The Varieties of Biblical Marriage

Well that’s got some symmetry in it’s own way doesn’t it? I’m not sure about your choice of the word “hate” though. Although it does indicate that you must have read my whole post, so I’m assuming you caught the part about it being “complicated,” and along that same line your suggestion is really not an option for me.

Let me know if you come up with something more viable that you think we can all live with.

Cheers

Siberia,

I’m under the impression that the Bible God is the one I’m describing, but He’s not just a one dimensional Guy. Even the best fictional characters are more complex than many Christians may describe God. That being said, and even in spite of the concession I do know that He loves us, loves you.

You seem to have skimmed over a couple of my points: Were the Spaniards accompanied by a fiery, visible and audible supernatural presence, performing patently supernatural acts that were notable not just for grandeur but also for omnisciently, finely-detailed justice, witnessed by millions of people simultaneously? And did they not profess to follow Christ, who said “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My disciples would fight.”? Again, you may not believe that said supernatural events occurred in ancient times, but if you read the text and follow its logic, then you have to believe that it is in fact demonstrating that one should not even *begin* to think about such “solutions” to problem human behavior unless that type of supernatural confirmation for it is happening here & now before not just your eyes, but *everyone’s*. So whether or not you believe such events happened, you are still left with the principle that if they’re not happening, don’t even think about trying this at home, or elsewhere. And particularly, believers in Christ are explicitly taught to understand that all of that in the past was a one-time thing meant to show us the *limits* and the *inefficacy* of physical power as a means to set things right, and that we only need to look at Christ Himself to see how we were really intended to conduct ourselves.

Also, again, it is so often ignored that the Scriptures in question have been regarded, for millennia, by the people who transmitted them, as both a very tightly, sparely-worded legal document and a test of the human soul, very like the test of Solomon saying to cut the baby in half, to reveal the intent of the parties in question. Christ did something very similar when He said, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you.” He thereby tested the intents of the heart, because if one hearing this *thought* to take it “literally”, they would reveal themselves as someone not willing to give Him a fair hearing (even if in doing this they professed to be siding with Him), because if their intent were to *really* understand, they would have noticed that word “if”, and understood from everything else He said that one’s *eye* does not cause one to sin. In fact, the heart causes one to sin. And the process of “cutting out the heart” had already been described, both by Him and by the previous prophecies, as the simple act of repentance and ceasing to be devoted to one’s own earthly profit. The physical description simply served to illustrate more thoroughly how dramatic a change this involves in a person.
He lays out this principle explicitly, as well, when He echos previous prophets and says that He speaks in parables so that “hearing they will hear, but not understand” if they are already closed off in their mind and not willing to make an effort to understand, not seeing that when He makes a statement that is obviously ridiculous-sounding on the surface, He is challenging the hearer to decide whether to pronounce Him ridiculous then & there, or whether to recognize an apparent departure from the pattern as a very obvious cue to examine it closer to see how it fits in.

Back to the more ancient stuff, again: we might form our own beliefs, based on what we see in the present day, about what was going on back then. With some of these beliefs, such as that there was a better way for the Creator to accomplish communicating with human beings who, as a group, had wished for the Creator to be concealed from them, you have to assume that the text is simply lying, propagandizing.
My point in saying that we have no way, from this late in history, of absolutely scientifically verifying whether it was or not, is that now, that is not the point. I’m talking about examining its *message* based on the assumption that it is as true as it represents itself. If you are basing your thoughts about what it is trying to say on the assumption that it is false, then you have no hope of discerning what it’s trying to say. I’m saying you don’t necessarily, on first examination, have to *believe* it is true, I’m saying just examine it with the thought in mind, “If it *were* true, what would it really mean?”
For example, the nations that were expelled were described in the terms that “their cup of iniquity was full”. This is in answer to your question about couldn’t they have been turned from their wickedness by having a show put on for them like the chosen people, instead of being expelled on pain of death? The answer, according to both the explicit text and the earliest commentaries, is that they *did* have such shows put on for them and rejected them, preferring the other supernatural forces they subjected themselves to. And the text makes it clear that one of its main premises is that there *are* other supernatural forces in the world, placed there specifically to preserve people’s capability to choose whether to love the true Creator or not, by allowing the possibility of alternate visions of Creation. It makes it clear that the Creator wants love, which is a mighty tall order, because that has to be freely given.
If we are given absolute, unquestionable evidence of a Creator, we are automatically forced into servitude, and that is not love.

