Holy... how can anyone say the Bible has no literary merit after reading this masterpiece? Better yet, how can anyone say it is not inspired by God when this was written in the 6th century BC? This refutes atheism single handedly and puts the Bible at the top of the Western canon.
>Better yet, how can anyone say it is not inspired by God
Because there’s no such thing.
Quite telling too that atheists produced nothing on the aesthetic level of theists.
Read Bysshe
Nobody says the Bible has not literary merit except 16 year olds on reddit
Well most of it doesn't
>how can anyone say the Bible has no literary merit after reading this masterpiece?
It's one of the greatest works of poetry of all time. Only other places I have ever found such powerfull poetry as the Speech of God from the bowels of the storm is on Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.
>Better yet, how can anyone say it is not inspired by God when this was written in the 6th century BC
Have you read Aeschylus yet? Is that inspired by Zeus?
>This refutes atheism single handedly
Linguistic beauty is not a good argument for the existence of God.
>and puts the Bible at the top of the Western canon.
There are several books in the Bible by several authors, and most of them are not good.
>Have you read Aeschylus yet?
Yes
>Is that inspired by Zeus?
No, but Aeschylus obviously had divine inspiration.
>Linguistic beauty is not a good argument for the existence of God.
Cope.
>There are several books in the Bible by several authors, and most of them are not good.
Don't care.
>Cope.
Why wouldn't I want God to exist and the universe to have meaning?
If anyone could come up with satisfactory proof I would be more than grateful to accept it. But great art is no proof at all.
Berkeley already proved God. When you come up with a satisfactory refutation let me know.
It's one of the most frustrating books of the Bible.
>Devil makes a bet with God
>Job is completely in the right and spends the entire book reasonably demanding an answer
>God doesn't want to admit that he made a bet with the Devil so he just tells Job to shut up and then restores his health
>>Job is completely in the right
Filtered. This is God's world. He made it, He created everything. Justice is whatever He decides.
Then I have no moral obligation to consider him good. It would make him merely powerful, and nothing more
God decides what's a moral obligation because He created morals.
Again, that just makes him powerful, not moral
Again, you're wrong. You don't decide what's moral, God does. You have nothing.
No, sorry, I very much can, because I'm the one suffering and dying in his universe, and not him.
Also, my death is irreversable, which makes my opinion of what is and isn't moral infinitely more important than his ever could be, becausr I pay an actual price for immorality, while your god by definition can't
Ok don't care enjoy eternal damnation and hell on earth too
I'm really not bothered by your infantile revenge fantasy. According to Islam, you'll fry just as hard as me, but that doesn't bother you either, so why should I be bothered?
Like I said: don't care. God gave us reason and evidence to find Him. If you refuse to see it because of you enormous pride that challenges God's rightousness, then enjoy the day of reckoning.
>psychanalysis
Never will.
ok
The wiki page has a nice qrd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_to_Job
>I suffer and die in this universe
>my death is irreversable
>THEREFORE, I can decide what is or isn't moral
I don't see the chain of logic here. Why does the reversibility of your death have bearing on whether you can decide morals? Does every individual decide what is and isn't moral? If so, why pose as a pouting baby shaking your tiny fist at a God you don't even believe in?
Simply ask of that anon what I asked of you; how does one obtain the "right" to define morality? It's no brain teaser to imagine God creating the universe but in what manner did he alloy his creation with the pure substance of morality? What would that even look like?
>I don't see the chain of logic here.
It's very easy: I suffer the consequences of immorality, therefore my opinion on it matters, since I'm the one actively effected by it, in the form of suffering, and an irreversable death. God can't die, although he apperently can suffer (which doesn't really mean much, because he can't die, so it's just a mild inconvenience to him), therefore his opinion on morality means absolute diddly dogshit
If you suffer the consequences of something, your opinion matters. If you don't, yours doesn't
>I'm the one actively effected by it
No you're not. God is effected by it too, as is your family, and, more broadly, the whole of society. Was Job the only one effected by God's spite? How can you say that when in this very thread you invoke Job's fate to call God cruel? One man's scorn for another can weigh as heavily as a blow. Isn't everyone who reads the Bible in some manner implicated in those who have been imprinted upon by God's judgment?
The web of causality is infinite, and I see no reason why one man's self-pity should overshadow the millions of others who don't even notice the force acting upon them.
Ultimately, look to the contemporary political debate on justice: that contrapoints troon made a video explaining and then criticizing each judicial theory as it was developed, at the end of the video he promises to release a sequel elaborating a REASONED theory of justice; but where is that video? I'll be impressed if ever it is released.
