The Book of Job

[Machadaynu]

I mentioned my thoughts on The Book of Job in the 'Back to Church' thread, and it was suggested that I start a new thread about it. So here it is.

The story of the book of Job is (to quote myself from the other thread):

God is chatting to Satan and mentions how Job is his best follower and would never lose faith. Satan essentially has a bet with God that Job would turn on God if his life wasn't so great. God, for some reason, accepts this deal with the proviso that Satan doesn't kill Job. It's not explained why God is chewing the fat with Satan rather than, say, destroying him completely, what with God being omnipotent and Satan being pure evil.

Anyway, Satan sends all sorts of illness to Job, kills all his animals, destroys his farm and kills his entire family. God, being omniscient, knew this would happen when he took on the bet - he knew Job would suffer, and he knew Job would remain true to him. Quite why he needed to prove this to Satan (pure evil, remember) is something of a mystery.

In the end God gives Job twice as many animals as before, and 10 new children, including 3 daughters that were prettier than the ones God allowed Satan to kill.

Christians see this as a story of how faith is rewarded (even if you're only suffering because God is trying to prove a point to Satan) I see it as a story of how God will use us as he sees fit, is insecure and vain and is apparently either unable, or unwilling, to resist being influenced by Satan.

I contrast God's treatment of Job, his wife and children - all "God's children" used as pawns in a game, and suffering terribly for it - and wonder what we'd make of a human father treating his children in such a way. I expect the MN opinion would be rather damning to say the least. Yet when God does it, it becomes an inspiring story, and God is love, apparently.

Christians, I am told, see the book as a lesson in why the righteous suffer. The answer, it seems, is that their all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent holy father is sometimes prone to abandoning people to the worst excesses of Satan to try and prove some kind of point to God knows who.

Seems odd to me. God does not show love in that story. God shows himself to be deeply unpleasant. Or not God.

What are your views on Job?

Kings didnt seem to mean quite the same either.There were loads of them.
I dont cherry pick,I may well have said that before.

headinhands,if you address to a specific poster,is it ok if you say who please.thanks.

I've only skim read the last couple of pages, so forgive me if I am misunderstanding, but it reads as if the Christians of whatever persuasion, are making the "evidence" (i.e. what is written in the Bible) fit their own personal beliefs and their own personal view of their deity.

There are plenty of Christians out there (equally convinced of the veracity of their beliefs) who know that people like me, and probably a few more on this thread including the Christians, are going to hell, because we don't believe their particular brand of Christianity.

As a pagan, one of the joyous things I get to witness is the moment when people begin to realise that there are alternative views of "God" other than the Abrahamic version of the Bible. It's why I tend to use the word "Divine" when talking about my relationship with whatever the Divine is. "God" as a word is too loaded in Western mythology.

world, I don't claim to 'know' that anyone is 'going to hell' That would be arrogant and disingenuous in the extreme.

I do however know that there are people here on earth who are in hell in this life, and that the God I follow requires us to do something about this, whether physically, spiritually, or both. I'm more concerned about this and inclined to leave eternal justice to the God I trust. :)

Grimma, I agree with you about science being such a wonderful and exciting thing. I wish I was better at it :) I love reading about it though.

As for cherry picking and slavery in the bible: I've said this before that those who used the bible to justify slavery were ignorant and idle in not looking into what the bible was really saying. You may say that the bible justifies slavery, and this is what the slave traders of the 17thc for example based their evil actions upon. But what they did could not be compared. For example, the bible says that if someone took and sold a person as a slave by force that person should be put to death. Not sure how the slave traders got around this one. The fact is, in the context of the culture, the biblical mentions of slavery are clearly to ensure the safety and the protection of the slaves - namely, showing God's value on each and every person, whether slave or free, male or female etc.

In the OT there was no welfare safety net. Many people could only survive through going into slavery. The bible made it clear that treating slaves badly was deplorable. In the NT, the same situation. And in addition to Paul's suggestions to slaves to honour their master, he went further and commanded masters to treat their slaves with justice and fairness. Paul makes it clearly that God values every person, and in Philemon implies that the right thing to do would be to set a slave free in a certain situation he is addressing.