You said that the Creator is depicted as acting just like human beings. There’s an important distinction, though. If I let someone into my house and I step out a moment and he takes my keys, locks me out and proceeds to do lots of things I do, including eat my food, drive my car, impersonate me at my job and take my paycheck, etc., leaving me out on the street to starve, but then when he happens to leave the door unlocked one time, I come back into my house and begin to eat my food, drive my car, go to my workplace, etc., wouldn’t you say that the other person acted wickedly? Now, when I return, am I acting wickedly because I am acting in so many ways just like he was while in my house? In fact, Biblically if that were the end, if I proceeded to continue to act exactly like him and let *him* starve, I would certainly not be acting like the Creator, who is portrayed as only *conditionally* asserting rights over the land, who upholds self-sacrificing generosity as the ideal, and in the end manifests a personal demonstration of this ideal by simply giving it all up. The earlier assertion of rights over land was only to demonstrate that it *could* be done–otherwise no one would understand that anything was given up, but would have no reason at all to believe that any of it ever belonged to the One giving it up in the first place.

That’s what I’m saying. The Scriptures depict a Creator who, at one time and place in history, asserted the right to tell people where to go, and even to marshal human forces to that end. And they emphasize that the Creator would not have ordered people expelled unless they *needed* to go elsewhere. Only their Creator would know them that well, to be able to know their needs that well, only one whose very essence animated them and gave them life. By Biblical logic, only one who can make alive can have the authority to remove life, because from that one’s perspective, it is not necessarily a permanent end. Any human being assuming the position of the Creator and purporting to truly know the needs of fellow created beings to that degree is indeed a bottomlessly wicked and evil person.
Not only that, but the most ancient commentaries point out, based on the logic of the passages themselves, from examples of events related in them, that the only reason that the threat of human violence was commanded to be instrumental in these expulsions, is because the chosen people had demonstrated lack of faith themselves, in wanting to spy out the land as if to prepare for a military campaign, when the whole episode was intended to be purely miraculous. They would have been excused from a military-style campaign even then, if they had not then been completely cowed by the spies’ report that the inhabitants of the land were too numerous and too physically and technologically superior to conquer, ignoring the fact that they were *not* there to conquer through numbers, strength, or technology.
*That* is right there in the text. Now how does *that* compare to all the human-led conquests you know about? Were they not about numbers, strength, and technology?
So the commands to smite were again, only a test of spiritual will, as is made obvious by simply continuing to read and apply logic. In fact, all the greatest victories in the conquest are described as cases where the people demonstrated faith to the extent that not a sword had to be lifted, but the people and their armies of the land fled because of supernatural intervention.

So here’s the case I’m making for there being a truly correct way to interpret these scriptures: just simply let them interpret themselves, follow the trails laid right out in the words, with the assistance, if needed, of explanation by the earliest people we know of who applied the ink to parchment in their own language to transmit it to us today. No bending and twisting, no contradiction. It’s not that explanations aren’t forthcoming—the explanations from what should be the most obvious sources have simply been ignored and swept under the carpet!

But even this prominence of willful ignorance (through–as I’ve been saying–forces in the world, I might add, that claim to support the Biblical Creator–and yet whose existence as enemies by deceit has been demonstrably prophesied in its pages) has all come about through the Creator’s will that we have the freedom to choose to love or not, necessarily including the freedom to believe or not, to notice those big lumps in the carpet or not. We may wish at times that it were made more unambiguous, as you say, but that would rather quickly have the effect of making it universally unquestionable, and thus our ability to have a will of our own would be completely nullified, through no choice of our own, and render our existence meaningless.
The role of Christ, as prophesied, was to more thoroughly, tangibly demonstrate how this ability of will is worth all of the difficulties we face, worth doing the hard thing, the uncomfortable thing, even to the extreme extent of that very Creator tangibly experiencing every feeling of the human form including the worst type of death. Again, just like the Exodus, we can question and say “well, that wasn’t really the Creator, or it just plain didn’t happen, or lots of people were crucified, what makes that one so unique”, etc. But that is simply a way to not address the message–to not consider, if it really were true as written, what would it mean? That is key, because only by understanding the *meaning* that the text is wanting to convey do we get the clues to what can provide support for its truth to us.

Let me try to make it a little clearer, that I do not subscribe to a Christian interpretation of the ancient Scriptures that ignores the earliest Jewish interpretations. Much of what you are responding to is not the actual things I said that you are quoting, but apparently to the reasoning of people you have heard who superficially believe the Bible but do not make the effort to study it for themselves.

Let me answer a few things: Yes, free will for the Egyptians. The Hebrew word that is translated “hardened” is actually the verb that is used everywhere else to mean “strengthened”. It was actually a measure the Creator took to *preserve* Pharaoh’s free will. The commentary says that the strengthening in question was to make it so the plagues did not induce fear in Pharaoh, so that he made his decisions based on his true desires, not based on fear. Egyptians were also free to apply the blood to the doorposts of their homes and wait within and be spared the plague of the firstborn–and by then, they had fair enough warning so that only an overwhelming desire to continue to profit from the oppression of the Hebrew slaves, telling themselves that their gods would support them in this (probably including heavy involvement in the decree to kill so many Hebrew children–the rule of all this finely-detailed justice is “measure for measure”), would have prevented them from taking that precaution. A huge multitude of them went out of the land with the Israelites. Yes, it totally represents the Egyptians has having free will.

