandments and there is a very jealous undertone about other gods. "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me." From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.
lookdangerous 6y ago
I read this story as a patterned warning against what happens when Humanity becomes too rallied around one particular creative act, so in agreement that they lose sight of the rest of reality and bring about their own downfall. This happens often imo.

Is the lord here just a dick? Why would he do that?

rangibaby 6y ago

“God does something just because he can” is a running theme throughout the Old Testament.

WJW 6y ago
“Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?” — Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”

danharaj 6y ago

Why do monsoons knock down trees? God shouldn't be thought of like a very powerful human.

theamk 6y ago
Monsoons knock down the trees because they have no choice. Lacking any intelligence, they have to follow warm air and pressure differentials. Is this how you see your god?
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.). You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.) But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    > Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
  - Miraste 6y ago
    I don't see why being upset that a monsoon ruined your life requires magical thinking.
    - chongli 6y ago
      I think the point is that religious people may be quicker to move through grief to acceptance in disaster situations such as monsoons. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this but it’s an interesting hypothesis to test.
- danharaj 6y ago
  They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor. God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    At the Passover seder, one topic my relative get hung up on many years is "Why did God 'harden Pharaoh's heart'?" My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart. Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago

The point of the story is that the humans should know their place. Aspiring to accomplish great things through cooperation, rather than prayer to god, is presented as hubris. Compare to the older stories of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, made mankind less dependent upon the gods, and was thus consigned to eternal torture. Tyrants hate collectivism more than anything.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Reminds me of the implied echo in Greek Mythology. The Titans created the Gods. They tyranized them out of fear and were later near entirety overthrown except for the collaborators or most merciful among them. The Titans shaped man and the Gods breathed life into Man. The Gods tyranized man out of fear of them.... Accidental or not the implications long term are of a cycle of overthrow and self fulfilling prophecy.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

I highly recommend watching Jordan Peterson's lectures on youtube called "Biblical Series". They (attempt to) explain this and similar questions from Christianity to people who are typically smart and approach the world intellectually, who will usually have trouble with these concepts and the meaning of the stories. Regardless of "belief" in Christinity, it is clear to me at least that any such simplistic interpretation as "god was just a dick", is at the very least, missing the point of the stories. There is a much more deep and logical meaning in many of those stories, which becomes very obvious when you get presented to it, and that's before you even start tapping into the spiritual/existential/metaphysical content of the stories. It makes much more sense even as simple life wisdom. To present an overly simplified answer, I will say that typically (and this is a typical occurrence in the stories, where god does something painful or creates an obstruction), when something like that happens, the phrase "god did it", does not refer so much to the fact that christinaity tries to make up this god character and give him some lines to make him look a certain way, in order to tell some message. Instead, "god did it this way" refers to god being everything, the universe, including the human societies: god is not something above human world as a guy in the sky (in fact bible never presents that image, it's more something from monty python), god is the personfification of the world and everything that happens in it. And what happens in it is that sometimes people feel pain, do stupid things, sometimes tragical (appearing so) events happen. That's just the fact of life. Christianity does not triumphantly claim that "god did it" as any form of justification, it simply describes that since those thing do obviously happen, that means the universe, the world, the society - the god (all those things combined) make those things happen. And then the rest of the story is presented in such a way as to understand how humans can act in relationship to those underelying realities. How they can respond to and understand what is happening in the world.

lowdose 6y ago
Than you really have to stretch the principle of charity beyond what it reasonable. Just read the first of the ten commandments and there is a very jealous undertone about other gods. "I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me." From this statement it is very clear to me who God is and that is not the Universe, society nor the father of time.

lookdangerous 6y ago

I read this story as a patterned warning against what happens when Humanity becomes too rallied around one particular creative act, so in agreement that they lose sight of the rest of reality and bring about their own downfall. This happens often imo.