Posted: Nov 01, 2014 1:24 am
John Platko wrote:monkeyboy wrote:John Platko wrote:monkeyboy wrote:
Seconded.
I too would love to know how that works. My normally perfectly adequate reading comprehension, which seems to work consistently when applied to any other book I've encountered, always seems to let me down when it comes to the bible. Not one believer has been able to explain how it works when I've asked before but they can all apparently do it.
Well I'll try not to disappoint you. Reading the Bible can be tricky, what with all the errors and all. And sometimes, try as I might, I am simply unable to come up with any good interpretations of a story. Take this Adam, Eve, and a snake story, I know of no good interpretation of it. I'm convinced that whoever wrote it imagined a bad idea and then wrote a crappy story about it. And then there's this story about a guy who almost killed his son - but that one I got figured out, the moral of that story is don't even think about doing something like that.
But I thought the moral of that particularly vile story was to demonstrate that Abraham's loyalty to god was so absolute that it came above the love he had for his only son and to introduce the notion of the sacrificial lamb because god likes the smell of BBQ. That it is a vile and repugnant way to test the loyalty of one of your followers is obvious. Surely its also totally unnecessary for a god who knows our hearts etc or can he be fooled by a good poker player? Did Abraham just bluff god knowing that god was a big softy really?
I'm thinking you completely missed the point of this story. To me the rather obvious moral of the story is: don't let your fantasies about God cause you to do harmful things, as Abe almost did, because while the Self within him saved the day at the last moment it could have ended in tragedy.
Whoa there!!!!!
What in the blue blazes of fuck??? God told Abraham, the cornerstone of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to sacrifice his son. Its there plain and simple. Just as Abraham was about to do it, God called off the loyalty test, whatever version you're reading. What you seem to to have managed to glean from that is that Abraham was suffering from some sort of God inspired psychotic episode which nearly led to him carrying out an act of infanticidal manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was saved from this by a moment of clarity.
Now, I am an atheist and I work in psychiatry. I can see where this interpretation comes from very easily but that is not the intended message or it would have been written differently surely. I'm very used to psychotic people trying to rationalise delusional beliefs as reasonable positions but their intention is not to communicate the interpretation I make of their tale but to make me accept their version of events at face value, just as in the bible with the Abraham/Isaac encounter. The message being portrayed is not that Abraham really needs to keep taking his meds or bad shit can happen, which may or may not be true, it is that his loyalty and obedience to god transcends the love a father has for his only son. Abraham is shown as an example of virtue by being willing to kill his son to please god, not revered as a dangerous psychotic guy to be closely supervised if he goes near the cutlery drawer.
Perhaps this is a classic example of the reading comprehension issues between believers. Some of you can make the words say things that aren't apparent to the rest of us.