Bible Questions?

No.

Would you mind rewording this, I don't think it says what you want it to say.

Humans do punish themselves and God has pretty much allowed them to do so but remember the Bible also says that God is our heavenly Father.

If you were a father with young children and you had given your children great freedom in making their own choices, in order for them to learn how to make good choices in their lives and one day you found your children playing in the busy street, would you allow them to be hit by a car and seriously injured or even killed just so they could learn not to play in the street or would you intervene?

 

The way I read it was mankind was living in happiness and supposedly speaking the same language after the last great genocide your god had cursed them with, I'm referring to the great flood.

So they built a large tower to live in in case the spectral genocidal dictator you call a loving god decided to flood the Earth again, upon seeing how well his creations were able to live together without him intervening he destroyed there culture and made it nearly impossible for them to communicate, in addition to this I guess he also scattered them across the Earth.

Of course none of this makes any sense at all but it does go to show what a jealous colossal prick the god of your religion really is.

As for your quote your god did not remove his children from the street instead he drowned them in floods among other things.

 

Oooh!Oooh! I have a question. "Leviticus 19:19: Obey my commands. Do not crossbreed domestic animals. Do not plant two kinds of seed in the same field. Do not wear clothes made of two kinds of materials?" Is that still binding? Was it ever something God was concerned about? Why?

 

Did Jesus die so we can conquer physical or spiritual death (according to Scripture)?
If physical, why do we still die? If spiritual, why does Genesis 3, when referring to the death Adam brought into the world only refer to a physical death?

 

I noticed you didn't answer my question.

 

Christians are not under the Mosaic Law.

 

What was your question?

Would I intervene to stop some children from playing in a busy street?

My answer is yes, what does this have to do with anything?

What purpose does the bible give for god scattering the culture that had been built around the tower of babel?

Jealousy?

 

If God intervenes and creates an artificial consequence of doing what he considers a bad thing, then that is not free will. Free will means God allowing Man to make his own mistakes and learn from the consequences of those mistakes. God visiting His wrath upon the builders of Babel is in direct conflict with that, since He effectively creates a negative consequence where none would normally arise.

 

Is anyone else?

 

Why is God even worried? Does this go further towards evidencing my belief that God's "omnipotence" is actually just "very-strong-ness"? Surely if his power was infinite, nothing Man could do could ever hope to threaten or match him.

Also, I have to say, given how God's judgment is described in the Bible, you can hardly blame people for doing whatever they can to avoid it. Maybe if God doesn't like people doing that, he shouldn't have responded to a general lack of moral fibre by drowning millions of people.

There's a lot less rapes now than there were back then. So... that's something, right?

 

Yes that was my question but why would you interfere? They were happy playing in the street and may not even have been in any immediate danger but you interfered, because of your knowledge and your experience you can see the danger the children can not. Likewise God could see the danger of where this was leading and thus changed the language for the benefit of mankind.

 

Parents intervene all the time in their children's lives creating artificial consequences, because they can see the actual consequences and don't want their children to eventually to face those greater consequences. Doing so does not take away their free will but hopefully teaches them to use their free will in a such a way so that they will not face the full consequences of continuing in that bad course.

No, free will merely means that we have the ability to chose what we was inividuals will do. But God will not allow those choices to collectively exterminate mankind or make the Earth uninhabitable.

"He effectively creates a negative consequence where none would normally arise." How would you know that? It's pretty much a given that to be God you have to know somethings that mankind does not know, so how would you know that God by his confusing the languages did not stop a very real bad consequence from happening?

 

Some still consider themselves under that law but the Bible says that it has served it's purpose and is no longer in effect.

 

Worried is probably the wrong word.

That "very-strong-ness" allowed him to create the universe, so that "very-strong-ness" is "very-strong-ness" indeed.

And you are correct, nothing Man could do could ever hope to threaten or match him but God does not want to take free will away from mankind, while at the same time God does not want mankind to go extinct or destroy the Earth, so from time to time God nudges mankind in a different direction.

