this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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This is a hilarious way of putting it, and as someone who hasn't been all that steeped in christianity to be very familiar with it, that actually told me a lot π
That's only the kind and charitable interpretations. There are ample stories of God directly murderizing people just for disobeying a direct order.
IMO, it's all complete codswallop that's been misconstrued off of the simple recordings of history and an attempt at passing on wisdom about which rulers were good and why.
After all, all it takes is some narcissistic piece of shit emperor to declare they shall be referred to as "god", and no other rulers will even be recorded as having a similar honorific ... and bam. God as described in the Bible suddenly makes perfect sense being a fickle piece of shit because he's just a bastardized history of seemingly good rulers dealing with completely different problems in completely different ways.
Now, I don't think that's all of it. There is obviously much spirituality and baby's first philosophy wrapped up in there, too.
This isn't even all that far from the popular hypotheses about the history behind some of the stuff in the Bible, but the reason why the God of the Bible seems so damn fickle is that it's likely an amalgamation of two different early Israelite / Canaanite gods: El and YHWH aka. Yahweh (and that name probably sounds familiar. Guess why!) If you're interested in history, check out the book A History of God by Karen Armstrong, a nun-turned-atheist-historian. It's an extremely interesting look into the prevailing hypotheses about the history of the 3 Abrahamic religions.
Now, it's been a while since I read that book or about this in general so I'm not 100% sure I'm not mixing Yahweh and El up, but I think in general the ones where God goes all "FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR" to some person or nation are El. In general in the "Elohist" passages that descend from stories of El, God is described as something really abstract or non-human, such as the burning bush. Also, interestingly the name still pops up in the (Hebrew-language) Bible in various forms.
In the "Yahwist" passages, God is described in a more personal and intimate way, and again if I remember right Yahwew is the more laid-back "facet" of the Biblical God. Interestingly the OG YHWH really hated farming and farmers, and there's a general theme that farming and soil are somehow connected to evil, and you can see some that in the Bible; Cain was a farmer, for example. My own pet hypothesis for this is that that dates back to the agricultural revolution, when conservatively minded people would absolutely have thought that that newfangled woke farming bullshit is going to destroy society, and this sense of farming as a source of evil could have gotten incorporated into religion. Yahweh is also why depictions of God are forbidden.
Historical regional rulers did, however, affect eg. which god was favored, or what was part of the official religion, and on top of that a lot of the stories of different rulers and even some of the prophets in the Bible are essentially self-insert fanfic for some king or another.
Oh excellent, sounds like a book I'll have to pick up so I can put some real substance behind my hunches. Thanks for the recommend.
If we're going to take the Bible as stories that are somewhat partially true, I'd like to imagine that God as described was or is a supernatural nth dimensional being that allows for the manifestation of the human conscience in our moments of greatest suffering, but upholds a disassociative desire for a greater justice or harmony that can appear to many as an almost alien destructive nature and the tendency to punish, while another aspect or being above us, perhaps the same one, is basically a chilled out stoner who enjoys being lazy, exploring mushrooms as food, but doesn't like the idea of farming and sedentary lifestyle.
Please enjoy my verbal diarrhoea haha