Again, as I thought I made clear, the text represents the thrust of the Israelites’ mandate as *anti*-military strategy–I guess I should have specifically mentioned military strategy and thinking separately from technology, as I was intending them to be understood as included in the superior technology part.

The behavior and beliefs of medieval Europe have nothing to do with correct interpretation of Scripture. Why else do you think the Christians near the end of the Roman Empire, who lived by the correct, peaceful interpretation of the Scripture, would be praying that the Roman Empire would not fall, so that they would not have to endure the worse persecution of the terrible, deceitful power that was prophesied would arise out of the ashes of that empire, at the location of its seat of government? Yes, this is documented. And “crosses of light” (when you squint at the sun-god just right) do not even begin to touch the level of lengthy, persuasive and instructive supernatural engagement that is described in the Exodus. Had the Crusaders been people willing to really understand Scripture, they would have noticed that distinction and not been deceived.
And the people in Exodus are represented as being continually skeptical of these supernatural events, because of being *used* to seeing supernatural things unfold from other sources. But each time, the tests of veracity revealed in which ways their skepticism did not arise out of genuine truth-seeking, but out of simple desire to not be so different from the world around them, to fit in and elevate themselves materially through the *tangible* systems of the world.

Thought I explained the whole dynamic to you, showing the parallels of how these events played out with the sayings of Solomon and Christ, where something shocking was said as a challenge to *think* or as a way to reveal motives, not to assume that the first impression you get from hearing/reading is correct, when being human, you might have missed something. By the way you are apparently understanding them, you would have Solomon actually slicing the baby in half, and Christ intending that most if not all of His followers indeed be walking around with empty sockets where they had gouged out their own eyes.

When I talked about conditionally asserting right over land, then giving it all up, I wasn’t talking about the Flood, I am talking about the land of Israel as a demonstration, carefully worked out in a way that still preserved the free will of everyone involved, of the Creator’s ability to operate in the physical world. By giving it all up, I am talking about the Creator in the form of Christ, renouncing it all and giving the demonstration of what it means to truly abandon all interest in this world for the sake of the next.

The commandments you refer to as if they are still to be observed today: Yes, He said that they were not done away with. But they were specifically placed in categories of things that were to be done *in that Land*, with the patently evident supernatural Presence operating and emanating from the Temple. In the absence of those conditions, all such commandments are suspended indefinitely. Indeed, the Temple was destroyed twice explicitly because of people not applying commandments in the spirit they were intended. Christ came to show exactly in what spirit they were intended (“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone…”), and also made sure that the conditions for which those commandments are prescribed are indeed absent indefinitely, this time until everyone truly gets it, which according to the writings’ words, will not be until Christ actually returns and transforms the entire nature of Creation anyhow. Even then, it goes on, there will be, in the end, no Temple, for there will be no need since Christ will be the visible dwelling place of the Presence and none who have entered that next world will need the protection from that Presence that the Temple in this world afforded. Both Christian and Jewish sources agree that the Temple of Christ’s time, too, was desolated of the Presence long before its destruction.

As for the Flood, again, we have never seen the like of the circumstances. The text refers to people before the Flood reaching such a height of wicked collusion with the evil supernatural, that superhuman beings were roaming the earth–basically the whole earth was like a mashup of WoW & GTA, if those games were allowed to be as violently pornographic as possible. In fact, ancient stories from many cultures relate the same stories as the Greek legends you were talking about, where the Greeks had simply transferred the location of the events from Mount Ararat to Mount Olympus, and the legends of the Greek gods’ wretched behavior were in fact echos of the stories of what had actually happened among these superhuman beings before the Flood.
Again, if you don’t believe such things can exist, fine. But so much evidence makes the case that this is how the text is representing the circumstances, that it would only make sense to apply the text’s own context consistently, and interpret what it means by what it says according to that context. A document that explores the quest for creations to love their Creator out of free will, would never be complete unless it included every way that free will could possibly play out, every type of environment it could produce. And it would not be believable if most of those environments did not turn out to be undesirable through the wrong choices of the people involved, including at least one so irrevocably so that it all had to be reset before it was too late for everyone.

You can characterize it as fits of childishness, temper tantrums etc., but that does not make it so, and it completely ignores how the people who understood it and wrote it in its original language described the story as the intricate, delicate dance of a Creator being revealed to the created beings while preserving their free will. The fact that a fractal-like pattern on the frost on a window and in the leaves of a fern plant look nearly identical does not make them one and the same thing. All it shows is that the forces that shaped the two events are analogous in some single respect in the way they balanced against each other, but they still have otherwise entirely different structures, functions and dramatically different effects.

