Richard Dawkins, in his best selling book The God Delusion, (available at all good internet shops - and indeed book stores if you can still find one) described Yahweh in unsympathetic terms.
“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.”
I think we can now add a few more words, including:
- Schizophrenic (as in 'The Trinity')
- Psychopathic
- Domineering
- Overbearing
- Precocious
- Egotistical and . . .
- . . . Imaginary
If you have enjoyed this series of posts, summarised in the links below, you might also be interested in the earlier series about the Historicity of Jesus.
If you have been appalled by my romp through the confusion about the god of the old testament, you might like to leave comments to explain where I went wrong. Please avoid quoting scripture at me to do that, as I do not accept quotations as evidence. What you need to demonstrate is that things are not really as confusing as they appear. Good luck.
Related posts:
- A family of Old Testament gods
- Yahweh and El
- Yahweh and Baal
- The Ugaritic Texts
- Asherah - the wife of Yahweh
- Enough about Yahweh - mysterious indeed! - - this post
And a further discussion about one of the comments on this post can be found here.
7 comments:
God is a spirit, you cannot see a spirit. But just because I cannot physically see God does not mean He does not exist. The complexity of information contained in biological systems is incredible. Order does not come from nothing. Chance occurrences lead to entropy not ordered systems. Give yourself the opportunity to believe.
The comments by Anonymous are all over the place.
Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it's not there. That's true. But that's not evidence that it does exist, either.
Order does not come from nothing, but it can arise spontaneously. If we're talking about molecules like those needed for life, they can indeed spontaneously arrange into larger, ordered structures. This is observed in chemistry and biochemistry labs every day as part of routine experimentation. (And don't believe you need a lab or scienstist to get it to happen, either - it happens in nature just the same.)
Chance events in open systems (those with an energy input - like the Earth) can lead to increased order. Systems necessarily acquire increased entropy in closed systems.
The will to believe has nothing to do with finding out how the world really is. That requires a lot of hard work, thinking, experimentation and patience. Not just willingness to believe the world is how you like to think it is. That's just lazy.
You say you were once a Christian. Did you ever have a "born again" experience as John 3 describes, after which Christ's Presence became real in your life and you experienced a change of heart (as in deep recognition of your sins and repentance) and mind? Could you suddenly relate to the experiences and testimonies and exhortations of the writers of the New Testament? Could you say you experienced the Holy Spirit's witness and guiding Presence in your life then? I understand if you may now have reasonings to explain all this away even if your answer to some of these questions may be "Yes," but can you humbly/earnestly share your "testimony" as you would have while you were still a "Christian," using terms that Christians can relate to? Just curious to know...Thanks...
No. I am glad to say that from this point of view I remained perfectly sane and was not affected by the mass hysteria that you describe. The Holy Spirit (whatever that is) had plenty of opportunity to 'infect' me in that way and I saw other (generally credulous and non-skeptical) people affected. Modern neuroscience is quite good at explaining the symptoms that you describe.
However, my inability to be a good enough christian for my anonymous questioner to judge me worthy to comment is largely irrelevant. (Oh sorry - judge not!)
Stories related in this thread of posts are hard to refute rationally. Why not admit the doubts in your own heart and start to think for yourself whether your faith has any foundations at all.
Your house is built on sand - probably quicksand.
Friend, I do not judge you, but there is a fourth-dimensional rational reality to what I was asking...something that one cannot "shake off" with pure intellect and reason because I was truly born again in Christ (REF: John 1:12-13; John 3:1-8; Rom. 8:14-16; Gal. 4:4-7)...perhaps I can describe it as the converse of what Thomas said to Jesus, "Lord, help my unbelief!"
For just one moment judge me not either and give the benefit of the doubt that our being may not only constitute mind/intellect but mind, body, soul and spirit. And consider that modern neuroscience is limited only to measuring mind-body and spirit-body interactions, which is what "soul" refers to...
I too was an agnostic skeptic with a mind hostile and alienated from God (Col. 1:21). I was gazing at a poster of a cell in my Biochemistry Dept. when a realization (if I may use the term "revelation") came upon me that there was an invisible intangible "life force" defining "life" behind all the biochemical reactions simultaneously taking place in this cell. That was the day when it was an incontrovertible reality (science declaring the obvious fact) that there had to be an original and intelligent "Life Giver"...I could not help but become a theist that day...
With that "seed of faith" planted in my heart, through reason and conscience, I eventually arrived at (or I dare say I was led by the Holy Spirit to) Christ (the process of which would take much more time and space to elaborate about), and I dare say it was the Holy Spirit that brought me to conviction that like a child I called upon JESUS to come into my heart and life...from that day on the testimony of Christ has been in me...
