One aspect of Christianity I have never understood is: WHY does God want to hurt certain people and life forms? Every time he calls upon the people to sacrifice animals so they can burn the flesh to please him, he is commanding his adherents to hurt animals. What does he have against sheep and other hooved creatures? What did they ever do to him?
There have been quite a few people he has hurt himself or directed others to hurt. In most cases, so the argument goes, the folks he singled out were b-a-d people and they deserved his rightful wrath. But what about the person mentioned in Isaiah 53:10?
To my mind's eye, that is completely illogical. Even worse, how can anyone turnaround to claim that this being that finds pleasure in hurting others is loving and merciful. Sounds like a monster to me!
To see what other questions I've asked about the Christian Bible, go here.
There have been quite a few people he has hurt himself or directed others to hurt. In most cases, so the argument goes, the folks he singled out were b-a-d people and they deserved his rightful wrath. But what about the person mentioned in Isaiah 53:10?
Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.Many Christians believe this verse is a foreshadowing of Jesus, while others don't see it that way. For my purposes, I don't really care who is being reference. It just blows me away that a so-called perfect entity would a) have the desire to hurt anyone and b) be pleased that they indeed were hurt!
To my mind's eye, that is completely illogical. Even worse, how can anyone turnaround to claim that this being that finds pleasure in hurting others is loving and merciful. Sounds like a monster to me!
To see what other questions I've asked about the Christian Bible, go here.
Anyone who takes anything in the bible literally is an idiot. It was written by many different people over a long period of time, over 2000 years ago. All of whom may have had slightly different images of God. Just because the Bible says something about God doesn't mean its true, because God has no way of communicating with us directly. Society has changed drastically over the past two millennia, the bible has little. It was written in the social context of the first century.
ReplyDeleteIn regard to the passage, how does its author KNOW that God is pleased with the beating of a man? He doesn't, he just assumes it.
While I certainly agree with your overall thesis, there are literally millions of Christians in the world who do, in fact, believe that the words in the Bible are God's words.
ReplyDeleteWhile traveling recently, I picked up on an airport layover whim a book called "The Reason for God," by Timothy Keller. While I don't really like this book, which was largely a response to the Dawkins/Hitchins/Dennett/Harris arguments (and I don't really like them either) he does put some intelligent perspective, from a Christian point of view, on this question. I think Kai Wan is on point, but there are interpretations that can help understand what's going on here in a larger context. Literalism is a serious problem for all text-based inquiry, whether it's the TTC, Zhuangzi, various sutras or the Koran. Possibly even the Book of Mormon. But as my teacher would say of any text, "What is meaning?" It is never superficial (literal), and the attempt to understand it is where the meaning lies.
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