jackxyz
An extended continuation of a Twitter Direct Messaging conversation.
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That’s it, you see the point about Finkelstein and his work.
Given all the education, experience and expertise necessary, every tool and resource including unfettered access to the very lands where events allegedly happened all available along with fervent motivation, findings and scriptures both had to be fudged to make the pieces fit.
Finkelstein’s resulting publication was extremely unsatisfying.
And that’s the point.
Odd you should bring up the plagues of Exodus.
That one shows god at his worst.
Ten plagues, each time, god tells Moses beginning in Exodus 7:3
“…I will harden Pharaoh’s heart…”
Again and again for each plague, god suppresses Pharaoh’s free will so as to passive aggressively manipulate the situation in a way that allows a twisted and immoral justification for the heinous sins god intends committing.
Exodus 9:8-11, the 6th plague
Exodus 9:11
“The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils that were on them and on all the Egyptians.’
That’s hilarious. Just the thing an 11 year old boy would come up with, finally, Pharaoh’s magicians are unable to stand and work their magic because they’re rolling on the ground itching all over. LOLOLOLOL
Finally in the Exodus plague tales, god kills every innocent firstborn!!! WHAT? He demands worship? He can demand worship all he wants, he must earn respect.
All throughout the bible god treats humans as toys for his wicked pleasure.
he treats us as though toy soldiers out of an eternally refilling bucket.
All through history, the same, if it is accepted that god meddles in human affairs.
WWII for example, Hanover, Dresden, London, Berlin, Tokyo, all bombed mercilessly as god watches delighted. Whee!! Looky there what they do to each other.
Finally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even god sobers at this, leaves us to ponder in fear if, when or where next.
Meanwhile, 1939 -1945, billions of prayers are said, plaintively and sincerely begging for an end to the war while 80 million die. god answered none of these prayers.
Or, god was on the side of the Axis. Gott Mit Uns was on German Army belt buckles, Japan’s Emperor was revered as god.
Thank god I found my keys. God was with us in our football game victory. Really?
Oh, right, god works in mysterious ways.
My blog
“A False Positive Refuted” at http://goo.gl/z6NNMz was apparently not making it’s point well. I tried to be brief, it remained unclear to too many, I’ve since expanded and elaborated considerably.
I must admit, I have not yet read the complete bible, at this point I’m undecided if I’ll complete the task or not.
I started with Revelations, found that nothing but writings of an hallucinating author, written much like Hunter S. Thompson on an extended bender.
Cannabis, opiates, peyote cactus and psilocybin mushrooms all grew wild in the Middle East then as now, completely unregulated back then.
Any mention of or prohibitions against these substances in the bible? If not, why would that be? Perhaps the bible’s unknown scribes didn’t want to expose or lose their real source of inspiration?
Abraham, Noah’s Flood, The Exodus, all make a lot of sense when viewed as hallucinogenic inspired.
Abe’s voices in his head.
Noah’s locally catastrophic flood conflated to worldwide proportions.
Moses the murdering fugitive and 20 buddies lost in the desert a few weeks hallucinates a huge following, oh man, we were lost what seemed forever.
Tales got drastically conflated, became myths taught to children, complacently accepted without question as truth by adults, repeated for millenia.
Sorry, I’m not unquestioningly complacent, refuse to base my life’s values on these fabrications.
There is just too much knowledge available resulting from human inquiry and it’s so readily available.
Answers to questions purportedly addressed in the bible have turned out false when closely scrutinized. bible scribes knew and wrote only of the pedestrian, had no knowledge of the cosmic or microscopic.
bible scribes thought the earth was flat, stars could fall to earth, leprosy was incurable, Pi a round number.
I did get through Numbers.
Decided that what I’d read to that point was nonsense, the god presented worthy only of contempt and disdain. Rejected.
I think it not worth my time, effort and study, beneath rational intellect. Useful only for articulate argument.
And, back to my blog post, allegedly revealed scriptures and gods described therein are all irrelevant. If a god is not Universal, it is only an imaginary god.
Any and all bible specific discussions are moot, have no more real value than discussions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s, J.K. Rowling’s or Anne Rice’s work.
By the way, any of those three modern fiction writers could have written a far more cohesive bible had they chosen to do so.