I believe God is not opposed to Polygamy and Polyandry

I have to admit I have trouble comprehending a Christian fundamentalist approach to religion. (Fundamentalism in general I find hugely puzzling.) I've studied it for years - as an historian, not as a believer. Why is it attractive to people? Is it because of the perceived certainty? Of having answers? Something else?
 
Probably two things:

  • our fear that society will devolve into chaos without a concrete Deity,
  • our fear of death
... with the latter of the two being the biggest reason (in my estimation). Of course none of this is based on anything more than my personal fancy and speculation. I haven't done any research (let alone rigorous research) to add any certainty to this.

Re (from Deuteronomy):
"When a man is newly married, he shall not go out with the army or be liable for any other public duty. He shall be free at home one year to be happy with his wife whom he has taken."

When it says, "to be happy with his wife whom he has taken," it makes me think that the year off is more for the man's benefit than it is for the woman's, but maybe my interpretation is skewed. Also it speaks of "the army" and "public duty;" that makes me think of stuff like the draft and jury duty. No mention here of work in the private sector, but again, there's my biased (and undereducated) view of things ...

Re (from Magdlyn):
"What does this tiny nation from two millenia ago have to do with you today?"

About one millionth of 1%. Belief-wise anyway. As a matter of learning the mythology of a culture, it's somewhat interesting.

Re:
"Why would you expect an ancient tribal war and fire god to speak to you?"

I wouldn't. But since I don't rule anything out 100%, I will sometimes engage in discussion about the implications of hypotheticals (e.g., What if I'm just a brain in a vat).

It's not really within my control whether there's (a) God/dess/es or what the nature of that Deity is, so, I just make the best guess I can about what I think is up with the Universe, try to live my life accordingly, and answer what questions I can about that ancient tribal war and fire god in the interest of diplomacy and of identifying any little bit of common ground I can find. I know that the modern American understanding of who the Biblical God is, is different than the understanding the Jews had thousands of years ago, so I am willing to talk about God as he is usually perceived in modern America.

I'm not qualified to justify anything I do, to anyone except perhaps sometimes to myself. My only intent here is to try to describe some of my thinking process so that a cause-and-effect to the way I participate in religious threads can be seen.
 
I know that the modern American understanding of who the Biblical God is, is different than the understanding the Jews had thousands of years ago, so I am willing to talk about God as he is usually perceived in modern America.

Well, sure, but Aphrodite seem to want to rely on some strict literalist view of the Old Testament, discounting Paul in the NT, and who knows what other books.

She's all about modeling herself after the wife of a patriarch of the OT, or so she claims. She claims to be OK with being part of a harem of women who may be able to have sex with each other without sin, even though what she really wants is young men. Hmm...! Yet another justification for a One Penis Policy.

Now, my younger daughter has Borderline Personality Disorder. She has struggled terribly with bulimia and self harm and drug and alcohol addiction, for 10 years. :( Suddenly last year she "found Jesus" and "got saved" and it has kept her on the straight and narrow for the last 9 months. So yeah. She has black and white thinking and seems to thrive in a fundamentalist environment where rules are clear cut and "come from God." So, there's another reason to be a fundamentalist. It's better than crack and prostitution.
 
I am accustomed to black-and-white thinking ... My oldest brother, for one, engages in it. And I have seen it in a lot of LDS churchmembers, so perhaps I am somewhat numb to it. When someone says, "This is exactly how it is, and the Bible proves it," I just shrug and say, "Well, I know that's a popular way to look at things."

I have also partaken of a large slice of humble pie in my day, since I know I fervently clung to my own belief in the church for about 35 years. Who am I to lecture other believers when I was such a believer myself?

And I think that my missionary experience (1985-1986) influences how I interact with people today. As missionaries we were trained to arrive at a mindset of agreement with the people we were teaching by looking for common ground with those people, and emphasizing that in the conversation. I don't like everything I learned as a missionary but I do like that technique. I try to agree with other people as much as I can without being downright dishonest. I like to establish an environment in which everyone feels safe to speak their mind. It's not always possible but I still tend to try.

I know AphroditeGoneAwry has her own way of engaging in black-and-white thinking, even while departing somewhat from the mores of mainstream Christianity. That puzzles me, but it also stirs up my curiosity and makes me wonder what she's got to say. I am curious to know why she believes what she believes. I am optimistic that there is something new and interesting I can learn from her.

In my lifetime I have learned (repeatedly) that I can be very, very wrong about a lot of things. So while still using my powers of judgment and skepticism as best I can, I also make an effort to listen to contrasting points of view and consider them as possibilities. That's why I'll probably never be 100% atheist. I'll always hold out a 1% chance that (a) God/dess/es exists, as well as various portions of that 1% that said God/dess/es might reflect the beliefs of this, that, or the other church or individual.

