The Book of Job: Meanings? [Archive]

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Maia

26th December 2009, 03:19 PM

There are really only a limited number of residents where I work (a long-term care and hospice facility) who don't have some degree of dementia, ranging from mild to very extreme. There are a few who have it completely together mentally, however,and one of those few (we'll call him "Bob",) is there for management of his condition (I've never exactly understood what's going on, but it seems to be very complicated complications of long-standing extreme arthritis.) Basically, the great majority of it is pain management. Bob is on five different pain medications at any given time. His wife also has cancer (terminal, I suspect), and so does his best friend (also at the LTC facility). So we were talking about the Book of Job the other day.

Bob brought the topic up, of course. Although there's a LOT of religious talk around there, activities constantly has all the residents singing "Jesus Loves Me' and saying grace before meals, and they make them listen to horrible gospel songs, it would be very inappropriate for me to bring up any such thing (and I wouldn't do it anyway.) Now, Bob is a very devout Catholic and this was in a religious context (some kind of material from his church , but the interesting thing is that I wouldn't say the conversation itself was particularly religious in the way you'd think.

I think there's something about the Book of Job that really lends itself to a more secular reading. I do have some ideas as to why, but I'd like to know what others think.

JoeTheJuggler

26th December 2009, 03:24 PM

Limbo

26th December 2009, 03:29 PM

I recommend Answer to Job by Carl Jung. Fascinating read.

Maia

26th December 2009, 03:33 PM

Achán hiNidráne

26th December 2009, 03:48 PM

I Ratant

26th December 2009, 03:58 PM

Looking at the text in Job, it's nothing more than a fantasy.
I mean, I mean, it's about a bet that What'sHisName already knows what the outcome (omniscient and all that) will be, yet takes it, lets it go on thru all the horrible stuff done to the poor schlumpf protagonist, and then brags about in the story.
Just who would be the author of this tragedy?
Who would know the basic theme in the first place?
It's a story about someone who had it good, lost it, and got good again.
Adding the spiritual just makes a commonplace story into what?
The moral?
"Keep on believing, maybe the crap you're covered with will go away. Maybe. I'm sure of that."

tsig

26th December 2009, 04:34 PM

I recommend Answer to Job by Carl Jung. Fascinating read.

If you like long winded orations with no meanings:

"The Book of Job serves as a paradigm for a certain experience of God which has a special significance for us today. These experiences come upon man from inside as well as from outside, and it is useless to interpret them rationalistically and thus weaken them by apotropaic means. "

He's giving up on reason and appealing to magic.

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/4801.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apotropaic_magic

JWideman

26th December 2009, 04:56 PM

There is an important moral lesson to the story of Job:
God can't be trusted, he'll sell you out just to prove a point.

TimCallahan

26th December 2009, 04:56 PM

HansMustermann

26th December 2009, 05:16 PM

I definitely remember that book, and I always thought it was very odd. Kushner's interpretation of Job's dilemma was not only weird, but not very interesting or convincing. Basically, God gets his arm twisted by Satan and can't do anything about it, so Job gets shafted. Kushner then decides this means that God tries his best, but just really can't control everything. In that case, doesn't it make more sense to pray to the devil than to God? :rolleyes: After all, you don't have to beg a good being to do good; you only have to beg a bad (or morally ambiguous being-- because that's what Satan is in this particular narrative) not to do evil.

Now the ancients obviously didn't quite believe in an omnipotent or omnipresent God. (E.g., he actually goes through all the trouble to stop Jonah from fleeing out of his grasp.)

But no matter how I want to read Job, I really don't get the idea that God gets his arm twisted in any form or shape, nor that Satan (actually "the accuser", i.e., God's inquisitor) is even trying.

The discussion seems fairly relaxed and, summarized, goes like this:

God: "Have you seen how faithful Job is? I'm proud of him."
Satan: "Wanna bet? He's only grateful as long as you keep giving him stuff. First sign of hardship and he won't even remember you."
God: "Ok, you're on. Feel free to shaft him and his family as hard as you wish. Just don't do any bodily harm to him."

Satan proceeds to not just ruin Job, but also kill his servants and his children. Thorough job. Then cometh part two:

God: "See, told you he'd keep his faith."
Satan: "Ah, I dunno, if any direct harm came to him, I bet he'd still break."
God: "You're on. Do your worst, just don't kill him."

Satan proceeds to also give Job a nasty disease.

Sorry, that's not having your arm twisted, that's an irresponsible fratboy bet. That's the kind of God they had.

And then, when Job as much as moans that he'd like to plead his case to God (but still makes his undying faith very clear), comes the smackdown talk that Tim already summarized very aptly. God doesn't say, "dude, sorry, it was out of my control" or anything.

I'm sorry, I wish I could say something positive, but Job just isn't it.

In fact, if I were to summarize Job in a one-liner, it would be a line from Blackadder: "As private parts to the gods are we: they play with us for their sport."

bruto

26th December 2009, 05:17 PM

I like Wislawa Szymborska's take on it. (http://books.google.com/books?id=wt4sO8GUBX8C&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=wislawa+szymborska+job&source=bl&ots=x0gYmgES3u&sig=D2Twp67qBsVBAF5tFnlmisX2MGc&hl=en&ei=HLU2S728PNDKlAfUtrWQBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

ScannerHead

26th December 2009, 05:53 PM

Basically, the climax of Job comes when God shows up and says, in effect, "You're going to demand answers of me? No. I'm going to ask you: Who made everything and how does it all work? Can't answer? Then screw you!"

Sorry Tim. You were 'close' right up until the end.

"Can't Answer? It's because I'm GOD, and you're only man."

You, Me, the whole world Tim, is fatally flawed... God isn't. The fact He CAN and did establish the ground rules, requires you (and me) to abide by them, and you don't like it... wow. Too freakin' bad.

fromdownunder

26th December 2009, 06:07 PM

Maia

26th December 2009, 08:15 PM

There's a site that has the entire text of PUTTING GOD ON TRIAL: The Biblical Book of Job.
A literary, legal and philosophical study- Robert Sutherland. For some strange reason, the text is in a weird format that's very difficult to read, but it's a legal analysis of Job's case put into a historical context. (Right here. (http://www.bookofjob.org/)
I've also had long discussions about Job on our weekly secular group hikes at Radnor Lake. :) One theory that came up ( on the basis of evidence that the former Jehovah's Witness home-schooled guy had, and if anybody knows, he would), was that the last part of the Book of Job was not entirely original to the text. And it's true that some of it does seem extremely tacked on and confused. After Job's three friends give their endless speeches and Job alternates between stating his case and proclaiming his innocence, God shows up and blusters on and on about how powerful he is. Job knuckles under, although a careful reading of the text makes it very difficult to see in what way his statements about God's power have actually changed; he pretty much seems to be saying exactly what he did before, minus all the complaining. Job never actually did blame God for anything; what he did do in the first place was to demand to be heard. Then, we get:

And so it was, after the LORD had spoken these words to Job, that the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is aroused against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has. 8 Now therefore, take for yourselves seven bulls and seven rams, go to My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and My servant Job shall pray for you. For I will accept him, lest I deal with you according to your folly; because you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”

Now, the question I have is in what way this really makes sense. How did Job's friends speak incorrectly?
Where did they go wrong, and how was Job right by comparison? The biggest point of contention I can see is that the first three all blamed Job, pointing out that righteous people who were actually obeying God's will weren't punished in these ways. But throughout God's long self-justifying speeches, he never actually said that Job was at fault for anything. God never explains why any of these terrible things happened to him, and I think that this is what is so fascinating about this book. In the context of the belief system of these authors, I really think that it's a statement about the inexplicable nature of terrible things. Job called God to account, but in the end, it really didn't make any difference. Nothing was actually explained. The artifical happy ending was probably added to the original text later on. But the fact that terrible things happened to Job was a morally neutral fact of life.

Roma

26th December 2009, 08:53 PM

The meaning of the story of Job:

Ignore the idiotic advise your stupid friends are giving you,
don't get discouraged when crap happens,
and never give up because things could get better.

Ethnikos

27th December 2009, 01:22 AM

. . .After Job's three friends give their endless speeches and Job alternates between stating his case and proclaiming his innocence, God shows up and blusters on and on about how powerful he is. Job knuckles under, although a careful reading of the text makes it very difficult to see in what way his statements about God's power have actually changed; he pretty much seems to be saying exactly what he did before, minus all the complaining. Job never actually did blame God for anything; what he did do in the first place was to demand to be heard. . .Job is confronted by this terrible entity claiming to have power over him.
Job realizes that this entity in fact does, and that being so, does not in turn become confrontational to this entity. He allows this being to go on and boast, without contradicting him or judging him, seeing that this entity would not have these abilities without the sanction of the one who has the ultimate authority. The one upon the throne is the true judge of Job, and that is his answer to this being which he can not refute. In this life, Job is at the mercy of this being who can destroy him. But, when his life is over, he will be rewarded by one higher, and one who has better gifts than the one who rules this world.
If this sounds insane, let me give an example from the book:

Job 6:4 For the arrows of the Almighty are within me the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me

כי חצי שדי עמדי אשר חמתם שתה רוחי בעותי אלוה יערכוני׃

ki chi·tzei shad·dai im·ma·di a·sher cha·ma·tam sho·tah ru·chi; bi·'u·tei e·lo·vh·ah ya·'ar·chu·ni.

This word translated here as God, elovhah, is almost exclusively found in the book of Job, and in the other places where it is found, it is either highly ambiguous about who exactly is meant, or is used to describe one of many such, of whatever is meant.
This other word, shaddai, here translated as Almighty, is normally used to describe a divine attribute that transfers blessing from God to humans. (the exact same spelling as the word for breasts)
The irony of this verse is that Job takes the normal meanings of the titles and reverses them, from a shield to protect him from the enemy's arrows (the normal roles of those described by these titles), to the source of the arrows, and on top of that, not just ordinary arrows, but poisoned ones.

Eyeron

27th December 2009, 01:39 AM

is fatally flawed... God isn't.

********. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard that idiotic claim. If God is perfect then there should be no sin period because God himself is the very embodiment of sin and sins on many different occasions. He kills out of sheer spite. He is vengeful And he is genocidal. His entire argument is might makes right and he is always right because he has the might and the only thing God does is love. Why, God can sexually molest children in front of millions of his followers and they'd simply explain it away as God being ever so loving and caring. But if it just so happens that a human does these things then oh boy does he hate competition.

Eskarina

27th December 2009, 02:03 AM

What is there to discuss? The "meaning" of Job is simple: Yahweh , our alleged creator and omnipotent master and his representatives on earth, can do anything it/they want(s) to us no matter how cruel and vindictive. Therefore, you should shut up, bend over, drop trou, spread your cheeks, and take it because that's what the Lord commands and you are a wussy for complaining. Look what happened to Job! DID HE EVER COMPLAIN? Now go away and stop bothering us!

Fixed it for the benefit of everyone.

Ichneumonwasp

27th December 2009, 05:29 AM

Now, the question I have is in what way this really makes sense. How did Job's friends speak incorrectly?
Where did they go wrong, and how was Job right by comparison? The biggest point of contention I can see is that the first three all blamed Job, pointing out that righteous people who were actually obeying God's will weren't punished in these ways. But throughout God's long self-justifying speeches, he never actually said that Job was at fault for anything. God never explains why any of these terrible things happened to him, and I think that this is what is so fascinating about this book. In the context of the belief system of these authors, I really think that it's a statement about the inexplicable nature of terrible things. Job called God to account, but in the end, it really didn't make any difference. Nothing was actually explained. The artifical happy ending was probably added to the original text later on. But the fact that terrible things happened to Job was a morally neutral fact of life.

The view I have heard is that the ending was not tacked on, but that the surrounding story was expounded upon with the poetic philosophical middle. There is an original folk tale -- God tests Job, terrible things happen to him, and God restores him happily in the end because Job stands steadfast.

That folk tale is expounded upon with the long poem that comprises most of the book.

And, yes, I think it makes some sense -- what God says to Job's companions. They wanted to argue that Job somehow deserved what he got because he must have done something to piss off God; God tells them that they are wrong, that isn't the way the world works.

The ultimate point seems to be that what happens is mysterious and we cannot understand it. Consequently it appears arbitrary. It is clear to anyone alive that blessings and curses are distributed in what appears to be an arbitrary manner. How do we make sense of that if there is an author of the universe?

The only answer that Job seems to offer is -- you're never going to understand it. Which is probably a cop-out. The only two options appear to be -- sure the world looks arbitrary, so it either is with no God up there, or it isn't but you can't understand it, so just buck up and keep on truckin' either way.

It seems a bit amazing that the idea that there is no God never appears in this book. No one questions the existence of God. We are given Job's wife's reaction -- curse God and die -- and Job's friends' reactions -- you must have done something wrong (both of which are portrayed as improper reactions) -- and Job's reaction -- I just want to be heard.

We have all known or known of plenty of Job's in this world, but Job's without the happy ending. That is why many believe that humans invented the afterlife - because we still want to believe in universal justice which clearly doesn't exist in this lifetime.

kedo1981

27th December 2009, 07:12 AM

The meaning of the book of Job:
A bunch of crap made up by bronze age goat herders to explain other crap they didn’t understand.

Czarcasm

27th December 2009, 07:22 AM

What would you like it to mean?

HansMustermann

27th December 2009, 07:24 AM

Actually, IMHO that may be the true moral to Job's story. In early judaism there was no clear promise of an afterlife, and even as late as the Jesus story -- i.e., hundreds of years after Job was written -- the Sadducees were an influential sect which believed in no afterlife at all.

At any rate there is a strong theme that basically God will reward or punish you in this life. In fact, whole tribes and nations rise or sink -- in this world, not the next one -- because God really liked or really disliked an ancestor of them. Or their king. Or whatever.

Basically that's the idea that Job's friends hammer on.

As long as Job was rich, well, he probably deserved it. When he got broke and hit by a cruel disease, well, he probably deserved that too.

(Must have been nice to be rich in that time:p)

And Job himself commits the same sin. He wants to ask God, basically, why? He knows he's been righteous, he still keeps his faith in the Lord, but he's punished as if he were some archvillain. Something doesn't add up.

And that's why Job gets that "look how great I am, and how insignificant you are. Who the heck do you think you are to question me?" speech.

The main moral, as mentioned before by other people, is simply: bad things happen to good people too. Don't presume to second-guess God about it.

Maia

27th December 2009, 08:43 AM

Hokulele

27th December 2009, 10:19 AM

For a clearer description of what is going on in Job, read Ecclesiastes. You will find the same basic ideas, including the "keep on trucking" message at the end, but better poetry.

TimCallahan

27th December 2009, 10:39 AM

Sorry Tim. You were 'close' right up until the end.

"Can't Answer? It's because I'm GOD, and you're only man."

You, Me, the whole world Tim, is fatally flawed... God isn't. The fact He CAN and did establish the ground rules, requires you (and me) to abide by them, and you don't like it... wow. Too freakin' bad.

Well, the "ground rules," as laid out in the Book of Job, are that, for the sake of a wager, God can and does destroy a man's life. This is one reason we must consider Job to be fiction, since the contrived framework is set up to attempt to explain why a good and loving God would allow the evils that plague good human beings like Job.

Also, if the world is fatally flawed, the only way this condition cannot be laid at the creator's door is to appeal to the vile and pernicious doctrine of original sin, foisted on us by that reformed reprobate, Augustine of Hippo.

tsig

27th December 2009, 10:52 AM

Maia

27th December 2009, 12:14 PM

Originally Posted by ScannerHead
Sorry Tim. You were 'close' right up until the end.

"Can't Answer? It's because I'm GOD, and you're only man."

You, Me, the whole world Tim, is fatally flawed... God isn't. The fact He CAN and did establish the ground rules, requires you (and me) to abide by them, and you don't like it... wow. Too freakin' bad.

I have this strange feeling of deja vu all over again... somebody around here was definitely dragging out this argument before, but I can't remember who it was. Actually, I think I've seen it about 1,000,000,000 times before, come to think of it...

Tim's reply:
Also, if the world is fatally flawed, the only way this condition cannot be laid at the creator's door is to appeal to the vile and pernicious doctrine of original sin, foisted on us by that reformed reprobate, Augustine of Hippo.

Something tells me that this is where ScannerHead may have been going all along. But this isn't what the Book of Job says, which is part of what makes it so fascinating. I think I would like to write my own version. :)

(The scene opens in a Starbucks. God is sitting at a table in one of two large comfy chairs. He looks up when Satan breezes in through the front door.)

God: What are you doing here? I thought I threw you out a googleplex of eons ago!

Satan (shrugging): Well, you just can't get a decent cup of coffee in the depths of the abyss. 'Sup, God. (turns to
the barista.) Infinite espresso, please. (Satan takes the cup and sits down.)

God: (irritably) Get out of here.

Satan: (stirs the espresso and adds Splenda, because it's evil) No can do. The Starbucks at the edge of infinity is a free will zone. Everything's allowed. Even me.

God: Oh, all right!(sighs) So... what have you been up to?

Satan: Just walking around. Taking in the sights down below. I was just at a fertility ritual in Sumeria, and let me tell you, they get pretty wild. I tried to give them a few ideas, but mortals have outstripped us in the perversity department, God; we might as well face it.

God: (primly) I don't know what you're talking about.

Satan (elbowing God in the ribs) Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more? A bit of the old rumpy-pumpy, eh? Hide the wicket and pocket the balls? KFC and the plastic sporks? Oh, okay, I made that last one up... the point is, human beings are just corrupt to the core, every last one of them. You knowit's true, too. Otherwise, why do you already have that entire only-begotten-son thing planned? (leers at God) Does that mean you're already getting some from the not-so-virgin Mary, by the way?

(Author's Note: This is straight from Mormon theology. I swear.)