I understand that you are concerned about how humans misinterpret and misapply what they read in these texts, and place the blame on the texts. But like so many of the tests portrayed in those pages, we are not lacking in well-known witnesses (such as Jewish writings) to how much this is based on willful ignorance in the material pursuit of perceived self-interest, rather than on the message of the text itself. But the witnesses themselves are ignored and deemed inconsequential, though they logically should be considered quite central to understanding the text.

And slavery? Different definition than we commonly understand it now. As a person working to pay off a debt, Biblically I am a slave, and it is highly likely you are too. I am grateful that the Biblical ideals about these things have finally filtered into society toward their natural conclusion to the extent that despite my debt, I can live so much like one who is free.

“I always found it highly ironic that the supposedly simple scriptures need to be studied to be understood. It’s almost… malicious.”

Siberia, think about that statement for a moment. It’s almost malicious for someone to want you to dwell thoughtfully on what they have written or said to you? If so, I would feel sorry for whomever would be your significant other. Anything they said that might seem to contradict something else, it seems you would throw spitefully in their face without discussing and reasoning about it. As it is written, “Come, let us reason together.” I know, your significant other would probably not mention things like the seemingly ruthless punishments described there; but the spirit of “let us reason together” that was a recurring theme woven between them was why those punishments were forbidden to be administered unless the person committing the sin was repeatedly warned and admonished, and they only responded with high-handed arrogance of a type in which they explicitly displayed that they only cared for their own self-exaltation and would only be too happy to hurt others to achieve it, you might say gangster-type boasting. And even then, they could only be administered when the Presence was visibly and actively dwelling among the people, when it would be especially astonishing for people to commit such things before it.
Whenever people corrupted the administration of these statutes such that the laws were being misapplied, then the Presence would withdraw from its Dwelling, and in some cases the Dwelling was allowed to be destroyed.

To answer more simply, I have always found it highly ironic that when people supposedly read the Hebrew Scriptures, they turn for understanding of them to everyone except the Hebrews. Can you tell me why that is?

(quoting my earlier response…)****Let me answer a few things: Yes, free will for the Egyptians. The Hebrew word that is translated “hardened” is actually the verb that is used everywhere else to mean “strengthened”. It was actually a measure the Creator took to *preserve* Pharaoh’s free will. The commentary says that the strengthening in question was to make it so the plagues did not induce fear in Pharaoh, so that he made his decisions based on his true desires, not based on fear.*****

“Why even cause them in the first place, then? It’s like God, alright – he goes and causes plague to cow the Egyptians and, at the same time, makes him fear-less (while, at the same time, requiring others fear him – ironic). Downright malicious.”

The plagues were not caused to cow the Egyptians per se. They had built up a religious system, with awesome edifices that as you can see in their ruins today, created an entire world for those people such that they had made it very difficult to imagine any other way of life. And it was all built on cruelty and oppression, with supernatural authority behind it in the form of the gods they worshipped. The plagues were designed to systematically deconstruct the peoples’ enslavement to each of the deities to whom they ascribed this authority, by showing that those deities had no control over the various forces of nature that were assigned to them. They were done in an exact way, though, that people were still able to make the choice whether to believe or not… but they were shaken out of the inescapably absolute certainties they had built up through their religio-political system. These things were done to free Egyptians as much as Israelites, and those particular people who were actually hurt by them were only the ones who through their own choice had willfully indulged in all of that oppression and cruelty, that whole power trip with the amassing of wealth.

I submit that everything that you are angry with the Bible about, is actually due to what the spiritual descendants of ancient Egypt have done to its interpretation, having found a way to secretly/insidiously mix those principles back into purportedly Bible-believing society, lending the air of Biblical authority to the same oppressive practices focused on the awe-inspiring edifices, obscuring its words with their tools. Read Hosea for a prophecy predicting that, and see also the repeated stories in the rest of Scripture that showed certain people who, if they couldn’t amass power and wealth by opposing the Creator, decided to do it by seeming to go along with the Creator. It’s not as if people haven’t been warned. Even for someone brought up not taught to seek to understand Scripture for themselves, at some point in life everyone has to realize that it only makes sense.

Egyptians were also free to apply the blood to the doorposts of their homes….

“Not if they didn’t even know they were supposed to – and why would they believe anyway? They had their own gods, with their own capacity. They didn’t know any better. Yet there we have God and his Holy Temper Tantrum, demanding they do completely absurd things they had no reason whatever to believe in.”

How can you say they wouldn’t know, when it specifally mentions that “the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and in the sight of the people”. This is written immediately before the plague of the Firstborn, to emphasize that everyone in the land of Egypt was listening to what Moses had to say. And as aforementioned they were already given very good reason to highly doubt the capacities of their own gods.

