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[smick]

Mysterious ways, indeed.

I think it's a parable.   God's all, "Get out! See the sights!  Don't hide away!  Don't pull your turtleneck up over your head!"

[Ben-San]

You know there's no quicker way to undermine the respectability of your arguments than HURR HURR OTHER LANGUAGES SURE SOUND FUNNY, right? Well, I guess there is, but it involves replacing letters with numbers.

Anyway, the shai'tan in the Book of Job is not the later Christian devil. Shai'tan means "an accuser", an angel tasked by God with the job of keeping Him honest by questioning His judgment. There are a lot of possible interpretations of the Book of Job, but "God and the Devil made a bet" is an extremely shallow and inaccurate one.

[littlefallsmets]

Okay, but nailing me on having a little fun with the name of God and interpreting the identity of the creature God was bargaining with through the modern religious zeitgeist doesn't change the jist of that story. If the God of the Old Testament wants to prove a point or has a wild hair up the ass, loyalty and contract and covenant don't mean a thing. The great mass of humanity means nothing in the face of that deity's whim and vanity, no matter what those people do, no matter how they fulfill their end of the bargain.

That's the point, not my playing around a little because we're on an internet message board for a comedy strip and so interjecting some playfulness is half the impetus of the place.

[Ben-San]

Well, my point is that your "playing around" presupposes that everyone finds Hebrew's writing system as apparently hilarious as you do. At least, I don't recall you referring to Jesus Christ-CrossGonnaMakeYouJumpJump or whatnot.

Anyway, the contract isn't "cut a deal with me and things won't ever suck for you". Never was, anyone who says otherwise is lying. It rains on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. The deal is that after it all ends, the ones with a contract get picked back up for the afterparty.

Would the hurricanes and storms and financial disaster and boils have gone away if Job had said "God, go fuck yourself"? General experience suggests that they would not have. What Job's wife didn't understand is that Job's faith wasn't that things would never suck for him, and God wasn't reneging on the contract by making things suck - Job's faith is that he would be rewarded at the coming of the messiah.

If you don't like the odds on that deal, that's fine. Nobody's twisting your arm (at least, the Jews aren't). If you do like the odds on that deal, then go for it.

[littlefallsmets]

If I haven't made jokes about the disciples not letting Jesus prepare chicken because of a fear of cross-contamination around here, it's not being I'm particular pro-Christianity and anti-something else, I'm pretty equally sceptical of all the cosmic Ponzi scheme that people call faith and... it just didn't come up.

My personal journal's full of equal-opportunity mockery of all systems where some douchebag asks you to put money in a plate (and offer your children up for sex and/or battle) because he has an in with some invisible jealous unprovable monster and if you pay enough, you can get an afterlife that no one's ever come back from to prove.

Yes, yes, yes, Job's faith isn't about the now, I get that. But that God would treat the dude like a tinkertoy and his family like a mentally-disturbed child with a magnifying glass treats ants... that's still just being a dick. Worse, that's being a dick EXTRA just to prove that you can be a dick and get away with it, which is even worse than being a dick just because you're ornery or unhinged.

This wasn't "oh things are gonna suck for you, Job, you're gonna stub your toe and get a cold" this was "your family that has nothing directly to do with you or my sidebet? Yeah, they're dead forever and that's fine because I'm winning a bet!"

In all the interpretations of the Middle Eastern monotheism, the big cheese is a jealous petty prideful moody schmuck, not just the Hebrew tradition.

I certainly didn't mean to focus on just mainstream Judiasm, though, and if that's how you perceived it, I apologize, that was not my intent.

[jay-ell]

Is nobody gonna call me on the fact that I'm OK with circumcision on religious grounds but when the same argument is applied to female genital mutilation I'm totally opposed? 

I mean...it's a popular position, but that doesn't mean it's not still a bit hypocritical. 

[wombat]

It's not hypocritical because it's apples and oranges. The male version doesn't interfere with function in the same way. Presumably you would not be OK with a religious argument for ritually cutting off a hand or a leg, right?

[miles]

Is nobody gonna call me on the fact that I'm OK with circumcision on religious grounds but when the same argument is applied to female genital mutilation I'm totally opposed? 

I mean...it's a popular position, but that doesn't mean it's not still a bit hypocritical. 

By calling you on it I'd basically be admitting that I was mutilated. I have enough body image issues as it is.

[JorgeFabregas]

I'll throw in that I'm un, for those keeping score.

[pmcd9]

I just canned Smells for a post she made over a year ago.

[littlefallsmets]

I read the newspaper every day, Ash, and everyday the human race gets closer to wiping itself out in an argument over whether the Easter Bunny shits green eggs striped red or red eggs striped green... nevermind the fact that no one can show an egg of either type, let alone the great lupine beast itself and... yeah, it drives me nuts. Makes me irrationally mad, makes me ramble-mad, yeah. Sometimes the lack of a mouth and the need to scream gets the better of me, yeah, and I apologize for the annoyance.