God: (starting to blush) Oh, yeah? Then what about my servant Job? Have you seen him when you were on your educational little journeys around the planet? Blameless, upright, completely terrorized by the very thought of me, shunning evil, sacrificing goats, helping little old ladies across the street? What about him?

Satan: (adding more Splenda) Job! Mr. Goody-goody pants himself. Oh, yeah, I saw him. Of course he has his nose stuck so far up your butt that he's constantly in the process of performing a heavenly rectal exam. You've given him everything, God-- sheep, camels, oxen, land, sons, daughters, a hot wife, and a very short course of all the awful icky venereal diseases that do seem to strike down so many of these dirty illiterate goat herders... well, anyway. Start taking all this nice shiny stuff away, and just see how fast he turns into Sam Harris.

God: What?

Satan: Never mind. (muttering) For a deity who's supposed to be all-knowing...

God: Oh, fine. Have it your way. Just don't do anything to him. You'll see that I'm right!

Satan: (grinning devilishly, as one might say) Ta-ta!

blobru

27th December 2009, 12:51 PM

--- (The scene opens in a Starbucks. God is sitting at a table in one of two large comfy chairs. He looks up when Satan breezes in through the front door.)

God: What are you doing here? I thought I threw you out a googleplex of eons ago!

Satan (shrugging): Well, you just can't get a decent cup of coffee in the depths of the abyss. 'Sup, God. (turns to
the barista.) Infinite espresso, please. (Satan takes the cup and sits down.)

God: (irritably) Get out of here.

Satan: (stirs the espresso and adds Splenda, because it's evil) No can do. The Starbucks at the edge of infinity is a free will zone. Everything's allowed. Even me.

God: Oh, all right!(sighs) So... what have you been up to?

Satan: Just walking around. Taking in the sights down below. I was just at a fertility ritual in Sumeria, and let me tell you, they get pretty wild. I tried to give them a few ideas, but mortals have outstripped us in the perversity department, God; we might as well face it.

God: (primly) I don't know what you're talking about.

Satan (elbowing God in the ribs) Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more? A bit of the old rumpy-pumpy, eh? Hide the wicket and pocket the balls? KFC and the plastic sporks? Oh, okay, I made that last one up... the point is, human beings are just corrupt to the core, every last one of them. You knowit's true, too. Otherwise, why do you already have that entire only-begotten-son thing planned? (leers at God) Does that mean you're already getting some from the not-so-virgin Mary, by the way?

(Author's Note: This is straight from Mormon theology. I swear.)

God: (starting to blush) Oh, yeah? Then what about my servant Job? Have you seen him when you were on your educational little journeys around the planet? Blameless, upright, completely terrorized by the very thought of me, shunning evil, sacrificing goats, helping little old ladies across the street? What about him?

Satan: (adding more Splenda) Job! Mr. Goody-goody pants himself. Oh, yeah, I saw him. Of course he has his nose stuck so far up your butt that he's constantly in the process of performing a heavenly rectal exam. You've given him everything, God-- sheep, camels, oxen, land, sons, daughters, a hot wife, and a very short course of all the awful icky venereal diseases that do seem to strike down so many of these dirty illiterate goat herders... well, anyway. Start taking all this nice shiny stuff away, and just see how fast he turns into Sam Harris.

God: What?

Satan: Never mind. (muttering) For a deity who's supposed to be all-knowing...

God: Oh, fine. Have it your way. Just don't do anything to him. You'll see that I'm right!

Satan: (grinning devilishly, as one might say) Ta-ta!

Excellent, Maia! :D & just to tie up the loose ends:

Job: Wha...wha...what happened to all my stuff?

Friend #1: You must not be righteous.

Job: I am righteous!

Friend #2: Are not.

Job: Am too.

Friend #3: Uh-uh.

Job: Uh-huh.

Some kid: Hey, shut up.

God: I'm perfect. Here's your stuff.

Job: Yippee!

:halo:

Achán hiNidráne

27th December 2009, 02:19 PM

Fixed it for the benefit of everyone.

1) So cruelty by proxy excuses Yahweh?

2) Ummmm... Job DID complain at the end. That's what promoted Yahweh's swaggering "I brought you into this world, I can take you out" tantrum at the end.

Achán hiNidráne

27th December 2009, 02:25 PM

... and pernicious doctrine of original sin, foisted on us by that reformed reprobate, Augustine of Hippo.

The example of "Saint" Augustine just goes so show that there is nothing more evil than a penantant convert. They have to drag everyone else into his self-hating, pleasure-denying Hell to get them into Heaven.

I Ratant

27th December 2009, 02:35 PM

I....Ta-ta!
.
By Maia, she's got it! :)

HansMustermann

27th December 2009, 04:20 PM

JSS talks about this in several of his books-- he places the beginning of any kind of afterlife belief in Judaism with the Maccabees, which would mean that there was a long time when, at most, there was a very vague concept of soul-ish type things sort of flapping around in Sheol, not doing anything specific, not really having anything at all resembling an afterlife as people would conceive of it today. I remember the Saducee thing from Catholic school! :)

The Sadducees were the old priests of Judaism, as well as a very literalist bunch. E.g., if the Law said basically "an eye for an eye", they took it to mean literally that one should gouge out one of the miscreant's eyes.

The Pharisees were a school of thought that emerged after they got freed by Cyrus, formed mostly of scholars and scribes. They would eventually start being called "rabbi", and that pretty much tells us who won :p

The Pharisees were quite the reformer bunch, and more than a bit exposed to Akkadian religion as well as to the new Zoroastrianism brought over by the Persians. They tended to take a more figurative and modern (for 6'th century BC;)) view of things. E.g., they thought that "an eye for an eye" is satisfied enough if the miscreant pays an adequate compensation for an eye.

You can see the conflict in other things too. E.g., while for the Sadducees if the law says you're impure, you're impure, the Pharisees came up with purification rituals so you can rejoin the community ASAP.

But I digress.

The afterlife was very much a Pharisee idea. And you can get a glimpse into that in Acts, when at his trial Paul claims to be on trial for his belief in resurrection. Many Christians take that as referring to _Christ's_ resurrection, but basically for all those involved it would be taken to mean the Pharisee idea of resurrection in the end times. He's basically saying, "help, these guys are persecuting me for being a Pharisee." And predictably the Pharisees take his side. And in the debate everyone gets sidetracked from the actual accusation, which was actually a very different one.

Why I'm saying all this is because it puts a hard lower limit on when that idea appeared. Before Cyrus's conquest of Babylon, not only there were no Pharisees, but nobody had yet been exposed to Zoroastrianism. And the Pharisee ideas borrowed heavily from that one, including the aforementioned bodily resurrection of the dead in the endtimes.

Now I'm not qualified enough to judge whether it was as late as the Maccabees. Could well be. (Though I kinda find it strange that if that were the case they'd borrow more from Akkadian and Zoroastrian mythos than from the Greeks. But stranger things have been known to happen.)

But at any rate, yes, there is a minimum date for that idea.

In fact, I'm not sure there would even be a separate Sheol realm for a while. I don't remember it being anywhere in the Torah, also known as the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy parts of the Old Testament.

And basically everything else came after the return from the exile.

sigmund

27th December 2009, 04:32 PM

It's an allegorical tale that's been updated for the masses in the words of the amnesia ridden fish Dory - 'Just keep swimming, just keep swimming'.

Achán hiNidráne

28th December 2009, 12:02 AM

Are you familiar with Rabbi Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People? I know of several believers who take great comfort from this book (which focuses on the Book of Job). I think the theological argument is extremely wishy-washy.

It basically requires redefining God (not as someone omniscient and omnipotent, but just a force that does good things and is not responsible for the bad stuff).

Ah yes, when the relgionist has their primitive inanities challeged by facts and logic they retreats to their only remaining defense: Make their deity vague and meaningless so they can cling to their superstitious prattle while attempting to look reasonable to average moron-on-the-street.

I only approve of this approach as a stepping stone toward honest and rational disbelief! :)

I don't.

We humans are insignificant flyspecks living in a unconscious universe that is incapable of caring about our meaningless existence, much less whether or not said existence has treated us "fairly" or "unfairly." When we die. We are dead. After we breath our last, we don't go to some magical land where we kiss some deity's ass for all eternity if we've been "good," nor to some pit of ever-lasting torture if we've been "bad." We rot in the ground or the urn our ashes reside in gathers dust on the mantle. That's it. Nothing else.

"Good" things happen. "Bad" things happen. There is no plan. No meaning. No Karma. No comsic justice dealt out by a divine tyrant who makes sure that the serial killer who was never caught goes to Hell while his unnamed victim goes to Heaven. Nothing.

If people can't deal with those facts... TOUGH! They should be drilled into every man, woman, and child's head until they accept them. We should not excuse their cowardice.

We've coddled their stupidity for long enough! :mad:

Soapy Sam

28th December 2009, 02:10 AM

Is this the fish story?

You do know about fish stories, yes?

HansMustermann

28th December 2009, 02:13 AM

Nah, the fish story is Jonah.

ScannerHead

29th December 2009, 01:49 PM

Why, God can sexually molest children in front of millions of his followers and they'd simply explain it away as God being ever so loving and caring.

I don't know where you go to come up with stuff like that, but the fact you make up some absurd statement and try to make it sound like a fact is just pathetic. Did you read that in the Bible somewhere?

Where did you come up with the authority to judge God anyway?

truethat

29th December 2009, 02:11 PM

The meaning of the book of Job:
A bunch of crap made up by bronze age goat herders to explain other crap they didn’t understand.

Tha't about it in a nut shell. It also has a lot to do with explaining the fall of the City of David and how Jews were getting shafted left right and center and so had to make a reason why it still meant they had the stronger God.

bruto

29th December 2009, 02:13 PM

I don't know where you go to come up with stuff like that, but the fact you make up some absurd statement and try to make it sound like a fact is just pathetic. Did you read that in the Bible somewhere?Eyeron did not accuse God of having done this. He suggested, using a particularly outré example, that those who believe in God will always find ways to rationalize whatever he is presumed to have done. I rarely find myself in agreement with Eyeron, but I think he is right on this.

Where did you come up with the authority to judge God anyway?If you worship God you judge him. It just happens that you judge him favorably. whether in doing so you abdicate from further criticism is a choice you make as a matter of faith, but faith itself is a judgment. If we are atheists we do not judge god at all, because there is no god to judge. We judge only the assumptions of other humans, and for that we need no authority.

Gestahl

29th December 2009, 02:39 PM

I think there's something about the Book of Job that really lends itself to a more secular reading. I do have some ideas as to why, but I'd like to know what others think.

When I was a Christian, I got out of Job that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike (Ecclesiastes something:something), and that God allows bad things to happen for our own good.

As a non-Christian, it tells me that convictions and beliefs not kept in the face of adversity in life aren't beliefs at all, but convenient fictions to comfort ourselves, or to please others, etc. It is precisely the fact that we continue to hold them despite pain and suffering that makes them powerful, and live on despite whatever life throws at us.

Robin

29th December 2009, 04:16 PM

Maia

29th December 2009, 06:00 PM

Where did you come up with the authority to judge God anyway?

Aha, Scannerhead, but Job did judge God. Job called God to account, demanded an answer, and wouldn't shut up until God finally made a very late arrival on the scene and blustered around for several chapters. Also, God never actually tells Job that he's wrong or that he's done anything wrong. God doesn't come out well in any of this narrative, which I think may be why I've never seen a decent or even very coherent explanation of Job from a Christian POV.

Bob (from the OP, remember), who is certainly Catholic as could be, didn't discuss the Book of Job in a religious way at all. Nor did he talk about how it had taught him to bear his sufferings patiently or just give them over to God or anything like that, or, well... anything at all, really. Bob, keep in mind, really, REALLy suffers, each and every minute of every day. I still don't know what he actually gets out of the ideas in Job.

tsig

29th December 2009, 11:28 PM

kurious_kathy

30th December 2009, 12:15 AM

Aha, Scannerhead, but Job did judge God. Job called God to account, demanded an answer, and wouldn't shut up until God finally made a very late arrival on the scene and blustered around for several chapters. Also, God never actually tells Job that he's wrong or that he's done anything wrong. God doesn't come out well in any of this narrative, which I think may be why I've never seen a decent or even very coherent explanation of Job from a Christian POV.

Bob (from the OP, remember), who is certainly Catholic as could be, didn't discuss the Book of Job in a religious way at all. Nor did he talk about how it had taught him to bear his sufferings patiently or just give them over to God or anything like that, or, well... anything at all, really. Bob, keep in mind, really, REALLy suffers, each and every minute of every day. I still don't know what he actually gets out of the ideas in Job.

I myself have a hard time with the book of Job because I hate that Satan was allowed to attack him so badly. Obviously he was a godly man so why didn't God just tell Satan no and protect him more? I think God felt it was needed somehow to show Job his own self-righteousness was not enough to save his soul, he needed God to save him. Isn't this the very essence of the Gospel message. Sin is why we suffer, but Job reminds us that God is still in control no matter what we go through. I do not think anyone can survive suffering without God's grace. The book of Job shows us a stroy of God's grace, brokeness leads to restoration. In the end God restores Job with more than he lost, and that speaks loudly to me of how God has promised to restore all believers one day in heaven. The unltimate victory is that through Christ we have the promise of a new beginning, a world with no more pain or suffering because of sin. I believe your friend Bob may see the promise of restoration after suffering through the story of Job. You may want to ask him that.

Baby Nemesis

30th December 2009, 12:58 AM

This is what the Book of Job is likely to be for, as I said in another thread:

The Book of Job is an important counter-balance to faulty assumptions that might be made through reading too much into the rest of the Old Testament, since most of the Old Testament is full of prophecies and stories about God's punishment on societies for sins such as violence and oppression of the poor. Notice Job's friends say he must be guilty of just what Old Testament prophets condemned their societies for. It appears they made the mistake of thinking the kind of principles the Old Testament is full of - that societies would suffer because so many of their members were inflicting suffering on others, - could be taken to mean that any time any individual suffered, it must mean he'd done something terrible. The Book of Job bears an extremely important lesson for any believer of the Old Testament - that this is not in fact the case, and that some people might suffer for no good reason whatsoever, so it was very important not to be judgmental of them. Nothing in the Old Testament says that every instance of the suffering it describes as being a punishment for oppressive and cruel behaviour would be a punishment from God, and it doesn't address the reasons for the suffering of individuals. However, it may have been easy for anyone to assume it meant that when individuals suffered tragedy, they were being punished for something by God, so it was their fault.

It may be for this reason that the New Testament tells us that the disciples of Jesus asked him when they saw a man who'd been blind from birth, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" And Jesus told them that neither had sinned. They might have got ideas like that from the Old Testament. The Book of Job is an essential corrective to this mistaken belief, since it's about how suffering can happen to the best of us for no obvious reason.

If it wasn't for the Book of Job, a terrible stigma could have grown up against people who suffered tragedy among some Jews and Christians, because many might have mistakenly thought the Bible shows that they must be suffering as a result of God's punishment. Thus, the Book of Job could have prevented mental torment of many who might otherwise have suffered the effects of judgmentalism by such people on top of the tragedies they were already suffering.

HansMustermann

30th December 2009, 01:01 AM

HansMustermann

30th December 2009, 01:28 AM

@BN: I'm not sure that the stigma was unintentional, actually.

As was said before, the idea of afterlife enters Judaism very very late. (And AFAIK it's still not clear exactly what it's like.) Literally God was supposed to reward or punish you in this world. Including yes, that if you're rich and healthy you must have deserved it, while if you're poor and sick you must have deserved that too. Everything was from God. What Job's friends do or Job's wife saying "Curse God and die" were just the mainstream beliefs.

And it's probably no coincidence that the aforementioned Sadducees who were big on that interpretation, were the "party" of the rich and the priests.

But roll that around in your head: that was the interpretation of the _priests_. That wasn't some unfortunate mis-conception, it was the official doctrine.

It wouldn't be until after the return from Babylon that these newfangled "rabbis" gradually usurped the position, and added such further chapters as Job. What they had before was just the 5 books I mentioned before that form the Torah.

And note that even Job still fails to promise a reward in the afterlife, because they still didn't _have_ an afterlife. Job is eventually given his stuff back in this world.

Which basically still didn't blunt that stigma very much. It at best delays the moment when you can judge someone. If by the time they're dying God still hasn't rewarded them, well, then probably they weren't just tested, they were plain old sinners.

And at any rate, if someone's family had been dirt poor for several generations, while you were born of rich people, you could still claim basically it's a divine reward: after all, if his dad and granddad would have been more pious, God would have rewarded them sooner or later. He didn't, hence they weren't.

And yes, as you've noticed, that notion had survived at least until the 1'st century CE.

bruto

30th December 2009, 07:16 AM

I myself have a hard time with the book of Job because I hate that Satan was allowed to attack him so badly. Obviously he was a godly man so why didn't God just tell Satan no and protect him more? I think God felt it was needed somehow to show Job his own self-righteousness was not enough to save his soul, he needed God to save him. Isn't this the very essence of the Gospel message. Sin is why we suffer, but Job reminds us that God is still in control no matter what we go through. I do not think anyone can survive suffering without God's grace. The book of Job shows us a stroy of God's grace, brokeness leads to restoration. In the end God restores Job with more than he lost, and that speaks loudly to me of how God has promised to restore all believers one day in heaven. The unltimate victory is that through Christ we have the promise of a new beginning, a world with no more pain or suffering because of sin. I believe your friend Bob may see the promise of restoration after suffering through the story of Job. You may want to ask him that.

Your account may be the standard modern Christian viewpoint, but it utterly contradicts the story of Job from the very first paragraph. Job does not suffer because of sin. Let's get that straight. The story is not about that. If you think that is the case, you'd better crack open your bible and actually read it, because if you say that "suffering because of sin" is in any way what the story of Job is about, you're perverting the very first and explanatory words of the story, and the statements of the great Jehovah himself. The story asserts, and God's dialogue confirms, that in God's eyes Job was good and righteous, in fact so good that God himself called him "perfect."