In truth we are all guilty and innocent, deserving of the fires of hell and the bliss of heaven. No man can say wisely that he does or doesn't deserve his place in life, whether we find him starving on a square of dirt in Africa or sitting pretty on an English country estate.
The appeal of Christ is (I assume, I'm not Christian) exactly that he forgives us regardless of what we deserve. His love transcends the measured and farcically weighted moral judgments of the Pagans (recall, from the histories written by Thucydides and Xenophon, how successive generations of Greek leadership cloak their self-interest in the noblest pretense, setting the weights of infractions to justify whatever might be their policy on that day).
If you want to worship a tyrant who is willing to let his supposed adversary freely torment his children and then gets mad at said children when they are confused at what's happening, you go ahead. I want nothing to do with this guy. He is an abusive parent, not a loving one.
>I'm more rightous and better than God
Kek just wait until God sends you real issues your way.
So he can prove me right?
The problem with most people is that they believe in a fairy tale version of God. I blame Christianity for this. The truth is: God is both responsible for all that we perceive as good and all that we perceive as bad. Everything comes from God; to claim otherwise is to limit God.
Satan is an instrument of God. Evil and suffering are therefore just as much part of God as the opposite of evil and suffering. Job's suffering is God and Job's consolation at the end of the story is God.
Pantheism is pseud paganism, no one cares about your views.
>dismisses a claim without elaboration
>calls someone else a pseud
Anyway, i'll give you the benefit of the doubt: explain how omnipresence and omnipotence are compatible with a non-pantheistic conception of God. To assert that a thing is not God is to limit the unlimited.
>explain to me basic theology
Read any of the church fathers on free will
please don't post again.
Frick off
Read Van Til. What you say is God, in fact, comes from God to teach us the differences between things. The Bible says as much. A large part of the Torah is teaching you not to mix the clean with the unclean as many do today. That law saved no one but taught them well if they weren't shit-eatingly arrogant.
What book would you recommend for this specific question?
The Defense of the Faith. It has to do with how you evaluate what you see around you. Ignore any caricatures of just pretending God is real and going from there. It's actually interesting. Even if you're an atheist, you ought to evaluate things from that perspective.
Sounds good, will check it out. Thanks anon.
>Justice is whatever He decides
So what's the point of living a religious life for the sake of your salvation if God could very well decide to save the sinners and damn the saints or outright not save anyone? If God is morally inescrutable and thus completely unpredictable, then there's no rational way to know that He will keep the promises he made in the Bible. The atheist thus has no reason to abandon his "sinful" ways even if you could prove to him that the God you're talking about exists.
>So what's the point of living a religious life for the sake of your salvation if God could very well decide to save the sinners and damn the saints or outright not save anyone
Doesn't follow from what I said.
> If God is morally inescrutable and thus completely unpredictable
Never said this.
> then there's no rational way to know that He will keep the promises he made in the Bible.
If you make up things, sure.
>. The atheist thus has no reason to abandon his "sinful" ways even if you could prove to him that the God you're talking about exists.
If he misunderstands everything, true.
Just because he decide what's just doesn't mean we don't know what's just. Job was rewarded, Job goes to heaven. Who cares he had to suffer for a very short period of time considering he lived a great life for 90% of his life and then a perfect life for eternity?
Your tribal deity is filtered by the Euthyphro dilemma. The very fact we have moral feelings and can pass moral judgements is testament to there being objective moral law within us, which God must be the source and hence be fully aligned with it.
Denying our ability of moral judgement is akin to denying our ability to think or breathe.
Therefore if your deity behaves like a c**t, you have to explain how it can fall short of the moral law. "He owns you" is not an argument, as his force to own us is patently absent since we can judge and accuse this diety with no cognitive dissonance.
>there being objective moral law within us
>it's subjective to every person
Anyone who has 20 hours for a deep dive into the book of Job, I cannot recommend strongly enough watching these lectures on it from the Master's Seminary.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSzzuYDEQ4KAR5wzRL5c5Sq3eFPzKaGLh
You got hit by the midwit filter. The wager with Hasatan/the accuser (not The Devil, that is a concept that did not yet exist) is that if Job is afflicted he will curse God to his face. By the end of chapter 2, after Job's affliction, Job's wife tells Job to curse God and die, but Job refuses. That's the end of the wager right there. God won. He could have restored Job then, but he chose not to. Ask yourself why did he do that?
