this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
1325 points (96.2% liked)

Atheist Memes

5392 readers
179 users here now

About

A community for the most based memes from atheists, agnostics, antitheists, and skeptics.

Rules

  1. No Pro-Religious or Anti-Atheist Content.

  2. No Unrelated Content. All posts must be memes related to the topic of atheism and/or religion.

  3. No bigotry.

  4. Attack ideas not people.

  5. Spammers and trolls will be instantly banned no exceptions.

  6. No False Reporting

  7. NSFW posts must be marked as such.

Resources

International Suicide Hotlines

Recovering From Religion

Happy Whole Way

Non Religious Organizations

Freedom From Religion Foundation

Atheist Republic

Atheists for Liberty

American Atheists

Ex-theist Communities

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Other Similar Communities

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Not necessarily.

For example, look at the story of Solomon's wise ruling.

It's an anecdote about how to tell between a true parent and a false parent.

In that story, the false parent is the one who only cares about being recognized as the parent and is willing to see the child suffer and die to achieve that result.

Whereas the true parent is the one who cares the most about the child living as their complete unadulterated self even if that means being entirely unknown to them at all.

The tradition of God as a divine parent in Judaism goes back well before Jesus, and the Solomon story sounds a bit absurd as an actual ruling.

But it's important to keep in mind that Solomon was a figure back in the polytheistic Israelite days which the version of the Old Testament we have today was actively rewriting the history of. So what was a poignant anecdote about the concept of the love of a true vs false parent dating from a period when Yahweh was married to the fertility mother goddess Asherah ends up just sort of randomly in there, surrounded by a bunch of claims about how Yahweh is a divine parent and if you don't acknowledge him as that he's going to smite you.

So it may have simply been changing it back to an earlier perspective. Potentially even informed by the above.

In fact, if you look extra-canonically, you can see Jesus saying:

Jesus said, "Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore."

(Solomon's story above related to the child of a prostitute.)