If you're looking in the bible, as many of us do, for inspiration and moral example, what I would point out as the most relevant here is the way Job's false and stupid friends and neighbors jump to the assumption that his suffering is caused by sin, and preach at him of how God has a good reason for doing everything, and how his suffering must be from his own or his family's sin, while all the time we know from the story that it is not. Job is, in essence, surrounded by Kurious Kathies, and although their rubbish is far more eloquent and poetic than our modern colleague's meager capabilities allow, rubbish it is, rubbish it was, and rubbish it always will be.

Baby Nemesis

30th December 2009, 08:32 AM

Psalm 73's on a very similar theme to the Book of Job:

Psalm 73 (TEV)

1 God is indeed good to Israel,
to those who have pure hearts.
2 But I had nearly lost confidence;
my faith was almost gone
3 because I was jealous of the proud
when I saw that things go well for the wicked.

4 They do not suffer pain;
they are strong and healthy.
5 They do not suffer as other people do;
they do not have the troubles that others have.
6 And so they wear pride like a necklace
and violence like a robe;
7 their hearts pour out evil,
and their minds are busy with wicked schemes.
8 They laugh at other people and speak of evil things;
they are proud and make plans to oppress others.
9 They speak evil of God in heaven
and give arrogant orders to everyone on earth,
10 so that even God's people turn to them and eagerly believe whatever they say.
11 They say, "God will not know;
the Most High will not find out."
12 That is what the wicked are like.
They have plenty and are always getting more.

13 Is it for nothing, then, that I have kept myself pure
and have not committed sin?
14 O God, you have made me suffer all day long;
every morning you have punished me. ...

Maia

30th December 2009, 09:29 AM

Eh... Psalm 73, I don't know, especially when reading the rest of it:

15If I had said, "I will speak thus,"
I would have betrayed(T) the generation of your children.

16But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me(U) a wearisome task,
17until I went into(V) the sanctuary of God;
then I discerned their(W) end.

18Truly you set them in(X) slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
19How they are destroyed(Y) in a moment,
swept away utterly by(Z) terrors!
20Like(AA) a dream when one awakes,
O Lord, when(AB) you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.
21When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
22I was(AC) brutish and ignorant;
I was like(AD) a beast toward you.

23Nevertheless, I am continually with you;
you(AE) hold my right hand.
24You(AF) guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will(AG) receive me to glory.
25(AH) Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
26(AI) My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is(AJ) the strength[b] of my heart and my(AK) portion(AL) forever.

27For behold, those who are(AM) far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is(AN) unfaithful to you.
28But for me it is good to(AO) be near God;
I have made the Lord GOD my(AP) refuge,
that I may(AQ) tell of all your works.

Basically, it can all be summed it by: "They'll get theirs, because God is with me and he's going to get them, nyah nyah nyah." It's a delight to read in a way, because it's such a personal kvetch; not a lot of passive submission to fate is involved. But with Job, there's an element that I really don't see here. Job calls God to account, even saying that he wants to demand justice from God as he'd demand it from a fellow neighbor. The God that we see replying to him really has the feel of a sock puppet to me; he's saying exactly what Jews at that time would expect him to say if he showed up in response to a subpeona. And then he never actually blames Job for his stunning piece of insolence (and blasphemy, in that context) in demanding an explanation from him. God is a completely peripheral character in this story; it's all about Job, and I think that this book is all about affirming his right to tell the story of his suffering.

Also, considering that a coworker just got written up for telling a nurse that a resident told her that she wanted her to have a dresser in her room (which she DID, because I HEARD it), I don't think I'm going to tell another resident ANYTHING about what message to get out of the Book of Job. :eek:

HansMustermann

30th December 2009, 03:55 PM

Actually, I think God or anyone else answering like a sock-puppet is not very surprising in a work of fiction. All characters are essentially the author's sock-puppets. So God there has no more and no less freedom over what he says than Romeo in Shakespeare's play or Kermit in a Muppet Show.

And all gods in all plays (that feature gods)... well, as compared to what? Nobody knows what would God really say, any more than we know what Eris would really do in Homer's work, or than we know what would a divine flying pasta dish do.

Homer too treats Eris as what Greeks at his time would do, which is a stereotype of discord only. She can't, say, go in and bash a few heads in instead, because his audience wouldn't really connect with that view. Their gods could only cause their one aspect, in this case discord, and it _had_ to be reflected in the mortal world more than it is in the divine world.

The Aesir in the Norse sagas are treated rather stereotypically too. E.g., you won't see many examples of Loki acting as anything else than what you'd expect from a trickster. Most of the time, an irresponsible trickster.

Where it differs is, basically, in how good the author is. The OT fiction, honestly I find bad fiction, but otherwise that character is just as much there to tell us something as any other character ever.

HansMustermann

30th December 2009, 04:16 PM

That said, I don't think God is that peripheral a character. The message "who the heck do you think you _are_ to judge what God would or should do?" is too clear and too big a rant to be purely unintentional.

I think you have to judge it through the standards of fiction at the time, instead of by the standards of what you'd consider a good novel nowadays.

For a start, the whole thing is a Deus Ex Machina ending, so loved by the Romans and Greeks too. It was a common device to have a God come down (with a crane in theatre plays, hence the Machina parts) give a moralizing speech and set everything right. Where today you'd think up a good climactic ending and tie up loose ends, they'd just do that and call it a day.

The one in Job is badly done, but I don't think it's there as just a filler. That God actually is telling them something.

Second, again, you have to judge it from the perspective of a society and religion where _everything_ came from God. If you were rich and healthy it was God's reward, and if you were poor and sick, it was God's punishment for _something_.

While Job may be a bold character who actually says out loud that he'd want to ask God, everyone else in the story essentially has the same mentality: they have an expectation of a more or less deterministic God. If you're good, you get richly rewarded, and if you're bad, you get punished.

Sort of like a bigger Santa Claus, really.

And they basically were aware that X=>Y is equivalent to !Y=>!X. If you got coal in your sock, surely you haven't been good.

Everyone has the same expectation that if Job got so badly punished, surely he wasn't good. Job would like to ask exactly what he did wrong, while the three friends just assume it to be so, but basically they all expect a deterministic and fair God. (And for that matter, so does Job's wife. "Curse god and die." Cause and effect.) It's a theme that is there from beginning to end, or rather to where the Deus Ex Machina ending starts.

The "who the heck do you think you are to judge me?" speech in the Deus Ex Machina ending is addressing that one point. And it's IMHO the real moral of the story. God isn't deterministic, he can be unfair, bad things can happen to good people too, and who are you to judge what God should do?

Baby Nemesis

30th December 2009, 09:03 PM

The Book of Job is valuable, in that it can be pointed to by anyone suffering judgmentalism after a tragedy by people who think they or their family were personally punished by God and must have done something to deserve their suffering. Those views can be refuted with it.

There was an interesting programme on television just a few days ago that has some relevance, about people's theories about why God allows natural disasters like tsunamis. It was presented by a Christian, who went to several places in the world that had been hit, a year after the Boxing Day tsunami killed so many people in 2004 there. He spoke to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. He also spoke to Richard Dawkins.

Of course, Richard Dawkins had a totally naturalistic explanation for the disaster and a practical outlook.

The presenter said he himself had been brought up as a Catholic, with a deep but questioning faith.

First on his trip to the tsunami-affected areas, he visited Muslims in a place that had been hard-hit by it. He asked some of them what purpose they thought God would have in causing it/letting it happen. They said it was a punishment for the misdeeds of some people in the area. Specific things mentioned were wearing tight jeans and going off on motorbikes as couples to be alone together. The presenter thought it seemed rather harsh that God would cause such suffering for such offences, especially when the innocent would be caught up in it. Whatever you think of the Old Testament, the array of types of wrongdoing it says people would be punished for by war and so on was much more detailed, and the offences it emphasises by far more than the others are murder and other violence, and oppression/exploitation of the poor. It may be that the list of wrongdoings the Muslims who were spoken to mentioned would have grown more complex if they were pressed on the issue though.

The presenter went off to a Muslim university, hoping to find a more "refined" viewpoint. But the one he heard was even worse! He was told there that things like tsunamis were a test of faith, and that those whose faith remained strong despite what had happened would go to heaven when they died, whereas those whose faith failed because of it would go to hell.

It's this kind of bleak perspective that the Book of Job addresses, where Job says all kinds of nasty things about God and yet is not punished by him, and he's a very good man and yet still suffers horribly, the lesson being that not all suffering will be a punishment for sin. As I said, the Book of Job can be a tool with which to combat judgmentalism, should the people exhibiting judgmentalism be amenable to the lesson. It was difficult to know, however, how much of the perspective that the tsunami had been a punishment for sin and was a test of faith was judgmentalism, and how much was a simple attempt to make sense of it.

The programme presenter didn't like the takes on why the tsunami had happened that he'd heard so far at all, and said that if that was the best anyone could come up with, he'd rather be in the "Dawkins camp". I thoroughly agreed with him! Far better to have straightforward wholesome scientific atheism that seeks to investigate natural causes of such things and do things to reduce people's suffering because of them, than nebulous mystical theories about what God's purpose is in causing disasters. I found the views expressed by some in the programme a bit creepy. The views of some of the religious people were like a throwback to the days before science was up to much, when there was no chance of nature being tamed in any way, so the only thing people could do would have been to resign themselves to their fate or try and learn lessons, and religion could at least give them a perspective on things that allowed them to make sense of them. Nowadays people can be more optimistic that science can come up with solutions to alleviate some of the suffering, such as early warning systems, so people don't have to imagine the people of the world will always be helpless in the face of such things and just ponder on why they might have happened or what theological lessons can be learned. Maybe as people in such parts of the world become better educated with a more scientific outlook, they will adopt scientific atheism and become more optimistic that the future might hold the promise of change. I wonder what they would say now if it was put to them that science might be able to eliminate suffering from the world one day. Would some of them say science in that case would be working against God, eliminating a valuable tool he used to discipline people? Hopefully not. It would be concerning if they were to try to stand in its way. I suspect, however, that instead, if people really began to see the benefits of technology holding the promise of reducing suffering, their religious perspective would shift.

However, the religious viewpoint did provide a measure of comfort to some, although causing others to lose trust in God. One man interviewed who'd lost his whole family was of the view that suffering can be a lesson from God that can teach compassion for others. He had devoted his life to helping others since it happened. Others also expressed the view that suffering was designed by God to motivate people to be more compassionate.

Also, if the view that tsunamis and things are a punishment from God for sin actually does motivate some people who were engaged in criminal or other harmful activities to stop them because they fear the anger of God, then something positive can come out of them.

The presenter went to India, where many people believed that the people killed, even little children, must be being punished by God for things they did wrong in a previous life. I find the doctrine of Karma repulsive! I'm disgusted that anyone could think a little child suffering might be being punished for something they're alleged to have done that they can't even remember, and might never want to do in this life at all! However, it was surprisingly comforting to some. One woman had lost several of her children in the tsunami. She actually said that without thinking of it in terms of their deaths being punishment for something they did wrong in a previous life, her grief would be so overwhelming she wouldn't be able to cope. Having some way she could justify the loss of her children meant that at least she could make sense of something that would otherwise appear senseless and just make her feel helpless and at the whim of fate. I found it interesting how a doctrine that was repulsive to me could actually be comforting to others.

It may be that again, a more scientific outlook would provide an even more comforting explanation, as long as it was accompanied by the optimistic promise that science could make a brighter future, rather than tsunamis and things simply being presented as cold scientific fact which eliminated purpose in suffering and thus hope that there was a positive aspect to it in terms of its perpetration having a higher goal.

The programme presenter asked quite a lot of good questions to those he interviewed.

He came back to England for a while after his trip around the tsunami-affected area, and said he thought it would be good to interview Richard Dawkins, despite his "fearsome" reputation. He did so. Interestingly enough, Dawkins said he could respect some God-believers - Deists who believed God set up the world in the beginning and then left it to just develop on its own. I didn't expect Dawkins to say there were certain God-beliefs he was happy with. Maybe he's going soft in his old age or something. :)

The programme presenter was unhappy with all the religious perspectives he'd gathered up until that point, as was I. Richard Dawkins's perspective seemed the best, especially as compared with that of Westborough Baptist Church who were also interviewed and said the Tsunami was punishment for the tolerance of homosexuality in the countries affected. The presenter interviewed a Swedish man who was upset because the Fred Phelps brigade said they were glad thousands of Swedes had died in the tsunami.

But after interviewing all the others: the presenter finally found a perspective he was happy with. He went to Italy, to the Vatican observatory, where there was a group of Jesuits who blended theology with science. ...

The presenter had previously asked whether it would have been possible for God to have created the world in such a way that natural disasters never happened. The Jesuits said it wouldn't. They said volcanoes, earthquakes and so on were necessary to keep the world in working order. They said if such things never happened, erosion would cause the world to become smooth and eventually so marshy that no one could live there. It seemed like the beginnings of what could be a good rational explanation for reconciling the idea of a reasonably good God with natural disasters, but perhaps because of time limits, they didn't really explain themselves fully, so I couldn't really understand what they meant, which was disappointing. Maybe someone could clarify why the earth would become uninhabitable if it wasn't for volcanoes and earthquakes and so on?

One interesting thing one Jesuit said though was that if God intervened more in the world, it would stunt scientific progress, because things wouldn't be predictable, so no scientific laws could be made. For instance, if sometimes when people jumped off a cliff they fell to their deaths, but other people were gently propelled back to safe ground again, science would have a much more difficult time working out how the world worked, and thus scientific progress could not be made with anything like the rapidity it has recently been, so the world as a whole would be in a much worse state than it is now.

Atheists would probably find such a theological insight pointless; but both I and the presenter found their perspective to be interesting and the best explanation.

Interestingly enough though, I've found an interesting Channel 4 write-up about the programme (http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/tsunami.html) which makes the point, among many others, that natural disasters can often be made a lot worse by man's selfish actions. It says:

The victims of the Tsunami are still struggling to rebuild their lives. Despite sustained aid, their new homes and new lives remain physically and economically fragile. The scale of disasters is determined as much by the infrastructure that is in place as by the event itself. If the coral reefs and mangrove forests in the Tsunami-stricken areas had not been sacrificed to market forces, if the governments of the affected countries were not servicing massive debts and could have afforded high-tech warning systems, the human destruction would have been lessened considerably.

It's a two-hour long programme, but interesting, and the presenter asked intelligent questions throughout. Anyone who wants to see the programme can do so for a while here: Tsunami: Where Was God? (http://www.channel4.com/programmes/tsunami-where-was-god/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1)

(Some of the viewers' comments on that page seem a bit freaky!)

HansMustermann

31st December 2009, 12:00 AM

I dunno, BN... It seems to me an interesting exercise to find in the same message:

Also, if the view that tsunamis and things are a punishment from God for sin actually does motivate some people who were engaged in criminal or other harmful activities to stop them because they fear the anger of God, then something positive can come out of them.

... and ...

I find the doctrine of Karma repulsive! I'm disgusted that anyone could think a little child suffering might be being punished for something they're alleged to have done that they can't even remember, and might never want to do in this life at all!

The same children are dead in the premise for both makeshift explanations, and in the Christian fundie one it's even for something they didn't even _do_. WTH sins can a 1 year old have done to deserve death? Why is the eastern doctrine "repulsive", while the Christian one is barely "creepy" and you rush to find excuses for?

Also, shouldn't the view that "maybe it keeps people from being evil" excuse apply to both?

It seems to me like if you pick countries with comparable standards of life and all, the USA has 0.042802 murders per 1,000 people, while, say, Buddhist/Shintoist Japan has 0.00499933 per 1,000 people, i.e., almost 10 times lower than the USA. And even the India you mention has 0.0344083 per 1,000 people.

Assault: the USA has 7.56923 per 1,000 people, while Japan has 0.339272 per 1,000 people, and India has 0.218755 per 1,000 people.

Rape: the USA is up there with 0.301318 per 1,000 people, while Japan has 0.017737 per 1,000 people, i.e., nearly 20 times lower. And India has only 0.0143187 per 1,000 people.

So if we're going to give religion credit and a free pass for that, shouldn't the Karma-based ones get more of an excuse then?

And, while I'm at that, Wahhabi (fundie muslim) Saudi Arabia has only 0.00329321 rapes per 1,000 people, i.e., almost 100 times lower than the USA. Hey, maybe that's a good excuse for fundie Islam. Or maybe it just proves their point about the burqa ;)

TimCallahan

31st December 2009, 10:17 AM

. . . . In the end God restores Job with more than he lost, and that speaks loudly to me of how God has promised to restore all believers one day in heaven. The unltimate victory is that through Christ we have the promise of a new beginning, a world with no more pain or suffering because of sin. I believe your friend Bob may see the promise of restoration after suffering through the story of Job. You may want to ask him that.

So the children Job lost were equated with cattle and other goods? Remember, these are human lives snuffed out, suposedly so God can win a wager with ha satan "the adversary' or "the accuser," not Satan.

Darth Rotor

31st December 2009, 10:34 AM

So the children Job lost were equated with cattle and other goods? The cattle might actually have been of less value, I don't think the character development progressed far enough for us to suss out the kids -- might have been a rabble of "sharper than a serpant's tooth" sorts who Job, in his Lear like manner, was too blind to realize were bad seed. :p

My take on the Book of Job: life ain't fair.

DR

I Ratant

31st December 2009, 10:34 AM

The problem through history of "Goddidit" are those that feel he didn't do a thorough job, and take it on themselves to finish it up.
The "vengeance is mine" crowd that aren't content with waiting for the natural disaster to get rid of the infidel, but have to go on the warpath themselves as god's right arm.

