Welcome again to everybody. Take a seat make yourself at home, Please feel free to grab an Ice Water. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I will say, my initial impressions of Christianity were very negative because of the old testament. Im very glad to know I wasn’t the only person who thought “hey the old testament god is kind of really cruel.” like even gnostics back in the 2nd century were feeling that sl hard they just made the old testament god a different person
The old testament really is weird. Like, “So, some of you are thoroughly fucked in the head [citation needed]. Therefore, I’m going to mass murder all of you with a flood. But I’ll allow a few of you to survive along with a bunch of animals on a large boat. I’m sure this wouldn’t harm anything in terms of genetic diversity and will be well deserved.”
If a human announced they were going to try that, we’d immediately call them genocidal.
Or like, “Your city really was not welcoming to strangers. I’m just going to destroy it. Everyone in it.”
Or, “Can you sacrifice your son for me? J/k, that was a test.”
Old testament god is absolute barbarian narcissist energy. Loves collective punishment and loyalty tests.
The Tanakh often depicts G-d as cruel because nature is often cruel. Floods, pain, droughts, &c.: these cruelties came from nature, and for the ancient Jews nature and G-d were synonymous. It is true that there are no verified records of, say, somebody turning into salt, but to the ancient Jews such a misfortune would not have sounded entirely out of character for nature either.
I like to think of it less as “heres a bunch of stuff, everything is stuff God literally did” and a bit more like “here is a bunch of stories, some more allegorical, some based on real events, where we try to explain what human life, the world, and divinity is”