“Also, I’d love to see the source for this assertion of yours that the Egyptians went with the Israelites (even though there’s no sign whatever of the Hebrews ever being slaves in Egypt and thus needing to leave it, but let’s forget this for the moment).”

Here’s a source: Exodus 12:38 “And a mixed multitude went up with them…”

“That is, they wouldn’t have won if their God wasn’t with them. Gotcha. Evidence?”

Since the Biblical evidence is pretty clear, I assume you’re talking about archeological evidence. Well, that’s always changing. Until the past few years, the scholarship on the subject was heavily promoting the idea that there wasn’t even a King David. Now, mention of King David has been found in a document of a neighboring nation contemporary to the time, and a building fitting the description and stated age of David’s palace has been found overlooking the Temple Mount.

I’m not actually arguing here for the purpose of convincing people that the Bible is true. I am only taking issue with phenomenon of how even in these days people insist on divorcing it from the culture that produced it, and just interpret it any way that suits their fancy, whether to support their personal ambitions or to vilify it as some knuckle-dragging, primitive and brutal tool of domination out of hand (usually as a visceral response to the first type of interpretation) without consulting the very well-documented chain of evidence within the culture that produced it that shows what it really is saying, in case a person has to have it more spelled out.

“Yet the Roman empire fell anyway, conveniently after it converted to Christianity. Ironic, because the Romans before Christianity were known for their acceptance of other people’s creeds – it was one of their strengths, much as military discipline. Yes, I know, they weren’t so tolerant of Christianity, but other people? Pretty much so.”

****Like I said, that was prophesied, as evidenced by the believers who responded to those prophecies by praying that the rise of the evil power that would supplant Rome would be held off for a time longer. The power that then arose is so often itself called “Christianity”, as it indeed promoted itself, as if it is the sum and the essence of New Testament belief, but the future oppressing power was prophesied to be a kingdom, unique in its spiritual nature, and an actual contradiction of the message of Christ, who said His kingdom is not of this world–while this “spiritual kingdom” has its own national territory, with embassies from most nations and ambassadors to them, and its own army (by these markers identifying itself as anti-Christ). It is a repeating pattern that Scripture emphasizes, that no human being is immune from the allure of earthly power and wealth, of serving self over serving others, and when people succumb to this, the result is always oppression and suffering, and that this includes people who purport to uphold the Scripture, and that this always results in the widespread defamation of Scripture among those who refuse to recognize the warning about this contained in the book itself, or to see that it only makes sense for a Creator who wants people to freely choose to believe must allow this to happen–but not without the warning from one “who does not do anything without first telling that One’s servants, the prophets”, because no explanation of how this would happen in advance wouldn’t be fair, either.****

“I’d like to know that documentation, too.”

Here’s a collection of quotes on the subject from Tertullian in the 2nd century, *before* Rome fell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertullian#Antichrist_.E2.80.94_Beast_.E2.80.94_Man_of_Sin_is_Near

Also, look up Iranaeus and Hippolytus on the same subject, who said the same things.

(quoting my earlier post)*** Had the Crusaders been people willing to really understand Scripture, they would have noticed that distinction and not been deceived.***

“And yet they couldn’t, because most of them were not literate and the Scripture wasn’t in their hands as easily as you’d like me to believe it was for the ancient Hebrews. God obviously didn’t care enough either to stop them or show them the truth, like he did to the Hebrews. Who cares about some few Muslims, mm? Why would he even care to start a new revelation? He must know those people didn’t know any better. I have no doubt they believed just as much as the ancient Hebrews did, or the Aztecs. Yet God is silent, either on approval or disapproval. Almost… like he wasn’t there.”

Yes, the truth is buried just deep enough that those who don’t *want* to find it, won’t, and this is a perfect example. Whatever your sources are have neglected to mention that during the *exact same period* as the Crusades, the Waldenses were travelling the *entire length and breadth* of Europe, disguised as peddlers, distributing copies of the Scriptures (which was forbidden by the church and the governments it controlled) and teaching people to read them, and standing as witnesses against the horrific atrocities being perpetrated in the name of Christ. The Crusaders tried earnestly to stamp them out and, for some reason, obliterate the reading of the Bible by the people (odd, if the Bible was so in support of what they were doing with the Crusades), but they were repeatedly saved by miraculous means to continue their work, though many of them were killed. The Creator, as in the experience of Elijah, is often not in the fire, the whirlwind, or the earthquake, but in the “still, small voice.” The one you can ignore and pretend is not there if you wish.

*******And the people in Exodus are represented as being continually skeptical of these supernatural events, because of being *used* to seeing supernatural things unfold from other sources. But each time, the tests of veracity revealed in which ways their skepticism did not arise out of genuine truth-seeking, but out of simple desire to not be so different from the world around them, to fit in and elevate themselves materially through the *tangible* systems of the world.***********

“That’s humans being humans. God made us this way. It’s not our problem – it’s his design.”

