Smiddy, God has sacked the religions for their incompetence.
You know, we are the ones who invent words. We create words and define them out of our own experience. Perhaps God cannot reach us if we are glued to religion. We can't hear any new words or meanings.
To pursue your line of thought, it is fair to say that all three religions do not view Jesus as a common thread. They see Abraham as that "father of faith". But each failed to see what faith the stumbling, bumbling patriach exemplified.
It certainly wasn't faith by committee. Not faith by consensus. Not faith through the scriptures. He showed his faith in his solitary pondering and struggle with a word "olah"--burnt offering. He was going to have to learn the poetry of his/our relationship to God through the harsh language of the times. We invent words to match our experience.
Was Abraham going to define a God of horror, inconsistency and blood?
Remember, at that time there wasn't the vast menu of sacrifices that in later times the Children of Israel wrote up for themselves: heave offerings, wave offerings, sin offerings, voluntary offerings, communion offerings, etc. ad nauseum. The stark word that the patriarchs used was "zebach" for every serious meeting with God. In ancient Hebrew the written symbol was derivative of a slashing mark. A cutting. Blood and death.
But "olah" is not derived from that root in any way. Nor should we think that it would automatically replace zebach. The word that is written is not the word that demanded blood.
But what did it mean?
An ascent as of smoke, a stepping upward. Literally. This is the poetry of the moment that we ignore.
Was Jesus Abraham/Isaac altogether? For God so loved the world he GAVE--not KILLED--his only begotten son. If we cannot do better than to make a religion of a monster-God and continually choose division instead of trust--what more is there to be done?
Brooklyn shu me out for not teaching the Abraham story as the monster-son-of-a-bitch god who is a tricky liar. I choose to stumble in ignorance in front of the Goodness. I am not educated in these things but I understood the issue here.
Abraham is commended for listening to God in this most cryptic and ancient story--a story, which, of all the edits the OT had done, is universally considered untouched. It is crude and uniform in its transmission. We humans are only to blame if we choose to cast Genesis 22 as an evil event--evil in our own twisted perception. Each of us has to answer for our definition of "whole burnt offering". I believe God was trying to teach us not to fear Him or death.
Solitary and stumbling. Scriptures say Jesus called us to be true children of Abraham. I do mistrust much that I read. But if we care to share a story, this is one the Jews, Christians and Muslims need to reckon with--and maybe get kicked out of their gatherings altogether. Altogether.
PS sorry the italics wouldn't quit on my cheap computer.
