For a number of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot recently on way too many things (yes, more than usual!) to the point where I’ve read 8 books in the last 2 weeks, written 2 short stories and still had time to think about things that are totally random (as usual…)
Anyhow, I was thinking about how peoples interpretations and versions of stories and history itself varies over time and from mouth to mouth, and I remembered a line that was like, “when you hear 2 eyewitness accounts of an accident, you begin to wonder about history.” As luck would have it I was reading a piece about Noah and the Ark and when Id finished I remembered all the stories from the old Testament and all that became so much a part of popular culture like Moses, Noah, Jonah and others…
But there’s something we either choose to forget or just do by default… If you read the old stories as they are, you have a God that’s angry and intolerant and extremely vengeful. I thought about it and you had Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden right? Well God puts them there, and then tells them to do whatever they want so long as they don’t eat the forbidden fruit! Well they do anyway, and God’s pissed and kicks them out. First off, why put it there if you didn’t want them to eat it? Hell, being God, there’s no reason why. And for those who say that God knew all along and it was part of his plan, bugger off man…
So here you have the parents of ALL the human race who first chance they get disobey their creator and then he expects they’re gonna behave. Why? So he gets pissed off again and floods the world and destroys all his creations in a deluge, the humans that had been his “protégés”, made in his own image. Ok, then we have the God that actually tells Moses that he’s “vengeful and jealous” and the same God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they couldn’t find even one good person in either city. This SAME God goes on to put Jonah through hell (and a whales belly) until he agrees to go to Nineveh to deliver the same message to them, only to pardon them… ok, maybe he was in a good mood…
Here’s where I get confused. You have this God that makes people shit themselves and destroy in the blink of an eye, and then you have his son coming down to be amongst the humans (horrible as they are) and he teaches them everything that’s the OPPOSITE of what we’ve seen so far! Now you have a God that’s kind, benevolent and merciful. You have teachings of love and brotherhood and turning the other cheek, even in the face of infidels and blasphemers. Sounds like a whole different God to me, shit he even let his son die for us!
One thought I had was that maybe like all kids, Jesus was rebelling against his father and didn’t like the way he did things. Hey it’s a possibility, be open-minded… Then there’s the thought, maybe God decided that he needed to change management styles since the last one didn’t really teach us anything of value.
The problem as I see it though is that the things that Christ taught were beautiful and worthy of divinity and grace. But even after all these centuries and millennia, we’ve still not learnt a damn thing. Sure there are like in every religion people that live by the truth of what that faith is meant to be, but they are a truly SMALL minority sadly… But this disparity in the ways of the divine, seems like people would have wanted to study this to understand, “did we just get this wrong?” maybe, we did, but I haven’t come across anything that answers these questions.
I would imagine that this would be the hottest topic in Christian circles, but haven’t seen any signs… but then what do I know… I’m just a blind man in the woods…
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