Made a mistake of going to Sunday school today. Lesson was on Moses and the mercy of yhwh in delivering his people from Egypt through plagues, ultimately by killing all firstborn children and animals.

So the question I asked the class was this: why did god kill all the firstborn children (and in so doing destroy their families hearts) when many of them had nothing to do with Israelite bondage?

Why didn't he just kill pharaoh? Simple. Direct. Ethical at least somewhat.

No one had an answer except some weird shit about the atonement and the sacrament that totally missed the point.

What kind if sick bastard kills all the innocent children to make his point?

YHWH is a monster, and an incompetent one at that.

Glad you spoke up! MAYBE (?) you got them thinking....

yhwh ?

YHVH is the Tetragrammaton or four-letter representation of the personal name of God in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) / Old Testament. The name is considered by Jews to be too holy to write and say outside of very sacred religious/scriptural contexts. Generally the name is replaced by Adonai when the Tanakh is read. Christians don't usually have this prohibition and there are some Christian sects that actually believe it is required to address God by name as "Yahweh" which is the traditional rendering of the name or as "Jehovah",

OMG !!

It is so holy that using vowels is a sin !

*LOL*


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c93qbdqX3G4#aid=P99yOqRt9I4

Lol. Life of Brian.

Actually they (the Jews) don't write or say the name at all, even without vowels. They may replace it with Adonai in Torah readings, and colloquially many Jews will simply write "G-d" for "God".

Yahweh = god

it doesn't say Yahweh.

it says yhwh.

well, there are NO vowels in hebrew.. in any words...

Exactly. The addition of "vowel points" to Hebrew's consonant-only language didn't happen until several hundred years after the Romans first conquered Palestine. Long after the time of Christ. So, yep, YHWH.

Yes.

YHWH is a egotistical, narcistic, monster.
There is no justification in anything he supposedly did or does.

Drowning every man, woman, child, and animal save one family and one pair of each animals on a boat, because he didn't like how the human race HE himself had created had turned out.

So he killed them all and started again... from this tiny little group of people that he had saved... can you imagine the trauma and mindf#ck of the people who were saved?? How do you think they felt!??


IF he is real, I've got a massive bone to pick with that f#cker I tell ya!

I read about a Rabbi who interpreted the scripture in which the first thing Noah did when reaching dry land was to plant a vineyard. The Rabbi had gone through an experience in his life that made him realize that of course that's what Noah did, because seeing all of those dead bodies and knowing everything you knew is gone would make a person want to be drunk all the time just to cope.

I watched a program on AHC yesterday evening that explained the ten plagues scientifically. It did a pretty fair job convincing me they could have really happened.

My question has always been, didn't the first nine plagues also affect the Israelites?

YHWH would have to be some major kind of butthead if they did...

Good point. Why can't God just punish the Pharaoh? Why does he have to go kill and punish thousands of others who are totally innocent? How is that fair? It doesn't make any sense.

Can you imagine if the government of the United States went into the state of, say Iowa, and as punishment for something the governor did, went and KILLED a child from EVERY FAMILY in that state as punishment for their governor did? Yet he still leaves him in his office? Totally wrong, but somehow God gets a pass when he does things like this.

If you actually read the story you will see that none of the plagues affected the Israelies.

Cruelty to enemies was not considered bad in ancient times.
Once your army conquered a city your men looted the city, raped
the women and took for slaves everyone you didn't kill. The
alternative in such a situation to slavery was death.

Ancient gods were not all-knowing, loving beings. They were
powerful, but limited and tended not to care what happened to
humans. Humans would sacrifice to the gods to try to induce
them to favor the humans. One of the reasons the Christians
were persecuted in ancient Rome, was their refusal to honor the
Gods who protected Rome. This was close to treason.

The Jewish God, YHWH, was a new kind of God. He was not a god
of any particular physical phenomena (In the Egyptian pantheon
Shu was the god of the air/wind, Geb was the god of earth, Ra
was the Sun, Nut was the sky, Hapy was the innundation etc.)
and JHWH was not localized to any place or country. The
passage in 1 Kings 19:11-12 underscores this removal of YHWH
from physical phenomena.

"11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the
Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong
wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before
the Lord; but THE LORD WAS NOT IN THE WIND: and after the wind
an earthquake; but THE LORD WAS NOT IN THE EARTHQUAKE:

"12 And after the earthquake a fire; but THE LORD WAS NOT IN
THE FIRE: and after the fire a still small voice."

