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From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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Chris OConnor

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From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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Facebook isn't the best place to have quality deep conversations. I wrote the below post to someone and I'm pretty sure it will either go unanswered or will get buried and never even seen. That's just how FB works. So here it is and maybe it will stimulate a discussion.
I appreciate your comments and I agree with quite a few of them. To start with I understand that people wrote the Bible, not God. This is out of necessity, because God doesn't even exist. People wrote everything that has ever been written on planet Earth. Gods and the supernatural don't exist, as far as we can tell.

So yes the evil in the Bible reflects the culture of the people in those times. This is precisely my point. While you appear to recognize that the Bible wasn't written by God I can assure you a large percentage of Christians consider every word in the Bible to either come directly from God or via one of his messengers. The Bible is infallible and to be trusted entirely.

I'm trying to show how silly it is to consider certain passages in the Bible to be the will of a purportedly "good" God. No good person or deity drowns everyone on Earth, men, women and children, and no good god condones killing your own child for small infractions or even huge infractions.

So people that believe the Bible is truly the will of God are in a real pickle. They now have to figure out a way to rationalize the "goodness" of their deity with the evil that deity commits in the Old Testament. This is no easy task. Anyone that has really read the Old Testament is aware that God did some really bad things. Any human being that did even a smidgen of what the Christian God is said to have done would find themselves on death row rather quickly. But God gets a hall pass and he can do whatever he wants because "God works in mysterious ways and who are we to judge the Creator." This is weak thinking at its best.

My post was not directed at someone like you who is bright enough to see through the myth that a good God inspired the entire Bible. I'm more wanting an open discussion about how the Bible is clearly a book of myths written by humans for very human purposes.

To you the message of love comes from God. To me it is the very foundation of ALL social groups. To attain group cohesion we have no other choice than to say "Don't do shit to your neighbor that you don't want them to do to you." No God was needed for that lesson. Heck, this is commonplace ethics that originated long before Christianity.

The 10 Commandments to you come from God. To me they are again nothing more than humans creating rules for human purposes. There is no empirical evidence for a God existing therefore the 10 Commandments cannot come from a nonexistent God. Nothing in the 10 Commandments is special and necessarily divine. In fact quite a few of the Commandments are petty and selfish rules that could only be imposed to a rather vain and egotistical god.

"God doesn't judge people or punish people, people judge and kill other people and then use religion to justify their evil acts."

I can inundate you with Bible passages that show God does indeed judge and punish people. This is part of the very foundation of Christianity.

"If you were the parent that lost their child in the same way we all watched on the news from the toxic gas in Syria where/how do you find comfort and healing to continue living?"

You'll never find me arguing that belief in a loving God doesn't add comfort to the believers life. I get this. But does belief in something make that something real? Of course not. Muslims believe they stand to be rewarded with 72 virgins when they reach Paradise. Does this very comforting belief make it actually true?

I'd like to believe things that are true. I find my comfort in other places and not in my imagination. Belief in God is literally allowing your imagination to comfort you. God isn't there, more than likely, so why not seek comfort in a more real place, such as in the arms of your loved ones, or through deep reflection or quality poetry or some other soothing activity?

I've heard all my life that we need God to have purpose and morality yet here I am at 48 years old quite happy, satisfied and moral, and all without any semblance of belief in a God, gods or the supernatural. Believers have that one wrong. God isn't necessary for happiness in life and I'm living proof. Most of the people I am close to are actually atheists too. And they have jobs, families and do great and moral things on par with any Christian.
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Re: From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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Chris OConnor wrote:Facebook isn't the best place to have quality deep conversations. I wrote the below post to someone and I'm pretty sure it will either go unanswered or will get buried and never even seen. That's just how FB works. So here it is and maybe it will stimulate a discussion.
Facebook is a superficial platform with excellent ease of access but weak capacity to generate durable and informative learning and exchange of ideas, imho.
Chris OConnor wrote: people wrote the Bible, not God. This is out of necessity, because God doesn't even exist. People wrote everything that has ever been written on planet Earth. Gods and the supernatural don't exist, as far as we can tell.
These are complex ideas where hasty judgment is risky. Yes, the most likely hypothesis about the nature of reality is that the universe has no personal creator. However, nature is orderly, and the protection given to our planet by its cosmic accidents of location and structure means that our planet earth has quite amazing potential for super-complexity.