Honestly can you really say that people are doing everything they can to avoid God's judgments?

Okay, just for the sake of peace I'll give you that point.

 

A parent teaches a child how to handle free will effectively because the parent knows that the child will have free will either way. There is no suggestion that the parent gives the child free will, just as there is no suggestion that the parent drown or "confuse" the child because it does not use its free will in the way that they intend.

And the Tower of Babel was going to do that how exactly?

Taken as a parable, I know exactly what the message behind the Tower of Babel story is. I'm kind of intrigued by the more literal and/or forgiving interpretation.

See, this is a prime example. Taken as a parable, Babel has an obvious meaning: don't get ideas above your station, even if you think you have a really good idea. God's punishment is suitably divorced from the nature of the crime to provide the sense that, just because you think you've got all bases covered, something unpredictable might happen, and so you're best off not doing it at all.

From a literal viewpoint though, I don't know. My point of "creating negative consequence" is that the confusion of tongues has nothing much to do with building big buildings. We've built really big buildings since, and it hasn't happened to us.

As to "how I know" that a real bad consequence wasn't prevented, obviously I don't, and neither do you. I'm not prepared to get into that. This thread is about the Bible and its contents. It seems inappropriate to speculate about what might have happened if something in the Bible had happened differently. It would also be wholly counter-productive, since we could each assert our viewpoint over and over, and neither of us would have any evidence to support it other than a vague sense of what God's like. All I meant was that there is no direct negative consequence of building a big building that results in it being a bad thing to do. God has to create one (the punishment) in order to illustrate that it's bad. If building it was in itself going to have a major negative consequence in itself, letting that happen would have illustrated the point too.

 

when is the winking gonna start

 

Floods, confusion of tongues... that's "nudging", is it?

This is the thing: I get that it's meant to teach man a lesson. I'm just not totally clear on what the lesson is. The idea that just building a big tower = Man trying to be as gods is... well, just lame, frankly. I get that, all through the Bible, God tells someone not to do something because He says so, a person doesn't do it, and God kills them, and this illustrate that God's supremacy and will should not be questioned. I also get why a lot of people find that hard to stomach, especially when there is little or no explanation as to why something is not permitted.

And of course we've done far more godlike things since, from Hiroshima to Vegas, and gone relatively unpunished. Was there something about that particular tower that God didn't like, which hasn't arisen since?

Also: where is it now?

I'm confused. That statement was in reference to the idea that people were building a big tower so that next time God decides to flood the planet they can not die from drowning to death. I don't think that has anything to do with what people are doing now.

Also, as I understood it, avoiding judgment was, if not a sin, then at least frowned upon. Avoiding it implies either that you are a sinner, or that you believe God's judgment is flawed, which in the Babel context is clearly a sin in itself. Maybe I've got it wrong though. Do you think that people should be avoiding God's judgment? Or are you talking about God's wrath, punishment or whatever? I would think that that would be very different from "judgment", just as a death sentence is different from a trial.

I think there are probably a lot more that you'd be forced to admit to while never conceding that the world is not immeasurably worse than it was in some golden age associated with your own values, but yeah, for the sake of peace, eh?

 

I guess the big difference is that the parent explains why the kid shouldn't do it, if not immediately then at least at some point during their life. If you just yank a kid away from danger whenever it arises, you'll be doing that your whole life. If you give them some explanation as to why the thing is dangerous, they'll be able to make a sound judgment of what the risks are and whether it is better to avoid the thing altogether or just treat it with respect.

 

When ever I choose to, why do you ask?

 

May I?

If we accept a literal historical concordist reading of the story, then yes--that is what the babel story suggests. It also suggests that all modern anthropology concerning the origins of human cultures is wrong.

What the Message of Faith suggests apart from the Incident of the details of the story that is intertwined with ancient Near East motifs is that humanity will and does strive to be like God in knowledge and power, but this act of vanity is judged as a sin and is punished.

Is that still a little bit jealous, possibly. But just think of some of the things people do who weild extreme power over others (insert Pope/Catholic joke here )