TimCallahan

31st December 2009, 10:34 AM

. . . . But after interviewing all the others: the presenter finally found a perspective he was happy with. He went to Italy, to the Vatican observatory, where there was a group of Jesuits who blended theology with science. ...

The presenter had previously asked whether it would have been possible for God to have created the world in such a way that natural disasters never happened. The Jesuits said it wouldn't. They said volcanoes, earthquakes and so on were necessary to keep the world in working order. They said if such things never happened, erosion would cause the world to become smooth and eventually so marshy that no one could live there. It seemed like the beginnings of what could be a good rational explanation for reconciling the idea of a reasonably good God with natural disasters, but perhaps because of time limits, they didn't really explain themselves fully, so I couldn't really understand what they meant, which was disappointing. Maybe someone could clarify why the earth would become uninhabitable if it wasn't for volcanoes and earthquakes and so on?

One interesting thing one Jesuit said though was that if God intervened more in the world, it would stunt scientific progress, because things wouldn't be predictable, so no scientific laws could be made. For instance, if sometimes when people jumped off a cliff they fell to their deaths, but other people were gently propelled back to safe ground again, science would have a much more difficult time working out how the world worked, and thus scientific progress could not be made with anything like the rapidity it has recently been, so the world as a whole would be in a much worse state than it is now. . . .

Nice try, but we're not talking about someone going off the road to their death on a rain-slicked highway or a few people falling to their deaths in a landslide. In those cases we understand that snow and rain are part of the cycle that ourishes the earth with water. We are talking about a natural disaster, which struck without warning, and killed hundreds of thousands of people. We could excuse the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, since the people building there knew there was a volcano nearby. The same goes, I suppose for those of us living in California near the San Andreas fault (among others).

It would also be another thing had there been a series of shocks and smaller tsunami events leading up to the big one. However, what we are actually talking about is an event that struck without warning over a considerable area of the Indian Ocean killing, again, hundreds of thousands of people. There's simply no way one can square this with a just and loving God.

I Ratant

31st December 2009, 10:48 AM

And it paid no attention to the ethnicity or religions of those on the beaches.
Lots of Northern Europeans there catching the sun that day.

Baby Nemesis

31st December 2009, 11:57 AM

Nice try, but we're not talking about someone going off the road to their death on a rain-slicked highway or a few people falling to their deaths in a landslide. In those cases we understand that snow and rain are part of the cycle that ourishes the earth with water. We are talking about a natural disaster, which struck without warning, and killed hundreds of thousands of people. We could excuse the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, since the people building there knew there was a volcano nearby. The same goes, I suppose for those of us living in California near the San Andreas fault (among others).

It would also be another thing had there been a series of shocks and smaller tsunami events leading up to the big one. However, what we are actually talking about is an event that struck without warning over a considerable area of the Indian Ocean killing, again, hundreds of thousands of people. There's simply no way one can square this with a just and loving God.
I don't know why, but somehow, you managed to misread what I wrote. The Jesuits weren't equating jumping off a cliff with a tsunami that killed thousands. They didn't say any such thing at all. One of them just mentioned the thing about jumping off a cliff as an example of the way science would have trouble progressing if it couldn't predict outcomes, for instance if when some people jumped off a cliff, they died, while others floated around and then came back to earth at the top of the cliff because God was protecting them. Scientists wouldn't understand why it was happening, and so wouldn't be able to make even basic maxims such as, You jump off a cliff, you die! The comment was addressing the topic of why there's suffering in the world in general. They weren't saying that if natural disasters didn't happen, science wouldn't be able to develop.

What they said about natural disasters was that thing about how volcanoes and earthquakes are necessary in the world, otherwise the earth would go into some kind of degeneration and we'd all die. I specifically asked for clarification of that idea because I didn't understand the science behind it. Perhaps someone does?

But you're introducing the point that even if natural disasters have to happen, they could in fact happen in such a way as to protect the people in their path by always being proceeded by some kind of warning, such as little tidal waves that didn't do any damage arriving first before the killer one, that might signal to people to evacuate the area? Perhaps it's a pity the presenter didn't put that point to the Jesuits. However, I doubt such a system would work very well. It's quite possible that most people wouldn't evacuate, because they wouldn't understand the significance of the little tidal waves etc. It's not as if tsunamis come regularly enough that the signs would be obvious. Most people would probably think there had been an unusually big wave and not expect anything further. Besides, there are in fact warning signs before a tidal wave comes. The sea goes out quite a bit further than usual. Anyone who knew what that meant would have been able to warn the people.

This is a similar issue to the problem of pain. Some people think the world would be better if there was no physical pain in it; and certainly, it would be better if a lot of the chronic pain around didn't exist. But pain in itself is essential. I heard about a doctor called Paul Brand who treated leprosy patients. He realised it was important that people feel pain, when he noticed that because they couldn't, they were doing dangerous things that burned or cut themselves. He said people think the disease itself causes the deformities in leprosy patients, but actually, they're often caused because the people with leprosy don't feel pain, so they do things like rest their hands on hot stoves and other harmful things, not realising they're getting hurt, and then their wounds get infected so more damage is done.

Paul Brand wanted to stop them doing such things, so he devised systems that would let them know when they were doing something painful, imagining they'd stop. First, he tried a system of flashing lights; but the leprosy patients just ignored them if they wanted to do something that pain would stop anyone who could feel it doing. He tried sounds, but they were equally ineffective. He tried a system where they got mild electric shocks on a part of them that could feel pain, but they turned the system off if it might interfere with things they wanted to do. Such things might be getting hot potatoes out of the fire with their bare hands, or carrying bowls of very hot things.

Paul Brand eventually realised that the system would have to cause pain but be out of the control/reach of the patients it was meant to be helping so they couldn't just over-ride it. Then he came to think the pain humans feel is an ingenious means of protection, a blessing in disguise.

There's an article about it called Reflections on the Mystery of Suffering (Paul Brand). (http://www.stauros.org/notebooks/v01n4a01.html)

kurious_kathy

31st December 2009, 01:07 PM

So the children Job lost were equated with cattle and other goods? Remember, these are human lives snuffed out, suposedly so God can win a wager with ha satan "the adversary' or "the accuser," not Satan.

Satan is the adversary and accuser. He is the one who always tries to hurt and destroy people, I just don't understand sometimes why he gets away with it. Let's face it if Satan hadn't been there baiting Eve' do you think we would have fallen? Perhaps without Satan this world would have been a wonderful place, he is the one corrupting everyone and everything. Our sinful natures do not help, but I like to think without Satan this world would not have suffered as much. Perhaps sin was inevitable even without his help, I am just not ever going to know all things, only God knows all.

The big question is what can we learn from Job? I have seen a man so broken he did not want to live, and yet in the end God delivers him and gives him back a new wife and kids so he ended up with more. Sure he lost his first wife and family which is horrible, but if they all end up being saved and in heaven together then Job will have even more for eternity which matters most in my opinion. Let's face it we all suffer, some more than others' but with faith in Christ we have the promise of restoration which is the bigger picture. None of us can save ourselves; God is the only one who has to come through and deliver everyone as Job reminds us again all things are under God's controll even when it doesn't make sense.

Darth Rotor

31st December 2009, 02:14 PM

Satan is the adversary and accuser. He is the one who always tries to hurt and destroy people, I just don't understand sometimes why he gets away with it. Let's face it if Satan hadn't been there baiting Eve' do you think we would have fallen?
IF we hadn't fallen, we'd not have the internet to discuss this, Kathy. We (whoever the set of "we" is) would be in Eden in full communion with God.

But that isn't how it worked out.
Perhaps without Satan this world would have been a wonderful place, he is the one corrupting everyone and everything.
It can still be a decent place despite Satan. Dissing the Devil is now and again good fun.
Our sinful natures do not help, but I like to think without Satan this world would not have suffered as much.
Nor posed as interesting a challenge. Was not the Devil created?
The big question is what can we learn from Job?
As I said previously: life isn't fair.

DR

bruto

31st December 2009, 02:41 PM

Satan is the adversary and accuser. He is the one who always tries to hurt and destroy people, I just don't understand sometimes why he gets away with it. Well, why don't you read Job and find out one of the ways he did it? Let's face it if Satan hadn't been there baiting Eve' do you think we would have fallen? Perhaps without Satan this world would have been a wonderful place, he is the one corrupting everyone and everything. Including God, it seems, according to the book of Job. I mean really, what kind of God is this who has to prove himself to Satan by taking up a bet? Our sinful natures do not help, but I like to think without Satan this world would not have suffered as much. Perhaps sin was inevitable even without his help, I am just not ever going to know all things, only God knows all.

The big question is what can we learn from Job? Not, apparently, how to read and understand a text. I have seen a man so broken he did not want to live, and yet in the end God delivers him and gives him back a new wife and kids so he ended up with more. But in the case above are you attributing the loss also to God? Sure he lost his first wife and family which is horrible, but if they all end up being saved and in heaven together then Job will have even more for eternity which matters most in my opinion. Where in the book of Job is there anything about "being saved and in heaven together?" Let's face it we all suffer, some more than others' but with faith in Christ we have the promise of restoration which is the bigger picture. What does faith in Christ have to do with the book of Job. Job is not a Christian work. None of Job's family had the opportunity to save themselves through Christ, did they? What is the relevance of faith in Christ to the story of Job? None of us can save ourselves; God is the only one who has to come through and deliver everyone as Job reminds us again all things are under God's controll even when it doesn't make sense.No, it doesn't make sense, especially when the story has God inflicting the pain and suffering from which he later delivers you! You keep trying to inject your Christian viewpoint into it to say that it does make sense, but when that fails, you can't turn around and say it doesn't at the same time. It either does or doesn't.

Darth Rotor

31st December 2009, 02:44 PM

No, it doesn't make sense, especially when the story has God inflicting the pain and suffering from which he later delivers you! You keep trying to inject your Christian viewpoint into it to say that it does make sense, but when that fails, you can't turn around and say it doesn't at the same time. It either does or doesn't.
Maybe if she injected a Jewish viewpoint ... :eek: :D:D

Maia

31st December 2009, 02:46 PM

Hey, TimCallahan, better watch out-- you're well on your way to being attacked by exclamation points. (hands TC an umbrella) A word to the wise: you'll just get lured into a total waste of time and energy, and your attempts at logic and reason will disappear into a black hole.

If I wrote a revisionist version of the Book of Job, which I just might do one of these days, I think that Satan would end up being the most interesting character by far. (Kind of like he was in Paradise Lost.) Joni Eareckson (not exactly the most insightful theologian in the world, but still), actually had some fairly interesting comments to make about the theology in the Book of Job. The message is clearly supposed to be that God permits Satan to tempt Job, and that God isn't somehow coerced or cajoled into permitting all of the catastrophes, but then the question is why they're allowed at all. We're explicitly never told-- in fact, it's never even implied-- that Job's faith is being tested, and we're quite pointedly given the message that Job has not sinned. Who or what is Satan supposed to be, and what is his relationship to the main characters in the narrative?

While some historical evidence points to the idea that imagery in God's self-justifying speeches actually refers to the final destruction of Satan, one thing that intrigues me is how this concept would be explored in a fictional context. If Satan spoke to Job, what would he say? How would Job reply? Would Job blame his sufferings on Satan, or on God? Above all, would Satan indignantly point out that his butt looked better in leather pants? ;) (Hey, you write your fanfic, I'll write mine...)

HansMustermann

1st January 2010, 12:22 AM

What they said about natural disasters was that thing about how volcanoes and earthquakes are necessary in the world, otherwise the earth would go into some kind of degeneration and we'd all die. I specifically asked for clarification of that idea because I didn't understand the science behind it. Perhaps someone does?

We could go into that science, but in the end it would be a red herring.

First and most important, we're told that God created a better world already. The kingdom of heaven, for example. Twice, if you count Eden too. Whatever science problems exist with that proposition, we're told that god already solved them.

Unless you want to believe that in heaven you'll be hit by tsunamis, and chronic pain, and disease, and age and die, too.

It's hard for me to understand how a lot of people (e.g., those Jesuits) seem to reconcile "I'll go to a better world, one without all this bad stuff" with basically "this is the best possible world, and it couldn't work without the bad stuff". How does better than best possible work, anyway?

Second, such physics issues are the easy things to handwave, which, I suppose, is why they're used over and over again by apologists.

But how about disease, for example? What about viruses? WTH necessary role did Smallpox's decimating first the Roman Empire, and then a millenium and a half later the Americas, play? The total number of victims of disease _far_ outnumbers those dead in earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.

Why doesn't a loving God solve _that_ before worrying about tsunamis?

And how about the fact that the high infant mortality was the primary driving factor behind overpopulation, which in turn caused warfare? If only one in 3 of your kids will survive, you make 10, to beat even any statistical flukes. Then they're too many for the land to feed, and people start fighting each other for resources.

How about cancer? Why didn't a loving God give better DNA repair mechanisms? I mean, I know why it works like that for a godless evolution, but surely an omnipotent God can do better. And, again, we're told he already did better, unless you believe that you'll spend eternity in heaven as an increasingly deformed and broken mass of cancerous tissue.

Baby Nemesis

1st January 2010, 02:08 AM

TimCallahan

1st January 2010, 01:33 PM

. . . But you're introducing the point that even if natural disasters have to happen, they could in fact happen in such a way as to protect the people in their path by always being proceeded by some kind of warning, such as little tidal waves that didn't do any damage arriving first before the killer one, that might signal to people to evacuate the area? Perhaps it's a pity the presenter didn't put that point to the Jesuits. However, I doubt such a system would work very well. It's quite possible that most people wouldn't evacuate, because they wouldn't understand the significance of the little tidal waves etc. It's not as if tsunamis come regularly enough that the signs would be obvious. Most people would probably think there had been an unusually big wave and not expect anything further. Besides, there are in fact warning signs before a tidal wave comes. The sea goes out quite a bit further than usual. Anyone who knew what that meant would have been able to warn the people. . . .

Of course, if people are given a warning and shrug it off what happens to them is then, at least partly, on their own heads. As to the sea reatreating just before the tsunami hits, that's very little warning. If "the Big One" hit us here in Southern California and I suffur loss from it, that, too, is somewhat on my head, in that I've taken the calculated risk of living in an earthquakes zone. This has to be tempered, however, by the fact that there hardly seems a place on earth where there isn't some sort of disaster lurking in th wings: earthquakes on the west coast, hurricanes on the east coast tornados in the intrerior, etc.

Hundreds of thousands of people killed in a tsunami that hit with littl or no warning seemsto me nothing more than nature working the way it does in accordance with the universal properties of matter and energy, as well as the the dynamcs specific to the planet earth. If the killer tsunami is the deliberate act of an almighty God, that god seems monstrous to me. If it's merely something God allows, then he seems callously indifferrent. Were parents to show such neglect, they would be guilty of what's is called depreved indifference and would be culpable under the law.

HansMustermann

1st January 2010, 03:14 PM

... and sometimes disaster strikes where nobody expects it too. I'll use the Tangshan earthquake as an example again: nobody expected an earthquake there, and certainly not two waves in a row of _that_ magnitude.

But I have an even bigger problem with it, for anyone who wants to find an excuse for the "maybe it's punishment for sin" mentality, or some other form of fair God or universe. (I'll copy and paste the description I already posted in another thread, because, well, I'm that lazy;))

In the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, 93% of the residential buildings were levelled. The area wasn't even one where earthquakes were expected, so the city hadn't been built to withstand one.

After the first wave hit and did all that, while people were still digging the survivors out of rubble, a second wave hit. Everyone that still hadn't been pulled out yet, died there and then.

At the end of the second wave, 242,419 people were dead, and 164,581 were severely injured. ETA: in 7,218 families, _all_ members had been killed.

80% of the water pumps had been taken out by the quake, and water pipes were broken all over the city. The survivors were reduced to drinking mud out of puddles.

The bridges had collapsed. Railway lines were bent.

Food had to be paradropped in, but not nearly enough. And there was no way to transport all those wounded out.

For a start I have to assume that somehow God or Karma concentrated that many horribly evil people in one place, people deserving death and worse.

And somehow law and order didn't break down. More than a quarter of the population was outright killed, and that goes up to over a third if you count those badly injured and left in the streets with no medical support. (I'd think those would have to be even more evil to deserve _that_.) If a full quarter of the city is doing stuff that horrible, that they deserve death for it, you'd think someone would notice.

But my problem is even deeper than that: after the first wave hit, a lot of those "evil" people were digging their friends out of the ruins. That doesn't sound very evil to me, or at least it sounds like a chance to redeem oneself, right? A sinner who saves a life or two, has got to deserve a few brownie points, right?

But then the second wave hit and everyone who wasn't out in the clear at that moment, was squashed. Both victims who hadn't yet been dug out, and people trying to dig them out.

I have trouble imagining a benevolent God or sentient Universe or whatever, watching those "evil" people trying to do something good, and killing them for it.

Baby Nemesis

1st January 2010, 04:10 PM

First and most important, we're told that God created a better world already. The kingdom of heaven, for example. Twice, if you count Eden too. Whatever
science problems exist with that proposition, we're told that god already solved them.

Unless you want to believe that in heaven you'll be hit by tsunamis, and chronic pain, and disease, and age and die, too.

It's hard for me to understand how a lot of people (e.g., those Jesuits) seem to reconcile "I'll go to a better world, one without all this bad stuff"
with basically "this is the best possible world, and it couldn't work without the bad stuff". How does better than best possible work, anyway?

It's the purported non-corporial element that makes all the difference. A spirit world wouldn't be subject to physical laws.

But how about disease, for example? What about viruses? WTH necessary role did Smallpox's decimating first the Roman Empire, and then a millenium and a
half later the Americas, play? The total number of victims of disease _far_ outnumbers those dead in earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.

Why doesn't a loving God solve _that_ before worrying about tsunamis?

