Ruffrodys05
IBL Representative
To answer the OP....If there was a God, he was not a "good father."
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Was God a good father? (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter seahawk 17
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matuski
Footballguy
About the most fun a guy can have on these boards anymore... franknbeans only gets us so far..
bostonfred
Footballguy
Two of the biggest stories in Christianity combine to create the story of God being a good father. The first is the story of Abraham, and the second is the story of Jesus Christ.
In the first story, God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son. It's unthinkable, but Abraham was willing to do it because of his loyalty to God. There's certainly an air of cruelty to the story so far, especially for people like us who grew up in a time where sacrificing something to God is considered outrageous, and sacrificing a human life is criminal. But for the time, it was an extreme request for God to make, and it was an extreme show of loyalty for Abraham to agree. And in the end, that pleases God - not the idea of human sacrifice, but the idea of a love that transcends your own wants and needs, or even the wants and needs of your own family.
But that's not where the story ends. Because God didn't make Abraham go through with it. Instead, He told Abraham - and by proxy, all of His children - I love you too much to ask you to do these things. But not only that, I love you all so much that I will give my only begotten Son for you. The idea of a God who DOESN'T demand that Abraham actually sacrifice his son, is eclipsed by the fact that He loves us so much that He is willing to do the same thing for all of us. That's like the absolute maximum you could ever ask for someone to do, the most unthinkably powerful single gesture someone could perform to demonstrate that they love you more than anything they've ever had or ever will have. It's not a pretty symbol, by today's standards. But it is an incredible story about a Father's love for His children - all of us.
Whether that's an allegory or a true story, it's a powerful idea: God wants you to love Him and be good to one another, and God is willing to sacrifice more than you could ever imagine for all of us. And that Jesus died for our sins, because we are imperfect and make mistakes, but God loves us so much that there's nothing He wouldn't give to make us happy - even His only begotten son. That's a pretty neat story, if you're not His only begotten son. Then you might have some questions about how good an idea this all was. But for the atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians, let's focus on the allegory.
Isn't this a good value to instill in people? That we should love our fellow man, and be willing to sacrifice for one another? That we all make mistakes, but all we have to do is recognize that we make mistakes, be a little introspective, and be fair with one another, and we can all get along just fine. That's the story of Abraham and Christ in a nutshell. These were not common values of the time. This was groundbreaking stuff. Turning the other cheek, loving your fellow man, but not coveting his wife, or being envious of his stuff, and certainly not killing or stealing from him. These are good values, and the Bible does a fantastic job of teaching these stories in a way that we can still understand them today. Even if you don't believe in a literal omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, it's hard to imagine that you don't believe that there are some powerful truths in that story. And those truths - to me, that's God. Not a dude in white robes who tells people to do things and smites people He doesn't like. God is the infallible truth of our existence, the goodness we strive for, the good feeling you get when you help someone and they don't know it, the random chance that just happened to make your day when you were having a bad time of it. These things happen whether you believe in God or not - because God isn't a guy pulling the strings for you to make sure you have a good day. The good day itself is the presence of good - the presence of God.
In the first story, God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son. It's unthinkable, but Abraham was willing to do it because of his loyalty to God. There's certainly an air of cruelty to the story so far, especially for people like us who grew up in a time where sacrificing something to God is considered outrageous, and sacrificing a human life is criminal. But for the time, it was an extreme request for God to make, and it was an extreme show of loyalty for Abraham to agree. And in the end, that pleases God - not the idea of human sacrifice, but the idea of a love that transcends your own wants and needs, or even the wants and needs of your own family.
But that's not where the story ends. Because God didn't make Abraham go through with it. Instead, He told Abraham - and by proxy, all of His children - I love you too much to ask you to do these things. But not only that, I love you all so much that I will give my only begotten Son for you. The idea of a God who DOESN'T demand that Abraham actually sacrifice his son, is eclipsed by the fact that He loves us so much that He is willing to do the same thing for all of us. That's like the absolute maximum you could ever ask for someone to do, the most unthinkably powerful single gesture someone could perform to demonstrate that they love you more than anything they've ever had or ever will have. It's not a pretty symbol, by today's standards. But it is an incredible story about a Father's love for His children - all of us.
Whether that's an allegory or a true story, it's a powerful idea: God wants you to love Him and be good to one another, and God is willing to sacrifice more than you could ever imagine for all of us. And that Jesus died for our sins, because we are imperfect and make mistakes, but God loves us so much that there's nothing He wouldn't give to make us happy - even His only begotten son. That's a pretty neat story, if you're not His only begotten son. Then you might have some questions about how good an idea this all was. But for the atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians, let's focus on the allegory.
