From: strom@Watson.Ibm.Com (Rob Strom)
Subject: Re:      Re: God Is Unfair
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 02:47:54 GMT
Organization: IBM Research

In article <9211112007.AA27824@inet-gw-1.pa.dec.com>, I3150101@DBSTU1.RZ.TU-BS.DE (Benedikt Rosenau) writes:
|> strom@Watson.Ibm.Com (Rob Strom) typed:
|> 
|> (Lots deleted in order to save space)
|> >The most important part of the story is not the destruction of Sodom.
|> >The most important part of the story is that Abraham *challenges God*
|> >on the very issue that Ken Arromdee raises in this post.
|> (More deletions.)
|> >The lesson is not that God indiscriminately destroys cities,
|> >the righteous with the unrighteous.  The lessons are:
|> 
|> >(1) Even God is constrained by His moral laws.
|> >(2) The righteous man does well to stand up for righteousness,
|> >    even if it means calling God Himself to account.
|> >(3) (less obvious but still important)  You don't need
|> >    an intermediary (e.g. priests, Jesus, Mary) to approach God.
|> >(4) Obeying God doesn't mean shutting up and passively
|> >    submitting; it means *doing righteousness*.
|> 
|> My lesson would be: the god of the OT does not recall its own moral standards.
|> Someone has to remind it.
|> 
|> Further, can you give stringent evidence that your interpretation of the
|> passage is the right one? That it was what your god meant when it destructed
|> sodom/invented the fabula of destructing sodom? It rather looks as if another
|> chain of theologic pseudo reasoning that aims at making the brute base of its
|> beliefs more palatable for our 'enlightened' times.
|>

You can't have it both ways.  If you criticize traditional religion for
being ancient and single-minded and inflexible, you can't turn around
and complain that my interpretation is flawed because it's too modern
and ambiguous and flexible.

What do you mean by "stringent evidence that my interpretation is the
'right one'"?  You sound exactly like the fundamentalists that
are often criticized here.  What do you mean by the 'right one'?
The one that God *really* wrote???  I'm telling you that this
is what I and many other Jews actually teach our children.
The Karaites probably read this passage differently; the
Christians read it still differently.  

|> To rephrase it, what you do is to stretch and to bend an old superstition until
|> it fits your world view. Others have done so, too, and have come to different
|> conclusions, including the direct opposite. I wonder how you integrate Job into
|> your lesson.

You're right.  There isn't a single algorithm we can apply to the text to
find the *authentic* interpretation of the passage.  But
why do you find that objectionable??  You sound like
a fundamentalist in reverse --- you're arguing that
if I corrected the errors of my ways and learned
to understand the One True Way to interpret the Bible
I would see the brutal and irrational message which
God intended me to see.

|> 
|> The fact remains: the god - as depicted in the bible - is a brutal one.
|> 

Only if you read the Bible like Protestant inerrantist fundamentalists.
That isn't the way we (Jews) read it.

|> 
|> (Deletions again)
|> >These are the lessons we teach.  They are relevant for
|> >alt.atheism, since you can view the lessons as lessons
|> >even if you believe the stories are all fables, and
|> >that Abraham and God either never existed or are
|> >literary metaphors.
|> 
|> Why should I believe a lesson that I consider to be a fable? The only thing
|> the story would be good for (if at all) was to be a paradigm. Further, what
|> can I learn from a lesson that serves the purpose of spreading the 'god'
|> mental phage?
|> 

The lessons have positive moral value.  The lesson that
doing right is more important than honoring authority
has vast social consequences whether you believe in
God or not.  The lesson that one should avoid making
the innocent suffer for the wrongs of the guilty
also has vast consequences whether you believe in
God or not.  The lesson of mercy (the Noah-Abraham-Moses
progression) is very important --- very relevant
for our recent times when both major US presidential
candidates supported the death penalty :-( .

If you think these are good lessons, then they should be
taught to your children.  Otherwise they will assimilate
the values around them and grow up more cruel
and intolerant and authoritarian than you might wish.

From my perspective, the 'god mental phage' serves
the purpose of spreading the lessons, not the other
way around.


-- 
Rob Strom, strom@watson.ibm.com, (914) 784-7641
IBM Research, 30 Saw Mill River Road, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY  10598
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,sci.cognitive,sci.psychology,sci.research