(April 15, 2013 at 6:55 pm)catfish Wrote: Yeah, it would have been murder. It was also just a story to show faith though, so no biggie...
That's how I saw it. Later texts made me wonder why god did that. We're told that god can see into the hearts of men, which I took to mean that he could see our motivations and understand our mind. Which means that he didn't have to ask Abraham to sacrifice his son, he knew that Abraham would've done so before he even asked. And Paul later writes that Abraham knew that Isaac was part of the lineage that would produce the nation of Israel, and that god could resurrect him.
So the story became one where god asked Abraham to sacrifice his son just for the sake of seeing if he had the stomach to kill him for kicks. The JWs saw the near-sacrifice of Isaac as a metaphor for the later sacrifice of Jesus. Which thus makes that sacrifice seem very creepy. And now I'm wondering why people seem to think that if you become an atheist, you suddenly have no moral center and might do all sorts of evil things.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