In ancient Egypt not only was Shu, god of air, IN the wind, Shu
WAS the wind. Not so with YHWH--he created the physical earth
but he was not part of physical creation like the pagan gods
were.

In ancient paganism once you went from one country to another
you adopted the worship of the local gods. Just as if you move
from one state to another you have a different governor. Both
governors are "true" but limited to their region. Similarly
with pagan gods. Belief in one group of gods did not preclude
worship of others. Paganism was very tolerant this way.

Not so with YHWH. His rule was death to those who worshipped
any other god--"for I, God, am a jealous God." This is why
Genesis mentions "the greater light to rule the day and the
lesser light to rule the night" instead of saying "the sun and
the moon." To say the word "sun" or "moon" would be equivalent
to naming the sun god or the moon god--rival pagan gods.

On the other hand YHWH gave a code of conduct to humans. This
was something new. Ethics and morality were not part of the
concern of the gods in ancient times. It was no skin of Zeus's
nose if you raped, stole or murdered. Morality didn't come
from religion in ancient paganism. But the Hebrew god, JHWH
created humans in his "own likeness." How they behaved toward
each other mattered to him and he gave detailed rules for
behavior.

The Judeo-Christian tradition goes back into ancient times and
much of the Old Testament is jaw-droppingly cruel and immoral
by present standards. To try to attribute things to a
constant, unchanging, and loving God requires tremendous
rationalization.

Once you look at the Old Testament as a collection of ancient
literature rather than God's unchanging word to us, it can come
alive. But you have to approach it on its own terms, as with
the Iliad or Epic of Gilgamesh, and not try to fit it, as a
square peg into a round hole, into some Mormon theology.

So I guess the idea that "one man should perish rather than a whole nation dwindle in unbelief" is outdated and not a viable doctrine.
Sure would have been an easy fix to get rid of Pharoah like Nephi did Laban.

Maybe God felt so bad about those Egyptian firstborn that he decided killing one person was a better idea.

Then later he decided maybe not, and destroyed the Nephites and Lamanites and wrecked havoc on all the cities on the North American continent when Christ was crucified on another continent. Nothing happened to those people who conducted the crucifixation, but the wrath was kindled against those poor Lamanites/Nephites and their children.

I also saw a program about the plagues and how they could be the result of natural consequences in that region. Made perfect sense without the super natural hype.

Logic and common sense sure makes a big difference in how things are perceived.

Considering the Jews were probably never enslaved in Egypt, there was no mass killing of Egyptian children. However, there were sick dudes making up the stories as some kind of lesson and tribal justification. After all, the authors of the story were such barbarians that it was news to them that murder was a sin.

And in the LDS universe, YHWH=Jehovah who is Jesus Christ in his premortal state, before he recieved his body. So the one who is supposedly so kind, loving killed all those people in the Old Testament. But then then the question remains, do they still teach this doctrine? I learned it in Seminary in the 70's, taught it on my mission 76-78, so it still makes one wonder?????

So what's the lesson that we can learn to help us in the latter-days?

Right? Can't you hear that question being uttered by the teacher or from the manual?

What would be the answer?

Do what the profit says. Obey, pray and pay. Don't look at porn or anti material. Otherwise God will curse you with a plague of apostasy and spiritual decay. The devil will grab you from behind (since you stepped off of Bednar's rug) and won't let go.

How a Christian would answer that is simple.
Killing the first born was a prefigurement of Christ's sacrifice.

Yes that is what the class members said Angela. Somehow they thought that the fact that Jesus was going to be killed could be best illustrated by a nice little object lesson--killing a bunch of innocent children (and calves and lambs and kid goats, etc.)

That YHWH knows how to write his name on the wall in big bloody letters.

My point is that this story IS a prefigurement of the atonement, and that they are both morally reprehensible.

BTW--who was worse, HEROD who killed all the children under age two, PHAROAH who killed the male Israelites, or YHWH who killed all the firstborn. It looks like a wash to me.

I'll go my way and you go Yahweh.

This sums up my feelings.

"What kind if sick bastard kills all the innocent children to make his point?" - Apparently SOME SLUT in Pleasant Grove, yesterday.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1238803

"It is so holy that using vowels is a sin!" - OMG! Vanna White is going to Rot in Hell.... LOL



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/13/2014 09:13PM by verilyverily.

Love it, Levi!

This of course is the problem with 99% of all religion, and especially ones such as TSCC which believe in the literal bible.

The god of the Old Testament was a bastard. Through and through. There simply is no way to reconcile that with a loving god. Same thing with the god of the BoM.

Nothing about Jesus entry into Jerusalem? It is Palm Sun.