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6 thoughts on “Coming Soon….

  1. 3

    My parents bought a big fancy Bible when I was a kid. It had a lot of prints of paintings in it, including this one. My mother was a Christian, but a pretty generic, don’t worry about it, God understands us and loves us type. Looking at that picture she explained the story and then said, “The trouble is, if God walked into this room and told me to kill you, I would look him in the eye and say NO!”

    So, yeah. That is a good story to start with, and that painting always brings back my mother, a believer, telling me she would tell her god no rather than hurt me.

  2. 5

    My favorite bible story is the last 3 chapters of Judges, 19, 20, and 21.
    It starts out similar to Lot giving his daughters to the angel rapers, and goes downhill from there. Way downhill.

    I have asked several religious folks to read that story, and explain what moral message I am supposed to take from it. So far, none have got back to me.

    “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

  3. 6

    K E Decilon, the story you mentioned tells you what its moral is: People are horrible, and without a king to enforce laws harshly they are going to commit atrocities as described in that story. Judges 19:1 starts with: “And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in Israel”, and Judges 21:25, the very last verse in Judges says “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

    The book of Judges is pro-monarchist propaganda. It says that without a king the Israelites were constantly being oppressed by one enemy or other, it took for ever for a worthy savior to fight the oppressor, when such happened only a few of the tribes joined the fighting while others sat around or even got into conflicts with the savior, and things got so bad that they committed one atrocity after another in a series of acts of revenge, to the point that a tribe was nearly annihilated, and extreme measures were used to save it. (BTW note that in Samuel we have the same moving parts in different roles, with Saul, the first king, being from Benjamin, and his first act as a king was saving the people of Jabesh-gilead.)

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