My own reading of Job was not that god’s goodness is undeniable, it’s that god really needs nothing from us and is entirely indifferent to human beings choosing to damn themselves or not, in contradiction to “your God is a jealous God”.
If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against him?
And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him?
If you are righteous, what do you give to him?
Or what does he receive from your hand?
Your wickedness concerns a man like yourself,
and your righteousness a son of man.
This seems to me like the most sane piece of theological reasoning I’ve found in any religious text whatever—casting God as an entirely amotivational agent ( which is strangely in contradiction to the premise of the story of Job ).
Not for the change of mind from “I completely don’t care about humans” to “I’ll make my only Son a human (to start with) and let other humans crucify him so that they could wash off the original sin”.
It’s not smoking-gun obvious to me that this second formulation is what the pre-Pauline Christians believed in. Jesus’s divinity certainly wasn’t settled even after Paul. Consider for example the Arian “heresy”.
My reading of Job is that Leviathan is more awesome than humans, and Job is forced to admit this, therefore God optimizes this world for Leviathan instead of humans. It’s not that humans are completely irrelevant; but they are merely a rounding error compared with Leviathan, the utility monster.
My own reading of Job was not that god’s goodness is undeniable, it’s that god really needs nothing from us and is entirely indifferent to human beings choosing to damn themselves or not, in contradiction to “your God is a jealous God”.
This seems to me like the most sane piece of theological reasoning I’ve found in any religious text whatever—casting God as an entirely amotivational agent ( which is strangely in contradiction to the premise of the story of Job ).
And then God says “j/k, just kidding” and does the whole New Testament thing :-)
Either God, Jesus or St. Paul—that all depends entirely on which sect you ask.
Got to be someone from the Holy Trinity—Paul isn’t going to cut it.
Paul might cut it if you’re Thomas Jeffson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible “Paul was the first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus.”
Not for the change of mind from “I completely don’t care about humans” to “I’ll make my only Son a human (to start with) and let other humans crucify him so that they could wash off the original sin”.
It’s not smoking-gun obvious to me that this second formulation is what the pre-Pauline Christians believed in. Jesus’s divinity certainly wasn’t settled even after Paul. Consider for example the Arian “heresy”.
My reading of Job is that Leviathan is more awesome than humans, and Job is forced to admit this, therefore God optimizes this world for Leviathan instead of humans. It’s not that humans are completely irrelevant; but they are merely a rounding error compared with Leviathan, the utility monster.
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