The God Of The Bible Commands All Men To Stone Rebellious Children To Death
(N.B. Stoning them to death is not an option. It's a command.)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-god-of-bible-commands-all-men-to.html
Bible Contradictions (With Stunning Graphics... Just Hover Cursor Over "The Red Line Dome")
Alan: The above link was supplied by "Young Fogey" in his two-part commentary on a recent "debate" between "value system" celebrities, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson:
Noted Atheist Sam Harris Debates Noted Theist Jordan Peterson
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/07/noted-atheist-sam-harris-debates-noted.html
Although I welcome any thoughtful consideration of religion (I am a cradle-and-cultural Catholic with an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in "Comparative Religions") I am increasingly struck that religion - particularly the 3 Abrahamic religions - have a remarkable ability to impart self-righteousness bloodthirstiness to "rank and file" devotees.
By my lights, this violence derives specifically from Abraham's insane willingness to kill his son, but is even more generally rooted in the twin teachings of "violence-as-a-godly-solution" and the creation of the Universe in such a way that "eternal torment without possibility of redemption" is "normal" - in effect "hellish torture for hellish torture's sake" - plus the more terrestrial Abrahamic belief that human affairs will end in conflagrational Armageddon. (Judaism is relatively exempt from the postulates of "eternal torment" and "Armageddon," although Zionist Judaism does a remarkable job creating "hell on earth" for Gazans and the citizens of Lebanon.)
The ugliness, punitiveness, and spiteful retributiveness that Abrahamic scripture and traditions impart is not unrelated to the election of Donald Trump, a textbook illustration of how "good Christians" (in league with Zionists Jews) "get it all wrong." (Islam, particularly in its Islamist manifestations, is the mirror image of contemporary Judeo-Christianity's self-righteous retributiveness.)
"What ISIS Really Wants" And How The Patriarch Abraham Appears To Be The Instigator
By my lights, this violence derives specifically from Abraham's insane willingness to kill his son, but is even more generally rooted in the twin teachings of "violence-as-a-godly-solution" and the creation of the Universe in such a way that "eternal torment without possibility of redemption" is "normal" - in effect "hellish torture for hellish torture's sake" - plus the more terrestrial Abrahamic belief that human affairs will end in conflagrational Armageddon. (Judaism is relatively exempt from the postulates of "eternal torment" and "Armageddon," although Zionist Judaism does a remarkable job creating "hell on earth" for Gazans and the citizens of Lebanon.)
The ugliness, punitiveness, and spiteful retributiveness that Abrahamic scripture and traditions impart is not unrelated to the election of Donald Trump, a textbook illustration of how "good Christians" (in league with Zionists Jews) "get it all wrong." (Islam, particularly in its Islamist manifestations, is the mirror image of contemporary Judeo-Christianity's self-righteous retributiveness.)
Strikingly, it is an orthodox belief in all three Abrahamic religions that unrelenting punishment is a divinely-ordained method for reforming evil doers.
However, we now know (and have known for some time) that punishment is a terrible, counterproductive - and ultimately self-destructive - way to "correct" people.
America's Passion For Punishment And Torture
Punishment Rarely Reforms But Instead Tends To Reinforce Wrongdoing
Best Pax Posts On Punishment And Torture As "Necessary" Methods For Righting Wrongs
Conservative Christians Delight In The Punishment And Pain Of Others
America's Passion For Punishment And Torture
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
Christians And "Christians" Choose Mercy, Love And Forgiveness, Or Retribution And Punishment
"Conservative" "Christians" Are Much More "At Home" In "The Old Testament" Than "The New"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
Furthermore, punishment -- whether it's rooted in a vision of Hell, or Armageddon or Fitan ("The Great Massacre" in Arabic) -- tends to implant the belief in "punished people" that they are also entitled to use threat, terror and physical/metaphysical violence as a default mechanism for "righting the world's wrongs" - a manifest absurdity that flies in the face of mercy, kindness, compassion and forgiveness.
Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"
"Love Your Enemies. Do Good To Those Who Hate You," Luke 6: 27-42
"Do You Know What You're Doing To Me?"
Jesus of Nazareth
Run this test...
Next time you see parents whooping their kids in public, look into the adults' faces and ask yourself if their evident passion-for-punishment either "looks" good, or is good.
Almost always, those faces will reveal moral and intellectual darkness.
Even so...
In the end, people will believe whatever they choose - or more likely "need" - to believe.
To avoid the ultimate calamity of "losing one's religion" (especially when religion is devoutly practiced) people will defend themselves against such loss - even if their religion is "atheism."
Why do we defend ourselves even at the expense of killing others, and even when those "others" are mostly speculative phantasmagoria -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq punished for The Twin Towers... Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam punished for a presumed "domino theory" that never took place... the overthrow of Iran's first democratically-elected leader, thus unleashing all the bad blood that's has polluted "the waters" since.
We humans are "moral contortionists" and either "refuse" to see -- or summarily "excuse" -- whatever metaphysical contortionism is needed to keep our core credo alive, even when our credos are demonstrably rife with lies, fantasies and wishful thinking - ultimately in the service of "justified" violence.
Call to mind Donald Trump and his followers and you will see, in flagrante, how the mechanisms of perverse political-and-religious falsehood operate.
Having said that, fideistic contortionism may not -- always and everywhere -- be an entirely bad thing.
However, it is crucial to remember that faith is not knowledge, nor hope certainty.
Love, on the other hand, is self-evidently true and - to those who are "in love," either with another person or with their personal God, lovers are blessedly "delivered from evil" because they are not even tempted to prove their "righteous superiority" - as crusaders, Zionists, jihadis and other "true believers" are.
I have not been able to track down "the chapter and verse" of the following assertion by Augustine of Hippo: "To say I love you is to say I want you to be."
Of course, such "Augustinian" love requires a great deal of courage.
Forty years ago, I heard a gay Berkeley psychologist proclaim from the sanctuary of Holy Spirit Catholic Church: "Courage is the ability to live with ambiguity."
What if every "true believer" were to say - as any of us might say to human loved one: "I love you God because I want you to be."
If God can create ex-nihilo, why shouldn't "His" co-creators be able to do likewise?
And given the ultimate unknowability of "things" on the other side, who knows?
We cannot "know" except in context of the widest possible "definition" that our "enveloping ecosystems" are greater than we are, and therefore fit the minimal definition of God, which - in Miriam-Webster - is given as "the supreme or ultimate reality."
Something is bigger than we are. Relative to any homo sapiens position in The Big Picture, "something else" is "supreme" - something else is "over us" and like it or not, we are existentially dependent on that "Supreme Being" even if Being is not "an individual or an entity" but Being Itself. https://www.etymonline.com/word/supreme
Human beings are integrated "parts" of Universe, "parts" that derive from - and are embedded in - The Whole. (I will mention in passing that "the behavior of any Whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and therefore "what" The Whole is and how The Whole behaves -- both now and in the future -- cannot be determined from any derivative vantage.)
Since I am, as a matter of fact, embedded in - and dependent on - my enveloping biomic ecosystem, and insofar as homo sapiens' biomic ecosystem is also enveloped by all other ecosystems in Universe (and "beyond Universe," if there is a "beyond") then of course God exists and only "the ill-informed" declare otherwise.
Against the backdrop of having "the courage to love" those "others" we "want to be," we might wisely ask: "To what extent does our religious faith depend on love rather than the contortions required by faith-masquerading-as-knowledge and hope-disguised-as-certaintly?"
And for those of us whose faith relies on "large doses of words," we might wisely recall what happened to Thomas Aquinas following his late-life mystical experience:
Even so...
In the end, people will believe whatever they choose - or more likely "need" - to believe.
To avoid the ultimate calamity of "losing one's religion" (especially when religion is devoutly practiced) people will defend themselves against such loss - even if their religion is "atheism."