Achieving this potential flourishing should be regarded as a scientific objective, and yet it is an objective that relates to the religious ideas of meaning and purpose. So if we imagine God as just the way of describing how the natural order of the cosmos enables human flourishing, then all the supernatural mythology can be regarded as symbolic allegory for real natural processes.

We can then deconstruct and psychoanalyse how the authors of the Bible had an intuition of such a natural order, and how they wrote it down in language they could understand, and to further muddy the waters, how the original language of intuitive prophecy could have been revised by political censors.

So yes, people wrote the Bible, but the question of whether the Bible texts are in any way ‘divinely inspired’ should explore how they may accurately reflect the ideal patterns of human connection to a real natural order.

It is not helpful to retain the hypothesis of a supernatural personal creator God in discussing the evolution of religion, in my view, since seeing how religious language emerged as symbolic allegory for natural processes is far more elegant and simple.
Chris OConnor wrote: the evil in the Bible reflects the culture of the people in those times.
Yes that is true, but again it is a highly complex topic where naïve assumptions can be wrong. For example Satan appears to have evolved from the Egyptian God Set, whose war against Horus formed the basis for the Christian myth of the fight between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness.

The victory of Horus over Set is linked to the war between the ‘two kingdoms’ of upper and lower Egypt, and it seems the demonization of Set and deification of Horus reflects how history is written by the victors.

Again to pick up on my own theory of the evolution of the Bible, the myth of the fall from grace into corruption actually reflects the real fall season in the earth’s third motion, the precession of the equinox. This orbital structure of time produces a highly complex mix between technological progress and moral decay, illustrating that simplistic theories of evil need to be put in a larger natural context.

We do not say that night or winter are evil, because they lack agency, even though dark and cold serve as metaphors for a hostile and difficult world of natural evil.
Chris OConnor wrote: I'm trying to show how silly it is to consider certain passages in the Bible to be the will of a purportedly "good" God. No good person or deity drowns everyone on Earth, men, women and children, and no good god condones killing your own child for small infractions or even huge infractions.
With the flood, the sea level rose by 120 yards since the Last Glacial Maximum about twenty thousand years ago, and then remained stable through the Holocene. The mutated memory of this real long slow event when vast areas such as the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea shore were converted from forest to sea provides the best explanation of the Noah myth.

It makes as much sense to call this process evil as to call falling leaves in autumn evil. It is part of a big natural cycle. However, Holocene stability went together with the rise of metal and agriculture, and these technologies enabled humans to develop mass delusional ideologies.

These ideas, especially where kings were viewed as the representative of God on earth, look to me to be a prime candidate for evil doctrines that generated suffering and alienation from nature. However, the divine right of kings idea had the benefits of delivering stability and security, so was an inevitable enabler for technological progress.
Chris OConnor wrote: So people that believe the Bible is truly the will of God are in a real pickle. They now have to figure out a way to rationalize the "goodness" of their deity with the evil that deity commits in the Old Testament. This is no easy task. Anyone that has really read the Old Testament is aware that God did some really bad things. Any human being that did even a smidgen of what the Christian God is said to have done would find themselves on death row rather quickly. But God gets a hall pass and he can do whatever he wants because "God works in mysterious ways and who are we to judge the Creator." This is weak thinking at its best.
How I look at it is that the Old Testament is all about military security of Israel. As a small nation surrounded by large empires, the only way Israel could hope to remain free and peaceful was through political alliances, gaining the protection of its neighbours. And that meant that Israel required a strict patriarchal morality, removing local freedoms and uniting the people in one monotheist religion, and going to war to enforce this stable society.

