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?

Which god amillion? And while we're at it can I ask what your personal situation is with Allah?

I vaguely believed in a Christian God while I was in primary school as that was what I was taught. I also believed in ghosts, Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster at the same age with much the same level of conviction.

By the time I got to early teens I was seriously questioning it all and realising that, actually, the version of Christianity I'd heard about (basic, common or garden Anglican) didn't make sense. There were just too many questions about how God supposedly behaved, the deeply dubious morality of many of His reported actions, and whether the Bible represents anything that's seriously worth listening to. And, no matter who I asked, I never did get any answers that either didn't raise a whole load more questions or (usually with the clay-and-the-potter or the god-moves-in-mysterious-ways cliches) I was basically told I was asking questions I shouldn't be asking.

As I've got older I've looked into lots of religions in much more depth and have concluded that none of them make coherent sense. Sure, many of them have great stories and many of them have interesting moral lessons but, equally, all of them also have moments where you end up thinking "Hang on, if this God is supposed to have that nature, why on earth did He/She just do that?"

You could, of course, then just view the Bible as a collection of old stories that is not to be taken literally (as, I think, Holoferneses more-or-less does) but then that just leads you into the quagmire of trying to justify why you pay attention to any of it.

In realising there were no Gods, I never saw it as deliberately throwing anything away. It's much more about realising that regarding superstitions as Eternal Truth is not a sound basis for living my life.

It's this one amillion :)

headinhands, you are stilla Christian and I think you know the bible as much as I do. You have said elsewhere that you have backslid. I dont think you have yet rejected it,but me going through with you what is easily read in the bible,when you know most of it anyway,doesnt really make much sense for me to do with you.

Snorbs on the other hand is yet to become a Chrisitan and is asking very viable questions that she has not maybe had answers to before.

amillionyears - can I ask why it matters so much, to you personally and in general, whether people are or are not Christians?

amillion what is your current relationship with Allah? Or Zeus? Or Krishna?

Love.

I'm yet to become a Muslim, Jew, Pagan, Buddhist, Mormon, Sikh, Scientologist, Hindu or Subgenius either.

But maybe your answers could be the ones to convert me! Here are some of the questions I have never received convincing answers for:

1. Lot's wife got turned to a pillar of salt for merely turning to look at the genocide God was carrying out. How was that moral? Or, if it was an allegorical story, what are we supposed to learn from that detail?

2. God planned for Jesus to be killed as a blood-sacrifice to Himself (which in itself raises all sorts of ethical questions. If God so wanted to absolve humans from sin, why couldn't He just do that without killing anyone?) Therefore the people involved - Caiaphas, Annas, Pilate, the Roman soldiers etc - were all carrying out God's plan that God needed to happen. What happened to their free will? It seems to me that God set up a bunch of people to arrange for someone to be killed. How is that moral?

3. Did the dead bodies of the saints really rise from the grave when Jesus died? If so, how come no-one mentions it other than Matthew? If not, how can we believe anything else Matthew wrote if he's prepared to lie about something that big?

D' you know, this thread's got me thinking...the thing about Christanity (I can't speak for other religions as that'd be preumptuous) is that it's about following a person, the person of Jesus. The centre of Christian faith isn't a text or a series of dogmatic statements, but Jesus. So it's no problem to me that people disagree about various issues, or read the Bible differently to one another (although I think I can defend my way of understanding the Bible, as it currently stands). I can change my mind about how to understand bits of the Bible because ultimately, my faith doesn't depend on either toeing a particular hermeneutical line, or Getting It Right. My faith is in Jesus, and the Bible witnesses to Jesus. IME trying to understand very old texts is quite hard some of the time, and we need a good dose of humility to do it well. Just as well, as I say, that the centre of Christian faith is a person, not a text.

