Dear Josephus,

You wrote;

“Abraham lived in a society that sacrificed their eldest child to the fertility gods - that was normal practice in his Middle Eastern culture as atonement to the gods of fertility.”

I really do get tired of this rubbish getting trotted out by those who would sanitise God's actions in commanding Abraham to raise the blade over the throat of his son.

Besides which there is absolutely no evidence that this was 'normal practice' at all.

Rather it is evident from Genesis that Abraham's actions were that of a man in deep fear of a raging God who had wiped out the cities of the plain before Abraham's very eyes. This is despite Abraham trying to bargain for their lives. God was mindful of Abraham's judgement and probably resentful of it therefore the 'test'. What a deeply inhumane thing to have done though. It is pretty clear that God and Abraham never spoke afterward and that Abraham and Jacob were understandable estranged from each other.

This is part of the story of the humanising of a God, a theme which continues throughout the Bible culminating in the crucifixion where God finally gets to experience something akin to what he put Abraham through.

Your rather insipid interpretation attempts to strip much of the power from the binding of Jacob and we are left with a shallow take on one of the great biblical narratives.

SteeleRedux,
I do not know how you can claim Jacob was estranged from Abraham. That is nonsense as Abraham was long dead before Jacob was old enough to know his grandfather Genesis 25.
Human sacrifice was practiced in Mesopotamia during the time of Abraham.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice

Abraham refused to accept the polytheistic gods of his father Terah and it was he who was estranged from him and departed for the land now known as Israel.

Dear Josephus,

My apologies. I of course meant Issac.

You wrote;

“Human sacrifice was practiced in Mesopotamia during the time of Abraham.”

It was also practiced at time in Judea with great relish by Israelites and children were among the victims. But to claim that the eldest son was routinely sacrificed to the fertility gods is completely without evidence.

Dear Josephus,

The polytheistic gods were more tolerant than the monotheistic God. One could add one’s god to the polytheistic pantheon with a minimum of fuss. Followers of the Abrahamic Gods have a record of intolerance. "Thou shall have no other Gods before me." Why not? However, monotheism was a much more effective mechanism of social control so the ruling classes could take it on as the divine right of kings and other nonsense supported them. One can condemn heresy and equate it with treason. I think the story of Abraham as are many of the stories in the Bible is simply a Stone Age tribal legend which is used to inculcate unquestioning obedience to the dictates of the sometimes unreasonable tribal leader. Of course it is all nonsense. Women do not get impregnated by gods except in pagan legends and Christianity. Nobody can take on another’s sins except in pagan legends and Christianity. No one gets resurrected except in pagan legends and Christianity. The Roman Empire probably would have broken up earlier had it not adopted Christianity as the official religion. As it was the eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453.

If mankind cannot cast off the superstition of believing in god(s) at least we can get rid of monotheism and return to a more tolerant and humane polytheism. In the legend Terah was wiser than his son. Father knows best.

I would rather worship Athena, the goddess of wisdom, than the no good God of the Bible who orders a man to murder his son and then subjects his own son to an unpleasant death.

Yuyutsu

You wrote: "ARE-ness (or in its alternate grammatical forms, AM-ness and IS-ness) only requires one. No differentiation, no comparison. Existence on the other hand, implies a relationship between at least two: subject and object - the property of being and something that complies (or doesn't comply) with that property. It also suggests space (where this objects resides), time (when it appears) and causality (why it appears)."

The distinction you make between 'IS-ness' and 'existence' has the appearance of being quite arbitrary, so any properties the concepts are said to have, or implications they are said to have that differentiate them, can only be equally arbitrary. Even so, you might like to explain your concepts a little:

"Is-ness ... Only requires one": One what?

"Existence ... Implies a relationship ...": A statement, assertion, speculation, denial, proposition, hypothesis or theory may be said to have implications. 'Existence' is none of these. How can it be said to have implications?

What are the specific grounds for your distinction, other than in question-begging terms?

Posted by david f, Thursday, 26 November 2015 2:48:40 PM

" ... I think the story of Abraham as are many of the stories in the Bible is simply a Stone Age tribal legend which is used to inculcate unquestioning obedience to the dictates of the sometimes unreasonable tribal leader. ... "

Well said! To which I would add that I consider that the unsavoury underlying principle in that remains with us still today.

And I suspect that many of the old stories have been ever so slightly "kinked" to do exactly as *DavidF* has suggested.

See, who said God spoke? Can anyone tell us?

..

Thereafter, I think we need a better word than "non-sense" as if you accept that they were only hallucinating, then obviously hallucinations do actually originate in part in the world of sensory experience (and by the part that does not originate in sense I mean that aspect of a hallucination which has come about by the particular re-arrangement of stimulus and prior experience by the individual's concerned brain, and that of course can give the appearance that the hallucination is strange in the sense of it being outside the persons previous experience, but of course, that is unlikely to be the case.