Alan: Religious conservatives assume that judgment is primary.
In my view, we are all appalling sinners who had best pray for The Court's Mercy.
Absent mercy, every one of us is queued for a rocky ride - whether in "the after-life" or as we review what we have done from the vantage of our death bed.
Is it not plausible - even probable - that God, in "His" inscrutability, and prompted by His "love for the world," is at least as merciful as "He" is judgmental?
Or, as often happens in human courts, is mercy not likely to follow judgment? Perhaps by suspending judgement? Or even by being indulgent - clemency or a commuted sentence?
Would mercy not, at minimum, put an end to "failed experiments" by ushering them out of existence rather than torment them, forever, in an Unquenchable Lake of Fire?
What adamantine hardness instills the unshakable belief that Judgment is primary?
Unalterable. Final. Eternally punishing.
Such judgment is not human but lithic - something inorganic, something inhuman.
Not the image in which we are made.
As a rule, rigidity infects absolutists, spellbound by the Thunder Sky God who rules large swathes of the Old Testament.
Afraid to anger this tyrant, "the fearful" fall prey to a frame-of-mind we might call "Latter Day Stockholm Syndrome."
To break this "enchantment," it is helpful to recall that "Thunder Sky God" ordained --- not merely the "moral option" but the moral obligation --- that "rebellious children" be stoned to death by the collective effort of every male in the community.
In my view, we are all appalling sinners who had best pray for The Court's Mercy.
Absent mercy, every one of us is queued for a rocky ride - whether in "the after-life" or as we review what we have done from the vantage of our death bed.
Is it not plausible - even probable - that God, in "His" inscrutability, and prompted by His "love for the world," is at least as merciful as "He" is judgmental?
Or, as often happens in human courts, is mercy not likely to follow judgment? Perhaps by suspending judgement? Or even by being indulgent - clemency or a commuted sentence?
Would mercy not, at minimum, put an end to "failed experiments" by ushering them out of existence rather than torment them, forever, in an Unquenchable Lake of Fire?
What adamantine hardness instills the unshakable belief that Judgment is primary?
Unalterable. Final. Eternally punishing.
Such judgment is not human but lithic - something inorganic, something inhuman.
Not the image in which we are made.
As a rule, rigidity infects absolutists, spellbound by the Thunder Sky God who rules large swathes of the Old Testament.
Afraid to anger this tyrant, "the fearful" fall prey to a frame-of-mind we might call "Latter Day Stockholm Syndrome."
To break this "enchantment," it is helpful to recall that "Thunder Sky God" ordained --- not merely the "moral option" but the moral obligation --- that "rebellious children" be stoned to death by the collective effort of every male in the community.
In essence, the God of Israel commanded the slaughter of children for the crime of... being children.
Islam never conceived a moral mandate as barbaric as killing one's own kids, and not compassionately "as one might put down a rabid dog," but killing them in concert for the trivial "offense" of "passing through adolescence."
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is not now, nor ever was, "the word of God." http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+21%3A18-21&version=ERV
If my view is wrong, I hope to be set straight.
Absent correction, I hope "the spellbound" will ask why "this" God is worshiped uncritically.
Lamentably, "fundamentalists" proclaim a great deal of nonsense, not because The Living God requires "defense," but because they must defend their own "card houses."
Replace self-certain self-righteousness with real faith - shadowed by doubt - and it no longer matters if one's house of card collapses.
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