There seems to be an assumption that Christianity doesn't work or isn't valid unless everyone experiences it exactly the same. But Christains aren't <a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?num=10&hl=en&biw=1600&bih=696&tbm=isch&tbnid=pp9KXmwKRQ7ExM:&imgrefurl=www.startrekdesktopwallpaper.com/new_wallpaper/Star_Trek_Borg_Cube_freecomputerdesktopwallpaper_1024.shtml&docid=G6CZRfIhnfzsOM&imgurl=www.startrekdesktopwallpaper.com/new_wallpaper/Star_Trek_Borg_Cube_freecomputerdesktopwallpaper_1024.jpg&w=1024&h=768&ei=gcF-UJ3lNefI0AW3jIGoDQ&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=544&sig=109544042267910740141&page=2&tbnh=143&tbnw=175&start=23&ndsp=36&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:20,i:220&tx=87&ty=79" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Borg and resistance isn't futile! :)

Snorbs, there's a lovely long thread about why Jesus died. Worth a skim if you have time! :)

But Holo - how does a 'relationship' with Jesus - or any idea of who Jesus might have been - arise except from the Bible? Once you've got the idea of this relationship, how do you know there's anything more to it outside of your own head.

Well yes, it's kind of circular really. Jesus lived and died before the Gospls were written (obviously!) so faith in Jesus pre-dates the writing of the Bible. People wrote the texts that became the NT because of their faith in Jesus. Then after the writing of the Bible, the Bible became the witness to Jesus, so people like me come along 2000 years(ish) later and are drawn to faith in Jesus. So it kind of goes Jesus - Bible - Jesus. Do you SWIM?

There seems to be an assumption that Christianity doesn't work or isn't valid unless everyone experiences it exactly the same.

I think you've missed the point quite a lot. It's very plainly obvious that every Christian (and adherents of other religions) has their own subtly or not so subtly unique view of their faith.

The question that I and, I think, GlassofRose and Grimma have been exploring is how those individual views of faith may form. If someone said "I believe Jesus is the Lord and faith in him is the only way to heaven and that's it" then that's no skin off my nose. If someone says "I see the Bible as the literal Word Of God and try to follow it as closely as possible" then, again, that's cool with me.

If someone says "I believe the Bible is the literal Word of God and try to follow it as closely as possible" and then it becomes clear that, actually, there's lots of bits of the Bible they don't follow because they have reasoned that those bits don't apply, or were allegorical, or just too difficult or inconvenient, then that piques my interest as it seems to me they're saying one thing and doing another. Of course they're free to do that but I do find it curious and I'm fascinated to learn how they have reached that accommodation.

Yes, I find it fascinating too! And quite alarming sometimes...

I was thinking of the perennial posts that go along the lines of 'If you were God and wanted to get your messsage across, wouldn't you make sure that everyone got it right?', as if the diversity of expressions of faith somehow constitute evidence against the validity of faith.

So homophobia is a mere expression of faith now?

How can god tell Christian A that homosexuality is okay but Christian B that it's a perversion. If they've both got this 2 way relationship on the go how can god tell them both different things?

I think the question of "If you were God and wanted to get your messsage across, wouldn't you make sure that everyone got it right?" is a hugely important one that, again, I have yet to hear a coherent answer for. But that is a separate point to the ones we have been discussing here.

I suspect that Lot, his wife and his daughters didn't exist at all and, instead, the whole story was concocted to "explain" a natural disaster that befell the cities.

In doing so the manufacturers of the story cynically exploited the deaths of hundreds to produce their clumsy morality tale that, like so many other stories in the Bible, spread fear of God's Big Stick O' Smiting to promote blind obedience in the priesthood Him.

But that's just me.

If the story's been corrupted what can we really learn from it other than the unreliability of oral history?

'we'd need the original'.

Shucks, if only god had thought ahead. What a shame that this incident has been recorded in such a way that it makes god look like an egotistical monster.

If the story's been corrupted what can we really learn from it other than the unreliability of oral history?

Preachers can extract a moral story - often very little to do with the original - from just about anything. You only have to listen to Platitude Thought for the Day a few times, let alone attend church for long enough

(irresistably reminded of Alan Bennetts classic parody 'My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man' )