Obedience to God

[James Brown]

Why didn't God's command to Leslie Kelly end well?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So your modern day apologetic is to assert that God rendered physical sacrifice unnecessary hundreds (if not thousands) of years BC. Congratulations, you’ve just rendered Jesus’ death unnecessary.

Here's some things you've overlooked.

Uh huh...

- Jesus (like Abraham) willingly trusted God.

No, actually, he did not. He threw himself to the ground three times and begged God to “take this cup away” not because Jesus willed it, but because God willed it.

There are parallels.

That’s not a “parallel.” Abraham never begged God to take away the burden God placed upon him (murdering his son as a sacrifice). Abraham simply murdered his son. All God did was stop Abraham’s hand, but Abraham was fully intent on obeying God’s order to murder his son. In his heart and in his head, Abraham must have been 100% committed to murdering his son or else there is no reason for God to stop him. Your apologetic attempt not withstanding.

- God raised Jesus

He did?

and God spared Isaac.

Which rendered blood sacrifice unnecessary. Thus proving that the NT is a book of lies at the very least.

Both events end well.

How so? Isaac would have been forever traumatized and Jesus was murdered by Romans that even if one were to completely stretch any meaning out of sacrificial atonement (i.e., that it must be made by people who are requesting atonement; not by God for God’s sake) it still was already rendered completely unnecessary by God sparing Isaac.

Unless Jesus’ physical death was somehow 100% required by God, there is no need for Jesus’ death. Unless the Romans killed Jesus as a sacrificial atonement to Yahweh, there is no one who performed a sacrifice in order to achieve atonement. Even if Jesus had not begged three times for God to spare his life, since no one killed Jesus specifically as a sacrifice to Yahweh, that must mean God killed Jesus as a sacrifice to Himself, which, again, would not only be utterly pointless, we already have an example of God not requiring a blood sacrifice.

- There actually WAS a physical sacrifice on Mt Moriah.

All the more relevant to the point that the story renders human sacrifice unnecessary for God, thus underscoring the fact that it wipes out the entire purpose of a “new covenant,” further proving the NT could not be anything other than man-made lies with no basis in OT fact.

Read the text - then bring your A game.

That wasn’t even my V game and it decimated everything you tried to counter it with, so we’d be happy if you could raise your bar to anywhere around Q or P, because you’re nowhere near A. All you ended up doing was further demonstrating why the story of A&I proves the story of J can’t be true.

 

[James Brown]

It would seem to me that a better parallel between Moses and Jesus would be Jehovah asking Moses to sacrifice himself as proof of his devotion, not his innocent son.

As parallels go, it leaves a little to be desired. The Moses story has three characters, whereas the Jesus story only has two.

Unless we're to understand that when God sacrificed his son on the cross, he was doing so under orders from a higher power.

 

[steve_bank]

In the details would Abraham pass current Christian moral muster regarding sex? He essentially pimped out his wife for political cover, did he not?

 

[James Brown]

In the details would Abraham pass current Christian moral muster regarding sex? He essentially pimped out his wife for political cover, did he not?

Yes he did. And in typical Old Testament fashion, Jehovah punished Abraham for this sin by infecting other innocent people with plague. Abraham got away with it unharmed.

That's usually swept under a rug labeled "different culture, no longer relevant", along with polygamy, slavery, and impregnating your wife's maid. Then, after suitable throat clearing, we return to railing against the evils of "situational ethics".

 

[Lion IRC]

This thread is getting boring - me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means. Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example where people actually do kill the person God commands them to.
Yawn. /thread

 

[DrZoidberg]

This thread is getting boring - me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means. Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example where people actually do kill the person God commands them to.
Yawn. /thread

So you're saying that Abraham wouldn't have killed him if God hadn't told him to stop? I think it's problematic. If I believed in a God and that God appeared to me and told me to kill my son, I would conclude that my faith has been misplaced and I've all along beein worshipping an undeserving God. I'd stop worship that God. The fact that God later changes his mind (or makes up some dumb story about it being a test of faith) doesn't make God's claim to goodness believable. I don't buy it. And I don't understand why Christians do?

The story makes sense in a pagan context, where children were sacrificed to the gods in order to appease them. But pagan gods aren't good. They're powerful forces indifferent to the suffering of humans.

Judaism evolved from paganism. And it's clearly a pagan story that has migrated into modern Christianity. Even though it doesn't fit at all.

I don't understand why Christians find it so hard to admit that the story doesn't fit modern Christianity.

 

[SLD]

"Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering?"

It's as if Abraham knows that Isaac is destined to go on and have an innumerable number of grand kids

Well … what's the point of the story then?

I always read it as being that obedience to God's commands is the number one thing. Even if he asks you to do something that your own judgement would consider to be wrong, like killing your child, you should obey the commands of God because he knows better than you.

If that is not the case and Abraham knew that God would stop him before he killed Isaac (and God, I assume, knew that Abraham was aware of this), then what was going on here? There wouldn't appear to be any moral lesson or any real point at all.

Well, if the Abrahamic god is the one true god then obedience would indeed be the smart choice. Your life would be irrelevant. So what if you killed your own son? You just sent him back to god as he requested. Death isn’t particularly bad, just a transition. The only thing that’s important is to do what the big man wants otherwise you end up in the lake of fire.

And that sucks.

SLD

 

[braces_for_impact]

This thread is getting boring - me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means. Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example where people actually do kill the person God commands them to.
Yawn. /thread

It's boring because of how typically predictable the whole thing was. From the very first example you used your magical holy spirit splainin' powers to change the outcome and attempt to release yourself from the cognitive dissonance that an aborted child sacrifice entails. Also typical, you do so with a smug attitude and holier than thou disposition of yet another Christian that still hasn't been instructed by his lord and savior in how to treat people.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

This thread is getting boring - me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means. Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example where people actually do kill the person God commands them to.
Yawn. /thread

... I just did, in a post you ignored.

