• some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 months ago

    I have been reading scholarly works about Jesus, the formation and development of Christianity, previously lost teachings and such. I’ve read a lot of OT passages in these books about later events as a result. I am have become convinced that the Old Testament god was a mean piece of shit.

    • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      What gave it away? Ruining someone’s entire life, taking all he loves, inflicting him with the worst pains a human can feel, just to prove “See? I told you he’s my greatest bootlick”? Nuking an entire town and killing someone for the entirely human reaction of looking back at the home they left behind like some even more twisted version of Orpheus and Eurydike?

      Or giving his creations curiosity, tempting their curiosity, enabling them to indulge their curiosity, then yelling at them, throwing them out, condemning them to mortality, inflicting suffering on them and all their descendants as punishment for their ancestors’ curiosity who didn’t even have the comprehension to know what they were doing was wrong?

      Yes, I know that story is supposed to be a metaphor, but I have yet to find an explanation that doesn’t make him look like an absolute twat.

        • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          Actually, that one I’ll give a pass for its context: Cheats mixing in cheap materials with expensive ones, but demanding the full price as if the whole thing was made of the expensive one.

          Now the bit in Numbers about the cursed water, that was a bit fucked up - you shouldn’t have to secretly cheat on your husband just to get an abortion. Imagine someone catches you and you get put to death instead. And what if he doesn’t suspect anything or doesn’t give enough of a shit to charge you? Just too unreliable.

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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            2 months ago

            I am making a joke ai understand a good bit of context, plus if memory serves right there is a debate amongst scholars if the laws of say Leviticus was a general law that applied to all Hebrews or simply the tribe of Leviticus. Basically were they clan laws or not.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Oh yeah. Judaism at the time was basically, “God is a big mean motherfucker and if you don’t do what he wants, he won’t just punish you, he’ll punish your entire people collectively.”

      • Klear@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        My headcanon is that the New Testament god was someone else who murdered the old god and usurped his followers, pretending to be him.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        One interesting topic in the book, How Jesus Became God, was theological work in the first couple hundred years of christianity deciding whether the god of the OT was the same god Jesus praised or a different god.