(October 7, 2017 at 12:32 am)Astonished Wrote:(October 7, 2017 at 12:18 am)emjay Wrote: Take the commandment 'honour thy father and thy mother'... what if those parents are abusive, what then? The problem with the commandments in the Bible is that they are absolute and literally set in stone, if the story is to be believed, and as such they can never cover all cases nor can they ever evolve.
True remorse for something... that is compassion for the person you've wronged rather than self-serving remorse because you are being punished... can only come from understanding what you've done wrong, why it's wrong, and how it impacts the person you've wronged... ie it comes from empathy. If you are obliged to follow a set of arbitrary rules that don't make sense... in some cases at least (eg honouring an abusive parent)... then there can be no such true remorse; all it can be in that case is a self-serving remorse that comes out of fear of or actually being punished by God. So as I see it, there can never be anything but self-serving remorse involved in blindly following a set of absolute rules that you do not understand, and that do not make sense in all cases, and never can, by virtue of being absolute and set in stone.
So I guess what I'm saying here is that remorse doesn't seem the right term for the saying saying sorry to God part. Compassionate remorse only comes from empathy, and anything else is just self-serving.
Has Yahweh ever showed genuine empathy with humans? Is it even logically possible for someone who is so far removed from humanity in the ways described to even feel empathy?
No... never... only a select few, and even then, not for long. All the Bible ever does, especially in the Old Testament, is generalise and stereotype ... both in its rules and its targets for wrath... 'the people of x' as if they're all the same. Such generalisations and stereotypes are the absolute antithesis of empathy; empathy is by it's nature about understanding individuals and individual situations rather than stereotypes.