I think the one thing that saved me from being a devoted Mormon for life is that I was never a 100% believer. I always held out a slight chance that I might be wrong. That flaw in my percentage served me well once; who knows if it might serve me well again. I'll keep it.
 
A deity who created a world and beings within it (let's just assume this as the premise for the argument), and then opposes the happenings in that world and the choices of actions by its creatures has done a shitty job at design work and/or is intentionally cruel and avoids His/Her/Its/Their divine responsibility.

I've drawn the logical conclusion that an omnipotent, omniscient creator deity cannot at the same time be 1) morally judgmental AND 2) intelligent/capable AND 3) loving/caring for the world's creatures.
At least one of these three aspects has to go to make the assumption of that deity's existence plausible to me.

It worked fine for me when I chucked out the "morally judgemental" bit. Arriving at the belief in a loving, intelligent, all-encompassing deity responsible for igniting the Big Bang, who is utterly amoral and does not judge on anything, has been one of the biggest breakthroughs I've made for my personal happiness. (I do not for a second claim that this would make my belief objectively true, I just say it makes it logically sound. ;))



Yahweh was a son of El, the god of Babylon. That is in the Bible. Yahweh was assigned to a certain small tribe of nomads, the Israelites.
Wow. Thanks, Mag. I was aware that there is pretty strong evidence in the Bible itself of the Biblical god having started out as clearly henotheistic, not monotheistic (and I learned that fact at school - note that it was a Catholic school, so definitive kudos to the quality of our teacher.... thanks, Mr S., in the unlikely case you're reading this post :D).

But this is the first time I hear of the "Son of El" theory. This is fascinating stuff. Thanks for giving me something to read up on further! *gives you cake* :)
 
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Mmmm.
Cake or death?
Cake, please.
 
Re (from InsaneMystic):
"A Deity who created a world and beings within it (Let's just assume this as the premise for the argument), and then opposes the happenings in that world and the choices of actions by Its creatures has done a shitty job at design work and/or is intentionally cruel and avoids His/Her/Its/Their divine responsibility."

Good point. I guess I prefer to believe in (a) deity/ies that doesn't/don't have all power, such as the power to create organisms that don't (and don't have to) prey on each other. But assuming an all-powerful God, even the Holocaust would ultimately be God's fault, since He could have created German souls who wouldn't act that way.

In Mormon doctrine, there is something fundamental in our souls that God does not create. It is something that was always the essential part of who we are -- and always existed. If God could have changed that essential part of us, He chose not to, valuing the freedom to choose good or evil over providing us with a paradisiacal world.

If this is true ... If we were always this or that sort of person, and were never created (neither by God nor by ourselves) ... then are we to blame for our own evil actions? A lengthy (hour-long plus some Q&A) but fascinating talk was given at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g

Ahem. A little off-topic but I wanted to mention it.
 
But assuming an all-powerful God, even the Holocaust would ultimately be God's fault, since He could have created German souls who wouldn't act that way.
Indeed. I had to come to terms with this thought - who wouldn't have to struggle with it, even if they weren't (like me) both German, and someone with a neurotic guilt complex? - but in the end, yeah, it strikes me as inevitable that the ultimate "guilt" for anything, if one wants to place it, lies with the one who started it all by making this universe.

To go with the Biblical metaphor (not that I haven't left Abrahamitic monotheism far behind by now, myself ;)) - where the fuck did that damn snake come from, if not as a creature YHWH made? How is there a "force of evil" in a paradise, before the Fall From Grace? And if one goes with the "oh it's when Lucifer rebelled and Old Mike struck him down out of Heaven, Lucifer was the snake in disguise"... yeah fine... but... seriously. It shifts that question back in the timeline, but it's still the same question. Why did YHWH create an angel - an entity of light and goodness, made for literally nothing else than to serve his divine Lord, whom he knew, first hand, was glorious, and good, and most of all, tangibly real - that was even capable of rebellion? I don't see it add up, unless YWHW by design set someone up to fail, either the snake/Lucifer or Adam and Eve.

Less Biblically, from a viewpoint of simple physics (yes, the physics of God, I said it :D) an entity that made our universe - the space-time continuum - must, by necessity, know the entirety of all things that will happen within that universe at the point of creation. A god who was there "before" the Big Bang is, by necessity if we follow what little we can grasp of Einstein and Hawking, outside of time. All of the billions or trillions of years in this universe are the exact same NOW of creation, for the creator. If a divine creator made this universe, then He/She/It/They knew, without a doubt, that it would be a universe in which all kinds of violent atrocities will happen, and He/She/It/They still created it. If one wants to look for the "ultimate moral culprit", that's the big one right there, the one who toyed with the pinpoint singularity of ultra-dense, ultra-hot proto-energy. ;)