All I can tell you is that it's a far crazier and far more grating thing when its trapped in your own head. If there's any solace in that... solace away.

[Ben-San]

If I haven't made jokes about the disciples not letting Jesus prepare chicken because of a fear of cross-contamination around here, it's not being I'm particular pro-Christianity and anti-something else, I'm pretty equally sceptical of all the cosmic Ponzi scheme that people call faith [...] all systems where some douchebag asks you to put money in a plate (and offer your children up for sex and/or battle) because he has an in with some invisible jealous unprovable monster and if you pay enough, you can get an afterlife that no one's ever come back from to prove [...]
I certainly didn't mean to focus on just mainstream Judiasm, though, and if that's how you perceived it, I apologize, that was not my intent.

Hell of an apology there, chief.

So I think you missed my point.

If you ever find a supreme being who will make things stop being bad for you, will make your back stop hurting and your junk stop sagging and your house stop rotting and the weather clear up and the locusts go home and the tornados stop spinning and the volcanos stop belching because of any goddamn thing you did for him.. awesome. Sign a deal with that dude if you like.

I mean, you seem to think you have a much better bargaining position in the humans-God transaction than you do. You can take the contract you're offered, or you can leave it; God has atoms to spin and galaxies to explode rather than dick around bargaining with you. The contract offers a resurrection if you follow the rules set forth. Now, the interpretation of how closely and literally you have to follow them is what rabbinic study is about, but if you don't like your odds of getting paid off, don't sign the fuck*ng dotted line. When Job's wife asks "Why don't you curse God? God is the one who visits all this on you?", the correct answer is "What would be the frigging point?"

Does this sound pessimistic? Yeah, it does a little. But it's also an acknowledgement that none of us down here are omniscient omnipotent beings with unknowable goals and that trying to understand the motivations of one is pretty pointless for us.

Did you ever read that issue of Booster Gold where Rex Hunter goes back in time and kills Lex Luthor as a baby, and then decades later the Sun-Eater destroys humanity because Lex Luthor wasn't around to clone Superboy, and he gets told "Yeah, this is why you don't fuck with the timestream, because history is bigger than you can possibly imagine?" That's what's going on here. God allows Lex Luthor because He wants Superboy.

Have I brought my discussion to a sufficiently lay level here? There's also my analogy a while ago about pet dogs that someone can probably find.

..oh, and also, it wasn't "to settle a bet", but I already addressed that and you don't give a shit, so whatever.

[miles]

Job isn't the best example. There are examples in the Books of Moses that not only make a better case for LFM's point (or what I take it to be), but maybe contradict:

I mean, you seem to think you have a much better bargaining position in the humans-God transaction than you do. You can take the contract you're offered, or you can leave it; God has atoms to spin and galaxies to explode rather than dick around bargaining with you.

Maybe, because I think your main point is that God isn't going to waste his time bargaining, because he's God. But it's also clear that God has a stake in human affairs beyond creation. I mean, he's constantly telling Moses and his clan what and what not to do. And not only that, he has them do some FUCKED UP shit. Like, on a few occasions, he directs Moses to have his people go destroy an entire nation, adults and children, oh, except for the young female virgins. And it's not like they kept them for housework. So, a contemporary reader, unversed in rabbinic thought, sure, is thinking "Really, God? Rape? Genocide? Sex slavery? This is kind of fucked up. Possibly bullshit." Maybe this is just taking it prima facie when it requires more careful consideration, but it can't really be just set aside with a "If God does it, it's not illegal" or a "God works in mysterious ways, unknown to feeble humans." And certainly not by arguing that he's too busy doing his God thing. I also think that these examples support what LFM (and Hitchens, Dawkins, et al.) are getting at. God seems to provide an awfully convenient excuse to do whatever the fuck you want (not that that excuse is always needed or used).

[Ben-San]

Nations make war with other nations. Nations eliminate other nations, and, until quite recently, they take slaves in the process. Can't really blame religion for that one. At most you can say it lets people sleep better at night after committing atrocities, but so does "we did it to protect freedom" or "we did it for the children" or any other excuse you choose, theistic or atheistic.

[littlefallsmets]

The flip-side, however, is that when certain people want to make war for more Earthly reasons (pre-emptive defense, profit, revenge, profit, madness, profit) there's nothing quite as effective in making people feel like it is okay to die and okay to suspend their respect for human life and kill than arguing that the Absent Divine wants it. Because religious argument is the ultimate easy out from any responsibility to temporal concerns "this isn't about this life, it's about the next life and so this life's rules don't apply... Thou Shalt Kill Heathens!" or "die in battle, get-into-heaven-free card!" or so on.

There are few ways to more effectively grease the wheels of war than telling people that God wants war and what God wants God gets, God help us all.

You are, of course, skirting all the times when it is claimed in various scriptures directly and specifically that divinity wants/demands/encourages war and war atrocities, as miles pointed out much more succinctly than my overworked mind could.