The main message of the Biblical prophets is that Israel lost its political sovereignty, for example with the captivity in Babylon, because of its moral failure to strike effective social pacts with its hostile neighbours. This moral failure is portrayed as due to Israel allowing evil to prosper, by not being strict enough with monotheism. Now that morality is hard to grasp from a modern secular view, but I think it is plausible for ancient Israel, as a way to justify the claims that God was a valid source of moral ethics.
Chris OConnor wrote: My post was not directed at someone like you who is bright enough to see through the myth that a good God inspired the entire Bible.
From Spinoza and Einstein, a way to reconcile God language with science is to always see mention of God as a metaphor for Nature. It is plausible to see the orderly structure of Nature as it governs life on earth as good, having provided the protective cosmic cocoon for four billion years of flourishing evolutionary complexity.

The overall good process of natural equilibrium for millions of years of evolution, with steadily increasing complexity, is regularly punctuated by great ‘evil’ events, such as the Permian Great Dying in 252 Million Years Before Present where 95% of all species went extinct, and the asteroid in 65 MYBP that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The boiling of the sea due to global warming could be the next such disequilibrium, pushing the planet back to a more simple condition. But life on earth recovered from these past catastrophes, turning crisis into opportunity for new growth and prosperity, just as humans recovered from the flooding of the Persian Gulf and all the continental shelves of the planet in recent millennia.

As the Carpenter said to the Walrus, if we can stop the sea from going boiling hot then we could colonise the galaxy.

Evolution has an inherent driver towards greater complexity, to fill any available unused niche. Complexity is good. That scientific fact is the real natural context that to me gives meaning to the idea that God is good and inspired the Bible.
Chris OConnor wrote: I'm more wanting an open discussion about how the Bible is clearly a book of myths written by humans for very human purposes.
The Bible operates at multiple levels, ranging from personal and social morality right through to a big theory about the structure of time.

It is not clear how these different levels of purpose relate to mundane human purposes. There is a strong theme that human purposes are often in conflict with divine purposes. If for divine we read natural, then there is a sense, as Richard Dawkins argued in The Selfish Gene, that the Bible is calling us to transcend the fatalism of instinct, to evolve past the determinism of genetics, and instead structure human life against enduring values of love and grace and truth and justice.

One of my favourite myths in the Bible is the Tree of Life. Traditionally, this tree connects earth and heaven, as seen in other cultures like the Norse Yggdrasil. The Tree of Life is the tree, alongside the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that stood at the centre of Paradise when Adam and Eve were expelled in the myth of the fall from grace into corruption. The Tree of Life then reappears at the very end of the Bible as the myth of universal reconciliation, the symbol of the once and future presence of God on earth.
Chris OConnor wrote: To you the message of love comes from God. To me it is the very foundation of ALL social groups. To attain group cohesion we have no other choice than to say "Don't do shit to your neighbor that you don't want them to do to you." No God was needed for that lesson. Heck, this is commonplace ethics that originated long before Christianity.
Again looking at the Bible through the lens of cultural evolution, it seems to me the big story is the replacement of instinct by reason as the driver of action. Instinctively, we react with revenge when we are hurt, but the Sermon on the Mount says that instinctive revenge only generates a cycle of retaliation and escalating hatred, whereas rational forgiveness can enable mutual trust.

The Biblical idea that for humans we have the choice to be ruled by spirit or flesh means that we should think about the source of love as coming from our ability to communicate in language, as the home of spirit. If we take the view that all language is in some sense an activity of the human spirit, setting humans above animals, we have a scientific framework for an ethic of love within religion, whereas such a loving morality cannot arise from non-linguistic instinctive sources alone.
Chris OConnor wrote: The 10 Commandments to you come from God. To me they are again nothing more than humans creating rules for human purposes. There is no empirical evidence for a God existing therefore the 10 Commandments cannot come from a nonexistent God. Nothing in the 10 Commandments is special and necessarily divine. In fact quite a few of the Commandments are petty and selfish rules that could only be imposed to a rather vain and egotistical god.
The big problem I see in the ten commandments is their definition of a person as restricted only to an adult man who owns property. That patriarchal monotheist morality, treating women, children and slaves as owned chattels, made sense for the military security of ancient Israel, but now it is obsolete. It was already seen as obsolete by the time of the New Testament, as it contradicts the central teaching of Jesus Christ that the least in the world are first in the kingdom of God, even though in the myth Jesus got crucified for saying that.