If you choose to accept that thought, morality becomes moot (which for me, ever guilt-ridden, was a relief I can't even tell you how big it was). And then you're free to look at your life, free to be as amoral as you can be, and answer the question "if seriously nothing at all here morally matters, then what kind of life do I want to live?" And I went "heck, if the divine creator loved even freaking Hitler enough to say yes to making a universe in which that guy would go on to send millions to atrocious death, then why shouldn't I give it a try and treat folks with love and respect, 99.999% of which won't be genocidal dictators?" And well, I'm still at it. I believe that whatever I do, even if I fuck up, it's still all cool. I am free to try and love folks not because I'll go to Hell if I don't, but because I honor the divinity that is in the other person as well as it is in me, and the divinity's love in which we are all connected.

(And before the question comes, because some well-intentioned, but still misguidedly preaching, atheist will always ask it - what d I need God for then? Trust me on this one: I do need him for consistency of my thought system. The reasons would just derail this thread even further to go into, but my world would crumble into psychotic nihilism without the God Axiom.)

And even if that axiom may not be objectively true - it may very well be objectively false; I don't pretend to know, and I actually believe that it cannot ever be humanly known... I'm an agnostic theist - damn, believing it with all my heart makes my life a lot nicer both for myself and for folks I end up meeting. :)


If this is true ... If we were always this or that sort of person, and were never created (neither by God nor by ourselves) ... then are we to blame for our own evil actions? A lengthy (hour-long plus some Q&A) but fascinating talk was given at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g
An hour long youtube video? Geez, dude, you know internet folks have short attention spans!!! :p (I may look into it later, thanks.)
 
I know I know. I just threw it out there on the off chance that someone might get curious. As a consolation, I just watched that video again myself, and found that

  • it was well worth watching again,
  • the main (non-Q&A) part of the talk is actually *only* about 55 minutes. :)
Re: the benefits of believing in God ... seem to be real enough to certain people whom I highly esteem (e.g. InsaneMystic) that I can appreciate those benefits. I don't know why I can't see those benefits working for myself, and even if I could, would I be *able* to believe? Who knows.

Why am I not a nihilist when I have no God to give any meaning to my existence? I somehow *feel* as if existence is intrinsically meaningful. I find it miraculous and amazing that a species has involved that can inspect itself and make ethical observations about itself -- observations that (I believe) eventually improve the overall behavior of that species. I am excited to be a fortunate part of that phenomenon. I'm pumped. I want to leave a footprint that will inspire people both now and in generations to come.

Is there really such a thing as good and evil? That is quite a puzzle. I think that as time goes on we can learn *better* ways of doing things -- and that's good. By good I mean, "encouraging, inspiring, gives hope." I tend to think of evil as any tragic event or series of events, especially if (at least hypothetically) it could have been avoided.

I don't so much believe in the notions of evil and good as sin and righteousness (respectively). We're all saints, and we're all sinners, both in the same package. We make tragic mistakes in life, and if we're very lucky, we learn from those mistakes, and do better with whatever time we have left. It's a waste of precious living moments to beat ourselves up, yet I don't blame us for doing that either. We all have to learn in our own time and in our own way.

Anyways, I agree with your post in general.
 
I reject all this good/bad, sin/moral shit coming from some sort of omniscient all powerful "god." It's just pointless wondering, and the Bible is no help, it's hopelessly antiquated.

But if you understand the social milieu of the day, like I have striven to do, you can parse this:

Insane Mystic said:
To go with the Biblical metaphor (not that I haven't left Abrahamitic monotheism far behind by now, myself ) - where the fuck did that damn snake come from, if not as a creature YHWH made? How is there a "force of evil" in a paradise, before the Fall From Grace? And if one goes with the "oh it's when Lucifer rebelled and Old Mike struck him down out of Heaven, Lucifer was the snake in disguise"... yeah fine... but... seriously. It shifts that question back in the timeline, but it's still the same question. Why did YHWH create an angel - an entity of light and goodness, made for literally nothing else than to serve his divine Lord, whom he knew, first hand, was glorious, and good, and most of all, tangibly real - that was even capable of rebellion? I don't see it add up, unless YWHW by design set someone up to fail, either the snake/Lucifer or Adam and Eve.

First of all although "Lucifer" the light bringer was conflated with some kind of cosmic evil long ago, we don't need to do so.

Just read the Bible IN CONTEXT, instead of taking for granted that the "final verdict" is the correct one, while complaining it makes no sense for you.

It doesn't make sense because it is pre-scientific mythology.

The snake, as I hinted upthread, would have been know to ALL humans of the region at the time (600BCE and earlier) as a GODDESS symbol. The serpent was associated with several goddess figures. In that region, it was Asherah. The Gan Eden story is yet one more tale about the competition of Yahweh and Asherah worshipers. Most of the Old Testament is about a transfer of power from women to men, writ large as gods.

