Just wanted to mention a further point.
You said: a child hearing that story today is given the message that you do whatever God commands no matter how innately morally wrong it is.
To which command are you referring too? Noah building an ark for him and his family? How is that morally wrong?
You can debate about God’s justice, but what does that have to do with Noah following immoral commands?
There are many things on this planet, and amongst humanity, that are frightening and indeed terrifying. Perhaps an atomic bomb exploding in our city may be enough to cause absolute fear to all of us - and such an evil act is done by human beings. The notion atheists constantly bring up, is that God is the source of such evil, and in a childish way, declare they will refuse to believe is such a god.
If we accept the obvious fact, that much of the evil we observe is directly attributed to human acts, is it unreasonable to insist the atheist conforms to his own reasoning, and that he should either think there is no humanity he can believe in, or there is no morality humans can practice?
Everyone has the burden that our own evil acts place on us. Decency and an adult outlook (indeed our own sanity) would force us to accept responsibility for such acts - only then can we start to think of avoiding evil and seeking the good. The banal insistence from atheists, that pass the blame elsewhere undercuts the impulse for responsible moral acts.
Theologically (briefly) God accepted the difficulties we humans face, lived amongst us, and yet without any act that would bring blame to him, was put to death - this death of an innocent man was an act by human beings who knew they were acting in an evil manner. Of all the terrors we can face, the deliberate and premeditated murder of any innocent, is a terrifying act. God understood all of this, accepted the fact that He created us, and provided a means for forgiveness of such sins - it is a sublime truth that we as humans should regret our evil, and seek earnestly to do the good for ourselves and our fellow human beings. This is from God and is offered as an act of Grace. It is extraordinary that atheists should seek any and every opportunity to negate and contradict this central tenet of the Christian faith.
Tim,
We live in a post-911 world. A world where ISIL use atrocities and social media to market a warped ideology. This ideology resonates with disenchanted young men around the world. In the predominately Christian Western world we can’t fathom how anyone can believe that committing atrocities in the name of God can ever be justify. It is morally reprehensible to us. It is basic to our evolved human morality. That is the context that I speak in. I live in 2015 America. My morality is shaped more by the events in the 2000’s than events 4000 years ago. My concern is much broader than how traditional western Christianity looks at things. So looking at the Noah story as a 21st century American, I would have to conclude that Noah and his family were willing accomplishes to the largest genocide in history. God revealed his plan to him and instead of telling the authorities, Noah work his whole life to save himself and his family. In my book, (and with my 2015 morality), Noah was not a righteous man but a coward, someone not to be emulated, nor praised, nor glorified as a righteous man. Why does this matter in the 21st century and why do I think that this story shouldn’t be told to children?
Because let say today, a young man says that he committed to God and willing to do anything that God commands him to do. He becomes a target for manipulation. I believe that some unscrupulous person can get him to do anything including flying airplanes into buildings. But you might say that it can’t happen to good Christians. History says otherwise. (priest scandal, abortion clinic bombings). I say this not to denigrate your Faith and beliefs but instead to say that your Faith may have moral responsibilities that might supersede your Faith.
Again looking at this story using 2015 morality, I can’t image the psychological trauma that Isaac endured. He probable had nightmares his entire life. He certainly looked at his father differently after this ordeal. Abraham was totally unfit to ever be near his son again. Again, in 2015 morality, Abraham should have been arrested for the most egregious form of child endangerment ever perpetrated in history. Isaac’s mother should never have left Isaac with this man. And if she knew of this event, and did nothing she is unfit to care for the child. Again, not a story to tell to today’s children.
Patrick, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to be perfectly blunt with you. You’re completely distorting the message of Noah. Noah as an accomplice to genocide? Noah should have reported it to the authorities? What authorities…? To whom could Noah talk to prevent a flood that wasn’t gonna happen for 100 years? The story is about REPENTANCE. Not about killing people to gain 72 virgins in heaven.
So a couple crazy Islamic terrorists crash into a building and all the sudden we have to completely reevaluate the entire Christian religion??
(Which by the way, jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel beams… But that’s a different topic)
Are you not aware of World War I, World War II, the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot? None of these people were religious… Are we gonna now reevaluate Atheism?
To say we should “rethink” Christianity because of what Islamic terrorists did is like saying we should “rethink” atheism because of 20th century dictators. You’re making this an issue of “the evils of religion”… When it’s just flat out HUMAN evil. Pure and simple
Where did I ever say “good Christians” will never do this? It does not matter whether you’re an atheist or believer, to be a morally good person. That is not what Christianity teaches. We are ALL bad people… The only difference is the repentant and unrepentant, and yet somehow you’re trying to make the story of Noah akin to Jihadists…
Why are you putting 9-11 into this special category, as if this is the first time in history we’ve seen human evil on a major scale?
I never said the Abraham-Isaac story should be considered a children’s story. It’s not.
If the story literally took place then no doubt Isaac would extremely traumatized. There is no recording of them ever communicating again.
There are multiple messages in this story:
God shows Abraham that this is NOT what God condones. Unlike Abrahams neighbors that worship Molech and sacrifice their children in the fire.
It was a test of Abrahams obedience. Yes a VERY gruesome test… But it does the job of getting your attention.
Most importantly this foreshadows the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.