In so far as JESUS and the Apostles (whose testimony my spirit also bears witness with after I was born again)validated the Old Testament prophets, is my rationale for regarding the Old Testament writings...
I am well aware of the evolutionary scholarly hypotheses for the origins of the OT (especially about the "gods" verse in Psalm 82 which Jesus also referred to at one point), but the Bible is remarkably self-validating about Israel's continual struggles with polytheism as well, and the hypothesis that there were retroactive attempts by the powerful elite to develop monotheism are still just that, only hypotheses still filling in the blanks with conjecturing. As a born-again Christian I am well aware of the lesson in Genesis 3:1 and the reality that throughout God's History there have been attempts to counterfeit evidences of His reality...
The fact that the Ugaritic writings pre-date those of the OT does not conclusively mean that theirs is the original account from which the OT writers copied and modified. For example, the Epic of Gilgamesh pre-dating the OT Flood account does not prove that the biblical account was derived from the Epic, since flood stories from around the world seem to have more in common with the OT account, indicating another possible original source of the possibly historical account..the biblical hypothesis is that the original true knowledge of God was corrupted by man under the influences of Satan...simple and silly as this may seem, it is not intellectually dishonest to also give this the benefit of the doubt, and to remain open to the possibility that more evidences may yet surface in biblical archaeology...
Much is yet to be uncovered in biblical archaeology, so I give the benefit of the doubt to alternate hypotheses of pre-existing monotheism, open to the possibility that the present hypotheses may indeed be based on arguments from authority and half-truths. I have yet to uproot the supernatural testimony of Christ within, and the scientific testimony of Nature which provides zero evidence of abiogenesis (the "life force" also not conclusively reducible to biochemistry), my "faith" still resting on the solid bedrock foundation of reason and conscience...
You are of course free to believe whatever you like, and I appreciate your engagement in this discussion. Thank you for spending time on it.
I have been planning to touch on the topic of the flood in some posts soon. They are forming in my mind and I will publish a mini series soon. I wonder whether you have read the Epic of Gilgamesh? It reminds me of a concise version of the Lord of the Rings more than the Old Testament. The chapter about the flood seems surprisingly out of place. More on that later but your comment has helped me to understand a new line of argument. I appreciate that too.
This is the point that you effectively remind me that the post hoc argument that I used was a logical fallacy. I agree that is is not necessarily true that the earlier texts that we have found are not necessarily the source of the bible. They could indeed be 'cousins' of the bible, descending from a common ancestor or more likely in my opinion from common myths of the ancient world.
However, if you were a young earth creationist I suspect there would not have been enough time since the creation. Even if you are not a creationist at all there are other problems. How do you know that the old testament is the true descendent of the mysterious earlier source and that the other writing like the Ugaritic texts were somehow flawed?
I'm afraid that biblical quotations are of no interest to me as evidence, and the other things you mention about revelation, faith and witness are quite circular in nature too. You rather rely on the idea of the existence of a soul and a spirit and I'm quite sure that there is more evidence that we do not have souls. Neuroscience and related topics now explain increasingly well how minds work without invoking some supernatural entity called the soul. I could address this in more detail in future if you have not read about it before - and of course many readers will not be aware of the work that has been done in this field.
Thank you again for your comments.
as my friend said above that God is a spirit, you cannot see a spirit. But just because I cannot physically see God does not mean He does not exist. okay, for a while, i accept the existence of God but i will still have a question in my mind if that god is Yahweh or el? why that god can not be canannite god Baal or greek god Jeus or norse god odin,or sumerian god Anu, or indian gods Brahma, Vishnu or Mahesh, African god Sango, Arabian god Al lat, uzza or manat, or millions gods and goddesses who had been worshiped by different people. and all those gods are supposed as creator, operator and destroyer of world, all were assumed as omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient and mightiest in all others. i have no objection of your god and spirit theory but i have objection with the theory " my god is real god and your god is fake". can you believe that your god Yahweh is Baal or Allah or Vishnu or anu or Zeus or Odin or Jupiter who were worshiped in past in different parts of world? that's the reality that there were no monotheism in world even in the period of old testament. how your god Yahweh came suddenly 3000 years ago to remind the humans of all world that i am your real god and all others are fake gods while homo sapience were evolved thousands years ago and were worshiping many gods and goddesses for years. can you imagine how non believers of Yahweh in Europe were killed or forcefully converted in past? how a patron god of Israelite became the only god of all humankind while all humans are neither the son of Adam, not the descendant of Abraham. in fact our ancestors had less knowledge than us but they had better imagination power than us. open your eyes. all religions are based on imaginations and fairy tales.
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