And how about the fact that the high infant mortality was the primary driving factor behind overpopulation, which in turn caused warfare? If only one in
3 of your kids will survive, you make 10, to beat even any statistical flukes. Then they're too many for the land to feed, and people start fighting each
other for resources.

You can perhaps find reasonable answers in your own paradoxical words. If it wasn't for disease, you'd perhaps be asking why God allowed so much over-population in the world that caused war, since without disease, the population would have grown far faster, and if it had outstripped the technological development needed to cope, people would have fought over resources far more.

That isn't an answer I like, but it's one valid way of looking at things.

Still, thankfully, there have been people over the centuries who, rather than spending their time asking why God's allowing something, as others did, have had the resources and intelligence to do something about it. Nowadays, however, because so much is being done to curb disease in the developing world - albeit it could be done a lot more quickly, we have a rapidly spiralling world population that could cause real problems if something isn't done very soon.

Thankfully, solutions are at hand. I've written about this on the board before, for instance in a post I wrote in my thread about vegetarianism and world food shortage. (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=5061381&postcount=52) Interestingly enough, recently, there was a television programme presented by David Attenborough about the problem of world over-population which forecast dire consequences soon if nothing was done to reverse the world's rapid population growth; and it ended by suggesting that the same solutions would work that I had mentioned on the board before.

There are actually several factors that cause over-population. Wikipedia lists 12 things affecting the current-day birth rate of countries, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate#Factors_affecting_birth_rate) for instance. Having a lot of children isn't simply a means of trying to ensure some survive. And in fact if it was, the likelihood is that it would be noticed after a while that many more were surviving than had been estimated, and reproductive practices would change, at least till the next epidemic. Here are a few other factors that can and have affected the birth rate both now and in the past:

The desire to have a lot of children to work as extra labour on the farm or family business;
The availability or lack thereof of contraception;
The age of marriage. One thing that could be very significant in reducing the birth rate is the increase in women's education and career opportunities. The David Attenborough programme I mentioned cited the example of a place in India, which had an unusually - for the country - advanced education system. Women stayed in education much longer than in other parts of India. They wanted to utilise their extra skills in the workplace and so on. And since they were able to read and write, unlike many in the developing world, they had greater access to information about family planning. The average age of marriage is about ten years later than in some other parts of India. Thus, by the time couples marry and think about starting a family there, many women in other parts of India have already had about four children. The average number of children had by couples in the part of India where women are better educated is about two, IIRC.

There's apparently a significant correlation between female literacy and a drop in the birth rate in many countries. When women are empowered and given extra opportunities by education, they often tend to marry later, apparently.

There are also other factors affecting the birth rate.

Your argument that over-population causes war is actually an argument that infers that disease is necessary to keep the population down to prevent war, in the absence of systems that can provide resources for the growing population. So the answer to your question is inferred in your question itself.

However, the causes of wars are much more complex than simple over-population leading to a struggle for resources. Apparently in the Middle Ages, there was a toxic meme among the aristocracy that made them think there was glory in war. There were several other reasons war happened so frequently. For example, here's an article on the Crusades that outlines several factors that motivated them: The First Crusade - Causes (http://www.the-orb.net/textbooks/nelson/first_crusade.html)

... 5. The middle classes were now aware of the profits of the eastern trade, and were searching for some way to bypass the middlemen of the eastern empire and to trade directly with the Muslims. They knew that they could become rich by cutting out the Byzantines and taking for themselves the profits that the Byzantine merchants had been making on trade with them.

6. The economic system was in a state of transition, with some districts specializing in some "industrial" crops to the point that they did not raise enough grain to feed themselves, and were doing so before the transportation and internal trading system had advanced enough to distribute consumer goods efficiently. So there were frequent local famines. At the same time, agriculture was improving so greatly in productivity that many people no longer had work. The peasants needed more food and more land to cultivate. In 1095, a famine and epidemic in northern France and the Lowlands was causing widespread misery and the lower classes were some miracle to deliver them.

7. Pilgrims returning from the Holy Land were bring home stories of the atrocities being committed by the Seljuk Turks, masters of the Levant, against pilgrims, and of the way in which they were desecrating the places holy to Christians. This caused great outrage, in part because the average western European was better acquainted with the Bible lands than any place other than their own villages and towns. The Holy Land was the Christians "other home." ...

Hundreds of thousands of people killed in a tsunami that hit with littl or no warning seemsto me nothing more than nature working the way it does in accordance
with the universal properties of matter and energy, as well as the the dynamcs specific to the planet earth. If the killer tsunami is the deliberate act
of an almighty God, that god seems monstrous to me. If it's merely something God allows, then he seems callously indifferrent. Were parents to show such
neglect, they would be guilty of what's is called depreved indifference and would be culpable under the law.

Indeed. A few times in the programme on the tsunami and how it could be reconciled with the idea of a loving God, the presenter asked whether it would have been possible for God to have made the planet without hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes and the like. The answer he got from the Jesuits was that it would have been impossible. They said the only alternative would have been for God not to have created the earth at all. That's why I'm interested in the science behind these claims and whether anyone can tell me whether it really is necessary for these things to happen or the world would become uninhabitable. I can't comment further until I know. If what the Jesuits were saying was wrong and actually it would be possible to make a habitable world without these things, then the charges some atheists make against God are fully justified. However, ironically enough, I heard from a militant atheist himself that it would be impossible to have a world without such things as volcanoes. Unfortunately, he didn't explain why in a manner I could understand. If he was correct, I'd like to know more about what would happen to the earth if such things didn't happen, and whether there is indeed no alternative and more benign system that would work.

One interesting thing the Channel 4 write-up about the programme (http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/tsunami.html) said was:

Alongside Muslims, Tsunami victims were largely advocates of eastern-based religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Their outlook spares them the paradoxes that torment clerics in the Judaeo-Christian–Muslim tradition. The eastern religions regard everything as impermanent and don’t fetishise an individual’s life on earth. They see humans and all living things as part of a cycle of birth, life, destruction and rebirth. This applies to the planet too. Death and destruction are part of a cyclical process of purging and purification.

But there is a Christian equivalent. The Apostle Paul talked a bit about how suffering on earth will seem momentary compared with the joy of heaven. And the Christian worldview does in fact allow for people who lived before Christ going to heaven; Jesus is recorded as saying that even the dead would hear his voice, and that anyone who took notice of what he said would live. One way of looking at the concept of hell is that it's the equivalent of the Hindu belief in Karma. Apparently, Jewish rabbis of Jesus' day were fairly universal in thinking there wasn't just one universal punishment called hell but a few different ones, one of which would only last a short time, whereupon many of those there would go to heaven or be annihilated. Thus many would end up in a better place.

That still isn't an entirely satisfactory explanation, because it doesn't take account of the grief and trauma of those left behind and the pain with which some met their end. But I think the thought that life is fleeting and heaven is eternal has been a comfort to many over the years.

HansMustermann

1st January 2010, 04:58 PM

It's the purported non-corporial element that makes all the difference. A spirit world wouldn't be subject to physical laws.

Right. So if he knows how to make a world where these laws don't apply, why does he stick us in one where these evils are necessary?

You can perhaps find reasonable answers in your own paradoxical words. If it wasn't for disease, you'd perhaps be asking why God allowed so much over-population in the world that caused war, since without disease, the population would have grown far faster, and if it had outstripped the technological development needed to cope, people would have fought over resources far more.

Except that would be the answer that misses the whole point. The point is that without rampant random mortality, the world _doesn't_ overpopulate. Just look at the western world today.

Precisely adding all that disease and infant mortality is what _caused_ that overpopulation and thus war. Not "solved", not "prevented", not even "limited", but "caused." Is it clearer now?

So, yes, I'm still left asking why would a benevolent deity do that.

That isn't an answer I like, but it's one valid way of looking at things.

One wrong and uninformed way, but ok.

Still, thankfully, there have been people over the centuries who, rather than spending their time asking why God's allowing something, as others did, have had the resources and intelligence to do something about it.

Then why do we need the God bullcrap in the first place?

Nowadays, however, because so much is being done to curb disease in the developing world - albeit it could be done a lot more quickly, we have a rapidly spiralling world population that could cause real problems if something isn't done very soon.

Except that in the countries where that has genuinely been solved, the population is _declining_. Without immigration, the western world would pretty much implode.

Your argument that over-population causes war is actually an argument that infers that disease is necessary to keep the population down to prevent war, in the absence of systems that can provide resources for the growing population. So the answer to your question is inferred in your question itself.

Except for the fact that everywhere where people got sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics, there's been a baby boom for about a generation and then the population levels actually started to drop. So, yes, there's something to be inferred from there, but not what you think.

And even as solutions go, a benevolent deity could come up with a better solution than 15 solid years of the Antonine Plague, or the two solid decades of the Plague Of Cyprian. An omnipotent and benevolent designer could, for example, limit the reproduction rate. Make the female infertile for 5 years after a birth, for example. Whatever.

Protein-based timers are used everywhere in your body, and they work well. Adding yet another one to inhibit the expression of a gene would have been a trivial affair for a designer deity, and it doesn't violate any laws of physics or chemistry.

That said deity would choose to send, say, the bubonic plague instead, and slowly kill a lot of people in excruciating pain... well, that says a lot about the benevolence of such a deity.

However, the causes of wars are much more complex than simple over-population leading to a struggle for resources. Apparently in the Middle Ages, there was a toxic meme among the aristocracy that made them think there was glory in war.

There's nothing Middle Ages about that, actually. It's just a continuation of something that's been there ever since the first tribes got missile weapons and used them on each other. You have to convince people there is _something_ -- honour, glory, you name it -- to get them to do something they're hard-wired to resent doing. Namely, kill each other.

And if you study tribal warfare, it _is_ about resources. They don't have the organization to lead wars of conquest.

There were several other reasons war happened so frequently. For example, here's an article on the Crusades that outlines several factors that motivated them: The First Crusade - Causes (http://www.the-orb.net/textbooks/nelson/first_crusade.html)

There's a subtle difference there, actually. It's not really why war happened at all, but why war was channelled in that direction. War happened all the time anyway. The church and some elites just figured out they can channel all that army towards the East against the Saracens and Seljuks, instead of letting the European warlords fight each other instead.

But it's kind of funny that you mention the Crusades and Byzantium, actually. You know why? Because the Byzantines had already figured out the overpopulation aspect, and even had a state policy about it. They actually paid their neighbours to fight each other, so they'd reduce the overpopulation pressure at their borders. The Byzantines would literally pay the Bulgars to attack the Cumans, then the Magyars to attack the Bulgars, then the Slavs to attack the Magyars, etc.

That still isn't an entirely satisfactory explanation, because it doesn't take account of the grief and trauma of those left behind and the pain with which some met their end. But I think the thought that life is fleeting and heaven is eternal has been a comfort to many over the years.

A comforting lie is still a lie.

Marduk

1st January 2010, 05:25 PM

The meaning of the book of Job:
A bunch of crap made up plagiarised by bronze age iron age goat herders from Bronze age farmers to explain other crap they didn’t understand.
fixed that for ya
:D

Kopji

2nd January 2010, 12:10 AM

I think it is good to look at the campfire stories of the Bible with more understanding than BAD, ALL BAD. :) Part of developing a skeptical attitude is examining things from different viewpoints.

A contemporary Christian view is that Job demands a mediator to plead his case before a seemingly distant God. This mediator is seen as a need for God to be just and fair. The story in this light is understood as a precursor for a role that would be developed later by the Christian writers- one role of Christ is as mediator for our sins.

I do agree with Maia's observation that for a believer, reading the book is tricky. Indeed, God smacks the statements of all of Job's friends and calls them false. Turns out that the real story is that Job was not being punished because of his sins, but because of some mysterious purpose of God. Toward the end, Job's cry to God goes something like: 'even if you kill me I will still love you' (atheist paraphrase so take with a grain of salt).

Even as an atheist I find that poignant. I do understand the pull that faith and belief can have on people.

Yes, the end part with the last friend that shows up is almost universally derided as a very late add-on to the traditional campfire story.

There is a basic fallacy in Job though, and it is one of exclusion. Job can curse God or love God, but not deny there was a God. That idea after all, would be bad for business.

TimCallahan

2nd January 2010, 09:53 AM

Ethnikos

2nd January 2010, 11:26 AM

The concept of God in Job seems to be caught in transition between the old Yahweh before the exile - a typical tribal god with a consort, ruling a small pantheon and without power beyond his turf - and the newer concept of Yahweh as a universal God.
According to the old orthodoxy of my denomination, Job was the first book of the Bible that was written. Supposedly Moses wrote it during his self imposed exile in the wilderness. He obviously knew how to write and I guess he brought some paper with him to occupy his spare time with. My guess is that it was a regional story that he would have picked up on in his journey.

Baby Nemesis

2nd January 2010, 01:00 PM

It's the purported non-corporial element that makes all the difference. A spirit world wouldn't be subject to physical laws.
Right. So if he knows how to make a world where these laws don't apply, why does he stick us in one where these evils are necessary?

:lol2: Well, I don't know. Perhaps we should be floating around the ether somewhere singing praises to God, or whatever else is supposed to be on the agenda in heaven post-judgment day. Would you like that? Good old atheist hymns of praise to God? :D Oh well, at least you wouldn't miss your computer. You don't miss what you've never had, as they say. Still, it does strike me that options for self-advancement may be rather limited up there, which might dissatisfy some. :)

Except that would be the answer that misses the whole point. The point is that without rampant random mortality, the world _doesn't_ overpopulate. Just
look at the western world today.

Precisely adding all that disease and infant mortality is what _caused_ that overpopulation and thus war. Not "solved", not "prevented", not even "limited",
but "caused." Is it clearer now?

Why are you still arguing this when I've put forward the case that things are much more complex than that? Why don't you even seem to take into account the very basic matter of the lack of decent contraception throughout the entire world history up until the 1960s? Your argument would have been better if you'd been patient enough to wait till you'd read further down my post before trying to critique it.

Still, thankfully, there have been people over the centuries who, rather than spending their time asking why God's allowing something, as others did, have had the resources and intelligence to do something about it.
Then why do we need the God bullcrap in the first place?

Primarily because ... Wow, fancy being given the opportunity to talk about all this again. :) Thanks.

The primary purpose of God-belief is a motivator for just that social responsibility and compassion that can lead to the betterment of humanity. That's not at all to say Christians have a monopoly on it, of course. But certainly dedication to God and New Testament values can transform people's lives and values so they want to live from then on for the betterment of humanity, in line with New Testament instructions as to how Christians should live. To a certain extent, the apparent effect of Christianity might be caused simply by the fact that people who want to do that anyway can be attracted to a world-view that promotes the values they hold dear. But Christianity has been frequently reported to make people rethink and change their values and life goals significantly. I've written some posts on the values promoted by the New Testament and their effects before. I'll quote snippets from some.

From this post in the Religion's Value Questioned thread: (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4826334&postcount=136)

... Then there's the Catholic version, CAFOD. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAFOD)

The Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD), previously known as the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development, is a United Kingdom -based international aid agency working to alleviate poverty and suffering in developing countries . It is funded by the Catholic community in England and Wales, the UK government and the general public by donations.

CAFOD was founded in 1962. CAFOD's aims are to promote long-term development; respond to emergencies; raise public awareness of the causes of poverty; speak out on behalf of poor communities ; and promote social justice, in witness to Christian faith and gospel values. It is also involved in short-term relief.

(Emphasis not in original)

And from this post in the same thread: (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4817045&postcount=130)

David Wilkerson started a ministry that's helped thousands. He started an organisation in 1958 to help drug addicts reform. From an article called Teen Challenge Offers Hope to Drug Addicts, Alcoholics, Prostitutes (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/348821/teen_challenge_offers_hope_to_drug.html?cat=34):

When many are bound by alcohol or drug addiction, it may seem to their loved ones that there is no hope. Those who have operated Teen Challenge, a Christian ministry for almost 50 years know better, as they have seen countless men and women overcome their addiction to drug or alcohol addiction and become productive members of society. So successful has the ministry been that it has been endorsed by a president of the United States, governors, mayors, judges, law enforcement personnel, and other prominent members of society.

Today, Teen Challenge helps gang members, drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and others with addictions through a 15-month program. The ministry was organized in 1958 by David Wilkerson, a pastor of a country church, who went to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ among gang members in New York City. Perhaps the most famous convert was Nicky Cruz, who though once the leader of the toughest street gang in New York City became a Christian and still preaches the gospel himself throughout the world as an evangelist. ...

And from this post: (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4810005&postcount=124)

And really, if anyone's convinced they've experienced God, who are we to say for a certainty that they haven't? Which one of us could be certain they were under a delusion? It might be worth their while to examine whether it was just some emotional process that caused what they originally thought was God. But if they're convinced it was God after that, how can anyone be sure they're wrong?

Here are some examples. I'll quote from one of the testimonies I linked to a few posts ago. Would it really serve any purpose to convince these people the experiences they had that changed them for the better were just emotional processes and God doesn't exist? And how can we be sure it wasn't God?

From Testimony of Carl Dutton - A Captive Set Free (http://www.smartbusiness.com/testimonies/dh_prison/dh_cdutton.htm)

At the age of 16,I was arrested for public drunkenness.* I began drinking to be sociable with the men I worked with and to feel good, never dreaming I would become a drunk. Not long after the drinking began, I started smoking pot and taking pills to feel even better. In a very short time I was a drug addict. Since my wages were only $1.00 an hour, I started dealing drugs and buying and selling stolen property to feed the habit. Every addict in town knew how to find me, to buy drugs and sell stolen property.

Although I was married, I was continually in and out of jail and went to prison twice. Soon I had lost everything, my home, wife, children, humanity, and dignity. ...