The persistence of the Ten Commandments as a moral teaching reflects the enduring attraction of slavery. People who like the moral framework of the Ten Commandments often tend to have fairly close historical associations to people who would not have wanted anyone to covet their slaves, as banned by the tenth commandment.
Chris OConnor wrote: I can inundate you with Bible passages that show God does indeed judge and punish people. This is part of the very foundation of Christianity.
The conservative morality that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom can readily apply to all primitive life, where any departure from strict pious rules is seen as highly risky. From the expulsion from Paradise, the flood, the drowning of the Egyptian army, the brimstone inflicted on Sodom, the wrath of God is always the flipside of love.

There is a shift at the end of the Bible, with line in the Apocalypse (Rev 11:18) saying the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. That is a line that does not get read or quoted much by creationists, since it demonstrates that their own attitudes of hatred towards nature are evil and unbiblical.
Chris OConnor wrote: You'll never find me arguing that belief in a loving God doesn't add comfort to the believers life. I get this. But does belief in something make that something real? Of course not.
This opens the problems of psychological projection and transference, the human tendency to imagine that our fantasies are factual. The role of comfort was well expressed in early Christian theology, in the supposed proof of the existence of God by Saint Anselm, that an existing God is obviously far better than an imaginary God, therefore God is real. This projection of desire is comforting, with the rather paradoxical psychology that if I believe something is true, then I cannot imagine it could possibly be false.
Chris OConnor wrote: I'd like to believe things that are true. I find my comfort in other places and not in my imagination. Belief in God is literally allowing your imagination to comfort you. God isn't there, more than likely, so why not seek comfort in a more real place, such as in the arms of your loved ones, or through deep reflection or quality poetry or some other soothing activity?
One of the greatest statements in the Bible is Proverb 29:18, 'Where there is no vision, the people perish'. This means that a shared story is essential for a society to develop abiding values. The role of imagination in producing such a shared story is strong. Part of the problem is that where most people do not reflect deeply on the meaning of words, it becomes essential to simplify the shared story in a way that can cut through to popular morality, ie through myth.

That is why the complex moral story of the connection between heaven and earth was simplified into the myth of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The best way to respond to imaginative fantasy, from a reflective perspective, is to ask what the surface lie may conceal, as a substantive moral message hidden within the myth.
Chris OConnor wrote: I've heard all my life that we need God to have purpose and morality yet here I am at 48 years old quite happy, satisfied and moral, and all without any semblance of belief in a God, gods or the supernatural. Believers have that one wrong. God isn't necessary for happiness in life and I'm living proof. Most of the people I am close to are actually atheists too. And they have jobs, families and do great and moral things on par with any Christian.
Some people might say that your reflective atheism, asking what all this false language actually means, does constitute a ‘semblance of belief’, even though transposed to its opposite.

The problem here is that talk of God has been so badly twisted by human agendas that sincere seekers for truth find it very hard to see beneath the cultural rubble of religion to any underlying truth.

Natural physics is the starting point for logical analysis of reality, but if we then look to psychology, and the strange behaviour of human societies, we find that truth becomes more ambiguous, and language that on the surface is literally false can conceal a valid moral truth. For example the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a mythical vessel for the ethical message of universal unconditional love.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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The New Testament is seen by Christians as the great step forward, because the God that did or advocated doing so much killing isn't there anymore. He is said to be more loving. In place of the war-God, though, we now have Hell as a major theme, which was barely developed in the OT and isn't a big deal in Judaism. We go beyond loss of life as punishment as in the OT to eternal torture as the supreme punishment. That doesn't strike me as such a positive evolution.
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Re: From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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DWill wrote:The New Testament is seen by Christians as the great step forward, because the God that did or advocated doing so much killing isn't there anymore. He is said to be more loving. In place of the war-God, though, we now have Hell as a major theme, which was barely developed in the OT and isn't a big deal in Judaism. We go beyond loss of life as punishment as in the OT to eternal torture as the supreme punishment. That doesn't strike me as such a positive evolution.
Hell is a metaphor for evil and destruction, for the power of the instinctive flesh that fails to live by the way of spirit. The mentions of hell are at http://biblehub.net/search.php?q=hell and of Hades at http://biblehub.net/search.php?q=Hades

