2 responses to “God Behaving Badly”

1. 

   reyjacobs

   July 1, 2011

   “Yahweh does get angry—but always legitimately so—over evil, injustice and oppression”

   Like having the Amalekites wiped out for an offense that took place 400 years prior, for when Samuel sends Saul to wipe them out he says “the Lord has remembered what Amalek did when they refused to let Israel pass through their land when they came out of Egypt–therefore, go and wipe them out, leave nothing breathing.” How very legitimate a complaint. The problem is not that Yahweh is a monster, but that the Bible is not the inerrant and absolute word of God. There is a lot of human opinion, bad human opinion, in there. To take it all as God’s words directly to you leads to the absurdity that God is an inhuman monster.

   “he’s slow to anger and…what primarily characterizes him is love.”

   Like in Psalm 50 where he says he will not require any sacrifices, actually making fun of them Himself, and concludes rather with “he who offers praise glorifies Me, and to him who orders his life aright I will show the salvation of God.” This really leaves Christianity out in the cold with Judaism as the legitimate religion, since Christianity requires an implacable God who cannot be satisfied sans a perfect human sacrifice. But if God can forgive without any sacrifice, as Psalm 50 indicates…if he can forgive the sins of the man who merely praises him and orders his life aright without sacrifices, then there was no need for Jesus to die on the cross as a sacrifice for sin. There was need for him to die as a martyr, but not as sacrifice. The LOVE that characterizes God in the Old Testament makes this plain: Christianity is based on an unloving theory that takes the sacrificial passages in the Torah to the extreme and doesn’t accept the corrections of the prophets and the Psalms with respect to the nature of God and what he requires. Further, whereas Judaism acknowledges that Gentiles who live a good moral life (or as they would put it, “keep the 7 laws of Noah”) will be saved, Christianity on the other hand (unlovingly) asserts that all Gentiles (and Jews too) who don’t believe in Jesus (and believe in him exactly right, i.e. believe in the proper formulation of the Trinity) will burn in hell for all eternity. If then, Yahweh is as loving as you claim, then Christianity is false and Judaism true: Christianity requires Marcion being right in order for it to be legitimate. Especially since Micah 5 is about Zorobabel, Isaiah 7-8 is about Mahershalalhashbaz, Jeremiah 34 is about Assyrian captivity not Herod killing babies, Hosea 11:1 is about the Exodus not Jesus’ baby vacation in Egypt, and “He shall be called a Nazarene” doesn’t exist in the Old Testament (these are all OT prophecy fulfillment claims made by Matthew in his first two chapters). Further, Paul clearly twists Psalm 32 in Romans 4, and the gospel writers have trouble determining how many donkeys are prophesied that the coming king will ride on, for Mark and Luke both understand the “a donkey, a colt, the foal of an ass” as referring to just one animal, for they understand the Hebrew parallelism, but Matthew takes the passage as referring to TWO animals, not understanding the parallelism, and thus showing that he was inventing the narrative from the passage, and how literally so, since he makes Jesus ride on two donkeys! Go back to Judaism already and quit playing games with Paul’s damnable heresy of justification by faith alone before you wind up in hell burning next to the false-apostle and heretic, the apostle of the heretics, the gnostic-apostle.

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2. 

   The World Wide (Religious) Web for Friday, October 28, 2011 « GeorgePWood.com

   October 28, 2011

   […] reviewed (and recommended) David T. Lamb’s God Behaving Badly here. This article is adapted from a chapter in that […]

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