My husband and I were on a rare date this weekend, and we had a great time...so I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how Abraham (of the famous Abraham/Isaac/Jacob trio) came up in conversation.
At one point, however, hubs turns to me and says, "Seriously, 'Gina, if I got out of bed one morning and told you that God had told me to take our son for a walk into a neighboring community and KILL HIM, what would you say?"
"..................Um..............................................He didn't did He?"
"No."
"Just checking. Okay, then, I'd probably grab the first available item I could use for self-defense - a kitchen knife, maybe, if I couldn't beat you to the gun safe - and I would defend our children tooth and nail from your crazy-ass self while simultaneously screaming at our children to dial 911 so I could have you committed to an insane asylum. If, after a respectable amount of time, you did not improve, I'd seek a divorce. If I even imagined that any 'improvement' on your part was feigned, I'd divorce you and whisk our kids away somewhere where I could change our identities and never see you again. Basically, I'd protect my children...even from their Dad."
"That's what I thought." Then came a pause, and then, "So what the hell was wrong with Abraham's wife?!"
I thought it over for a moment, and then said, "Nothing. She didn't exist."
The conversation continued in a different vein at that point, but O...M...GOODNESS. Why had I never considered what Sarah was thinking? Why, as a WOMAN, had I not thought about her potential reaction to Abraham's sheathing his knife and heading off to a mountain with Isaac in tow?
Oh, I remember now: women in the Bible are insignificant.
In fact, women in ALL "scripture" are insignificant.
And so are women in the LDS church, who are taught-without-being-taught (thanks to decades of studying "scripture") that women are insignificant.
But Sarah aside, how is it that a Bedouin a few thousand years ago who is all ready to murder his son because he heard a voice tell him to is NOT considered CERTIFIABLE? How is it that a teenager hacking off a rich man's head and dressing up in the dead guy's clothes to steal his stuff (Nephi!) because "God told him to" is a HERO? Or good old Lot ready to hand over his young, virginal daughters to would-be ANGEL RAPISTS is the ONE GUY in all the city who is SAVED?
I could go on forever about the Old Testament (and may yet in another post), but let's limit this one to JUST the crazy guys who were rewarded for sick, twisted stuff.
Who is game? Comment with your favorite scriptural nut case who did what they did because God said to, or who did something awful in an attempt to please God. GO. And have fun with it. ;)
The daughters of Lot. They slept with their father when he was drunk, and both got pregnant. That is really gross! I don't even want to think about that.
ReplyDeleteWhat would make things easier for a lot of people in this world, I think, is if religious types would stop insisting that the Bible/Book of Mormon/[Insert other religious text here] was LITERAL. It's what prompts people (who really aren't very nice about it) like Bill Maher to make a documentary about them and ridicule them the whole time (which is worth watching, BTW). If it's not literal, then it can be metaphoric, and a bunch of us wouldn't have the urge to continually PROVE they are wrong or at the very least, misguided. If it wasn't literal, and was more metaphoric, say, to teach a moral, lesson, or other valuable idea, a lot of confusion, hypocrisy, and argument would be avoided. Does this make any sense--or is it just me?
ReplyDeleteI'm less concerned with whether people think that God literally or metaphorically told someone to kill his own kid, and more concerned with whether they think it would be okay to kill your own kid if a god tells you to do so.
DeleteAnd whether they pray to a god that they think is allowed to tell them to do that.
There was that guy in the old testament, Jephtah, I'm too lazy to look up the passage so I'll just recite what I remember, who took his army to slaughter some people. After the successful slaughter he promised his god that he would kill the first living thing (thinking it would be a lamb or some cow or something) that he saw upon entering his hood (city for the ghetto speak challenged). But his daughter came running up to him with arms open happy to see "daddy." Some bum was probably sitting on the hood wall thinking, "Sorry kid, your daddy is a mass murderer and complete idiotic zealot." The father couldn't eat his words so he had a fire started and burned the girl crispy. God was pleased.
ReplyDelete