Their could be other meanings, but like Christy says, we are far removed from the time culture of when it was written.
I believe that Cinderella was sadistic child abuse. If Cinderella lived next door to you with her step mother and her two sisters, wouldn’t you do everything to help the poor girl? If you felt that the abuse was too severe, wouldn’t you notify the child protection authorizes? I would.
We have to be careful taking stories from the past and puffing them up to mean something in today’s world. A child today can get totally different meaning out what the story actually is saying. We try to protect them from harm but we may not be preparing them well enough for the real harsh world out there.
Tim,
I guess it is a good time to requote this now famous Dawkin’s quote:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Of course, but that’s not the point. The point is when Hans Christian Anderson first told the tale, people weren’t distracted by the stepmother. It wasn’t the focus of the story and people probably wouldn’t have characterized her as a sadistic child abuser. She fit some acceptable trope of the culture. The original Little Mermaid is even more violent and disturbing. The fact that many fairy tables strike a modern audience as disturbing when they were probably not disturbing in their time is my point. We can characterize the listeners from bygone days who didn’t bat an eye at telling a children a story about a girl who gets her tongue cut out and suffers as if every step is walking on knives and leaving a trail of blood, all to get a boy to like her as a backwards and immoral people, but we don’t know that. Maybe they just had different conventions for story-telling than we are accustomed to.
Same with the Noah narrative. I seriously doubt any of the original audience would walk away thinking the story was primarily about genocide or question the character of God for causing it. Not because they were twisted people, but because they had a different frame of reference than we do now. They probably wouldn’t be able to make much sense out of Ender’s Game.
Ironically, that quote is on the very first page of the book I recommended to you: Did God Really Command Genocide?
I don’t see what point you’re trying to make. I don’t take much stalk in what Dawkins says (he’s considered to be a radical even in the atheist circles). He has an obvious vehement hatred for religion… It’s nothing new.
He’s an evolutionary biologist, not an Old Testament scholar, thus he is making a bold assertion outside his field of expertise. Scientists don’t like Christians making claims about science when it’s outside their field of expertise… But Dawkins feels he can? That’s intellectually dishonest.
Your comment didn’t have anything to do with my question: why do you put 9-11 as a poster boy for “the evils of religion” yet do not do the same for Adolf Hitler or Stalin, for atheism? It’s one-sided.
I like what you say here Christy.
It’s important to know that every story has “conflict” and “resolution”. The story of Cinderella has conflict: she lives with an abusive stepmother. But that is not the point of the story. The POINT is that despite her difficult circumstances she remains positive and eventually finds a prince. Hence it’s a story of perseverance and happy endings. It’s a fairystory.
Patrick, you characterize the story of Noah in a similar fashion. There’s conflict: there was great violence in the earth, every thought of man was only evil continually. However you focus is on Gods ulterior motives, when he plainly tells you his motives in the story. There was great violence in the earth and much wickedness. I’m going to restart with Noah.
You miss the elements of this story that’s about renewal and rebirth. God says I will no longer curse the ground for mans sake, for man is evil from his youth. Beforehand Man did something bad and God cursed the ground for it… But now he’s going to get at the root of the matter. The heart. The cursing before was just external causes.
Because I lost a friend who work on the 86th floor of Tower 1.
Patrick, I am very sorry for your loss.
I apologize if I got carried away with the analogies… I might have overstepped my bounds, there.
I wasn’t trying to downplay the 3000+ lives that was lost that day. That wasn’t my intention at all. All I was trying to say was that evil is evil … And it takes on many forms … Characterizing Christianity with Jihad I couldn’t help but find insulting. But then again I didn’t have a personal experience with 9-11. But I did lose a friend to the war in Afghanistan, that was started by 9-11.
I never characterized Christianity with Jihad. And never would. Recall we were talking about Noah, then Abraham as stories unsuitable for children. Somehow you got to Hilter, Stalan and Pol Pot. By the way, Hitler was a Christian.
Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” ~Adolf Hitler
Agree, different times, different places, different moralities of what is evil and what is good.
A few more of Hitler’s writings and speeches:
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”
“The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defense of its own teaching.”
“His [the Jew’s] life is of this world only and his mentality is as foreign to the true spirit of Christianity as is character was foreign to the great Founder of this new creed two thousand years ago. And the Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews…”
Pol Pot was a Buddhist and believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whole thing was ultimately a question of power. “How many divisions,” he famously and stupidly inquired, “has the pope?” (The true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, “More than you think.”) Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (Millions of innocents died of gnawing internal pain as a consequence of this “revelation.”) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his.
Hi Patrick,
By your reasoning we should conclude that Judas was a Christian with apostolic authority, and indeed all one has to say is, God said this and that, so I can commit any evil I wish. It is self-evident that communism espoused atheism - and Nazis would not give a toss about religion of any type. Perhaps you should read the inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. There you will find an outlook which recognises the difference between Christianity proper and what many in the world say (and act) as if they were Christians.
It would be remarkable if Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao (and many other megalomaniacs) were not aware of the traditional religions in the country they were born - yet it takes a huge leap to equate their ideologies (versions of communism and national socialism) with the teachings of the Gospels (Or of Buddha). Indeed the fact that you do this points to great prejudice on your part - hardly the comments of a reasonable person.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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