Isn't this a good value to instill in people? That we should love our fellow man, and be willing to sacrifice for one another? That we all make mistakes, but all we have to do is recognize that we make mistakes, be a little introspective, and be fair with one another, and we can all get along just fine. That's the story of Abraham and Christ in a nutshell. These were not common values of the time. This was groundbreaking stuff. Turning the other cheek, loving your fellow man, but not coveting his wife, or being envious of his stuff, and certainly not killing or stealing from him. These are good values, and the Bible does a fantastic job of teaching these stories in a way that we can still understand them today. Even if you don't believe in a literal omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, it's hard to imagine that you don't believe that there are some powerful truths in that story. And those truths - to me, that's God. Not a dude in white robes who tells people to do things and smites people He doesn't like. God is the infallible truth of our existence, the goodness we strive for, the good feeling you get when you help someone and they don't know it, the random chance that just happened to make your day when you were having a bad time of it. These things happen whether you believe in God or not - because God isn't a guy pulling the strings for you to make sure you have a good day. The good day itself is the presence of good - the presence of God.
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I've seen an argument that states that the reason God doesn't come right out and make his presence undeniably known to all, believer and non-believer alike, is that we wouldn't truly love him, obedience would be the only option when confronted by someone so powerful as God himself. And I apologize if I didn't summarize the argument perfectly, but hopefully people have heard this before and will get the gist of it. Well, God did a pretty good job of communicating directly with Abraham, so I don't think Abraham did anything out of love, it was probably fearful obedience, and was probably something anyone else would have done. The idea of a god demanding the sacrifice of a child doesn't seem unique in that time period.
As for the lessons in the allegory, sure those are nice things to teach, but its debatable whether those things can be concluded from the stories. And it's not like ancient Israel is the only place in ancient history that has taught these things.
bostonfred
Footballguy
Sure, but who cares? I'm not arguing for why Christianity is the "right" religion, or that Christianity is the first or only or best teacher of these stories. Just that there's some really powerful truth in its stories. So powerful that it dramatically changed the course of human history. And I know - not always in good ways. Lots of bad, bad things came of Christianity. But like you said, it's not like the crusades are the only time in history that people have conquered other groups because they were different.
I don't know whether I believe that "God did a pretty good job of communicating directly with Abraham", because I don't know that I believe in God as a being that you can communicate with. What I do believe, though, is that there was something special about the story of Christ that made it spread like wildfire. There's a truth - a positive truth - in the words. To me, that truth is God. And God is that truth. Sometimes, you learn something so powerful that you just stop and think, wow. That's what I call God. Whether it's the discovery of a subatomic particle that changes the way we understand the universe, or the moral revelation that we shouldn't leave the world to our children worse than what was left to us, or whatever it is that blows your hair back - that's what I see as God. It's a notion of God that should appeal to theists and atheists alike, at least as a starting point, although they all ascribe different properties from there. An atheist might say, well, truth is truth, there's no magical being who makes it happen. A theist might say, yeah, God is truth, but God is also more than that. I don't claim to know which one is "right"", or if it's more complicated than that, but I'm endlessly curious. I just know we can find some common ground in those core truths, and that's something really positive.
So as far as I'm concerned, fire away if you must. Tell me how you didn't like this story or that story in the Bible, or how Christianity is just an amalgam of other religions. None of that really bothers me, because while I came to a lot of truths I think are Godly by learning about Christianity, I don't see the stories of the Bible as anything more than an interesting way to share the truth. If the stories are all true, or all allegory, or somewhere in between, that's interesting, but it's not the center piece to me, and it doesn't change my faith in the things I do believe in because I've set the bar for my own beliefs so low. I don't presume to know whether everything written in the Bible was copied verbatim over thousands of years, and I don't presume that the world should live by the standards set in that book instead of some other book that they might prefer.
What I do know is that there are some powerful things in Christianity and other religions, and I feel like many atheists dismiss those things without looking for the positives, and cause more strife with theists than they need to. And there's no question that a lot of theists do the same, but worse, pushing their own belief system on other people, using force to enforce that behavior, either the force of law or using force themselves - some bad bad stuff. I don't want to be a part of that. I don't think that's what faith is about.
Let's find some common ground, between theists of different faiths, and even between theists and atheists. We understand a lot of things about the world. We fill in the blanks in different ways, but we should all enjoy the discovery process. Call it faith, call it science, call it curiosity, it doesn't matter to me. We're all on the same tiny rock spinning in the same enormous universe wondering about the same things. We're learning more, faster, than at any time in human history. I feel tremendously fortunate to be a part of that. That's the part I'd like to focus on.
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