Today’s item of discussion is the paradoxical nature of God as he is presented within the Christian church.
One of the most egregious fallacies in Christianity is the presentation of God, in which he is shown to be this loving, caring deity, yet also as a jealous, angry deity. These characteristics could not be more disparate.
The God of the Old Testament (OT) was clearly a vengeful deity, more interested in fulfilling the interests of his “chosen” people than in demonstrating the love attributed to him by modern Christianity. This is a deity who either destroyed directly, or gave license to his people to destroy, large swathes of people whose only shortcoming was not being of the Hebrew tribes. Would a loving God destroy two entire cities full of people by raining fire upon them? Alright, fine, they were a disgusting lot of brutes who did horrible things to one another. What about the children? What about the infants? Slaves who were not there of their own volition? What about the people of Jericho? Why were they so bad? It’s difficult to believe that a people sophisticated enough to build a city with insurmountable walls could be so barbaric as to deserve annihilation. I think it is far more likely that the Hebrews just wanted the land (assuming the story isn’t a fabrication), and killing its occupants was the quickest means to that end. What about the Passover? How could God kill an entire generation of firstborn children and still claim the moniker “loving?” What had those children done, besides being born Egyptian (not to mention that this is likely another fabrication)?
Now in the New Testament we learn that God is a loving God. The love of God is demonstrated in the person, Jesus Christ. Now what really makes this confusing is that a recurring theme within the Bible is that God is unchanging. If God is unchanging, then why the departure from the OT God of fury, fire, and brimstone? “It’s the transcendence of the divine.” Oh, that old canard again. So God, who supposedly created logic as a means by which we can learn about him and his nature, is immune to the laws of the logic he created? How are we supposed to learn about God and get closer to him if we cannot use the laws he created for us because those laws take us away from him?
This is another of the reasons why I can no longer believe. A paradox this powerful could only be the work of a human mind. A perfect deity without flaw would not commit such a blatantly obvious fallacy. Any deity claiming the worst of human nature, e.g. jealousy, anger, hatred, cannot--by definition--be “love.” There is no way to reconcile this.
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