It’s almost as if the priest is suggesting that God wants us uneducated to be better subservient to him, and that seeking knowledge is punishable (by death technically).
Kinda the point of Satanism.
Monotheistic religion formed in a dialectical relationship with the state. Obedience to God reinforces obedience to the King. No gods no masters is quite literal. Monotheistuc religion is a superstructure created by the material conditions of nascent monarchical statehood that reinforces the conditions that created it.
The gnostics figured out an explanation for this 2000 years ago.
According to them, the “God” who created the material world and is talked about in the Old Testament is an evil and/or ignorant lesser deity and that’s why the world sucks.
The “real” God rules over the immaterial (souls, knowledge, and the likes) and is called “the Invisible Spirit”.
Both the snake and later on Jesus were agents/emanations of this “Invisible Spirit” sent to bring knowledge (“gnosis” in Greek) to humanity in order to help them break free from the prison that is the material world.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter how logical and internally consistent your ideology is, the one who is more organized wins out in the end. This doesn’t have anything to do with any currently ongoing political situation. 🫠
You’re awesome. I came here to drop some Gnosis and here you’ve done all the heavy lifting.
Fuck Saklas!
Also, prior to the old testament being in the form it is today, the character that would become the one god was just a minor god within the Canaanite pantheon. A lot of the old testament makes more sense when read with that context.
Yep, Exodus 34:14 : “For thou shalt worship no other god; for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”
This strongly implies that (in this theology) there are multiple gods if Jehovah/Elohim can be jealous.
The bible taken literally is madness. Even new testament. If I were to be religious, I would assume everything is a metaphor.
Gonna come at this from kind of a scholarly angle here… Yes. Yes absolutely.
And just for fun, I’ll use the Bible to argue in your favor.
You raise the point that even the New Testament (the half that pivots from “follow these rules” to “don’t be a douche”) shouldn’t be taken literally. Some might argue that that’s the only part that should be taken literally, but let’s take a look at how Jesus chooses to illustrate that message: by doing miracles and relating parables. He’s not regaling crowds with true tales of history, he’s telling them made-up stories to convey a point about morals.
Hm… Made-up stories to convey a point about morals…
Stories, perhaps, like someone turning into a pillar of salt because they chose to dwell on the past instead of moving on? Or about the value of perseverance and solidarity in the face of continued adversity? Not giving up hope, even when you’ve lost everything? How murder is just straight up bad?
Lot’s Wife, Moses & the Pharaoh, the entire book of Job, Cain & Abel; all from the Old Testament, and all far less believable than the Good Samaritan… But somehow, those stories are to be taken as truth, while a story about a nice guy existing in Samaria is an allegory for the goodness in all of us? It’s all parables, all the way down. The New Testament is just parable-ception - it’s a made-up (or at least, very heavily embellished) story about a nice guy who tells stories about nice guys.
All religions are mental illness adjacent.
The Bible literally says it should be taken literally.
That’s what makes it so funny.
Even the name says “take me literally”.
Back in the day, a man would take an oath on his testicles, “I swear on my balls it is true”
Old and New Testament means “Old and New I swear on my balls this is true”
Im not religious at all.
But if I were, I would believe these were written by flawed humans that were inspired by god, but absolutely filling in blanks with their personal beliefs and stories.
Here’s the thing that doesn’t often get noted with this story - the Serpent tells the truth. God lies. And, again, the Serpent is the bad guy?
Most people won’t go beyond the “sepernt = bad” logic ingrained in human brain.
“Genesis” is crap, start to finish.
Only in an age of no books could this religion flourish; only the Black Death broke their stranglehold of Europe.
Still tax free! So that’s nice.
Only in an age of no books could this religion flourish
I’d like to point out that Greece and Rome were absolutely packed with knowledge and curiosity… until monotheism showed up.
How did it get from that point to the “Dark Ages”, where peasants were kept in ignorance and only the priests could read?
I’m not arguing, honest question
Shortly? They were polytheists. Christians weren’t.
"The Paradox of Tolerance, articulated by philosopher Karl Popper, argues that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance because if a tolerant society tolerates the intolerant, the intolerant will eventually destroy the tolerant, ending tolerance itself. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien [beliefs and cultures]. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam, and it might not be unreasonable to suggest that it would have been better for Western civilization if Greece had moulded it on this question rather than Palestine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_monotheism#Associations_with_violence
I know mostly not my own word but should be plenty of explanation my hands are freezing ask more if you feel like it
He’s a brave kid to turn his back to a Catholic priest
Squint real hard and take the beginning of Genesis as a tale of solar/planetary formation followed by evolution, closest origin myth I know of.
“Let there be light.” Solar ignition. Let’s go!
They got the order of life mixed here and there, but at least it started in the sea. Adam and Eve’s curse is by far the most interesting bit.
They eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Let’s say they were apes before that event and look at the curses laid down.
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Now we know good from evil. Bit hard to argue animals are terribly moral, having a concept of good and evil. Other mammals are close, especially emotionally, but nothing like humans.
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Now our heads are swole with brains, painful childbirth follows. Don’t know of any mammals that have such painful, risky births.
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We’re cursed to labor all our days to bring food forth from the ground, when before we were swinging from trees, eating fruit and the occasional howler monkey baby. The invention of agriculture anyone?
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Cast out of the Garden, we can never get any of the above back.
I find it fascinating how many factual points they hit without resorting to, “Big god spooged on mountains and giants came forth and so on and so on.” (Yes, I’m aware of how nuts Genesis gets down the road. I’ve read it a time or two.)
If you really want to confound Christians, point out there’s a second creation myth 3 or 4 pages later, which disagrees with the first.
The seven day creation myth usually gets folded with the Adam and Eve myth in most tellings. Christian preachers can get away with it because nobody reads the Bible.
Not sure what you mean. We talking about the two slightly different creation myths?
Pretty hilarious reading along and the book just starts repeating as if the first couple of chapters didn’t happen. 😁
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I’ve been saying this for years. Satan is the good guy in the Bible.
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“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin
