(June 21, 2015 at 12:10 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:
I'm not defending anything. I'm explaining it...and why it is not as black and white as you anti-christers seem to believe. The Israelites were a stubborn, stiff-necked people. Here are a few assessments from various points in Israel's history:
- Exodus 32:9 “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people.
- Nehemiah 9:16 “But they, our ancestors, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and they did not obey your commands.
- Acts 7:51 “You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit!
From Moses to Nehemiah to Stephen...you can see what God was dealing with. Consequently, God had to bring the Israelites along slowly...forming His people little by little...weaning them away from false gods and other beliefs and customs.
If god were seen to slowly move the Hebrews in the direction of being more moral I'd buy it. But that's not the way I read the OT. Because god orders his stiff necked people to rather odd things if that's the purpose: senseless dietary and dress restrictions. Not to mention actually ordering the killing of whole towns to the last person.
(June 21, 2015 at 12:10 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Here's a classic from Jesus:
Matthew 19
When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there. 3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “[b]Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
Catch that?
Moses permitted the people to divorce but Jesus commanded us to step up our game.
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I see the change proposed by Jesus. But I also see that Jews no longer permit divorce and they somehow got there with out Jesus. The rules for marriage in various societies including whether marriage must be monogamous, whether and why divorce is permitted, who is allowed to marry who and so on have varied widely over human history. The Etruscan's idea of marriage looked rather more like our modern ideas than the Hebrews did, as did the Roman and Greek idea, yet somehow they got there without god telling them to. So mores change, but I don't attribute the change to god steadily pushing us in the right direction.
(June 21, 2015 at 12:10 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Same with slavery. It was permitted, but now it's not. We've been molded by God.
Really? Where does it prohibit slavery in the Bible? Didn't the Catholic church actually own slaves in North and South America?
The America abolitionist movement pitted church against church with many churches declaring slavery to be the will of god. The earliest anti-slavery proponents were free-thinkers. http://www.freethought-trail.org/profile...use&Page=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought Funny it should take atheists to get the ball rolling.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
