The problem is the retcon. The OT OG is comically evil. I mean, okay, Zeus was a serial rapist and the entire pantheon was incredibly spiteful and petty. Most of the pantheons were pretty bad. They’re made up stories that reflect their times and cultures. Sometimes you get the Avengers. Sometimes you get The Boys.
I don’t know of another one where a god caused the eternal suffering of all life on earth because one man, whom that god designed and created with perfect knowledge knowing exactly what he would do, disobeyed him. It’s like if you get a brand new puppy and tell it not to shit on the floor while knowing that it will because it’s just a puppy, and then when it does you not only kill the puppy but dedicate the rest of your life to killing every dog, cat, or other animal that you see. As punishment. For a puppy. It’s not even evil. It’s clinically insane.
Unfortunately, that was the launching point of Christianity. They could have just come up with a new religion with a god of love and mercy, but because they built off of a Jewish apocalyptic cult, they painted themselves into a corner. The god that destroyed all life on earth because he didn’t like what some people were doing at the time now has to become the loving father. Then they weren’t satisfied with a prophet or martyr, they had to make him into god, too, because otherwise they felt they weren’t being serious enough.
Now, it’s a dumpster fire. You have everything from proclaiming universalism to people committing murder in the name of that weird god with the multiple personality disorder. And a disturbingly large number of people will reject anything and everything that goes against whatever their interpretation of the religion says - empiricism be literally damned - and most of the time it just so happens to be the religion they were born into, or a variant thereof.
… a god caused the eternal suffering of all life on earth because one man, whom that god designed and created with perfect knowledge knowing exactly what he would do, disobeyed him.
Not only that, the disobeying was eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Prior to that, Adam and Eve did not comprehend ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ They could not understand that what they were doing was “wrong.”
Yahweh created humans in order to torture them.
Yahweh created humans in order to torture them.
Naw, he wanted to larp as the hero. Seriously. The free will argument is that he needed them to sin blah blah blah so that he could then save us all.
It’s like that kid that set out to be a the good-side character in fable, gets bored and goes murders a bunch of villagers and pays off the temple to stay happy.
This is one of the best breakdowns I’ve ever read.
May you be touched by his starchiness’s noodly appendage.
This is the most accurate description I’ve ever read
Hi fellow believer, is there an FSM community you know in Lemmy?
Christianity had some greek influence later on? It’s probable that god (YHWH) goes partially back to an old pre-israeli weather god which grew in popularity (just called El (Lord) then). But that was long before separation into jews and islam.
Oh, absolutely. The Mediterranean region shared a lot of culture because people are quite mobile.
El was a regional father-god. El was the father of Yahweh via his consort Ashera. Yahweh was the brother of Baal and the rest of that pantheon. Yahweh became the tribal god of the people of Israel, and consolidation merged the stories of El and Yahweh until they became the same being. Ashera, who was the goddess of femininity, wisdom, and motherhood became the serpent in the garden, as her symbol was a snake coiled around a tree.
Biblical mythology is really nothing special. Every pantheon and mythology evolved over time as political and religious factions waxed and waned. We see it in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for instance. Sol Invictus, for instance, was the Roman sun god, whose great temple was introduced on Dec 25, 274 CE (in case that date rings a bell).
Of course, there are generally few hard dividing lines in cultural history. Religious traditions are sticky, and they tend to gradually fade rather than having a sharp dividing line. Ashera was also worshiped as the consort of Yahweh as a goddess in her own right through (iirc) the 4th or 5th century CE. The religion that would become Judaism wasn’t “monotheistic” until as late as the the 2nd century BCE, and even then there was a lot of lag, as it were, in the religious culture.
The idea that there was a unified religion of Judaism that worshipped a single god Yahweh for six thousand years is purely because popular (and especially religious) history constantly gets re-written. That idea has a foundation in editorial discretion, not historical fact.
El was a regional father-god.
Later, yes. First he was a minor weather god. Which then got more jobs.
The guy sitting on the biggest mountain, spending water, is someone else, right?
consolidation merged the stories of El and Yahweh until they became the same being.
Right, forgot that part, thanks!
I’m hesitant about the “minor” part. The father-sky-god idea is somewhat omnipresent in most proto-indo-european mythologies, with Zeus/Jupiter also being a weather god. It seems like the breakdown between sky-father and earth-mother was fairly common, with the sky-father sometimes being personified by weather, or the sun, or something similarly central, while the mother was associated with plants and growing things, and sometimes water. The reconstructed proto-indo-european word “dyeus” translates to sky-god and led to the latin cognate deus, which simply translates to “god.” Like “god,” it’s the generic word for a god that was then adopted by “monotheism” to mean a particular god, eg “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis .”
Gods, like kings and empires, rise and fall. And religious leaders, like politicians, want people to think that the current thing that they’re pushing for is the way it always was.
I know retcon is a pop culture term that hasn’t fully migrated into the mainstream, but it literally means retroactive continuity. It means rewriting or reinterpreting known “facts” (which may simply be accepted canon of stories or myths) in a way that suits the new intended interpretation. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and very much in line with Orwell’s idea of “He who controls the past controls the future.” Thus El was always Yahweh, despite the fact that Yahweh was El’s son and Ashera was El’s mother. Ashera was Yahweh’s consort for a while, too, because culture is a real time smorgasbord of stories that doesn’t need to be mutually compatible. Any inconsistency is either taken care of by the folks who edit the texts, or at worst get chalked up to “that was a misunderstanding of how things really are”.
I’m really continually amazed at the persistence of the idea that the dozens of Abrahamic religions are interpreted as being literally true given modern historical and archeological scholarship showing they’re no different than every other religion, but it does show that there’s a stickiness someplace in the individual and collective minds of humanity that we are still figuring out.
Not to mention… I doubt Mary really had any say in the matter.
“Oh by they way. You’re preggo. I’ll explain it to the hubby so, you know. Be cool? Yeah?”
Calvin ball. The only rule is that the rules are never the same.
You didn’t touch 21st base. You have to go to hell until some rando changes that rule.
New rule: hell’s where the fun is.
…for your sins, which you didn’t have had to begin with,…
The story of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 runs similarly to the Hebrew narrative, where the High Evolutionary is trying to create heaven on earth and were just an intermediary iteration.
Sin doesn’t have anything to do with moral failing, but is about God finding us wanting. (And yes a lot of religious folk conflate the two.)
Essentially we have to fit into the cookie cutter and block all the light on the fringes to ride this ride, and God rejects the rest of us.