Namely, made us free to choose. If you don’t like that idea, I would say that *is* a problem, but it is not the Creator’s problem, because the Creator’s will was that we are free to generate problems if we so choose, and free to be delivered to be able to rise above them, if we so choose as well.

“And yet, while I do not, I’m sure lots of people might think so and take things at face-value. Is it their fault? Not really. Again, God is a helluva lousy communicator (and incapable of updating his Holy Writ. Sucks to be us and have to rely on extensive study of the past to actually get what it’s all about, eh?). This is one of the situations where clarity is important, yet there is no clarity. Maliciousness or incompetence, I don’t know.”

Neither. It’s simply leaving it up to us, the creations, to decide whether or not to really pursue a goodness behind it all. Like it says, ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and the door will be opened; making it really clear by saying “the kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a man found, and sold everything he had to buy that field.” If a person isn’t willing to decide that living in suspicion and hatred, for starters, is not worth the effort to preserve an appearance of worthiness before others, despite the events that happen to everyone to suggest that to them, then no further truth will be forthcoming. Everything will be viewed in terms of whether it positively reflects on one’s particular notion of worthiness and self-esteem, and if that appears negative at first glance, it will be deemed not worth a second glance except to seek to further condemn it. The Creator being the Creator, the effort to uncover sufficient evidence, whether objective or subjective, to support belief, will be matched to the capabilities of each person and the resources available to them. You seem to be capable of quite a bit of research, yourself. Are you living up to that capability, even-handedly to both sides of the issues?

****When I talked about conditionally asserting right over land, then giving it all up, I wasn’t talking about the Flood, I am talking about the land of Israel as a demonstration, carefully worked out in a way that still preserved the free will of everyone involved, of the Creator’s ability to operate in the physical world. By giving it all up, I am talking about the Creator in the form of Christ, renouncing it all and giving the demonstration of what it means to truly abandon all interest in this world for the sake of the next.********

“While, of course, protecting Israel’s interests. Some are more equal than others, I guess.”

??? Misunderstanding again, apparently. When Christ renounced it all, Israel’s interests as a nation in its land were quite decidely *not* protected. The Talmud records that for 40 years after that day (passover 30 CE, the year that the statements of times in the Gospels show was the week of Christ’s crucifixion), the Temple doors opened on their own every night, which was considered a portent of the Temple’s destruction. Furthermore, the red sash of the sacrificial goat of Yom Kippur ceased to miraculously turn white after the atonement service, which it had done to signal the forgiveness of corporate sins of the nation for the year.
It would be hard to believe that this wasn’t true, because the Jewish people would decidely have motivation to *not* write in the Talmud a date for the beginning of the portent of their Temple’s destruction that coincided with the crucifixion of Christ.

****The commandments you refer to as if they are still to be observed today: Yes, He said that they were not done away with. But they were specifically placed in categories of things that were to be done *in that Land*, with the patently evident supernatural Presence operating and emanating from the Temple. In the absence of those conditions, all such commandments are suspended indefinitely.****

“Says who? How can you be so sure of this?”

Says millenia of rabbinic interpretation; not only that, but they are not content to just pronounce these things, but prove from the Hebrew text how the commandments are very explicitly given for particular situations: “When you come into the land…” “Speak to the priests…” “Speak to the leaders….” “Speak to the people…”. We tend to skim over those parts, ignoring that it is a legal document and these things are organized the way they are for a reason. And the New Testament and Prophets agree, making multiple statements about, for instance, the period coming on the earth when there would be no Temple, and therefore sacrifices would not be offered since they were not the point in the first place.

*****Indeed, the Temple was destroyed twice explicitly because of people not applying commandments in the spirit they were intended. Christ came to show exactly in what spirit they were intended (”Let he who is without sin cast the first stone…”), and also made sure that the conditions for which those commandments are prescribed are indeed absent indefinitely, this time until everyone truly gets it, which according to the writings’ words, will not be until Christ actually returns and transforms the entire nature of Creation anyhow.*****

“Again, says who? Jesus was pretty clear on that everyone sins. OK. Cool. I grok that. He wasn’t so clear about what are the sins, though. Paul gives a big rant about abominations and all evil things, but not Jesus.”