Pretending that the conventional idea of hell was originally meant as literal is superficial and wrong. This literal myth of the suffering afterlife of the damned was a big part of the corrupted vision of Christendom as part of the agenda of social control by the state-church alliance, with its displacement of morality to the afterlife, but in my view was not meant literally in the original texts.

Mentions of destruction are at http://biblehub.net/search.php?q=destruction The main gospel text is from the Sermon on the Mount - Matthew 7:13 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it."

This is a text that provides a vision of salvation that is entirely compatible with scientific knowledge of evolutionary biology. Heaven, or the narrow gate, is a metaphor for the way of life in truth, achieved through spiritual discernment, while hell, or the road of destruction, is a metaphor for the life of carnal desire and indiscipline, allowing instincts to override our better angels.

Consider the parable of Dives and Lazarus at http://biblehub.com/bsb/luke/16.htm The rich man Dives going to hell symbolises the fate in store for the Roman Empire, while the poor man Lazarus/Osiris going to heaven symbolises Egypt, which appears lost and defeated but represents eternal truth and vindication. The symbolic meaning is that the worldly power and wealth of Rome produces spiritual emptiness and abiding torment, while the ancient cultural heritage of Egypt, even though suppressed under Rome, has an authentic vision that is the source of enduring blessing and grace.

Matt 25:46 is among the most vivid statements of the evolutionary morality of the Gospels, with Jesus explaining that failure to perform works of mercy is the main cause of eternal punishment. Considering this as an idea that makes sense, the punishment cannot be inflicted on the unmerciful person after death, but upon everyone in the world who suffers the causal impact of the lack of mercy.
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Re: From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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I believe that Hell had wings precisely because of the concrete aspect, which was original to it in all likelihood. It's not possible, anyway, to prove that Hell had currency at first only as metaphor before it was hijacked by literalists. Today, Hell is seen as metaphorical by a great many believers, but to characterize that as a return to its original meaning is dubious in my view.
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Re: From a Facebook discussion I'm having on the evil in the Bible

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DWill wrote:I believe that Hell had wings precisely because of the concrete aspect, which was original to it in all likelihood.
Trust me, nothing flies with concrete wings, even Satan. :)
It's not possible, anyway, to prove that Hell had currency at first only as metaphor before it was hijacked by literalists. Today, Hell is seen as metaphorical by a great many believers, but to characterize that as a return to its original meaning is dubious in my view.
My view is that all the miracles of the Bible began as parables. That is why Jesus said he talks to the general public in parables but reserves the secrets of the kingdom for initiates.

If the resurrection, walking on water, virgin birth, etc began life as symbolic moral fables, and only later became seen as literally true due the political demands of the church, we have a more plausible story of how sensible - even wise - authors could have written up this fanciful stuff.

Same goes for heaven and hell. Heaven is just the ideal of what earth could be if it was well managed, as stated in The Lord's Prayer. Hell is just the converse picture of what the earth could become with bad management.

But people love the myth of personal immortality, which was a great hook for the popular morality of Christendom, not a story with any good scholarly backing, so the threat of fire and brimstone worked wonders for keeping people in line.

On this point of literal versus symbolic meaning, there is a wonderful line in Mark 8:11. Jesus has just fed the five thousand as a miraculous sign from heaven: "The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.”

I raise this as a great example of how the Bible itself rejects literalism. Jesus has just given the perfect sign, a pure miracle, but says no sign will be given, indicating that the miracle means something else, ie is a parable.

Same goes for all the florid language about heaven and hell. They are parables for the transformation of the earth.
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