On a shelf, in the day room of that tank, was a beat up old bible that the Gideons had left there at some time. Something within me said, "You need to read that bible" I thought, "Read the bible? Only wimps and sissies read that, and I'm tough." After all, there were guys in there that I'd been in prison with, fought with and done drugs with. If I read that bible they would see me! Still, something kept saying, "Read that bible, read that bible." But, after
several days of pacing the floor in that place, I was so tormented that I went into that day room and picked up that old bible and began to read.

Oh, how the Lord convicted my heart and soul as I read. I thought, "Oh my, this book, this book it's true, it's true!" As I continued to read, God became so real to me. I knew my life was nothing, so right then I said, "Lord, my life is nothing, forgive me Lord, forgive me for the life I'm living and give me another chance. I believe, with your help, I can do a whole lot better next time! Just give me one more chance, Lord."

I want you to know, He brought up before me all my past faults and failures, and the many times He had tried to save me, but I had rejected Him. But then He forgave me, He came into my heart and saved me, washed and cleansed me I tell you, I had never felt so good...so pure...so clean. I didn't even feel like the same man who had been put in jail for the crimes he had committed. I was a brand new person, and even though I had lost everything, I felt like the richest man in the world because the Lord Jesus Christ had saved me. Just like the old hymn says, "Just as I am, without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me". ...

There's a book called Chasing the Dragon (http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Dragon-Jackie-Pullinger/dp/0892831510) by Jackie Pullinger, a woman who went to Hong Kong in her early twenties. She's actually famous and was given an MBE by Queen Elizabeth for her services. The book description on Amazon says,

The true story of how one woman's faith resulted in the conversion of hundreds of drug addicts, prostitues and hardened criminals in Hong Kong's infamous Walled City.

More than that, the book talks about how gangsters gave up violence and drug addiction when they became Christians. It even claims that through God's power, they experienced painless withdrawal from heroin. The book says,

Those who explained this extraordinary spiritual happening as an example of 'mind over matter' had to be ignorant of the facts. A drug addict facing withdrawal has a mind already half dead through continual drug abuse and is deeply fearful of pain. Most of our boys only begin to understand Jesus with their minds after they had already experienced Him in their lives and bodies.

What was really going on there? If their peaceful/painless drug withdrawal had nothing to do with God, what could have caused such a dramatically different experience for them than the agony some of them had gone through before when they'd tried to withdraw from drugs? Who is any one of us to say that whatever happened must have been a purely natural phenomenon?

I think it's good to have a critical outlook on such things, because it cuts down the risk of being conned by people making up stories, and it would certainly be interesting if someone were to come up with a scientific explanation of what was happening that made sense of it. But I don't think we should be closed to the possibility that they were correct in thinking it must be God working in their lives, because really, how can anyone be sure that couldn't happen? ...

And from this post in the same thread: (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4876614&postcount=142)

There are many examples in this thread about how religion can be valuable. Here's another. Numerous warlike tribes have become peaceful after turning to Christianity. And after all, why wouldn't they? See What The Bible Says About Violence, Anger, Jealousy, Arguments, And Living In Peace With Each Other (http://broadcaster.org.uk/section2/transcript/violence1.htm)

Here's an example of people giving up violence after turning to Christianity.

From a collection of reports on the deaths of a couple of missionaries in the late 1960s: (http://iagenweb.org/monona/Honorees/Masters/MastersPhilip.html)

... The society is one of several mission groups working in the interior of West Irian among tribes just emerging from a stone-age culture. A phenomenal response to the message of the Gospel has been witnessed among some of those warring cannibal tribes.

Notably, in the Swart Valley alone, since 1960, some 8,000 of the Dani tribe have become Christians, weapons and fetishes have been discarded and literacy has become widespread.

I'm not suggesting Christianity's the only thing that could have turned them from violence, of course. The point is that if it can work, it's obviously useful.

And from this post: (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4892673&postcount=147)

Here's an example of an atheist who was not shy about making a two-part historical documentary about how Christianity came to Ireland and Scotland and England and civilised them - albeit he says much of the civilising influence came from the literacy skills and new technologies brought by the Christians, which naturally could have been brought by other progressive groups as the Romans had earlier. Interesting documentary. The Telegraph interviews the documentary-maker: Dan Snow: How Britain nearly became the Irish Isles (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5369864/Dan-Snow-How-Britain-nearly-became-the-Irish-Isles.html)

So what did the Celts do for us? Even the term “Celt”, as Snow concedes, can be a vague, emotive term. For Snow’s purposes, however, the Celts are the people primarily living in Ireland who came to Britain to evangelise and to trade, and who by so doing gave (what was to become) the UK a common language, a longer life expectancy and, in essence, the beginnings of what we would now call civilisation. ...

Interestingly, however, Snow is no fan of Christianity per se: “I’m an atheist,” he says, “so I’m fairly harsh on the idea that Christianity is a self-evidently brilliant creed that everyone adopts as soon as they’re told about it.”

Through making this series, however, Snow says that in fact his regard for Christianity has grown. “It is fascinating, ideologically, to watch the Iron Age warrior ethos being transformed by Christian thought,” he says. “The old belief was that it was basically only really the warriors who were special. But Christianity told people that they were all special now. Even in this period, it was quite emancipating.” ...

And from this post in another thread (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=5336579&postcount=174)

... What can sometimes make the Bible more compelling to obey is that it says its moral commands are God's commands, so people who might not ordinarily have an interest in obeying such things might decide to because they feel the commands are being given by a higher authority who it would be unwise to disobey. That's where its moral code gets some of its power - not because it's the best, but because people think there could be unpleasant consequences for disobeying it, over-and-above earthly ones. It's a bit like law enforcement. If no one had any recourse to the police, I wonder how many more banks would be robbed or people harmed. Naturally, part of what makes people law-abiding is social conditioning - the values they're brought up with and the expectations they know those around them have of them, and their development of empathy. But part of it may well be to do with not wishing to bring the consequences of crime down on their heads such as the risk of arrest by the police. It's historically evident that people do do worse things if they think they'll get away with it:

De-regulation in the financial markets made the financial crisis possible.

When the industrial revolution first got going, there was very little regulation to protect workers. So many employers exploited them as much as they could. It was common for children to work down the mines, or in factories for even 16 hours a day. Machines weren't required to be safe. Employers would often make workers do maintenance work on them while they were still going, so as not to hold up production. There were a lot of accidents. People could be scalped, lose fingers, and get injured in other ways, sometimes needing legs amputated and other serious treatment. There were apparently even efforts to make workers work seven days a week in some factories. Employers weren't obliged to make efforts to create a humane working environment for the workers, so many didn't, even imposing fines on workers for doing the slightest things that might impede their work performance. There were even fines for whistling in some places.

Greed ruled. And that was also true on the seas. Many shipping companies who had some older ships they thought might not be as profitable as they'd like would deliberately overload them with things to such an extent that they were far too low in the water to be safe, often very heavy things like pig-iron, so in storms, it wouldn't take too much to sink the ships. Then they'd claim large amounts of money from insurance companies to compensate them for the "loss". Never mind the lives of the sailors who had to man the ships. A lot of them were scared to go on overloaded ships because they felt fairly sure they wouldn't come back. But the companies would penalize them if they refused, despite the fact that those same companies were deliberately trying to get their ships wrecked.

Some bakers would sell goods where the flour was mixed with chalk and other substances. Some things mixed in with them were even toxic.

The public only became protected from these common abuses through regulation, when such things became illegal. Some of those things just never happen nowadays in the West, because of government regulations making them illegal.

So God can be thought of as being like the ultimate regulator, whose discipline is a fearsome thing so people have an incentive to obey. If they obey government regulations, and they think God's regulations are even more important to obey, then that's where the Bible will get some of its power, not just the fact that the Bible prohibits some behaviours in itself. That doesn't mean the Bible will always be more effective. It just means it can be useful.

Having said that, there really are some beautiful verses in the New Testament.

Certainly, religion has been used over the centuries as an excuse to perpetrate great evil. But as I say in this post (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4869723&postcount=140), the factors that cause people to do such things tend to be multiple, both religious and non-religious. In fact, I discuss in more depth some of the evil perpretrated in the name of religion in this post here. (http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=4719325&postcount=70)

Nowadays, however, because so much is being done to curb disease in the developing world - albeit it could be done a lot more quickly, we have a rapidly
spiralling world population that could cause real problems if something isn't done very soon.
Except that in the countries where that has genuinely been solved, the population is _declining_. Without immigration, the western world would pretty much implode.

The population wouldn't be declining so much that it would be likely to disastrously "implode" any time soon. :) Decrease, it may well have done without immigration. And that was just my point - I outlined factors that can cause the population to decline, and suggested ways that could be achieved more widely. Because you still had the idea that disease leads to all the world's over-population, when you made that point, perhaps you just couldn't conceive of how it could be possible that more widespread treatments for diseases could possibly cause a rise in population. If you'd had the patience to read further through the post before commenting at all, you would have read my explanations as to how there are in fact many factors that influence a population boom or decline. The West's population wouldn't be shrinking without immigration merely because disease has been so effectively reduced in the West. The birth rate's been declining because of widespread access to contraception; because of easy access to higher education and career opportunities for women that would have been unthinkable generations ago that mean people generally want to have children later because they want to enjoy those opportunities. It's been declining because of widespread literacy that means people can become aware of cheap contraception, and easy access to abortion. It's been declining because social welfare systems mean there is no pressing need to have children in the hope that they'll look after you in your old age. It's been declining because greater prosperity means greater opportunities for travel and other things that make the thought of being tied to the home because of the need to look after children less attractive. It's been declining because welfare systems plus industrialisation mean people no longer need to have children to help work the family land or help with the family industry. Most people work for others in places where extra labour from family members isn't required. And when they become unemployed, they know they won't need the support of their families to survive. The birth rate's been declining because women are socialised nowadays into expecting to go onto further education and then a job or career, rather than having the expectation while growing up that they'll marry early and have children.

Except for the fact that everywhere where people got sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics, there's been a baby boom for about a generation and then the
population levels actually started to drop. So, yes, there's something to be inferred from there, but not what you think.

Population levels do drop when countries modernise; but as I said, it's not because disease is being tackled. It's because of factors like the ones I've just mentioned. That's why I advocate that promotion of such conditions is what will lead to a fall in the phenomenal increase in the world population and prevent the disaster it could cause if nothing is done.

I'll respond to the rest of what you said later.

As to earthquakes, volcanoes etc. being necessary, meaning that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in natural disasters are also necessary,
I've already pointed out that warnings could be part of such a system. I also find the idea that God couldn't come up with a better system a bit absurd.

If you were asked to help him out, what ideas would you come up with? Remember they'd have to be things that would make it absolutely clear that something very nasty was on the way, and things even the most hardened skeptics couldn't shrug off as delusion, so they'd evacuate as well. They'd have to be things that conveyed the message to entire towns, and that were so compelling that even people with housebound relatives, or people who had very good reasons to stay in the town, would make all arrangements necessary no matter how inconvenient, and evacuate. They would have to be things that left people in no doubt whatsoever that something nasty was coming and it was urgent to get out. And they would have to be something that conveyed the message without resorting to man-made technologies, since I don't think God uses those.

So, imagine God asked you to advise him on setting such a system up. What do you think you'd try?

HansMustermann

2nd January 2010, 03:02 PM

Well, the first thing I'd question is a need for a God that thoroughly wipes all trace of his presence... but will punish you if you believe in the wrong legend of him, or, given the utter absence of evidence, in nothing at all.

If God wants to be the boss, fine, let him take the mantle of ruler of the Earth.

Then He can play with physics as He wants, and have none of this nonsense of it having to work as if He wasn't there. No, it won't hamper physics if we know God did this or that, any more than having an electric lightbulb hampers our understanding of the Sun. We know which is the natural part, and which is the artifficial part, and frankly as a species we have the IQ to understand which is which.

That being out of the way, here's what I'd do (or advise God to do).

1. Let's not start with the volcanoes, actually, let's start with cancer. Frankly, volcanoes and tsunamis don't come even close to the sheer number of cancers.

Better DNA repair mechanisms are entirely within the laws of physics and chemistry, and don't need any divine intervention to keep going. And that would stop cancer right there. (Of course, it would also thoroughly stop evolution, but the fundies don't want evolution anyway. And as a species we kinda escaped it already, anyway.)

Alternately, there is a newly discovered species where apparently one single gene thoroughly stops cancer growth. It doesn't stop mutations, mind you, but it seems to detect when a cluster of cells is growing out of control, and simply blocks cell division for those.

Frankly, even humans can copy that gene from one cell to another nowadays. And again it doesn't require any rewriting of the laws of universe. So why doesn't God do that?

2. Get rid of pathogens and, again, give everything including bacteria better DNA repairs and copy. That ought to freeze bacteria to a stable configuration of benign ones. Get rid of viruses entirely.

It would be not just a direct boon to human health, but prevent crop failures and cattle epidemics too. And it would remove the need to stuff the cattle and poultry full of antibiotics all the time too. Organic agriculture, here we come.

Again, I understand the role viruses play in horizontal gene transfer in evolution, but again, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

3. Give women a 5 year infertility timer after each childbirth. It won't stop moderate population growth, but that ought to take care of your major overpopulation worries, right?

Again, a protein-based timer is entirely possible and already in use. You have a 28 day one in your body as it is for example.

4. I'll return to the crop problem. AFAIK no plants can fix their own Nitrogen, though some cooperate with bacteria for that one. I see no reason why that bacterial gene couldn't be copied to cereals.

5. But to address your volcano and earthquake problem too... actually it's not as much that we need those per se. We just need some form of shielding against the charged particles in the solar wind. Otherwise, see Venus.

The dynamo in the Earth's core is one way to get that, but, frankly, a God who doesn't need to stay hidden, can come up with a lot of other options.

E.g., an equally good way is not to need as much shielding to start with. A smaller Sun with an Earth orbitting closer, wouldn't radiate half as much and would also last a lot longer than the 5 billion years the Sun has left. When it comes to stars, actually the bigger they are, the faster they burn.

But, frankly, I'd be just as happy with the Hand Of God (TM) up there as a shield instead or whatever. Yes, it would be a bit of a dead giveaway, but as I was saying, let God come out of the closet already ;)

HansMustermann

2nd January 2010, 04:11 PM

TimCallahan

2nd January 2010, 05:28 PM

Well, just for the record, we already know that everything after the Torah, and for that matter a standardized written Torah too, was done by the priests and these newfangled rabbis (Pharisees) that had emerged after Cyrus released them. The Pharisees were the "party" of the scribes and scholars, and the priests were probably not exactly illiterate either.

So, yes, we already know that Job isn't a campfire story. It's the work of some literate scholar, and actually more likely a commission was involved. At least in the final published version.

I'm still thinking that it's a bad story, especially given those circumstances.

Well, of course, Job is two stories jammed togaether that don't quite jell. As far as when the stroies were written, I think it' a pretty good bet that both "J' and the Court History were written ca. 850 BCE, well before the Persian period and the Pharisees. Howevver, I'm sure you're right that plenty of late editing of earlier works went on.

HansMustermann

3rd January 2010, 01:16 AM

Well, as early midrash, probably. Adding stuff that's not attributed to Moses to the actual holy book is a later phenomenon, though.

Baby Nemesis

3rd January 2010, 09:34 AM

And even as solutions go, a benevolent deity could come up with a better solution than 15 solid years of the Antonine Plague, or the two solid decades
of the Plague Of Cyprian. An omnipotent and benevolent designer could, for example, limit the reproduction rate. Make the female infertile for 5 years
after a birth, for example. Whatever.

Protein-based timers are used everywhere in your body, and they work well. Adding yet another one to inhibit the expression of a gene would have been a
trivial affair for a designer deity, and it doesn't violate any laws of physics or chemistry.

That said deity would choose to send, say, the bubonic plague instead, and slowly kill a lot of people in excruciating pain... well, that says a lot about
the benevolence of such a deity.

Death wasn't slow - the plague apparently took a mere three days to kill any one victim. Still, it would appear, from the Christian perspective, that we have a God who likes to leave solutions to human ingenuity or effort or discovery much of the time, after giving hints on ways of handling things. The focus on cleanliness in the Torah, and on avoiding contamination by unclean things like flies, along with specific verses like the one commanding soldiers to bury their excrament, and the ones about isolating people with certain infectious diseases, were a crude - by modern standards - outline that could be extrapolated from, whereupon measures could have been taken that would have cut down a lot of the suffering from the plague if followed, since medieval streets were dens of appalling sanitation where refuse and human waste was piled up, a haven for the rats that carried the fleas that harboured the bacteria that caused the plague. Where measures were taken to clean up cities by burning refuse, and to isolate people with the plague, its incidence was reduced quite a bit, so I've heard. People didn't know what its cause was. However, simply cleaning up the neighbourhoods and organising people to work to keep them cleaner could have gone a fair way to significantly reducing the problem.

As for the infertility issue you raise, actually, under stress, or other adverse life conditions such as food shortage, women can become less fertile. That's been known for a long time, but recently there have been studies into why it happens, that have discovered hormonal changes. One or two recent ones have even made a link between job stress in high-power careers and infertility. There's a news article that references the studies called Is your career making you infertile? (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article6073045.ece)

... Super-skinny women who under-eat to stay that way have long been known to risk compromised fertility. Several years ago, Rose Frisch, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, explained how too few calories and too little body fat triggers a woman's brain to switch off her body's ability to reproduce by gradually restricting the flow of a hormone called leptin.

There is what Frisch has described as a “razor-thin borderline” where a drop of just 3lb can tip a normal-sized woman into infertility without her realising it. She may continue to menstruate, but might not ovulate during her cycle. If body-fat falls much lower, then amenorrhoea occurs when the menstrual cycle simply stops. ...

The stress of some women's lifestyles also plays a significant role. In research at Emory University's School of Medicine in Atlanta, Professor Sarah Berga of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics, has shown how stress often triggers a cascade of events that result in reduced levels of two hormones crucial for ovulation. Women with hectic jobs on top of busy lives, she says, are most at risk.

