God was such a dick about this. Punishing the innocent people of Egypt, when they lived under the thumb of an absolute monarch. God forbid God actually hold the powerful responsible for their own actions.
Want to know how I would handle it? Here’s my Moses speech:
"Let my people go. If you don’t, one week from today you’ll get a fever bad enough to lay you up in bed. One week after that, you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, and your right arm like clockwork, two hours apart. One week after that, if you still haven’t let my people go, you’ll just have a heart attack and drop dead.
Your successors will have one week after assuming power to let my people go, or they will die of a heart attack. If they try to weasel their way out of this by putting a baby or other figurehead in charge, whoever is actually pulling the strings will have one week to let my people go before dying of a heart attack. God will just keep bursting pharaohs until he finds one that is willing to listen."
There. Direct and instant accountability. The only people who get hurt are those who actually have the power to do something. Was it really necessary to kill a bunch of innocent Egyptian children? No, it wasn’t! God should have just sat there and popped off pharaoh after pharaoh. How many pharaohs do you think it would take? Something tells me it’s not many. I think by the time you got to the third or forth, one would say, “fuck it. Fuck my pride. I’m only pharaoh because of this Yahweh fella. I should probably just let his people go. Yahweh does NOT fuck around.”
But nah, that would be too easy. Instead has God has to go and punish a bunch of completely innocent Egyptians who hold no political authority whatsoever.
God is a dick.
To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh…
… Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah… God also ‘hardens his/Pharoah’s heart’, which compels Pharoah to not comply.
Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened… God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.
This happens multiple times.
So now… God isn’t just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death… God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events… he was in total control the whole time… God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will… when this was not the case.
This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.
Its abuser mentality.
If that happened, it wasn’t that bad.
If it was that bad, you deserved it.
you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm,
To the death?
No, to the pain.
Old Testament god is not benevolent. They are based on ideals from a time where the natural thing to do after winning a war was to kill everyone of fighting age and take everyone else (especially the women) as slaves. Ever wonder how Moses’ people got to Egypt in the first place?
Old testament god is a god of war and wrath. Killing only the Pharaohs would have been weakness.
It’s worth noting that Yahweh is the dirty of the Israelites at a time when basically everyone (including the Israelites) were henotheistic and basically claimed “my god is the best god” rather than “my god is the ONLY god”.
Also has the added entertainment benefit of basically turning God into Rem from Death Note.
Well me as an atheist understand it the other way around. I saw a documentary where they explained how those plagues actually could have occurred, and why they targeted specifically Egyptians.
And then people went on and blamed god for it of course.
At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.
Locusts were certainly a common problem.
Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle … the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile’s flooding seasons.
A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.
… But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.
…
Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.
At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.
Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant… untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God… and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.
Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.
When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured… Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba’al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.
El and his son Ba’al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon… this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.
…
The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.
The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were… and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia… all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.
2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.
There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.
What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites … well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict… Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.
There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews… ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.
Bible memes
Nice
I’m glad this is getting some positive interaction. I’ve tried posting Bible memes before. idk I thought this was pretty damn funny, and I’ve posted some stuff about gnosticism since learning more about it has become a my wiki rabbithole special interest. Like that one in particular isn’t even one of those tired het “marriage bad” jokes he literally starts by complimenting his own wife. Like a lot of Bible stories are just genuinely funny as fuck like the thing where it just goes on for a good couple of verses about dudes jizzing bucketfuls of cum. When you grew up with that shit sometimes it’s fun to just look back like wait …wut?
but literally any bible / Christianity comm gets downvoted to hell on lemmy and I’m just like. Y’all know the block function is a thing right? You can just let people have their community and have their own discussions. I just block all the AI porn comms because I don’t really wanna see it but I’m not gonna mess with the posts because idc what other people are into. Like seriously just look up “Bible” and “Christianity” and just go block all those comms. If it’s that upsetting for you to see them then block them. Live your best life as far from it as possible, especially if you’ve got religious trauma.
Especially those of us that grew up fundie and regardless of what we believe now it was a huge part of our childhood and we can’t even make memes about it with each other that will show up in our own feeds normally weighted with the stuff from the other comms we follow?
You might want to try a sub like [email protected] for those.
Content that’s only relatable to people familiar with specific religious subcultures already starts off on the back foot traction-wise. Christian stuff, in particular, is so heavily encumbered by the past and present crimes of Christians that you really can’t refer to it neutrally and expect a positive response.
You posted a youtube short link on lemmy? Yeah, that’s not going to go over well.
There’s a lot of tech literate people here, and from my experience many of them dislike short-form video content with sound. Especially when its from Alphabet, Meta, etc.
I thought we agreed to use alt frontend redirects for backward compatibility with old stuff. YT links don’t bother me. I don’t even mind the tiktok style videos.
It’s the rich data harvesting apparatus surrounding the technology that I instinctively want to drown in a bathtub.
I hate short videos with sound. Sound is so demanding of attention so much so that it drags others into it. I don’t even want to focus on it that much.
Fair. Having the option of sound is nice but if you’re blocking cookies and other local storage the only way an app can save a default mute preference is URL parameter, so I use StopTheMadness for stuff like that.
It’s Prince of Egypt. That movie will always get upvotes.
It is peak abrahamic religion
I think it also has to do with Louis Armstrong singing this song
That guy is kind of sexist plus its a video on a big tech platform. Between the two I see why it wasn’t liked.
This post is a bit better since it is simpler and relies on less obscure information. In general I’m not in favor of people going around promoting their religion but in this case it is actually reasonable. If you want to have Christian community that’s fine but in my experience online Christian communities tend to harbor extreme views while being hostile to any real discussion. I do like that this post isn’t just another screenshot of a 10 year old comment.
Haha gottem
Locusts?
What 10yo finds funny:
So that’s why i find it double funny
So you’re 20?
How could you tell? 👉👈
