I’m not religious myself, but I was raised by a devoutly Christian mother, and, as such, I have a lot of knowledge about Christianity.
This also means there are several Bibles lying around the house.
I got bored a few months ago, and decided to pick it up and read the book of Ecclesiastes after hearing someone speaking on it.
About an hour later, I set it down, finished, and utterly confused.
The writer, supposably Solomon, seems to jump between condeming God and life as being without meaning or justice, and saying that there is meaning and God is just from verse to verse.
What I found even odder was how much evidence the writer compiles to prove that the world is unfair and without meaning, and how little he offers in favor of meaning and God’s justice.
Has anyone else read this? Any thoughts? Explanations?
I briefly looked over that book in the Bible and I think that it is more about the inability to find meaning when trying to find it simply from the world… What i mean by this is that there is no meaning in a simply worldly sense, meaning must be derived from God… just my guess
I think that the book challenges the view that some may have that God is perfectly knowable, logical, understandable. To human beings “He” can seem unjust while being Just because there is a different dimension here in terms. What is Good from “His” perspective could very well seem unjust from ours. If you want a good discussion on this try reading Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.
It may be that the change of opinions in the book are due to the possibilities of !. the book had more than one author or 2. that scribes added their own insights into the text. Both possibilities are well known to researchers of ancient manuscripts.