RE: Genocide in the Old Testament
September 22, 2013 at 7:51 am
(This post was last modified: September 22, 2013 at 7:52 am by Tonus.)
It certainly makes you wonder why a being so grand and powerful that humans are just a speck upon a speck upon a speck within his magnificent creation, is so needy. If these insignificant dots in an insignificant corner of this ultra-massive and remarkably awesome universe don't figure out this odd puzzle required to acknowledge him, he massacres them. Sometimes, just to show how malicious and petty he is, he orders them to massacre each other. But the largest-scale killing is by his own hand, when he wipes out nearly every living creature with a flood. Why? Because they didn't pay him any mind.
Think about it. A being of such immense power compared to us that we may as well consider him omni-everything. To call ourselves gnats in comparison is to overstate our own worth. He has crafted a universe so large that we can define it numerically but the scale is simply too big for us to truly comprehend; but he spun it right off of his figures the way we'd make a clay pot. Our Sun, just one of possibly trillions that he had made, could wipe us and our world out with a large enough flare. And he desperately needs for us to tell him how great he is, on pain of death and eternal suffering.
That strikes me as utterly nonsensical.
Think about it. A being of such immense power compared to us that we may as well consider him omni-everything. To call ourselves gnats in comparison is to overstate our own worth. He has crafted a universe so large that we can define it numerically but the scale is simply too big for us to truly comprehend; but he spun it right off of his figures the way we'd make a clay pot. Our Sun, just one of possibly trillions that he had made, could wipe us and our world out with a large enough flare. And he desperately needs for us to tell him how great he is, on pain of death and eternal suffering.
That strikes me as utterly nonsensical.
"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
