That god was always eternally pissed at us for something. Jesus has had to delay his coming so many times now that we have all lost count. All because we were not ready. We needed more time to be corrected and spanked.
Its no wonder so many have left the church over the decades when this is the only god they ever heard about.
Vengeful and angry and ready to strike us down for being such worthless worms.
God Is Disappointed in You is for people who would like to read the Bible... if it would just cut to the chase. Stripped of its arcane language and its interminable passages of poetry, genealogy, and law, every book of the Bible is condensed down to its core message, in no more than a few pages each.
Written by Mark Russell with cartoons by New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, God Is Disappointed in You is a frequently hilarious, often shocking, but always accurate retelling of the Bible, including the parts selectively left out by Sunday School teachers and church sermons. Irreverent yet faithful, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants to see past the fog of religious agendas and cultural debates to discover what the Bible really says.
THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD
ReplyDeleteTaoism: shit happens.
Hare Krisna: shit happens, rama rama ding ding.
Hinduism: this shit happened before.
Islam: if shit happens, take a hostage.
Zen: what is the sound of shit happening?
Buddhism: when shit happens, is it really shit?
Confucianism: confucious says "shit happens".
7th Day Adventism: shit happens on saturdays.
Protestantism: shit won't happen if I work harder.
Catholicism: if shit happens, I deserve it.
Jehova's Witness: knock knock, shit happens.
Mormon: shit happens again, again, and again.
Judaism: why does this shit aleays happen to me?
feel free to add to the list,
drive-by-philosopher
The bible is deliberately written in such a way that many verses can be viewed at various depths and from various angles. So a person can always learn something new no matter how many times they have read their bible. This Mickey Mouse bible does not allow this. The only time I can see this as being reasonable is for very young children. There are warning threats in the bible by God Himself about adding or subtracting from His inspired word. It's a brave or foolish man who writes and publishes such books as this one.
ReplyDeleteThe perfect COG Bible would contain the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation only.
ReplyDeleteDennis,
ReplyDeleteand the book of Acts the sequel ;-) and perhaps the one book "harmony of the gospels" starring gta as the rugged jesus.
nck
Given the recent blog entry about answered prayer (or lack thereof), one would think that there would be those who are disappointed in God.
ReplyDeleteHey, look at it from His point of view: He created everything; everything belongs to Him; He has every right to do anything He very well darn pleases; we have no rights; we are the ants in the little glass ant farm; we have no standing to question Him at all.
Unfortunately, the latest and greatest cosmological theory, which has some very compelling features and would explain a great deal, posits that the Universe has always existed -- after all, no matter which direction we look, it goes on and on and we've never seen the edge of it (we only sort of assume that it's 13.5 billion years old, but in the 1960s, one cosmologist claimed it was more like 100 billion years old and had compelling evidence). So if the Universe has always existed, God didn't create it. That would mean that if there were a God, He was a creation of it.
From there, it gets really dicey, because God simply could not be what the Bible claims He is, and, in fact, is only ideas about what God would be from those who might not be that qualified to tell us. Inspired? Perhaps, but not directly and not in excruciating objective detail. God didn't dictate the Bible. In fact, there are those who have fairly strong evidence that many, if not most, of the Books of the Bible were forged by people claiming they were who they simply were not. II Peter is an example of this, is as 6 epistles of Paul (and not to put too fine a point on it, no one but no one had access to the original documents at the time the Bible(s) was (were) assembled by THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH!).
So, as Dennis said, the perfect COG Bible would contain the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation only, keeping with their narcissism and desire to be God themselves, acting every bit like psychopaths on steroids.
This is exactly the god I was raised to fear by the COGs. He is a god who has deliberately made you human, and then demanded that unless you become superhuman, he will not be pleased, and blamed you for the fact that you are merely as he made you. Not that this view cannot be biblically justified, it certainly can, which is why I'm not a christian anymore.
ReplyDelete7.02. In case you have never heard, stars eventually cool down. From memory it's about 10 billion years before they go cold. So the universe could not always have existed. Your explanation side steps where the physical laws of the universe came from. And why the fundamental constants such as the speed of light, are just right. If they were different, there would be no suns. Alas, the universe is Gods plaything. Being made in Gods image, does give us rights in His eyes. God does not rule by whim. Many times people questioned Christ, and he did not go ballistic, but rather answered the questions. God, like every reasonable parent, allows questioning. What boggles me is something like a dog, or a cat. These are engineering miracles. Observing their cute and lovable traits, the God who created these, is very different than the God portrayed in the world and in this blog.
ReplyDelete2:04, Given your lack of understanding of cosmology, you really shouldn't be talking about it and then using that to draw conclusions.
ReplyDeleteThe age of a star has nothing to do with the age of the universe. New stars are being born, such as those in the star nurseries in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula (M16). Our own sun is only about 5-6 billion years old, and is in the middle of the main sequence, eventually to begin the process of dying in another 5-6 billion years. Moreover, our solar system was born out of the ashes of the supernova explosion of a star many times larger than our sun, which is how the heavy radioactive elements such as the Uranium isotopes on our planet were formed.
The "physical laws of the universe" are not an actual thing. Nobody thinks the laws of the universe were written by a cosmic legislature, or that they are enforced by angels or something. They are constructs we humans use to catalog phenomena we repeatedly observe, such "gravitational attraction." But those phenomena arise from the mechanics of the universe, which scientists are still struggling to understand. Now we understand gravity as the "cheerio effect" which occurs when mass deforms the fabric of spacetime.
The argument that the universe is "fine-tuned" for life, to explain the "setting" of values for the strengths of fields or the speed of light is, according to Sean Carrol of CalTech, the best cosmological argument that apologists have, but is still a "terrible argument." According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, if the universe were the size of your home, the combined quantity of it that would not be hostile to life would be about the size of a proton, so it's a little hard to say that a universe that is so incredibly hostile to life has been "fine-tuned" for it. It's a profoundly geocentrically biased argument. The argument from the perceived cuteness of kittens and puppies is a much worse argument than the fine-tuning argument.
Then there's the problem that Doug brought up, that the bible appears to have been forged, which you declined to address.
3.29 PM That the laws of physics and chemistry are human constructs is ridiculous. Did you study these topics in high school? If the fundamental constants were only slightly different, there would be no suns and no life on earth. All your 'arguments' are of the type used by various COG writers for decades. They bring up a point that contradicts some viewpoint/conclusion, give a child like, mickey mouse explanation, and then dismiss the point as if they have answered it. No, they didn't satisfactorily explain the objection at all. There is only the appearance of an explanation. This is one of those deceitful logic fallacies, "I did too acknowledge your objection, so your objection is wrong, and I must be right." If you have the truth, why play such games?
ReplyDelete3.29PM. PS, on further thought, it's the 'argument from authority' logic fallacy, but the 'authority' is used to invalidate rather than 'prove' some point of view. That is, 'it's not true cause I say so.'
ReplyDeleteI thought the dog was an invention of the British to hunt fox.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2005/12/frankenfido.html
nck