In one of her studies, Berga found that women who didn't ovulate had excessive levels of the stress hormone cortisol present in their brain fluid, often due to trying to squeeze in too much work and exercise. “Your brain is hard to fool,” Berga says. “If you are under-eating, overworking and over-exercising, then the hypothalamus - the part of the brain that controls the release of hormones - keeps a running tally of what you are doing.” ...

If the human body was incapable of bearing children for five years after a child was born, that would be fine today, but years ago when there was no system of welfare benefits that would ensure people were looked after in their old age, greatly reducing a woman's capacity to have children could mean that when they got too old to work, they might well fall into destitution. If they simply had two or three children in their lifetime and the children moved away or something happened to them, the parents wouldn't have more to fall back on. The system has both advantages and great disadvantages.

But don't forget humans would be capable of organising their lives so they themselves didn't have children during times of severe hardship, though it might have meant making some sacrifices, since it would have meant choosing to put that goal before the sexual part of their relationship.

And if you study tribal warfare, it _is_ about resources. They don't have the organization to lead wars of conquest.

However, tribal warfare has more complex causes than a simple struggle for essential resources. Greed, ongoing feuds where revenge killing follows revenge killing in a spiral of increasing violence, inter-tribal prejudice/hatred fuelled by stories of injustices from the past, a culture where warriors are glorified, and other things can be factors motivating warfare. It seems violence is often at least partly fuelled by the kind of unethical behaviour that the New Testament condemns and thus anyone truly following it wouldn't partake of. It can be argued that God gave humans the blueprint for making the world a better place and then largely left us to get on with it, so it's up to humans to work for social justice, to campaign against human rights abuses, to work for improvements in living standards, to do what they can to make the world a more peaceful place, and so on.

Ancient tribes could actually organise very well when they wanted to. Take the sacking of Rome by the Barbarian tribes that led to the fall of the Roman Empire, for example. It seems they had a long history of having a warrior culture. From a gruesome little article about them: (http://www.history.com/content/warriors/warrior-cultures/barbarians)

Major Battle: Battle of Teutoburg Forest, 9 A.D. The Romans, who were at the height of their power and had one of the world's best armies, suffered one of their biggest defeats at the hands of the Barbarians, Germanic tribes who specialized in guerilla warfare. The battle stands centuries later as the first, and perhaps most important, event in German unification.

Who They Were: During the 1st century, present-day Germany was dominated by small, semi-nomadic, warring tribes, who honed their fighting skills by battling each other. The Barbarians favored hand-to-hand combat and surprise ambushes and fought without any rules. They had almost no armor or helmets and sometimes fought bare-chested or even naked. ...

The Barbarians' reputation for savagery was intensified by their belief that their gods required slow, painful human sacrifices. ...

... here's what I'd do (or advise God to do).

1. Let's not start with the volcanoes, actually, let's start with cancer. Frankly, volcanoes and tsunamis don't come even close to the sheer number of
cancers.

Better DNA repair mechanisms are entirely within the laws of physics and chemistry, and don't need any divine intervention to keep going. And that would stop cancer right there.

So you wouldn't advise God to stop things breaking in the first place, but simply to make the body's repair mechanisms more sophisticated when things go a bit wrong? Also, if that was your only solution, you'd be missing a number of things that we already have in the world today that can work to reduce the incidence of several types of cancers. And it could be argued that God arranged for those to be around. For instance, there's the information in these articles:

Preventing Cancer: 6 Steps (http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/library/CA/00024.html)
Hidden Powers of Fruit and Veg. (http://icnewcastle.icnetwork.co.uk/lifestyle/fitness/tm_objectid=14795532&method=full&siteid=50081&headline=hidden-powers-of-fruit-and-veg-name_page.html)

According to The World Cancer Research Fund, eating certain fruits and vegetables could lower your risk of cancer.

They have compiled a list of 20 "Superfoods" which all contain health-enhancing qualities.

These boost the body's natural functions such as digestion, immune system and bone strength, and some believe, offer protection against cancer.

Red and orange peppers

Peppers are an excellent source of vitamin C - half a red pepper provides all the vitamin C you need in one day. They're also useful sources of flavonoids and beta-carotene - both might help oppose free radical damage that can lead to cancer.

Kiwi fruit

The tangy yet sweet kiwi fruit is a great source of vitamin C - even better than an orange when compared in weight. It contains vitamin K, potassium and magnesium.

Brazil nuts

These are rich in the mineral selenium, which has antioxidant effects that may help protect against cancer. A few should be enough to meet your daily selenium needs, and most of us in the UK have low intakes. Selenium can also help to keep the immune system strong.

Tomatoes

The rosy red colour of tomatoes is due to the mighty antioxidant lycopene. Some research has linked eating plenty of tomatoes - especially cooked canned, pastes and sauces - with a reduced risk of heart disease and cancer, (in particular, prostate cancer). Tomatoes are a source of vitamins C and E, flavonoids and potassium, which may help regulate blood pressure.

Broccoli

This cruciferous vegetable is notable for its sulphoraphane content, a phytochemical shown to activate enzymes which may destroy cancer-causing chemicals. It's also good for folic acid, vitamin C and other antioxidants. Enjoy raw or briefly steam or stir-fry.

And so on, listing over a dozen more. (I'm sure you can find a more scholarly take on it on their actual website if you want.) Wasn't it nice of God to invent all those! ;) Some cancers are primarily genetic, but some have a lot to do with lifestyle.

Well, the first thing I'd question is a need for a God that thoroughly wipes all trace of his presence... but will punish you if you believe in the wrong
legend of him, or, given the utter absence of evidence, in nothing at all.

Firstly, Christians believe there is evidence, in provisions like the ones just mentioned, for example. Secondly, I don't think the Bible suggests that things are that simple. All over the Bible it talks about the key factors in earning God's pleasure or displeasure being to do with moral behaviour. There are one or two verses in the New Testament that might convey the impression that mere belief is the important thing, but the Jews of the time would have understood that not to simply be a matter of thought processes but about thoughts leading to actions. From an article about that: (http://www.tektonics.org/af/baptismneed.html)

Behind much of the thought in the Bible lies a "peculiarly Semitic" idea of a "unitive notion of human personality." [Dahl, Resurrection of the Body, 59] ...

Applied to the individual, the Semitic Totality Concept means that "a man's thoughts form one totality with their results in action so that 'thoughts' that result in no action are 'vain'." [ibid, 60] To put it another way, man does not have a body; man is a body, and what we regard as constituent elements of spirit and body were looked upon by the Hebrews as a fundamental unity. ...

Applied to the role of works following faith, this means that there can be no decision without corresponding action, for the total person will inevitably reflect a choice that is made. ...

Alternately, there is a newly discovered species where apparently one single gene thoroughly stops cancer growth. It doesn't stop mutations, mind you,
but it seems to detect when a cluster of cells is growing out of control, and simply blocks cell division for those.

Frankly, even humans can copy that gene from one cell to another nowadays. And again it doesn't require any rewriting of the laws of universe. So why doesn't
God do that?

That sounds exciting. I expect the reason God isn't doing it is because he's waiting for humans to do it themselves.

2. Get rid of pathogens and, again, give everything including bacteria better DNA repairs and copy. That ought to freeze bacteria to a stable configuration of benign ones. Get rid of viruses entirely.

It would be not just a direct boon to human health, but prevent crop failures and cattle epidemics too. And it would remove the need to stuff the cattle and poultry full of antibiotics all the time too. Organic agriculture, here we come.

Again, I understand the role viruses play in horizontal gene transfer in evolution, but again, it's a price I'm willing to pay.

I expect God was waiting for humans to develop the means of doing that also. If I was God, I expect I'd do things very differently indeed. But then, I can't be sure that unforeseen horrors wouldn't result from my actions, such as if I eliminated disease in what I thought to be my benevolence, and then people just weren't dying of anything, so they all lived forever, and the world got so over-populated there weren't enough resources for everyone and terrible wars broke out, with millions of ferocious grey-haired centuries-old warriors battling it out on either side.

3. Give women a 5 year infertility timer after each childbirth. It won't stop moderate population growth, but that ought to take care of your major overpopulation
worries, right?

Again, a protein-based timer is entirely possible and already in use. You have a 28 day one in your body as it is for example.

Well, humans have invented effective long-lasting contraception now: There are injections that give contraceptive protection for a long time after they're given. What's needed is for humans to organise to make these things widespread in developing countries, alongside other modernisation programs.

4. I'll return to the crop problem. AFAIK no plants can fix their own Nitrogen, though some cooperate with bacteria for that one. I see no reason why that
bacterial gene couldn't be copied to cereals.

I don't understand that one, but it seems humans are making huge strides in plant technology also. For instance, see my thread Genetically modified food development is a must. (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=131160)

5. But to address your volcano and earthquake problem too... actually it's not as much that we need those per se. We just need some form of shielding against the charged particles in the solar wind. Otherwise, see Venus.

You mean it would be really warm? Hmmmm, nice! :D ... No, OK, so it would be too hot to live on? How do volcanoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and things protect against the sun?

bruto

3rd January 2010, 12:28 PM

If we're going to use plague avoidance as a measure of divine hint-making, then on the grounds of efficiency we should probably just worship cats like the Egyptians.

Baby Nemesis

3rd January 2010, 01:03 PM

If we're going to use plague avoidance as a measure of divine hint-making, then on the grounds of efficiency we should probably just worship cats like the Egyptians.

You can worship what you want, mate. :)

And further to my point about how I'd like to eliminate all disease if I was God, but it might lead to disastrous over-population because no one would ever die so we might have age-old grey-haired warriors terrorising the place in a struggle for scarce resources, with so many fighting-fit old people around, it might well be a bit like that Monty Python sketch (http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_1/55.htm):

Voice Over: This is a frightened city. Over these houses, over these streets hangs a pall of fear. Fear of a new kind of violence which is terrorizing the city. Yes, gangs of old ladies attacking defenseless fit young men.

(Film of old ladies beating up two young men; then several grannies walking aggressively along street, pushing passers-by aside.)

First Young Man: Well they come up to you, like, and push you - shove you off the pavement, like. There's usually four or five of them.

Second Young Man: Yeah, this used to be a nice neighborhood before the old ladies started moving in. Nowadays some of us daren't even go down to the shops. '

Third Young Man: Well Mr. Johnson's son Kevin, he don't go out any more. He comes back from wrestling and locks himself in his room.

(Film of grannies harassing an attractive girl.)

Voice Over: What are they in it for, these old hoodlums, these layabouts in lace?

First Granny: (voice over) Well it's something to do isn't it?

Second Granny: (voice over) It's good fun. ...

:D

truethat

3rd January 2010, 01:13 PM

The book of Job is a throw back to when believers didn't necessarily believe in ONE god, but just that their God is the one who should be worshipped. There were often fights in the Near East to show that one God was more powerful than the other. The "Devil" in Job is just a gussied up old God. This was a test of wills between two equal Gods.

For those of you who cherry pick through your bible take a look at the stories about Hezekiah and the seige at Sennacherib

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezekiah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sennacherib4

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%2018&version=NIV

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2 Kings+19&version=NIV

Kopji

3rd January 2010, 01:48 PM

Just for the record, the literary sophistication in the Bible, the use of irony, symmetry (i.e. making the end ofthe story reflect the beginning) the use of symbolism and type scenes, etc. shows that, while the authors of the Bible weren't sophisticated with respect to science, they were hardly ignoarnt shepherds telling stories around campfire.

Good storytelling is an ancient art, I would not sell the Shamen, nomadic shepherds, and their campfires short. These are individuals who probably spent their entire lives telling stories.

And anyway, the basic story of Job is not all that complex, or probably even unique to the Judeo-Christian traditions: Our particular deity's ways are greater than ours, and what appears as 'bad' is only part of a greater battle that we have little information about.

Job certainly has a good deal of honesty to it, in that it admits there really is no explanation for why there is suffering if God is benevolent. Of course, most of the deities of ancient civilivations really weren't that benevolent.

God is benevolent to Job in the same way that he makes the sun rise on the good and wicked. This raises a fascinating question about how things would be any different if there were no God. There is suffering with God, suffering without God. 'It is a Mystery'. God could do something about it if he wanted, but God does not always stop the hunter's arrow from striking the deer and neither does he involve himself with saving us.

Except for third Tuesdays after a full moon if the blood of the right kind of lamb is offered. Sorry I made that up. But it is the same idea. The idea that God brings suffering so that he can sometimes reward us later sounds a little screwed up.

The concept of God in Job seems to be caught in transition between the old Yahweh before the exile - a typical tribal god with a consort, ruling a small pantheon and without power beyond his turf - and the newer concept of Yahweh as a universal God.

Good. Concepts of God changed because we changed. We moved from being hunter gatherer nomads to more sedentary agricultural river valley civilizations. Perhaps a universal idea of God unites more people, and was useful for governments to maintain order in cities rather than tribal groups. Just an idea.

As to earthquakes, volcanoes etc. being necessary, meaning that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in natural disasters are also necessary, I've already pointed out that warnings could be part of such a system. I also find the idea that God couldn't come up with a better system a bit absurd.
-sigh- The thinking seemed so reasonable up to here. Even in the Bible, God killed almost everyone but Noah and his family and look where we are today. I would think that even a moderately smart deity could see that the plan was not working. God has had thousands of years to send earthquakes, floods, disasters and yet unbelief is growing.

TimCallahan

4th January 2010, 01:17 PM

Good storytelling is an ancient art, I would not sell the Shamen, nomadic shepherds, and their campfires short. These are individuals who probably spent their entire lives telling stories. . . .

Granted. We certainly should not marginalize people by calling them "ignorant shepherds." Their storytelling was indeed sophisticated. It's also quite possible that the literary devices we find in Bible stories could have been part of an oral, as well as a written, literary tradition.

That said, however, the ancient Israelites were the cultural recipients of both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations. Also, as Iron Age Semities, they were the recipients of the Bronze Age culture of Ugarit. In addition, the West Semitic peoples (Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites etc.) were the inventors of the alphabet, which was a much simpler and more fluid form of writing than either syllabaries, such as cunieform, or pictographic systems, such as Egyptian heiroglyphics.

Israel amassed considerable wealth by exercising some control over trade routes leading through the Levant, as can be seen by the amount of ivory found in King Ahab's palace. Later, after Israel had fallen to the Assyrians, the kingdom of Judah became the beneficiary of Israel's demise. The fall of Samaria coincides with a great ingease in the size of Jerusalem. The wealth that now flowed into Judah can be seen by the tribute imposed on Hezekiah by Sennacherib following Judah's unsuccessful revolt against the Assyrians.

The long and the short of it is that the culture of those who wrote the Hebrew Scriptures - whether it be the J Document, the other strands ofthe Torah, the Court History, or the later stories, such as the later portins o Job - was relatively sophisticated and literate.

Kopji

4th January 2010, 10:25 PM

Maybe more to Maia's original question, Job dates from the 'exile' period. A time when Jerusalem is sacked and Israel is hauled off to Babylon and essentially in exile from their homeland.

Job's 'friends' present some fairly primitive theology, but seem like the kind of ideas ordinary people grew up hearing. They'd know these guys as neighbors. The ideas conflict just like in real life. Certainly the story underwent great revision over time, but the core of it seems very rural, this is an outdoor story. I suppose that Job himself could be compared to Israel in a larger sense: losing everything and feeling like they did not deserve it. There is a sense that Job is captive and confused in his own personal Babylon.

When I say 'campfire stories' what I mean is that the core of the 'wisdom books' don't preach at us, but tell their stories in a way that the listeners are taking away different things. The book has divisions that are sort of cliff-hangers in storytelling. At the end God shows up and I can just hear the fuzzy little Endor Ewoks making their little battle sound effects. :) And as a non believer, the Bible seems best when it is that way. I don't really find much use in modern Christian critical analysis. To me, if there is beauty in it, it just in the story. Hey, God picks up the earth by the corners and shakes the wicked off. We get it. Why debate if the earth is flat?

kurious_kathy

6th January 2010, 12:49 AM

Ok, but then riddle me this: what does God restore to Job's children, who had been squashed to test Job? What does God restore to Job's servants, who had been put to the sword to test Job? What does God restore to their widows and orphans?

Sure, if you look strictly at Job, you can do the pretense you just did. But what about everyone else who suffered for God's and Satan's fratboy bet, without even being the ones tested?

I'm not God so I would not know for sure, but I can forsee one day they may all end up in heaven together as they were all most likely knowledgable of God and acknowledged the sacrifce he would make to save them. The OT jews made sacrifces to acknowledge what Christ would ultimately come to do to save them from their sins. Because Job was righteous I'm sure his kids and servants had the knowledge of God through Job sharing it with them. At least, I hope they were all believers. as that would mean Job can look forward to seeing them all again in heaven. They will have even more members in their family since Job was given a new wife and kids.

As for your specific question of what the servants and kids got, an eternity with God is the best any of us can hope for. God is still the one in control of all our lives come what may.

AdinDraco

6th January 2010, 03:26 AM

I'm not God so I would not know for sure, but I can forsee one day they may all end up in heaven together as they were all most likely knowledgable of God and acknowledged the sacrifce he would make to save them. The OT jews made sacrifces to acknowledge what Christ would ultimately come to do to save them from their sins. Because Job was righteous I'm sure his kids and servants had the knowledge of God through Job sharing it with them. At least, I hope they were all believers. as that would mean Job can look forward to seeing them all again in heaven. They will have even more members in their family since Job was given a new wife and kids.

As for your specific question of what the servants and kids got, an eternity with God is the best any of us can hope for. God is still the one in control of all our lives come what may.

