The Old Testament is included with the New Testament as part of the Christian cannon. There are instances in the New Testament where Christ as God gets pretty angry and throws fits akin to the God of the Old Testament. Telling people they will go to Hell if they don't believe is not being a very nice God. How can you say you are all loving and in the next breath say, "Oh by the way, if you don't believe in me, you're damned in Hell"? To me, that sounds like a contradiction.
Thomas Paine, the other great American patriot like Thomas Jefferson, gave a thorough analysis of the Bible in The Age of Reason. In it he asks how an all loving God can inhabit human form and then let himself get killed for his creation. He sees this as an affront to the Almighty. People thought Paine was an atheist, but I think he believed in the Deist God. Certainly he didn't believe in the Christian God.
Perhaps we need to look at some of the other "heretical" gospels. Maybe dipping into the Gospel of Mary Magdalene would be a change, to look at it from the woman's point of view.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
1) I think you're dead wrong on the part about numerous "instances" of an angry Jesus...just the one moneychangers episode and that's it , as far as I can tell. Give me some actual biblical quotes where Jesus flips out and tells people they are "going to hell" and then come back to me.
2)Contrary to popular belief, Paine was not actually "American". He was English. He definitely was a rabblerouser and revolutionary and quite a good pamphleteer but not an American.
3) Why must the "Christian" God necessarily be any different from the "Deist God" or any other God, for that matter? The more you study about religions the more commonalities you find, and the more room there is for overlaps. One need not necessarily follow the Christian bible or any other book to believe in God, by whatever name you wish to call Him/Her/It.
4) Although I differ on the first three points, I do agree that there's a lot of wacky stuff in the apocryphal books that's worthy of further exploration. There's definitely a major amount of information that is left out of the picture because of the political nature of the early church (and the current church, for that matter).
ahhh! I looked it up and I take back #1. I give you credit there. He was pretty harsh with the Pharisees in Matthew 23. I guess I have never really believed in hell so when he talks about it I take what he was saying as metaphor. But for those who do actually believe in hell and take him literally there, they might have a different take on that passage.
Then again, he's all talk and no action. He never actually CAUSES wailing and gnashing of teeth like the OT God does. He just scares the Pharisees into thinking that they they might be victims of such misfortune.
Overall though, as he's described in the book, he's mostly NOT angry, esp. in comparison to the Old Testament God. He just has a problem with hypocrites and moneychangers.
Paine sounds more like a gnostic or a Muslim than a deist when saying the Incarnation is an affront to God. He also leaned toward the model of the French Revolution, and we can see what a disaster that turned out to be.
Jesus talked about hell and money more than anything else in his ministry. He berated the Pharisees so often because they were the religious leaders of Israel and were abusing their position. His rhetoric against them is more than balanced by his kindness to others.
People often say that God in the Old Testament is angrier than God in the New, but hell is described with far greater detail and frequency in the New. Jesus thought it was important because he talked about it more than heaven. You're looking at this backwards. God doesn't have to send anyone to hell because we're already on our way. Our sinful nature makes it impossible to co-exist with a perfect God. We don't need God to judge us and send us to hell for our sins; we need God to save us from that fate. That is what Jesus is about.
If you were about to go to prison and the governor offered you a pardon, you wouldn't know how valuable that pardon was unless he accompanied it with a vivid description of what prison is like. Jesus speaks of hell in metaphors because human language falls short of being able to describe separation from God. At least when we are separated from God in life, we have other people and things with which to try to fill the void. Separation from God in death leaves us absolutely nothing but the pain we tried to avoid.
The OT God is the same as the NT God. There are many examples of grace and mercy in the OT and there are examples of swift judgment in the NT, but they all have a specific context.
uh uh stormpilgrim...it's been said before and refuted all over the internet...just google it...the idea that jesus talked more about hell than heaven is a fallacy. Take a look at Bible Online and check out the different versions and do a word count, or look at a concordance, and you'll see that it is a simple fact that he talked much more about heaven than hell. His "angry episodes" are also a minority and in no way balance out all of the miracles he is said to have performed, etc. It is also questionable as to whether or not the "hell" that he talked about was actually the same kind of "hell" that religious right people might talk about today. It's a fascinating topic with no clear cut answers.
To me, the resurrection, heaven, and hell, are all metaphors and I believe are to be taken as such. The resurrection is of a spiritual kind.
The Sufi religion gives us an interesting insight into man's relationship with the divine. For example, Rumi and Hafiz refer to God as "The Friend" or "The Beloved." I believe there was a female Sufi named Mirabai, who was said to dance naked in the streets and recite her love poetry to God she was so ecstatically in love with Him. In the Christian tradition there was Teresa of Avala. We look at these people and say they were crazy (by modern psychological standards, they probably were), but spiritually maybe they were healthy because they found a deep connection with their God.
Stormpilgrim, what you're saying is like the justice system saying, "You're guilty till proven innocent."
Question: How can an all loving God who took great pains to create his creatures take the attitude that they are (damned) to be separated from him from the moment of birth? He's not really all-loving, nor is he a kind father. And the irony is that, if you believe God is all-knowing, he already KNEW in advance that his creation would be separated from him. So why bother creating it?
Such solipcistic logic is silly, and I think the Creator wants us to use our reason for better things.
No, we are not proven innocent at all. Christ is innocent, but suffered our penalty in our place. All are guilty through Adam, but all may be made innocent through Jesus.
Yes, God knew his creations would sin against him, but he provided a means of pardon for the faithful in every era through Christ. As for why he bothered creating us if he knew what would happen, he still gained much. God can't be made more complete, but he now has a great multitude of children in his fellowship, despite losing others. A risk-averse God could have created nothing, or he could have rigged the outcome so that he would lose nothing, but then he may as well have built a model railroad.
God risks losses for a greater reward, just as we do. People who are known for great businesses suffered many losses before the success that made it all worthwhile. They knew going in that they were going to end up broke at least once, but they persevered. We take risk in creating anything of value, and that characteristic is part of God's nature imprinted upon us.
If God took risks in creating his creation, then God is imperfect. A perfect being wouldn't create other beings with flaws.
And how do you know so much about God? Did he tell you all these things about his nature?
The ability to make choices, even bad ones, is not a flaw. A created being without that ability would be incomplete. I'm an amateur theologian against a professional agnostic, but I've read the Bible enough and listened to enough teachings to get a decent sense of this. Getting in these debates is helpful, too. Most Christians won't encounter this kind of thing.
You're calling me a professional agnostic? Please. I am no such thing. I am far from having all the answers. I revel in new discoveries.
You see, this is one problem with religion. Because any religion is based in something called scripture, you can't go outside that to discover anything new.
Science is always making new discoveries and blowing away preconceived theories or modifying them, not because those preconceived theories were wrong (such as evolution or relativity) but because we are discovering new things that the originators of the theories could not possibly have known with the instruments they possessed at the time.
You're right about Christians not encountering anything like these debates anywhere else. I started this blog so people could post poetry, stories, or ideas, and kick around ideas, chew them, and spit them out, without fear of reprimand or offense.
Post a Comment