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发表于 3-10-2008 11:53 PM
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1. Why there so many "bloody incident" that appear in the Old Testament?
2. Does God command the Jewish to kill?
3. Why God seems cruel in the Old Testament?
These are good questions that have been asked for centuries, way back to
St. Augustine who felt he could not believe in a God Who would do such
things and so became a Manichaean for a time instead.
My own view is that the bible is of divine inspiration but has human authors.
No matter how hard we humans try to listen to what God is saying, we
don't get the message clear, because its reception has to be filtered
through our preconceptions. In those passages of the Old Testament in
which God is represented as commanding genocide, we see the human author's
conception of God as the sponsor and champion of their tribe, pressing
their tribes' interest against the neighbors. His job is to win their
battles, to expand their borders, and to make fools of their enemies.
The Old Testament also tells us that God has other ideas about what
their partnership was about. God forms a people through Abraham to
advertize Divine glory and to be a blessing to all the nations of
the earth. Israel wanted to be like other nations and win the international
competitions, to become rich and prosperous etc. But that was not destined
to be because God chose a small nation strategically placed on trade routes but squeezed between big powers that fought over the territory.
In short, the cruelty that is ascribed to God reflects their conception
of who God should be. But however understandable it was that they should
think so, they were wrong.
Pax et bonum, |
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