Does Jehovah Have Two Faces?

by cameo-d 8 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  cameo-d

  Is Jehovah himself playing both ends against the middle?

  Jehovah the creator; Jehovah the Destroyer

  This thing seems like a Jekyll and Hyde!

  Could this be one entity playing two parts?

  God, on his good days, and Satan on his bad days?

  If Satan is the ruler of this world...

  and "God" has "the whole world in his hands"...

  then, is god actually Satan? And Satan is god? Are they one and the same being?

  Funny, but it seems Shiva, the Hindu god, has all the same properties, too.

  Shiva (Sanskrit: Auspicious One), or Siva , is one of the main Deities of Hinduism, worshipped as the paramount lord by the Saivite sects of India. Shiva is one of the most complex gods of India , embodying seemingly contradictory qualities. He is the destroyer and the restorer, the great ascetic and the symbol of sensuality, the benevolent herdsman of souls and the wrathful avenger.

  What sayeth the people?
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  hamilcarr

  The eternal "trade-off" between absolute monotheism (God having two faces, both a "good" and a "bad") and dualism (God having one "good" face).

  Related to the discussion on Cyrus prophecy (showing the cultural background of these different perspectives)

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/170942/2/OK-so-whats-the-deal-with-the-Cyrus-prophecy
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  Narkissos

  Once the moral dichotomy of "good" and "evil" is set up and becomes the ruling metaphysical criterion, it is very difficult to break free from it: whether you construe Yhwh as "good" (with the mainstream Jewish and Christian tradition, which henceforth needs a "devil" in charge of the "other side"), "evil" (with an important part of the Gnostic tradition) or "both" (with Dt-Isaiah and later Jewish, Christian or Moslem mysticism), you are still captive of the same dualist structure.

  A lot of the (oldest or independent) Yahwist narrative tradition in the Bible escapes this dichotomy though. The Yhwh character in the Eden or Babel stories, for instance, is irreducible to moral dualism: he is neither "good" nor "bad," and even describing him as "both" is inadequate (substituting shades of grey to the actual colours, as in a black and white picture as it were).

  It is no accident that Nietzsche chose the historical prophet of black and white (Zoroaster = Zarathustra) as the literary herald of the (re-)conquest of colour.
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  possible-san

  cameo-d,

  In many cases, I did not answer to many of questions which you have raised.
  Since you criticized "It is New Age", before you listened to my current belief.

  Although I do not know in what country you live, the churches called "New Thought" exist in the United States.
  Probably those churches will answer to the question of yours completely.
  
  Or the answer is written in Dr. Joseph Murphy's books.

  possible
  http://godpresencewithin.web.fc2.com/
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  Satanus

  Why stop at two faces for yhwh? In ezekial or daniel, it describes his cherubs as having 4 faces, 3 of them animal, and only human. These appear to be the closest to yhwh, or the highest angels, perhaps refelctions of him.

  In hinduism, there are three gods Brahma as the creator, Vishnu as the maintainer or preserver, and Shiva as the transformer or destroyer. Everything is reycled by these three processes. But, all is recognised as being brahmin. Thus, you have all the processes, creation, maintanence, and destruction, yet all are one.

  S
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  hamilcarr

  Narkissos. Would you argue that the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' (which results in the consideration of God having two faces) is an innovation of approx. 7th cent. BC?
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  Leolaia

  The older Israelite and Canaanite cult (like the neighboring Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions) was strongly rooted in nature, with the different aspects of nature being created or modulated by the gods or (in the case of henotheistic Yahwism) Yahweh. Life in the Levant depended on agriculture, and the climate was variable -- severe droughts for a time, prosperity at others, disastrous storms at other times, pestilences at others. Nature had its blessings and its disasters. So if Yahweh was believed to have mastery over nature, he must be responsible for both bounty and disaster. The seemingly arbitrary concept of Yahweh is in part a reflection of the arbitrariness of nature. The OT is replete with stories and references to Yahweh sending rains in good times, withholding the rain at bad times, and testing his people in other ways at other times.
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  cameo-d

  The seemingly arbitrary concept of Yahweh is in part a reflection of the arbitrariness of nature.

  Yes, I can see the simplistic point there, Leo.

  But I am thinking in more extreme terms. To badger people with threats of destruction for centuries through these archaic writings, and to have people live under the constant threat of doom which is not caused by natural events but is absolutely provoked by an "angry god"...i.e. "The Day of Jehovah".

  In a pantheistic view...could this be a subjective manner of passing the word that this planet is terminal and is not meant to last forever?
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  Narkissos

  hamilcarr: the pragmatic distinction of "good" and "bad" (in French, "bon / mauvais") is probably as old as language (think mushrooms, for instance: as soon as instinct and mimetics are replaced with verbal education, i.e. culture, that's a pretty useful pair of notions). However, their development into the moral concepts of "good" and "evil" (French "le bien / le mal"), their interiorisation from external law to individual conscience, and their further promotion to overarching metaphysical absolutes ("le Bien / le Mal") allowing for a bipolar world-understanding, certainly has a history (or a genealogy, in Nietzschean terms): to the latter I believe that Persian dualism and its influence on Judaism is a turning point, as far as our cultural inheritance is concerned. (I mentioned another important step a few days ago in another thread about "sin," i.e. the taking over of priestly ceremonial distinctions such as "clean" / "unclean" in the moral predication of the prophets.)

  Leolaia: good points about "nature". I think the same might be said of the Yahwistic explanations of victories and defeats in war, for instance. Another important aspect is that the older Yhwh, in a polytheistic or henotheistic context, is not all-powerful. He has no inherent superiority over other deities (cf. 2 Kings 3 where a human sacrifice to Kamosh stops Israelite progress into Moabite territory), or even human technologies (the "chariots of iron" in Joshua), he can't even deal with his own people entirely as he pleases without resorting to some tricks (e.g. David's census as a means to cause a quasi-automatic punishment of Israel in 2 Samuel).