(December 2, 2012 at 12:49 pm)TaraJo Wrote: Compare the Old Testament to the New Testament and you notice a pretty drastic changethere. OT god is a vengeful God, smiting people for any little infraction. NT god just kinda sits back and says "You'll get yours in the afterlife."
I mean, you look at the body counts between the two. What does god kill people over? In the OT, people have been killedfor making fun of a bald guy, or for attempting the 'withdrawl' method of birth control. In Exous, God directly takes credit for hardening Pharaoh's heart so he can show off, which means that when he killed the first born of Egypt, yeah, that's something God wanted to do. In the book of Job, he lets Job's family get slaughtered and Job himself get tortured just to prove a point.
On a side note, it's also worth noting the things god does NOT kill over. The mosiac laws alone say crazy things like rape a woman, you don't get killed unless she's already married while they also sentence people to death for working on a Sunday. The rest of the OT isn't much better: Get your dad drunk and seduce him, nobody dies. Murder your brother because you're playing favorites, again, you don't die.
However, overall, the god of the OT is pretty damn vengeful, right? So, what happened? New Testament god killed one guy I think, but since he brought two people back from death (Lazarus and Jesus), his body count is actually in the negatives. In fact, he doesn't raise a finger while his people are being killed, while his message is being silenced and the messengers are being tried, convicted and tortured.
How'd this happen, though? God is supposed to be perfect. However, God changed, which means he either wasn't perfect before that change and is perfect afteror he was perfect and then changed to become other than perfect.
The god of the old testament was clung to to give credibility in Roman society. No new religions were accepted on the basis that either something was always true or it wasn't true at all.
The obvious difference in the way god acted according to the OT and the way christians taught god caused all sorts of differing early attempts to square the circle and rifts and repression followed.
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