See the Sermon on the Mount. I would say that gives a pretty clear summation of what sins are. Furthermore, He made it clear that He did not need to get so specific, except to clarify the essence of things lest anyone be unsure, because He said He didn’t speak any new commandment, and said that heaven and earth would pass away before even one ornament of a letter would pass from the books of Moses. It has recently been confirmed by comparison of Yemenite scrolls and European scrolls, traditions that were confirmed entirely separate for at least 1800 years, that this is true. There were discrepancies between the European scrolls, yes, but once the comparison narrowed it down to one scroll that agreed with the majority in every case where there was difference, it matched the Yemenite scroll exactly throughout. Paul only confirmed that though the punishment as written may not apply, as it almost never did to begin with anyway, when you understood the organization of the commandments, it was still true that what were always to’evah/causes of turning away were still to’evah.

**** Even then, it goes on, there will be, in the end, no Temple, for there will be no need since Christ will be the visible dwelling place of the Presence and none who have entered that next world will need the protection from that Presence that the Temple in this world afforded. Both Christian and Jewish sources agree that the Temple of Christ’s time, too, was desolated of the Presence long before its destruction.****

“Quaint. References?”

See above on the Temple’s destruction and its harbingers. Talmud Bavli, Tractate Yoma, Daf/page 39b.

****As for the Flood, again, we have never seen the like of the circumstances. The text refers to people before the Flood reaching such a height of wicked collusion with the evil supernatural, that superhuman beings were roaming the earth–basically the whole earth was like a mashup of WoW & GTA, if those games were allowed to be as violently pornographic as possible. In fact, ancient stories from many cultures relate the same stories as the Greek legends you were talking about, where the Greeks had simply transferred the location of the events from Mount Ararat to Mount Olympus, and the legends of the Greek gods’ wretched behavior were in fact echos of the stories of what had actually happened among these superhuman beings before the Flood.*****

“Says you. The Greeks were the Greeks; Mr. Olympus bears no semblance whatever with Mt. Ararat. There is nothing whatsoever similar between the two stories – much less about the Greek gods’ lecherousness and the alleged “superhumans” from the pre-Flood (which, once again, mysteriously leave no traces they ever existed at all). Seriously, I’ve no idea from where you’d even draw such a comparison.”

Not just me. Tubal-Cain, mentioned as the pre-Flood inventor of forging, has long been recognized as linguistically related to the name Vulcan, the Greek god of the same function. Likewise Naamah becomes Nemesis. And it is also well-known that most of the Greek gods were not invented by the Greeks, though they Hellenized their names and sometimes made up new stories, but many if not most were imported from other cultures, with their stories, and these stories are traceable, like that of Vulcan/Tubal-Cain, to antediluvian beings that came to be worshiped by people in various forms down through the ages.

Why does Ararat have to bear any semblance to Mt. Olympus, anyhow? Things like that have not stopped people before from co-opting things that carry weight in the world as their own, like this example of the Greeks. The earliest recorded temple of the style that was later adopted and refined by the Greeks, rectangular and lined with pillars with triangular roofline, was the temple at Musasir near Ararat. If they imported a temple style, why not gods as well, complete with change of residence to their own mountain?

“Then again, we know the Flood didn’t happen simply because we know it’s impossible for it to have even happened at all (unless God’s ****ing with our brains, naturally – hiding the evidence from us so well that it’s like it’s never existed at all). Also, I’d love to see where it says that the earth was that wicked. Even if it was, the animals surely didn’t get compassion, nor the children.”

Again, something can be compassionate from a Creator’s perspective that isn’t from a human perspective. If a Creator is, as written, the essence of life and consciousness, then making an end to a creation’s earthly phase of life and consciousness doesn’t necessarily mean the absolute end of that being, from the perspective of a Creator who can effect a continuation of that life under better circumstances. A human being cannot know or do anything of the sort, therefore it’s true that a human can’t make such a decision compassionately—as I’ve been saying, even in the circumstances described where humans were involved at the *direction* of the Creator, it was extremely circumscribed and limited to that time and place, and as you can see when reading further, it was not carried out to the extent that was described as a possibility.

Another example to illustrate the point: If I put someone on a table, slice them open from their neck to their navel, crack their rib cage with hammer and chisel and pull it open and grab their heart, anyone would agree I am doing something horrific. But if the circumstances are that it is in the emergency room on someone who would otherwise die, by the ER doctor, then it would be hard to look at, but understandable. Now imagine someone who has decided to form their opinion of healthcare by first impressions, and not pay any attention to anything written by providers of healthcare, and they go to a hospital and that’s the first thing they see. Not having been made aware of the explanation for it, they would be horrified and might want to kill everyone there for what they are doing to that person. Now you might be generous and say that they could have lived in a situation where it’s mostly not their fault that they didn’t know, but I’d still say that it’s just maybe, a little bit their fault for not finding out when choosing to explore the subject, even more so if they just decided to never go in that awful place again and persist in believing what they wanted to believe about it, without asking around some more.