You cannot use the bible to justify slavery. You can only look at the context and see that followers of God made efforts to reflect God's value on people by putting certain rules in place. Slave traders hardly reflected the spirit of this.

William Wilberforce was a committed Christian and fought this kind of evil slavery in the name of God and in the name of the word of God. His victory in this resonated back over years of oppression.

I reckon people 'cherry pick' in line with their inherent ethical nature. Wilberforce (and most of the MN posters) tend to focus on the parts of the Bible which conform to their innate decency, and interpret thus. Whereas slave traders and homophobes do a negative cherry pick to support their positions. Then there's the poor sods who get caught up in a sect which has cherry picked particular pieces for them and interpreted in unfortunate ways, and so you get the sad cases of JW parents believing its wrong for their child ot have a blood transfusion.

I agree with you Grimma, but maintain that those who have 'cherry picked' the negative bits have not read into the context and background sufficiently, and thus fitted the verses around their particular ideology. Gets my blood pressure fair up, it does

I'd therefore say that you cannot cherry pick if you want to go for a rounded and honest reading of the bible and of Christianity. As a Christian I think it is dishonest to take certain parts and make it all about them, and discount others because they're a little bit uncomfortable. Unless we're prepared to face up to and engage with such passages, we're not doing justice to our faith imo.

There are so many different forms of Abrahamic religions purely because of Cherry picking... ie. Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists, Anglicans, Anabaptists, Baptists, Calvinism, Evangelicalism, Lutheran, Methodist, Old Catholic, Roman Catholic Protestant, Pentecostal... Judaism, Islam...

Slavery in the bible isn't necessarily misinterpreted by people who want to use it to justify the wrongs they do. I think those who want to gloss over it's inclusion in the bible try to give it new meaning.

amillion - You are right it did mean servant... an unpaid one who has no choice about it.

I don't really understand the rationale behind the phrase 'cherry pick', tbh. Maybe someone who uses that phrase could explain the thinking behind it?

It means that many Christians pick and choose which bits of the Bible they pay attention to and which bits the ignore, or claim is an allegory that means something other than what it apparently says, or say "that bit doesn't apply any more". The suspicion being that they pick and choose based on convenience or because their interpretations match their prejudices.

Eg,
a) the significant number of UK Christians who cite the Bible as their reasoning for their opposition to homosexuality, versus

b) the number of Christians who have failed to heed Jesus's recommendation that his followers sell all their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.

That kind of thing.

So is the phrase 'cherry picking' predicated on the suspicion that Christians are deliberately disingenuous? Just trying to scratch beneath the surface of the rhetoric here.

I don't think its (usually) deliberate. I'd say that its pretty much inevitable that Christians have to read and interpret selectively given the contradictions and parts which don't stack up to modern ethical standards.

The Christians who cherry pick the Bible the least - literalist fundamentalists - still mostly have to be somewhat selective...and they commit the far worse error of cherry picking factual information about the real world.

So if it's inevitable, why is it seen as something that no-one wants to admit to? And IYO, Grimma, does less fruit farming ;) make fundamentalists better readers of the Bible? Just interested because this phrase always comes up on MN religion threads and, as far as I know, no-one questions it.

No-one wants to admit to cherry-picking, because as soon as you start saying that some parts of the Bible are optional, then the book's supposed infallibility as the word of God is undone. The idea of it being an absolute guide to life is destroyed, because no-one can agree on which bits should or should not be accepted as incontestable. The idea then that God makes judgment about people based on what they believe as well as (or instead of) what they do becomes a nonsense, if it is not actually possible to determine from the Bible exactly what it is that one should believe. It becomes complete pot-luck as to whether you happen to believe the right or necessary bits or not.

This probably does make fundamentalists better (in the sense of more accurate) readers of the Bible, but that is not the same thing as being better, more moral human beings, in my opinion.