Why do we defend ourselves even at the expense of killing others, and even when those "others" are mostly speculative phantasmagoria -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq punished for The Twin Towers... Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam punished for a presumed "domino theory" that never took place... the overthrow of Iran's first democratically-elected leader, thus unleashing all the bad blood that's has polluted "the waters" since.
Sowing And Reaping: The CIA's 1953 Overthrow Of Iran's Prime Minister Mossadegh
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/reaping-what-we-sowed-1953-cia.html
Best Pax Posts On Psychological Projection And "The Shadow"
Best Pax Posts On Psychological Projection And "The Shadow"
Call to mind Donald Trump and his followers and you will see, in flagrante, how the mechanisms of perverse political-and-religious falsehood operate.
"Fifteen Amazing Contortionists"
YouTube
Having said that, fideistic contortionism may not -- always and everywhere -- be an entirely bad thing.
However, it is crucial to remember that faith is not knowledge, nor hope certainty.
Love, on the other hand, is self-evidently true and - to those who are "in love," either with another person or with their personal God, lovers are blessedly "delivered from evil" because they are not even tempted to prove their "righteous superiority" - as crusaders, Zionists, jihadis and other "true believers" are.
I have not been able to track down "the chapter and verse" of the following assertion by Augustine of Hippo: "To say I love you is to say I want you to be."
Of course, such "Augustinian" love requires a great deal of courage.
Forty years ago, I heard a gay Berkeley psychologist proclaim from the sanctuary of Holy Spirit Catholic Church: "Courage is the ability to live with ambiguity."
What if every "true believer" were to say - as any of us might say to human loved one: "I love you God because I want you to be."
If God can create ex-nihilo, why shouldn't "His" co-creators be able to do likewise?
And given the ultimate unknowability of "things" on the other side, who knows?
We cannot "know" except in context of the widest possible "definition" that our "enveloping ecosystems" are greater than we are, and therefore fit the minimal definition of God, which - in Miriam-Webster - is given as "the supreme or ultimate reality."
Something is bigger than we are. Relative to any homo sapiens position in The Big Picture, "something else" is "supreme" - something else is "over us" and like it or not, we are existentially dependent on that "Supreme Being" even if Being is not "an individual or an entity" but Being Itself. https://www.etymonline.com/word/supreme
Human beings are integrated "parts" of Universe, "parts" that derive from - and are embedded in - The Whole. (I will mention in passing that "the behavior of any Whole is greater than the sum of its parts" and therefore "what" The Whole is and how The Whole behaves -- both now and in the future -- cannot be determined from any derivative vantage.)
Since I am, as a matter of fact, embedded in - and dependent on - my enveloping biomic ecosystem, and insofar as homo sapiens' biomic ecosystem is also enveloped by all other ecosystems in Universe (and "beyond Universe," if there is a "beyond") then of course God exists and only "the ill-informed" declare otherwise.
Against the backdrop of having "the courage to love" those "others" we "want to be," we might wisely ask: "To what extent does our religious faith depend on love rather than the contortions required by faith-masquerading-as-knowledge and hope-disguised-as-certaintly?"
And for those of us whose faith relies on "large doses of words," we might wisely recall what happened to Thomas Aquinas following his late-life mystical experience:
Other Resources From My Blog:
St. Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law, and the Common Good /// Aquinas Quotations
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/01/st-thomas-aquinas-natural-law-and.html
Biblical Literalism: Not Only Impossible But Destructive Of Meaning And Souls
UNC-CH Professor Bart D. Ehrman:
Biblical Exegete And Former Christian Evangelical
The Bible and Textual Analysis
UNC-CH Professor Bart D. Ehrman:
Biblical Exegete And Former Christian Evangelical
The Bible and Textual Analysis
What's Wrong With The Abrahamic Religions: Absolutism, Scriptural Inerrancy, Bloodlust
What's Wrong With The Abrahamic Religions: Absolutism, Scriptural Inerrancy, Bloodlust
Pastor John Piper "discusses the vexing problem of God ordering the mass killing of every Canaanite man, woman, and child."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/07/john-piper-on-why-its-right-for-god-to-slaughter-women-and-children-anytime-he-pleases-and-why-i-have-some-major-problems-with-that/
Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong
Pastor John Piper "discusses the vexing problem of God ordering the mass killing of every Canaanite man, woman, and child."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/07/john-piper-on-why-its-right-for-god-to-slaughter-women-and-children-anytime-he-pleases-and-why-i-have-some-major-problems-with-that/Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong
"Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran?"
"Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy," A Glimpse Of True Christianity
http://paxonbothhouses.
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
"God Enjoys The 10 Plagues Way Too Much"
ISIS And The Inquisition: The Shadow Side Of Religion. Why Does Belief Do This?
Christianity's Bedrock Commitment To Torture: Remaking "The Faithful" In God's Image
Christianity's Bedrock Commitment To Torture: Remaking "The Faithful" In God's Image
Time For Catholicism To "Shelve" Traditions And Texts That Represent God As A Terrorist
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Trial By Ordeal: The Bloody Old Testamental Roots Of Modern Justice"
"Trial By Ordeal: Alive And Well Into The 17th Century"
"Trial By Ordeal: The Bloody Old Testamental Roots Of Modern Justice"
"Trial By Ordeal: Alive And Well Into The 17th Century"
The Bible's Apparent Promise Of Armageddon Is Conservative Xtianity's Excuse To Do Nothing
Bibliolatry... And How To Live Happily Ever After
Biblical Literalists: Please Weigh In These Passages From Deuteronomy And Acts
"Protestants and Frequent Churchgoers Most Supportive of Iraq War"
"Protestants and Frequent Churchgoers Most Supportive of Iraq War"
Religion and Perfectionism
Mohammed "Eliminate Doubt And What's Left Is Absolute, Heartless Perfection"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.mx/2013/11/mohammed-eliminate-doubt-and-whats-left.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.mx/2013/11/mohammed-eliminate-doubt-and-whats-left.html
"My Gripe With Christianity"
It Is Important To Know These Things So Religion Doesn't Do You More Harm Than Good
What Too Many Christians Get Wrong
"Any Religion That Needs Fear To Thrive Is Bad Religion"
"There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love."
1 John 4:18
"Any Religion That Needs Fear To Thrive Is Bad Religion"
"There is no fear in love.
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love."
But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love."
1 John 4:18
James' Epistle: "Judgment Without Mercy Will Be Shown To Anyone Who Has Not Shown Mercy"
People Want To Be Lied To: The Convergent Horror Of Faithful Falsehood And Aggressive Ignorance
Jesus: Festive Tippler And Friend Of Whores, Publicans, Tax Collectors And Sundry Sinners
Conservative Christians Delight In The Punishment And Pain Of Others
Conservative Christians Delight In The Punishment And Pain Of Others
Spit, Mud, Miracle
I Used To Be A Big Fan Of Miracles
Televangelism And The Seductive Promise Of Miracles
http://www.sflforums.com/showt
Spit, Mud, Miracle
I Used To Be A Big Fan Of Miracles
Televangelism And The Seductive Promise Of Miracles
http://www.sflforums.com/showt"Since God Doesn't Heal Amputees, Humankind Will. The Future Of Christian Theology"
John Ford, John Wayne, Aquinas And Theosis (Christian Divinization)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research As Adoration"
Aquinas, St. Symeon The New Theologian And Their Spiritual Kin
“God became man that man might become God"
Church Father, St. Athanasius
as 298-373
"Theosis, Service And The Future Of Christianity"
John Ford, John Wayne, Aquinas And Theosis (Christian Divinization)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ: "Research As Adoration"
Aquinas, St. Symeon The New Theologian And Their Spiritual Kin
“God became man that man might become God"
Church Father, St. Athanasius
as 298-373
"Theosis, Service And The Future Of Christianity"
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