Now, what is the reason for the wager and how does it support the themes of Job? The whole point of the book, I believe, is that the orthodox view of good or bad fortune being a reflection of a person's morality is insufficient because there are righteous sufferers and fortunate people who are wicked. The prologue is there to establish Job as the utterly and unquestionably righteous sufferer. Even god says so himself. So when the friends repeatedly insist that job must have done something bad to cause his suffering we know that cannot be true. There must be another explanation. Ultimately we get an anti explanation in the wisdom poem and then god's speech, from which we must conclude that there a kind of wisdom known only to God that we cannot understand.
>Hasatan/the accuser (not The Devil, that is a concept that did not yet exist)
Is that the type of "knowledge" you gained from spending 20 hours listening to some gay? Then I'll pass. The rest of your post is just as uninteresting.
If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
>Ultimately we get an anti explanation in the wisdom poem and then god's speech, from which we must conclude that there a kind of wisdom known only to God that we cannot understand.
Yeah that's all you can ever argue
>What about these loose ends and unsatisfactory, cryptic explanations?
>Oh it's a divine mystery, bro :^) just bend over and take it, God wills it
Because it's a cheap imitation of the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer
>God is a torturing sadist
Sounds about right.
ITT: people who haven't read Answer to Job by Jung
qrd?
basically
>misunderstood Job
>literally wrote a theory of what he thought was wrong with it, based on his misunderstanding
>instead of actually looking for an explanation
it's sad.
What was the misunderstanding and what is the correct understanding of Job?
suffering, and in Job's case suffering through cognitive dissonance, is a fundamental and base component of human existence and is, as contradictory as it may seem, a gift from God.
Stockholm syndrome in full effect here
filtered
> stockholm syndrome
oh, certainly, i won't even deny it.
unfortunately, you were born into the same prison i was, just like every other pseud on this board. if you'd rather thrash at the bars, screaming and hoping for a way out (hint: there is none except death, and even that is debatable, so if thats your position, "unironically" kys) you have the free will to do so.
or, you could accept your fate as a human being, and order some more books from the commissary. reading is fun.
>gnosticism
Western "Christianty" is a plague
so filtered its not even funny anymore. i'll pray for you
>bro life is suffering
>bro just read more
Pray for yourself first
>acknowledging suffering as a fundamental aspect of this world = gnosticism
God I hate this board sometimes
I am well aware that we share the same prison. I just think that you have fallen in love with this prison and its warden, because they are all that you know, and started excusing the abuse you suffer as an act of love, out of pure cope.
Incredibly cringe understanding
christian IQ: the post
>live in western world in technological age
>live in extreme comfort
>pretend like suffering wasn't a fact of life for 99.9999999999% of humanity both past and present
>"Just look at the sky bro"
Reported for underage
>gnostic turns marxist in the span of 2 posts
No, this isn't underage. This is what you must believe in avoiding misery in today's world. Like it or not.
>To live is to suffer anon
I LOVE EASTERN PHILOSOPHY. YHWH IS LE BAD. CHRISTIANS GOT IT ALL WRONG. SCHOPENHAUER IS A PHILOSOPHER.
stay ignorant kid. I've seen enough videos of pajeet poop cleaners to know that this existence might as well be hell
They look like they're enjoying their lives more than you who LARP as a gnostic-marxist who cares about others. You only care about yourself and your sad existence. Grow up and learn to serve God truthfully with all your heart, and maybe He'll take pity on you.
Any "Christian" who does not believe suffering in love of humanity as a fundamental teaching of Jesus Christ is not a Christian. You make the sign of the cross every single time you "pray", right? Do you not understand what that cross represents?
It means He died for you to whine on IQfy about pajeet videos and blame your depression on God
The amount of mental gymnastics you've had to play in this entire thread deserves a silver medal. I hate that I've seen worse on this board.
Ok now off you go back to your yoga mat
>Better yet, how can anyone say it is not inspired by God
Because there’s no such thing.
Job 1:1, "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil."
Job 1:21, "Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised."
Job 38:1-2, "Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said, 'Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?'"
Job 42:5-6, "My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."
Satan cannot bring financial and physical destruction upon us unless it is by God’s permission. God has power over what Satan can and cannot do. It is beyond our human ability to understand the "why’s" behind all the suffering in the world. The wicked will receive their just dues. We cannot always blame suffering and sin on our lifestyles. Suffering may sometimes be allowed in our lives to purify, test, teach, or strengthen the soul.
>The wicked will receive their just dues.
How do you know?
It's the best book in the bible though