Christians are more moral than Yahweh and Jesus. So why worship them?
The Bible contains many instances that show Yahweh doing things that no moral human would do. Not even the most right-wing Christian theist.
If you Christians had God’s power, in Noah’s days, you Christians would not use Genocide against man and beast on the earth. Jesus said he came to cure those in need, not kill them, so you would cure those in Noah’s day and would not kill them all. Right?
In Egypt, you Christians would not harden Pharaoh’s heart but would leave it soft and let him let the Jews go. You would not punish the first born for what their parents did. If anything, you would punish the guilty and not the innocent. Right?
To the many other instances where God ordered massacres of babies, you Christians would not, as your better morals would make you care or cure and not kill. Right?
Christians and Muslim thus recognize their better morals. That being the case, why have you Christians and Muslims chosen to follow a God whose morals are inferior to your own?
Religions are supposed to be all about morals, yet Christians seem to ignore that their morals and ethics are better than Yahweh’s by a long shot. Right?
Why do you follow Yahweh, knowing that your morals are above Yahweh’s?
This is an issue that many people have spoken about over the course of time. There have been those who have pointed out that the God of Jesus cannot be the God of the Old Testament – even early on in Christianity. The Fathers of the Church struggled with the question and have pointed to the allegorical approach to the OT, or to make the teaching of Christ a supersession of the OT. This wasn’t accepted by what we have come to know as orthodoxy, but it was an issue.
Another way of looking at the OT is to put aside our morality of the modern day and understand the symbolic message of the OT. There are people who have shown the symbolism of Genesis, which can be found throughout the OT, as a portrayal of how heaven and earth are symbols of the plan and the realisation respectively. In “The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis: A Commentary” by Mathieu Pageau, he explains how this works.
He starts of “salvaging creation from the scientific world view” because Genesis is quite clearly not that. He speaks of spiritual and material perspectives being at odds. He then goes on to talk about the biblical cosmology and heaven and earth and the use of symbols and language. Then he talks about humanity and the image of God and Adam as a microcosm. His next part talks about time and space in the Bible being different concepts to our modern-day ideas. The main gist of all this is to point out that the symbolic language of the Bible cannot be taken and read as a modern text. We must enter the cosmology and symbolic world of the Bible to understand it.
That is why the OT does cause us problems today, especially when people take it literally. You can only do that if you understand it within the confines of the biblical cosmology. Then you understand that the texts are not as problematic as they first appeared to be. It still is and archaic text, but it isn’t as bad as we thought.
Greatest,
Still using Yahweh as a whipping boy for immorality in the Bible? Progressive Christianity has moved beyond the God without and is experiencing the God within. Those who take the old myths of the Bible literally are becoming fewer and fewer. The world now demands recognition of a whole in which each shares an interdependent and viable part. Why waste time on Yahweh? We may have few years left to get it right.
God evolves along . to parallel Man’s insight. He can not reveal more allegory than it has current relevance.
The mirror that is a double , is progressive in the sense. that it moves along the projectory that pictures the is wished for to reflection between them to be the best ultimate union , so that ultimately , the figures in the mirror can not be distinguished. Man and God , then become like Father and Son, and the bond between them become absolutely spiritual, like a ghostly apparition, they do not need to understand each other, but feel the overwhelming need for their love , that is not of this world
At this point the mirror shines not through reflected light, for even light is trapped within it’s own frequency as Narcissus once was atoned by a subtle refrain of a distant echo.
This is one version of the problem of evil and I sympathize with the intent. There is in religion - and in secular life - the idea of doing what I say and not what I do. This may seem at first glance as hypocrisy but actually most of us allow for this with experts. Parents can forbid children to things they themselves do. Likewise with soldiers, police, courts, doctors. Where expertise difference is great and role difference is great we often allow the experts/those with differing role to do things we do not allow others.
I say this because this is precisely how some religious people think. They can point to secular versions of this that most people do allow for. So, I think this needs to be addressed when making the case you are making in this thread.
I think the counter-argument I outlined above - I did not go into all the steps of the argument - can be countered, but I think it has to be addressed. IOW I am not saying the defense I mention above means they are right (not at all) but if you really want to change people’s minds it needs to be addressed and it is not necessarily easy to do so.
I see many ignoring their moral sense to maintain their tribal or religious position.
They did it for Trump, as they publicly held their noses and voted him in. They do the same for their genocidal god.
I have yet to find the key that locks that vile exit strategy of ignoring morals and calling evil good.
There may not be a key in this milieu. People seldom change their minds in these places.