I follow your argument there Thistle, but it seems that what you are implying (forgive me if I'm wrong) is that the only real, valid options of what to do with the Biblical texts are to believe them (literally? Historically? Scientifically? What does it mean to you for the Bible to be 'infallible'? What about all the literary genres?do we have to ignore them? Do we have to ignore internal development of ideas within the Bible, or is that Cherry picking?) or to ditch them.

So oddly, if this is the case, this form of atheism and biblical literalists are singing from the same hymn sheet as regards how the Bible should be read, both playing by the same hermeneutical rules. The only difference is that this form of atheism ditches the texts whereas the literalists accept them. Does that make sense to you?

Unfortuneately I personally would have to agree with you.
I think there are a sizeable number of Chrisitans who do cherry pick.

All Christians have faults.
That is part of the reason why there are so many elderly worshipers.
Christians have faults all the way till they die.

How do you understand cherry picking, million? I don't mean to be antagonistic but it's a way of thinking that is so different to my own.

My definition of cherry picking is Christians who believe in God ,but dont like parts of the bible.
I have to be careful not to judge Christians here. Chrisitans have come from all walks of life and all backgrounds.
And if Christians keep at it,their faith grows. So may come to believe parts of the bible that they previously did not.

Thistle -pretty much spot on why people don't like being called cherry pickers.

I reckon the way someone like you reads it, Holo (from all I've gathered in other threads) is way preferable to either the literalists or the many naive Christians who focus on the bits that get expounded to them, and stick mainly to NT with the odd Psalm thrown in. Fundies are IMO not good readers of the Bible because they don't attempt to understand the sources of it, they just take it blindly as The Truth, and so have to blank out much real truth.

Depends what you mean by 'believe parts of the bible' .... do you mean eg taking Genesis literally, when that runs counter to all physical evidence? Most Christians believe in Genesis as a creation myth, containing divinely inspired truths but not the literal truth (well, that's how I saw it when I was a christian). Why would your god give people eyes and the power of reason and then expect them to blindfold themselves to the true wonder of creation? Why would he make a world that looked as though it was >4 billion years old on which life had evolved over most of that time if it wasn't so - why write in rocks a different story to the one that's ended up on paper?

Holo, my view is that it is perfectly possible to read the Bible and use it as a guide to which one refers in order to help one lead a better, more beneficial, and happier life, but that insisting that one has 'special' or 'favoured' or 'better' or 'more moral' beliefs just because one accepts certain parts of the Bible to be the literal truth is nonsensical. One can also come to lead a better, more beneficial and happier life by reading, for example, the complete works of Shakespeare. I make no distinction to my life (in this world or beyond) between the beliefs that I have that the Bible is not the literal truth, and the beliefs of someone who accepts the Bible as the literal truth; other than the fact that I am rather more fond of reason and logic I see no benefit one way or the other.

I think what gets up the nose of most atheists is that many people of religion are happy to tell them that they are missing out on some benefit or advantage if they don't accept X part of Y religious text to be the 'truth', but the fact that each religious person seems to believe something slightly different doesn't quell their insistence that everyone who does not believe those things to be true has somehow got it wrong.

Grimma,are you saying you were a Christian,and are no longer a Christian?
That you have thrown it all away?

The trouble is, how do you actually define 'a Christian'? So many Christians disagree on what exactly it is that you have to accept as the literal truth from the Bible that there appears to be no consensus as to how much or what you actually have to believe in order to 'be' a Christian. Even if you reduce it down to having a belief in God and believing that Jesus was his son and was sent to save us, then you have thrown away so much of the explanation that the whole concept of 'God' and 'saving' becomes meaningless.

Are there actually a set of core beliefs that every Christian will agree that if you believe those and no more as the literal truth, then you are a Christian? I'm not sure that there are.

Romans 10 v 9
because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead,you will be saved.

Ok - but without the rest of the bible, how can you know what god is? What does being 'saved' mean?