by tec 54 Replies latest watchtower bible
The bible contains verses descriptive or advocating suicide, incest, bestiality, sexual activity in a violent context, murder, revenge and human rights violations. May cause delusions hallucinations, decreased cognitive and objective reasoning abilities, hatred, bigotry and violence.
Do not take it leterally
Take care,
Ismael
You all seem to be forgetting one very important point. What point? This: the laws given to Israel at Mt. Sinai were exactly that! It was a law given ONLY to the nation of Israel and no one else. Why others take on the laws of other nations is beyond me. If you were never Israel, those laws didn't and don't apply to you--not a single one of them. If they do not apply to you, then neither do the penalties for breaking those apply to you. If you are not Israel, taking those laws and applying to yourselves is . . . well . . . shall we say "stupid." That would be like U. S. citizens taking the laws of Saudi Arabia and living by those arabian laws while living here in the U. S. Would you do that? Then why do you take Israel's laws and apply them to yourselves? We've done that because "our" religious leaders said they applied to us. Wrong!
Just a thought. Do with it as you will.
Eh I don't need just the OT to show God is an awful tyrant, the NT does a great job of showing him to be a tyrant as well.
You really need to get your facts straight. It's rather silly to think you know the minds of "that entire line of jews" and that you claim "they believed that Moses gave them that law." Uh, no they did not. My point is that if you don't do some fact finding before you post, you are not credable. - Cameo
I misunderstood you. I thought you were asking if I was sure there was a law saying circumcise on the eighth day, and I was focused on answering that. I didn't realize that I had written that Moses gave them circumcision in my response. I did know that Abraham gave them circumcision. But the entire line of the scripture that I quoted in my opening post actually begins with Jesus saying, "Yet because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a child on the Sabbath..." I only said the jews believed Moses gave them circumcision because Jesus says it here.
Notverylikely - You asked why would God choose the jews as his people if they were hard-hearted jerks? God was honoring the promise he made to Abraham regarding his descendants; a righteous and faithful man who was not a hard-hearted jerk.
Sylvia - I just finished re-reading the prologue to John. It is a beautiful opening, isn't it?
Gladiator - Thanks for your kind words. But you see, I cannot say that I love and trust Jesus for his teachings and example on compassion, love and mercy and then turn around and not trust his testimony about his Father. It was easy to love Jesus when I first learned about him, and the things he stood for. But I was still frightened of the God portrayed in the OT. Until one day I suddenly thought... 'but Jesus LOVES his Father. Jesus said that everything he taught came from his Father; that if we had seen Jesus, then we had seen the Father.' So if I'm going to trust Jesus, then I have to trust him in entirety.
PixieDust/ Keyser Soze - War is a tough topic for me to comment on. I've never lost anyone to war, never been oppressed by it, and the wars going on in this world have not touched me personally. But whether I agree or disagree, even today we go to war to save people, or to war to defend people... sometimes because of someone's political agenda.
But were the atrocities committed during the wars of the Israelites done by God's command, or were they simply the normal acts done in war at that time, and man attributed those to God? Snowbird, Guest with Questions, and Yizuman speak better than me on this topic, on another thread - "When Armegedon happens, i want to be able to see the people dying."
But the point is, and the point of my entire post is, the Israelites did misunderstand and misapply the law. Take an example from the prophet Ezekiel. Many times in the OT, the Israelites said that the sons would be punished for the sins of the fathers... to the third and fourth generation. But if you read Ezekiel, the entire chapter 18, you can see that the Israelites are rebuked for this teaching. 'The soul who sins is the one who will die.' If the father is a sinner and not the son, then only the father will be condemned. The Israelites actually prove their hard-heartedness by thinking that this rebuke and this command is unjust; and that the sons should suffer for the father's sin.
So no, I don't believe that God killed David and Bathsheba's son in punishment for his parents' sin. The OT does contradict itself in places. Jesus does not. If the laws were sometimes misunderstood and misapplied, then the writings about their history would have been influenced only by what they had believed at the time.
Only through Jesus can we know God.
Tammy
Tec,
Why would a good God create such a wonderous earth and then have an organization that dictated you were not allowed to participate in higher educational studies to learn about the things God had created for you to enjoy?
Why would a good God want you to spend all you life groveling and feeling bad about yourself and having to answer to strangers for your every thought and action and report on your marital life which should not include said stangers?
Why would a good God create such a palace of a planet and then lock you in a closet like KH without windows and expect you to spend 5 days a week there?
Why would a good God create people and an organization to enforce that people worship him by denying themselves enjoyment in life and discouraging strong family bonds?
This is an interesting thread. I can appreciate you comments Tec. Although, I don't believe that the gospel accounts are reliable historical documents of what Jesus really taught. In fact, the verse you quoted from John 8 regarding the stoning of an adulteress, is found to be a later insertion by the church since the account is not contained in the oldest manuscripts.
The point is, I accept God on His terms and I believe the divine Laws revealed by Him to the prophet Moses, peace be upon him, were wholly good and pure, and not a curse as Paul would have us believe. Christianity softened the worship and concept of God down to such a degree so as to attain more converts. Because of that we see a major difference in the personality of God in the OT compared with the NT. This is why Marcion in the second century proposed that the God of the old testament was not really the true God at all but was a devil. Jesus, he believed, was the true God who came to bring the true light. I don't agree with him, but it just goes to show you that this apparent difference is confusing and strange to say the least.
I'm an ExJW Muslim by the way.
I just wanted to add, that I don't believe that all the Laws found in the current torah are truly in their original form due to apparent contradictions of justice and even logic in some cases.
Cameo-
God would not and has not done any of the things you asked.
People have done these things.
Religious organizations that abuse the trust of the people turning to them have done these things.
The WT has done these things.
Piercingtheveil81, thank you for adding your perspective to this thread, and an interesting perspective it is... ExJW Muslim. I agree with you that the apparent difference between OT God and NT God is confusing. I also agree, if I understood you right, that the conflicts we find are something that man created by their own misconceptions.
By the time of Jesus, Judaism had become an organization of leaders who no longer practiced what they preached, and who no longer cared about the people under their charge. So rather than softening the perspective of 'God', I believe Jesus came to recover what was lost... and that included the laws of love, mercy and compassion. Those who follow Jesus are meant to reflect those laws, which might be why the views of Christianity seem softened. But in reality, those laws were in place from the very beginning.
Tammy
Religious organizations that abuse the trust of the people turning to them have done these things.
Was it a religious organisation that made the Israelites wander around in the desert for 40 years?
... or do you prefer to believe that because they never dropped a single pot, pan, or piece of cutlery in 40 years, or that the tale demonstrates that God is a tyrant, that this is one of those stories that isn't true and can be glossed over or ignored?
Cheers
Chris
