Lol. Your statement there is nothing but an indication that you choose to close your heart to God. And certainly, you can close your heart to God just as much as you can close a heart to a woman you do not love or have not met. But how is that any indication that a relationship with her or God is automatically unhealthy when you have not even attempted it yet? Just admit it, there is an animosity against God, and it is not because there is no healthy relationship possible with Him.
What an absurdly arrogant statement.
I said I don't consider it a healthy relationship to have to love a being that I have no evidence exists, which is a completely logical point. In fact, if I have no evidence such a being exists in the real world, and therefore don't believe said being exists, it's impossible to have a relationship with it.
I was at one point a Christian, and I have spent years studying the history of Christianity, and the theology behind it. On what basis apart from your own unjustified assertions do you have to state I've never attempted to understand your god?
In short, just because I don't believe in your imaginary friend is no reason to make judgments on what I've spent years reading about, debating and learning. It's complete arrogance for you to make pronouncements about those things simply because we disagree on this topic.
Because that is how the translation is in the Bible, I cannot avoid using the word, can I? Again, blame it on the limited vocabulary of English in describing emotions.
First off, the original languages that the bible was written in all had far more limited vocabularies than English does.
That being said, if you want to use this argument to justify your point, then I'm sure you know what the original word was, and what a better word in English would be.
So what language was the original scripture in, what word was mistranslated, and what would be a better word to use in its place?
Didn't I explain already? Sorry, but I hate to repeat myself.
No, not really... You've stated that you know, you're just not good at describing the difference. Well, how do you know what you claim to know?
If you can pass that info on to me, then I can go check your sources, and get a better understanding of what you're having difficulty in explaining.
If they have made a clear commitment to worship God, and then they turn back on that commitment later, they are no different from betrayers. They will logically be cut off, just like how you will cut off a woman who betrays you after making her commitment. Is that unjust?
Except they didn't, God imposed himself on the Isrealites. Read Genesis Chapters 12 through 17. God basically tells Abram / Abraham what to do, then winds up making a covenant with him that applies to all of his descendants.
At no point earlier in Genesis did anyone explicitly agree to follow god, and nowhere was Abraham given the choice either. Furthermore, the covenant is binding to all of his descendants, so there's no choice for them as well.
So your argument that these people decided by their own free will to worship god, then decided to turn their backs on him does not appear anywhere in the bible narrative. You're simply making stuff up.
On another note, if someone agreed to follow me, then decided for whatever reason to stop following me, I am not justified in putting them to death. Your god for whatever reason thinks it's ok to kill people who change their minds on this particular topic though.
And you believe God was enraged for no apparent reason? After God saved them from Pharaoh, after He parted the sea for them to cross, after promising to bring them to a good land, after giving them knowledge of who He is and what He can do, they still betrayed Him. If He did not love these people, why would He be angry at their betrayal? And why should God allow betrayers to be within His household?
See above, God's covenant is imposed upon the Israelites as descendants of Abraham (Genesis 17 to be specific). They can't be said to have betrayed god when they never made a commitment to him in the first place.
As for the great stuff that god apparently did, he also knowingly let them be enslaved and mistreated in Egypt for 400 years (Genesis 15:13) before "miracling" them out of there. Furthermore, he had them wander around in the desert for 40 years, when the walk from Egypt to Israel in reality takes a couple weeks.
So god wasn't exactly all that friendly to these people either.
Either way, the point still stands, even if he had been perfectly good to them and they still legitimately betrayed him, putting people to death isn't exactly a reasonable punishment.
What has anger towards betrayal got to do with jealousy? Or do you propose that if a person is not jealous in the human way, he can never be angry when he is betrayed?
First off, it's absurd that an all powerful morally good god would ever get jealous, especially of a golden calf...
Secondly, getting angry at a betrayal is fine, unless you impose your conditions on a people. Under those circumstances you should expect for some people to opt out of the deal.
You forgot to mention that Moses asked first who will be on God's side, and only the Levites wanted it. If the 3,000 stood on the side of God, why will they die?
I didn't mention that because it's irrelevant. He still had all the non-believers killed.
What happens if the Levites had opted to stay on the side of the golden calf? Would it be cool in your books to slaughter them as well?
Yeah, after you decide to worship Him, you still secretly worship other gods. It is no different from saying you decide to love a woman, but you secretly have other women behind her back. How does that kind of betrayal sound?
What other gods would they be worshipping? I thought your god was the only god?
I am talking about the moral and spiritual principles behind the Ten Commandments.
But they don't still actually apply to you as a non-Israelite. You may decide to adhere to them, but they aren't actually binding to you.
