The problem is the retcon. The OT OG is comically evil. I mean, okay, Zeus was a serial rapist and the entire pantheon was incredibly spiteful and petty. Most of the pantheons were pretty bad. They’re made up stories that reflect their times and cultures. Sometimes you get the Avengers. Sometimes you get The Boys.
I don’t know of another one where a god caused the eternal suffering of all life on earth because one man, whom that god designed and created with perfect knowledge knowing exactly what he would do, disobeyed him. It’s like if you get a brand new puppy and tell it not to shit on the floor while knowing that it will because it’s just a puppy, and then when it does you not only kill the puppy but dedicate the rest of your life to killing every dog, cat, or other animal that you see. As punishment. For a puppy. It’s not even evil. It’s clinically insane.
Unfortunately, that was the launching point of Christianity. They could have just come up with a new religion with a god of love and mercy, but because they built off of a Jewish apocalyptic cult, they painted themselves into a corner. The god that destroyed all life on earth because he didn’t like what some people were doing at the time now has to become the loving father. Then they weren’t satisfied with a prophet or martyr, they had to make him into god, too, because otherwise they felt they weren’t being serious enough.
Now, it’s a dumpster fire. You have everything from proclaiming universalism to people committing murder in the name of that weird god with the multiple personality disorder. And a disturbingly large number of people will reject anything and everything that goes against whatever their interpretation of the religion says - empiricism be literally damned - and most of the time it just so happens to be the religion they were born into, or a variant thereof.
This is one of the best breakdowns I’ve ever read.
May you be touched by his starchiness’s noodly appendage.
… a god caused the eternal suffering of all life on earth because one man, whom that god designed and created with perfect knowledge knowing exactly what he would do, disobeyed him.
Not only that, the disobeying was eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Prior to that, Adam and Eve did not comprehend ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ They could not understand that what they were doing was “wrong.”
Yahweh created humans in order to torture them.
…for your sins, which you didn’t have had to begin with,…
The story of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 runs similarly to the Hebrew narrative, where the High Evolutionary is trying to create heaven on earth and were just an intermediary iteration.
Sin doesn’t have anything to do with moral failing, but is about God finding us wanting. (And yes a lot of religious folk conflate the two.)
Essentially we have to fit into the cookie cutter and block all the light on the fringes to ride this ride, and God rejects the rest of us.
