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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked..
« on: August 01, 2022, 08:54:17 PM »Interesting point of view. My perspective is a little different. I was educated in a fundamentalist Christian school up until high school. Obviously the indoctrination didn't stick but I believed it at the time. So when it comes to stories like the Binding of Isaac my opinions on them are pretty intense.Sort of. My view of the Binding of Isaac is that it must be read in the context in which it was written — that is, the ancient Near East at a time when it was dominated by polytheistic cultures that routinely performed ritual sacrifice. In that context, the story makes perfect sense as a way of differentiating Yahweh from the other gods of the time. This isn't even a great leap of faith, as the Pentateuch makes frequent explicit references to the polytheistic cultures of the time and the fact that their practices were viewed as wicked by Yahweh. That is what the Bible says its context is.
You may read a story like that the same way you might watch an episode of Evangelion.
Once you read it in that context, it follows that it has absolutely no moral value in the modern world. I don't think that contradicts belief in God at all; it merely requires acknowledging that Genesis, as a legitimate account of God's early interaction with humans, was authored by humans in a specific time and place and cannot be removed from that context or the embellishments that go with it.
I read a story like that with the understanding that it's taught at every Christian Sunday school in a very uncritical way. In a Christian school the moral of that story is if God tells you to commit an atrocity then you must commit an atrocity.And that, to me, is a problem. Not the story itself, which is perfectly harmless if viewed in the proper context, but the insistence that there is one correct interpretation. Supposedly God gave us free will, so why not let children use it when learning about him?