Subjective Morality

[dave_littler]

I’ve had a thought rumbling around in my head in recent months - a product of one of my occasional and innumerable hypothetical debates with theists - which a post this morning on the atheist community prompted me to begin to formulate more textually.

It runs along similar lines to a lot of my thoughts on this topic (which you can view as pedantry,

Comments

[dave_littler]

It seems that the whole omniscient/omnipotent/omnibenevolent thing is another ret-con, or at least a very liberal re-inerpretation of certain cherry-picked words and phrases in the original text. I mean, if you read the older books of the bible, it paints a picture of a god who is fallible, can be surprised, who is capable of acts of pettiness and spite which he can be talked out of or later regret. This isn't the modern "force of nature" god we think of today; this is more in line with the Greek or Babylonian gods who were his contemporaries at the time.

In the time and place where this god was created, most of the gods were basically very powerful, and usually flawed hero-figures (often based upon real-life kings and such!), and the earliest versions of this god were certainly little different in this respect. It's only later worshippers - much later! - that decided to apply the traits of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.

I find it a wearisome act of excuse-making to even try to analyze the early of the stories of the bible with the assumption that the character written therein to have had these traits, when they plainly had not been introduced into the mythology yet by that point.

[echan314]

My brain hurts from all this.

I mean, basically the bible was written by dudes about their God and then reinterpreted and reinterpreted and translated and reinterpreted and then translated from the translation until what we have is something very much like what you'd get if you threw this through google translate's translations of four or five languages back to back.

[dave_littler]

You're mostly right.

Like I was saying to skittish_dirby elsewhere in this ppost, the mythology which the earliest Hebrews came up with is actually a simplified, bastardized version of an older religion which had been practiced in the region we now know as Israel; basically, there was a huge cultural crash and burn, and the people there were set back a couple of centuries. In the process, their religion went through a big revamp, and what had once been a polytheism became a monotheism; the other gods were pruned away, and the father-god, El, became Yahweh, the god of the Jews and later the Christians.

El was a much simpler creature than the later version, more like a tribal hero-god, of the sort that was common of the time.

I would LOVE to know the history of El; I suspect he started off as some flesh-and-blood guy. Probably a king or something. Sadly, that culture was so completely over-written by the later Jews that we're lucky we even know what we do about them. We're unlikely to ever know very much more.