 

[ideologyhunter]

First, I'll fess up to TLDR syndrome. But as to God ordering murder and the believers jumping in with a gung-ho spirit, may I recommend the Book of Joshua. As an example of Biblegod, in person and apparently audibly, ordering the extermination of a people, see Josh. 8:1,2. The rest of the chapter cheerily recounts the miraculous victory, in which Joshua and his fellow murderers put 12,000 people of the city of Ai to the sword; as the Bible says at verse 25, 'twelve thousand men and women, the whole population,' but that would also include the aged, the infirm, the young. The Bible writer insists in verse 26, "Joshua led with his javelin and did not pull back his hand until all who had lived there were destroyed." Nobody but a lockstep faith-filled believer could see that as anything but morally debauched. The rest of the book follows this same pattern. The reader is asked to believe that a marching army could, over and over, massacre town after town, physically stabbing to death adults and children, and still be a virtuous people and the darlings of God.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

This thread is getting boring

Typical. So take your ball and go home, since you obviously can’t address the blatant logical errors and points being made.

- me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means.

So only you can splain what it ‘really’ means. Got it.

Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example

We’re discussing exactly that and you’re dodging it all with this whiney blather.

 

[Rhea]

I don't contend that Abraham was unwilling.
I am saying he believed - trusted - God would NOT take Isaac from him.

Sheesh!
It's like you people have never been on one of those corporate team-building events.

"A trust fall is a purported trust-building game often conducted as a group exercise in which a person deliberately allows themselves to fall, relying on the other members of the group (spotters) to catch the person."

Keith&Co probably thinks this trust experiment is pointless unless someone gets dropped every now and then.

If the risk of a real drop is not true, then it is not a trust event.
I did one of these in middle school and they didn’t catch me. Flat on my face on the ground.
Afterward, every realized that they had broken the trust.

Fact is, God didn’t tell him to trust in a replacement at any point. God didn’t say he’d catch him. He had to be ready to sacrifice. Ready. To. Complete. The act. In order to show he was obedient to yahweh. Who would have known if he sandbagged.

It wasn’t a trust exercise. It was an obedience exercise.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I don't think a 'trust fall' comes anywhere close to Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac.
God never says, "Slit your son's throat, but don't worry, I'll stop you."

And while no one HAS to fall in order for the trust exercise to work, it has to be over a hard floor. There is no point to a trust fall if you've got a big ass pillow on the floor. Then you're not trusting your coworker, you're trusting the pillow.


But no, rather than a trust fall, this episode more closely resembles a live-fire exercise. Crawl over an obstacle course while real bullets fly overhead. You need to obey the rules, or you'll get hurt.
Thing is, one of the rules for Abraham was to shove Isaac into the line of bullets. Nothing in the story indicates that he had any reason to think God would yell 'Hold your fire!' at the appropriate point.

 

[abaddon]

If you obey God you can trust Him to not be a god of his word.

 

[steve_bank]

This thread is getting boring - me saying it's about trust not blood/sacrifice and atheists 'splaining what it 'really' means. Nobody even makes the effort to cite a biblical example where people actually do kill the person God commands them to.
Yawn. /thread

I feel a little sorry for you, you are always twisting and turning to justify yourself, Never knowing real peace and what freedom of thought feels like. There is religious experience, there is also the experience of standing on your own two feet without crutches.

Watch that first step, its a doozy.

 

[phands]

I feel a little sorry for you, you are always twisting and turning to justify yourself, Never knowing real peace and what freedom of thought feels like. There is religious experience, there is also the experience of standing on your own two feet without crutches.

Watch that first step, its a doozy.

Don't feel sorry for LIRC, he's been peddling his malevolent views here and other forums for years. Trying to excuse or redefine so that it's not all about blood and death is what he does...very poorly. But let's face it, if you read the babble, in the old testament, god kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered (see http://www.evilbible.com/), and that's a conservative estimate.

 

[steve_bank]

I feel a little sorry for you, you are always twisting and turning to justify yourself, Never knowing real peace and what freedom of thought feels like. There is religious experience, there is also the experience of standing on your own two feet without crutches.

Watch that first step, its a doozy.

Don't feel sorry for LIRC, he's been peddling his malevolent views here and other forums for years. Trying to excuse or redefine so that it's not all about blood and death is what he does...very poorly. But let's face it, if you read the babble, in the old testament, god kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered (see http://www.evilbible.com/), and that's a conservative estimate.

A lot of the time it is not their fault. The question is why some people avoid being taken in and some manage to free themselves. Christianity is pervasive and self reinforcing. Look at the endless stream of invoking gog on cable news.

It is a miracle there are any who are free of it.

 

[phands]

A lot of the time it is not their fault. The question is why some people avoid being taken in and some manage to free themselves. Christianity is pervasive and self reinforcing. Look at the endless stream of invoking gog on cable news.

It is a miracle there are any who are free of it.

I could not agree more....I posted my escape from xtianity story here way back in 2014, IIRC. I became atheist at age 7. I'm now 60, and have only ever had my viewpoint reinforced.
And yes, it's not their fault, as the horrible jesuits say, "Give me the child util he is 7, and I will give you the man". Escape is hard.

 

[Learner]

Interestingly I see a lot more people (conspiracy theists if you will) nowadays giving talks about a particular group of Jesuits (seeds of satan so-called) who have been said to be corrupting ,infiltrating various denominations, replacing or steering focus and distorting Christianity for centuries. No wonder we're a mixed confused bunch, considering if this being the case.