I don't want to fall prey to the slippery slope fallacy, but it seems that sort of rationalisation can equally apply to people like that woman who killed her 5 kids so that they would go straight to heaven. Hey, don't get mad at her - her kids are best buds with Jesus now. Seriously? god allowing the wife and kids to die was ok because they get to be in heaven - this is an example of dogma corrupting the will so as to justify obscenities.

Paulhoff

6th January 2010, 08:36 AM

I mean really, what kind of God is this who has to prove himself to Satan by taking up a bet?
It was fixed, you know, the all knowing so-called god, there was no bet. :rolleyes:

Paul

:) :) :)

Robert Sutherland

23rd January 2010, 05:13 PM

Maia:

I was scanning the web and found your post citing my book. Email me at bigferret48@yahoo.ca and I can email you free of charge a Word version. We can chat if you like privately or online about its insights.

All the best, Robert Sutherland

kurious_kathy

24th January 2010, 10:37 AM

I don't want to fall prey to the slippery slope fallacy, but it seems that sort of rationalisation can equally apply to people like that woman who killed her 5 kids so that they would go straight to heaven. Hey, don't get mad at her - her kids are best buds with Jesus now. Seriously? god allowing the wife and kids to die was ok because they get to be in heaven - this is an example of dogma corrupting the will so as to justify obscenities.

How in the heck do justify that thought, dogma does not corrupt the will, following scripture is a guide for morality which God teaches us to live more godly lives by surrendering our sinful nature to a more Godly, Spirit controlled nature. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom my friend, and he is the one who changes us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This women(in my opinion) could not have been Holy Spirit filled or she could never have followed out such a horrible act. God allowed it because it was her own stupid will that was the problem. Quit blaming people's ignorant acts on God. She was clearly evil and wrong for this horrible murderous act. Killing your kids so they don't have to suffer in this world, or trying to force God to save them is just wrong. Again a poor example of someone trying to play God and take matters into their own hands which is just plain stupid.

People do all kinds of crazy things, but nobody has the right to blame God for it, blame it on the false god who is Satan who fills peoples heads with all kinds of stupid, evil lies which is sometimes why they flip out. God is always the one giving us truth to combat the lies of the emeny of our souls. Demons are running a muck in these end times and everyone outside of Christ is vulnerable to their control. You call me dogmatic for following scripture, I call it smart. If God doesn't build your house, then you are on quick sand my friend and it's just a matter of time before you'll sink. The theif only comes to kill and destroy; and that theif is Satan. I suggest you don't follow his lead; as Satan's biggest sin was pride, and everyone who thinks they know more than God is full of it. When will people realize they need God's mercy and quit trying to play God themselves?

Paulhoff

24th January 2010, 10:54 AM

How in the heck do justify that thought, dogma does not corrupt the will, following scripture is a guide for morality which God teaches us to live more godly lives by surrendering our sinful nature to a more Godly, Spirit controlled nature. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom my friend, and he is the one who changes us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So, you follow the over 600 commandments then. Have fun with that, and don't forget to kill people who don't buy into the bible.

Paul

:) :) :)

Scott Haley

24th January 2010, 10:55 AM

The presenter had previously asked whether it would have been possible for God to have created the world in such a way that natural disasters never happened. The Jesuits said it wouldn't. They said volcanoes, earthquakes and so on were necessary to keep the world in working order. They said if such things never happened, erosion would cause the world to become smooth and eventually so marshy that no one could live there. It seemed like the beginnings of what could be a good rational explanation for reconciling the idea of a reasonably good God with natural disasters, but perhaps because of time limits, they didn't really explain themselves fully, so I couldn't really understand what they meant, which was disappointing. Maybe someone could clarify why the earth would become uninhabitable if it wasn't for volcanoes and earthquakes and so on?

Natural forces like the rain constantly erode the land. There are landslides and things in the mountains, so that they gradually flatten. Over the course of millions of years, the ground would become all low and marshy, as the Jesuits said. Waves erode the shoreline, the rocks turn to silt in the rivers and are carried out to sea. Eventually, there'd be no dry land at all.

One thing that saves us from this is plate tectonics. Huge geologic forces push up the land, sometimes turning flat ground into new mountain ranges. The downside of plate tectonics is it also causes earthquakes, sometimes horrifying ones.

Vital minerals in the soil tend to wash into the sea. One thing that replentishes them is volcanoes. Places like Hawaii and my home in Washington State have soil improved by ancient eruptions. Volcanoes create new high ground and lava flows can make new land. In the short term, they're very bad to be around when they're erupting.

I still think that an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful god could have given us the benefits of active geology without all the death and horror and children getting their limbs amputated. If he tried, would he fail?

Paulhoff

24th January 2010, 10:59 AM

People do all kinds of crazy things, but nobody has the right to blame God for it, blame it on the false god who is Satan who fills peoples heads with all kinds of stupid, evil lies which is sometimes why they flip out.
So you also buy into the Satan thing, how does an ex-Archangel get so much power, and why hasn't your so-called god done away with him? It sure seems that would clear up a lot of problems for people, or is it that your so-called god doesn't care that much for us after all?

Paul

:) :) :)

Paulhoff

24th January 2010, 12:01 PM

This women(in my opinion) could not have been Holy Spirit filled or she could never have followed out such a horrible act. God allowed it because it was her own stupid will that was the problem.
Helloooooooooooo, you have an so-called all knowing god, it should have seen this coming and so she should have never had kids and/or been born herself.

A so-called god allowed it, that is SICK.

Paul

:) :) :)

bruto

24th January 2010, 12:48 PM

So, Kathy, according to your backwards logic, a bad act proves retroactively that someone who professed to faith and Christianity could not have been a true Christian. After all, god is good, right?

God is also wise and all-knowing, I hear. Does that not also mean that we should retroactively judge the statements of his followers, and discredit those that betray shallow thinking, bad comprehension, false logic, smugness and just plain stupidity?

Can you tell us why the logic you apply to those who act badly should not be applied to you?

fuelair

24th January 2010, 12:58 PM

Baby Nemesis

24th January 2010, 12:59 PM

Natural forces like the rain constantly erode the land. There are landslides and things in the mountains, so that they gradually flatten. Over the course of millions of years, the ground would become all low and marshy, as the Jesuits said. Waves erode the shoreline, the rocks turn to silt in the rivers and are carried out to sea. Eventually, there'd be no dry land at all.

One thing that saves us from this is plate tectonics. Huge geologic forces push up the land, sometimes turning flat ground into new mountain ranges. The downside of plate tectonics is it also causes earthquakes, sometimes horrifying ones.

Vital minerals in the soil tend to wash into the sea. One thing that replentishes them is volcanoes. Places like Hawaii and my home in Washington State have soil improved by ancient eruptions. Volcanoes create new high ground and lava flows can make new land. In the short term, they're very bad to be around when they're erupting.

I still think that an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful god could have given us the benefits of active geology without all the death and horror and children getting their limbs amputated. If he tried, would he fail?

Interesting. Thanks. Are you suggesting that the shoreline would gradually get further and further inland as it eroded more land, and rain would eventually, over enormous amounts of time, wash all the topsoil on all the inhabitable land into rivers so ... na, but then earth would grow rocky, not marshy, unless so much of it was washed into the rivers that they filled up and flooded more quickly so it all got dumped on the land again in a soggy mush that was much like marshland, ... or something. Is that what would happen? So there needs to be high ground so it doesn't get ruined by being washed into rivers and then thrown back in the form of a soggy marshy mud? What about flat land that wasn't near rivers? Couldn't lots of people live on that? What about all the land that isn't near earthquake zones? That seems to survive allright.

Interestingly enough, there was a programme on the BBC a few days ago about how lots of big cities were built near earthquake zones, because the pressure of tektonic plates moving together or something pushes lots of minerals up to the surface so people can turn them into metals and things, and also water was easier to get at in the desert near earthquake zones because people didn't need to dig so deep to find it. I can't remember why they said that was now. I wonder if there would be another way to make the world where nothing bad would happen to it if earthquakes and volcanoes didn't happen?

Scott Haley

24th January 2010, 02:44 PM

A geologist could explain about plate tectonics better than me, maybe in a separate thread, because it's getting far away from the Book of Job.

You're right about the soil washing away to leave rocky ground. Given
enough time, the rock erodes too. Water runs downhill. Soil slides downhill and rocks roll down. Eventually, there's no hill anymore. When there's not much slope to the ground, you get a lot of puddles.

I heard a science writer claim that you have to have plate tectonics on a planet or it could never evolve intelligent life. I wondered if periodic heavy meteor showers would stir things up enough.

blobru

24th January 2010, 02:52 PM

... I still think that an all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful god could have given us the benefits of active geology without all the death and horror and children getting their limbs amputated. If he tried, would he fail?

Such as plate tectonics that limit the strength of earthquakes and volcanoes, so humans get the natural benefits without the devastation; or are there benefits to single violent events that wouldn't be possible with series of milder events of equivalent force?

ETA: sorry, Scott; I see from the above post you may not be in a position to answer.

Calling all geologists! (Tricky?)

kurious_kathy

2nd March 2010, 10:21 PM

HumanityBlues

3rd March 2010, 01:42 AM

For those who've read the Old Testament/Torah, God is a total dick in the entire thing, but he's a different kind of dick in the story of Job. There's a concept called the "Deuteronomical Order" that is kind of analogous to Karma which basically says, if you do bad stuff, God will do bad stuff to you (Gamorrah), and will reward you for doing good things (Noah). Anyways, Job is an obvious break from this understanding of God's law because basically the story of Job exemplifies that God will do whatever he wants and there is no rhyme or reason to it. He's just a total bastard.

You gotta admit, if you the Bible isn't taken literally, it's a pretty damn work of fiction.

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 03:08 AM

The meaning of the book of Job:
A bunch of crap made up by bronze age goat herders to explain other crap they didn’t understand.

Rem acu tetigisti.

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 03:09 AM

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 03:14 AM

According to the old orthodoxy of my denomination, Job was the first book of the Bible that was written. Supposedly Moses wrote it during his self imposed exile in the wilderness. He obviously knew how to write and I guess he brought some paper with him to occupy his spare time with. My guess is that it was a regional story that he would have picked up on in his journey.

Can you prove that,or is this just another Christian campfire story?

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 03:15 AM

So, you follow the over 600 commandments then. Have fun with that, and don't forget to kill people who don't buy into the bible.

Paul

:) :) :)

Yes,and kill people who work on the sabbath and your children if they give you too much lip.

Paulhoff

3rd March 2010, 07:34 AM

I posted this before,

You got to love Mark Twain,

The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes...The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession- and take the credit of the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.....There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.
- "Bible Teaching and Religious Practice," Europe and Elsewhere

Paul

:) :) :)

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 08:20 AM

bruto

3rd March 2010, 08:23 AM

Sorry I forgot to get back to you on this, but I have to tell you bruto I believe God deals with believers a bit harshly when we sin because we know better. One thing is true for everyone, sin has consequences.As usual, you utterly miss the point. My question to you is: does grievous sin actually suggest, as you explicitly put it, that a person is without proper faith? If so, what is the difference when the faithful sin?

Paulhoff

3rd March 2010, 08:26 AM

Was god in control of the Haaitian earthquake?
Don't forget Chile's earthquake, 500 times as big.

Paul

:) :) :)

I Ratant

3rd March 2010, 08:51 AM

Don't forget Chile's earthquake, 500 times as big.

Paul

:) :) :)
.
But much less loss of life.
It's the voodoo thing there.

Ethnikos

3rd March 2010, 09:10 AM

Can you prove that,or is this just another Christian campfire story?In your terminology, a campfire story.
I find it hard to imagine that if Moses had personally written the book, that it would not have been attributed to him by the religion that claimed him as their founder.
As far as my church goes, it is fundamentalist, meaning they believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, so all these books need to accounted for somehow, and in this particular case, it seemed fit to the early writers within the church to classify it in this way.
I can not discount it out of hand, that Moses could have been a sort of Robert Burns of his time, collecting folk tales and incorporating them into his own scheme of things. There could be a core story here that predates the final edit that we have handed down to us today.

Paulhoff

3rd March 2010, 09:11 AM

.
But much less loss of life.
It's the voodoo thing there.
No, better buildings in general, you know that.

Paul

:) :) :)

Fnord

3rd March 2010, 09:18 AM

What is there to discuss? The "meaning" of Job is simple: Yahweh , our alleged creator and omnipotent master, can do anything it wants to us no matter how cruel and vindictive. Therefore, you should shut up, bend over, drop trou, spread your cheeks, and take it because that's what the Lord commands.
.
You left out, "... and give thanks and praise unto the Lord, and worship Him in His glory for the blessings you have received."
.

TimCallahan

3rd March 2010, 10:01 AM

In your terminology, a campfire story.
I find it hard to imagine that if Moses had personally written the book, that it would not have been attributed to him by the religion that claimed him as their founder.
As far as my church goes, it is fundamentalist, meaning they believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, so all these books need to accounted for somehow, and in this particular case, it seemed fit to the early writers within the church to classify it in this way.
I can not discount it out of hand, that Moses could have been a sort of Robert Burns of his time, collecting folk tales and incorporating them into his own scheme of things. There could be a core story here that predates the final edit that we have handed down to us today.

Among the many problems of attributing the Torah to Mosaic authorship are its many anachronisms. Here are two examples from Genesis:

In Gen. 11:31 Terah, Abram, Lot and Sarai set out from "Ur of the Chaldeans." However, Moses assuming him to be a historical character would, at the latest, lived ca. 1200 BCE. Ur, originally a Sumerian city, wasn't occupied by the Chaldeans until ca. 850 BCE.

Genesis 36:31 states (emphasis added): These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom, before any king reigned over the Israelites.

Such a sentence couldn't have been written until at least one king had reigned over Israel. If we accept Saul and David as historical, this would have occurred ca. 1000 BCE, again about 200 years after the death of Moses.

Here's another example from the end of Deuteronomy (Deu. 34:5, 6, emphasis added):

So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD, and he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no man knows the place of his burial to this day.

There are two problems with these verses. First of all, if Moses wrote Deuteronomy, how could it go on beyond Deu. 34:4? Verses 5 though 12 are after his death. Even if we were to accept these added verses as an addendum written by Joshua we have a problem. When Deu. 34:6 say that no man knows where Moses was buried "to this day," it implies an event that happened far in the past.

These examples are only a few of the anachronisms from the Torah.

dafydd

3rd March 2010, 10:06 AM

I Ratant

3rd March 2010, 10:38 AM

No, better buildings in general, you know that.

Paul

:) :) :)
.
More god's work?
Higher standards for design (an aero engineer I know furnished drawings for his workshop to the local gummint, who asked him why he wanted to have the only building left standing in California after a Richter 9. :)) and construction practices and inspection.
These come with less dependence on humanity and more on physics. :)

iknownothing

3rd March 2010, 01:38 PM

This women(in my opinion) could not have been Holy Spirit filled or she could never have followed out such a horrible act. God allowed it because it was her own stupid will that was the problem. Quit blaming people's ignorant acts on God. She was clearly evil and wrong for this horrible murderous act. Killing your kids so they don't have to suffer in this world, or trying to force God to save them is just wrong. Again a poor example of someone trying to play God and take matters into their own hands which is just plain stupid.

But killing your child because God wants a sacrifice is good and shows your true faith. (Just ask Abraham.)

Killing your child for the really good reason that you promised God you'll sacrifice the first thing to walk out of your door? That is also good. (Just as Jephthah.)

And you're not the first Christian to try to explain death as being okay because now everyone can be with Jesus.

So if she, who was obviously mentally ill, was believing that God wanted her to do that, and she tested that against the Bible to see if it could be true, what would she find? There's plenty there to reassure her that showing her great faith in and obedience God's word is the right thing to do.

bruto

3rd March 2010, 02:48 PM

Robert Burns and Moses are not on all fours.Robert Burns actually existed and he was entertaining.Moses fails on both counts.Are you avoiding the earthquake question?The early Church Fathers probably suppressed The Merry Muses of Chaldea

marksman

3rd March 2010, 04:18 PM

I really think that it's a statement about the inexplicable nature of terrible things. Job called God to account, but in the end, it really didn't make any difference. Nothing was actually explained.

While, true, there's another level.

God could easily have explained it if He wanted to. I mean, the rest of us were given the explanation -- it was a cosmic bet. God could have told Job that if He so desired.

I think in the end, this is simply somebody's answer to the frequent musing of what you would ask if you could ask God any question. nine times out of ten, the question is "Why did this thing happen" and the author of Job is saying, "Look, even if you could speak to God, He ain't talking."

I think the moral of Job is three-fold:
1) Life can be unfair. Too bad.
2) Don't blame the victim.
3) God is never going to explain things to us -- if he did, we still wouldn't be satisfied.

I think too many religious people try to apologize for God. God's reprehensible here and the Book of Job doesn't even try to sugar-coat it. Notwithstanding Kushner's interpretation, Satan doesn't twist God's arm. Satan has to ask permission from God to do what Satan does, and Satan has to go to God multiple times for more authority. God could stop the madness at any time and does not.

I think too many antireligious people try to use Job as evidence of the unreasoningness of religion. But that's because Job is in stark contrast to Christianity, which requires an all-loving God. But Job was written for Old Testament folks who had no trouble accepting a petty, capricious God. A capricious God made sense -- the world with all its cruelties peppered with spots of beauty, appears to be made by a capricious God. Their attitude is "Yeah, God sometimes sucks; what are you going to do? That's what we got." The question of not believing in God is not even considered. It wasn't really an option. You either accept God with all His flaws, or you rebuke God, and in doing so, excommunicate yourself from your family, your friends, and your entire support network.

Fnord

4th March 2010, 10:05 AM

... I think the moral of Job is three-fold:
1) Life can be unfair. Too bad.
2) Don't blame the victim.
3) God is never going to explain things to us -- if he did, we still wouldn't be satisfied.
...

I'll buy that, and throw in a can of Foster's for your trouble.