(March 27, 2015 at 11:00 am)downbeatplumb Wrote: The thing about the Abrahamic faiths that puzzled me was how unconvincing god was supposed to be to people to which it had actually shown its power to.It's a running theme throughout the Bible. If we go by the interpretation that the Genesis serpent is the devil, he seems so unimpressed by god that he decides to turn humanity away from him, and turns out to have a surprisingly easy time of it.
Serpent: You can't eat any of the fruit?
Eve: Just the one from this tree. God says we'll die if we do.
Serpent: God's a liar, you'll actually level up if you eat it.
Eve: *greedily stuffs her face*
Adam: So Eve, what's going on?
Eve: Eating forbidden fruit. Want some?
Adam: *greedily stuffs his face*
When Moses is sent to impress the Pharaoh with the power of god, the Egyptian king turns to his sorcerers and they start working some magic as well. Even when god smacks them so hard that even the sorcerers give up, Pharaoh quickly gets over it and chases the freed slaves and doesn't stop until god drops a whole sea on his army.
Having seen all this, the Israelites recognize that their god is one serious heavy-hitter and they follow his plan and enjoy endless prosperity... haha, no: they almost immediately start bitching at him and moaning about how much better they had it when they were slaving for Egypt. God actually made freedom from slavery seem like the worst alternative.
It continues into the NT, where many Jews are so underwhelmed by Jesus' miracles that a group of them even accuse him of being an agent of Beelzebub. Considering that they were watching him perform actual miracles, wouldn't that imply that they'd seen this act before, from people claiming to represent other gods? Even the disciples didn't seem to know what to make of him from time to time, as if watching him cure the blind and raise the dead didn't merit anything more than "what else ya got?"
It's in stark contrast to the present day, where a smudge on a kitchen window "looks like Jesus" and draws wide-eyed travelers who drop to their knees in reverence to the Great Moldy Image Of God Himself! Where were these guys when Jesus was turning water to wine and feeding thousands out of a handbag?
"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