As for “hiding the evidence”, perhaps “we” are actually hiding the evidence, because it seems that it is staring at us wherever we go. So much water-deposition, everywhere on the face of the earth. Ever wonder why the Grand Canyon’s layers and layers of sediment are so flat, just as if there were no time for disturbances between layers? Why, during the millions of years they and quite a few other sedimentary layer-cakes like it were deposited, nothing ever disturbed the flatness of the layers except the occasional water-whirl pattern that mixed 2 layers together, mighty odd if one had solidified millions of years before the next was deposited? Furthermore, why the canyon itself comes to a straight V-shape toward its base, rather than the U-shape that the successive ebbs and flows producing undermining and deposition over eons would produce? Why each layer is sorted from coarse material at the bottom to fine at the top, and in fact the entire canyon has its coarsest material at the bottom and its finest at the top?

“I’d love to see this evidence. Even if it was so, I repeat, there’s no difference whatsoever from so many other books.”

“No difference whatsoever” is a pretty strong statement. You mean all those other books are word-for-word exactly the same? If something actually happened, I would expect to see a lot of different documents from different sources talking about the same stuff, everyone telling their side of the story. It escapes me why people seem to think that this automatically makes the events not true. If it still bothers you, then go a little more in-depth to see whose side of the story is the most consistent.

****You can characterize it as fits of childishness, temper tantrums etc., but that does not make it so, and it completely ignores how the people who understood it and wrote it in its original language described the story as the intricate, delicate dance of a Creator being revealed to the created beings while preserving their free will. The fact that a fractal-like pattern on the frost on a window and in the leaves of a fern plant look nearly identical does not make them one and the same thing. All it shows is that the forces that shaped the two events are analogous in some single respect in the way they balanced against each other, but they still have otherwise entirely different structures, functions and dramatically different effects.*****

“Because you want to believe it’s a delicate dance between Creator and Creation. I am just saddened that you even feel the need to see such a thing.”

I would say I’m more saddened by the unprecedented sheer magnitude of the horrors that have taken place when people have corporately felt the need to *not* see such a thing. That is why my main concern in posting here is not in believing I’m going to convert anyone in this manner, but just in placing an answer here that will testify against the cartoonish demonization going on. I consider the Bible-bashing, while conspicuously ignoring any Jewish voice on it, to be an ominous thing.

***** And slavery? Different definition than we commonly understand it now. As a person working to pay off a debt, Biblically I am a slave, and it is highly likely you are too. I am grateful that the Biblical ideals about these things have finally filtered into society toward their natural conclusion to the extent that despite my debt, I can live so much like one who is free******

“Wow, I wonder who you work for. Last I checked my boss wasn’t allowed to beat me, rape me or sell me (also, I’ve no debts to pay, thankyouverymuch. I earn a salary, unlike the slaves in the past). You seem to think it was all about debt, and that was a way to get into slavery, but it wasn’t the only way; conquest was another. Even the Bible says so: slave-owner, care for his slaves. If slaves were “free people”, he wouldn’t need to say such a thing. He wouldn’t need to tell the slave to obey his master if it was just a work-relationship. Hell, the word ’slave’ wouldn’t even be needed.”

Well, “slave” is an English word that has relatively recently acquired its most rigid adherence to certain connotations. The Hebrew word is “eved”, which means servant, and was used at various times to describe almost every type of person including government officials. And it’s not the boss that’s the one to worry about, it’s the creditor. Good for you on having no debts to pay. Anyhow, the allowances in the books of Moses, again, were by the language indicated to be for that specific time and place because of what was going on at the time, as has been rabbinically explained for millennia, and made more explicitly well-known by the words of Christ. The New Testament writings were not promoting slavery of that type at all, but were in fact paving the way for it to be done away with. Especially if you put them together with the books of Moses, which said not only to set free your Hebrew debtors after 6 years, but don’t stand by and let them get in debt in the first place, but help them, and then Christ made official the already-implied extension of this brotherhood to all nations. The taking of a slave as wife was so circumscribed that it really could not be done against her will, and it explicitly says that she becomes a full wife in every respect. When aberrations away from that were practiced, they were sin and commented upon as such. These were things that again, both ancient Jewish and Christian sources agree were written to people so immersed in a culture around them that practiced these things that to explicitly forbid it would have just shut their ears to it entirely, like it says they were “added because of transgressions”. So the way it was worded was a way of explaining why not to do it. This is how it has been rabbinically explained since long, long before it was cool to explain it that way.

So the explanations of the culture that produced these writings, which have survived intact for centuries upon centuries, which explain the structure of the writings in a way that didn’t support people lording it over others, and therefore were ignored because so many people *like* to lord it over others, were “rationalizing the irrationality”? Seems to me it was the opposite; the rest of the world was “irrationalizing the rationality” for their own purposes, and people got in the habit of overlooking the obvious. Now, people are still taking the bait, this time by getting mad at the writers, just as the distorters would have them do to *still* support their purposes…different game/strategy, same goal.