So, Asherah was recommending knowledge, female wisdom. Yahweh instead was forcing a different more obedient attitude. He says, in the story, if the humans eat of that tree "they will become like us," ie, more godlike. There was a pantheon of gods in those days, which is reflected in the 10 commandments, no other gods before me, Yahweh, for the Israelites. Asherah was a hugely popular god, and people were loathe to give her up.

Next point:

Lucifer (Latin for light bringer) was an epithet for a Babylonian ruler. An actual guy, not a god. Sure, he thought he was a god, or wanted people to think he was one, there was no separation of religion and state back then. Read Isaiah 14, read THE CONTEXT of his mention! He was known as the son of "Dawn," who was a female deity of the time.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah 14&version=ESV

Later religionists conflated the serpent (symbol of Asherah), Lucifer (a Babylonian king claiming divinity), Baal Zebul (aka Beelzebub) the god of Akron, along with the Persian god Angra Mainyu they came into awareness of after Persia conquered Babylon and let the Judahite rulers out of captivity, as well as, finally, with Yahweh's helper entity the "shaytan," to come up with an evil enemy who is the opposite of the "good god" Yahweh. But originally they were all separate entities in a pantheon of several different empires.
 
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I don't suppose there's any one good book in particular that does a good job of, how shall I say, cracking the Biblical code (e.g. identifying the original Lucifer and the serpent and such)? putting things in their cultural context? (Just wondering.)
 
I'm a slow reader, and the book "More Than Two" is immediately ahead of me in the queue, but then I'd like to get that Kindle edition of "Who Wrote the Bible."

What about books that analyze the New Testament? I remember you mentioning "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man," is that a good one to add to my list? What about books that analyze the rest of the New Testament (besides the Four Gospels), such as the Pauline epistles?

Looking for books that are honest, fair, interesting, and not too collegiate if you get my meaning. Reasonably easy to read; page-turners a plus. Not that I can't handle a little heavy reading, but, you know, in moderation.

Heh, I should also do more reading about LDS history -- history the Brethren would like us not to hear. Stuff about Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, et al.

Whew! I'm far too tangential for my own good. :eek:
 
Mag, please take this in the most platonic way possible, but I think I love you. :D
 
I'm a slow reader, and the book "More Than Two" is immediately ahead of me in the queue, but then I'd like to get that Kindle edition of "Who Wrote the Bible."

What about books that analyze the New Testament? I remember you mentioning "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man," is that a good one to add to my list?

Well, I love it, but I just reread it, and realized it is a heavy slog. Maybe look for "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism" by Joseph Spong, or another book by him. Another favorite author of mine is Elaine Pagels.


What about books that analyze the rest of the New Testament (besides the Four Gospels), such as the Pauline epistles?

On my shelf is "The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity."



Mag, please take this in the most platonic way possible, but I think I love you. :D

Well, thanks! Many people find me boring or irritating when I go on and on with this kind of analysis! It's nice to feel appreciated! :)
 
Heh, I should also do more reading about LDS history -- history the Brethren would like us not to hear. Stuff about Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, et al.
You can do it the fun way and go see The Book of Mormon on Broadway. ;)
At the humorous expense of the Mormon history, the musical points out that all religions are just stories repeated over and over again among people in a large group until the stories become The Truth and people start living their lives in an attempt to emulate the people in the stories.



Well, thanks! Many people find me boring or irritating when I go on and on with this kind of analysis! It's nice to feel appreciated! :)
Appreciating the discussion in this thread from an affiliated Jewish POV. Thanks for all of the contributions. Great reading.
 
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Well, thanks! Many people find me boring or irritating when I go on and on with this kind of analysis! It's nice to feel appreciated! :)

Like and like, innit? I've repeatedly been called boring and irritating over a lot of my pet peeve rants too. *cough*marriage*cough*

And seeing you pull it off with more of a calm intellectual neutrality is pretty refreshing, IMO. I always get emotional and/or sarcastic after a while; in those Myer-Briggs terms (which the internet loves, apparently), I wish I was INTP but I actually am INFJ. :)

But yeah, we're really derailing this thread now. Sorry about that.
 
If this train is derailed, then I don't wanna get back on track. Great discussion. LOVE this! (And now I have many other books to stick in my reading queue!). :D
 
I really liked Reza Aslan's 'Zealot' which places a historical Jesus in his time. I found it fascinating and learned a lot. It is very accessibly written. I also recommend anything by Karen Armstrong.
 
Re (from HappilyFallenAngel):
"You can do it the fun way and go see 'The Book of Mormon' on Broadway. ;)"

I may well end up biting that bait if the play makes its way to Seattle.

I've been busily saving notes from this thread into my books-to-read file.
 
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