The Shining Ones - The "god" of the Old Testament

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Yes, I read the earlier posts. Let’s put the entire conversation aside for now about Elohim and just look at the stories. Most of these stories can be found in the Books of Enoch and the Sumerian tablets. The Books of Enoch were considered canonical by many earlier church fathers and they go into much detail on the adventures of Enoch with the shining ones.

Many of the stories are also told much earlier in history and are recorded on the Sumerian tablets. Can you not see the demented actions of this Yahweh being for at least a few thousand years or should I post some of them?

Jesus tried to give us the real “religion” but no one listened. He did away with the 10 commandments and put them all into 2. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it!
 
Guys, stop feeding the troll. He’s obviously made up his mind that this nutcase author is correct, and that multiple thousands of years of history and study are wrong.

He’s not interested in language derivation. He’s not interested in culture or context. In his mind, since the words are spelled the same, they obviously are directed to the same end. :roll_eyes:

Stop wasting your time.
 
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I don’t think name calling is necessary ProdglArchitect! I just want people to keep an open mind.
 
If you want people to keep an open mind YOU need to also keep an open mind, which you have systematically refused to do. You have either ignored or misrepresented every attempt to show you how the language of the Bible refutes your position, and have just kept repeating your presumptuous assertions. You cherry pick verses to suit your needs and ignore every other verse which refutes them, and you willfully misrepresent history, culture, and language to further your own flawed interpretation.

You are showing all the characteristics of every other troll to stand on their soap box, so the moniker seems entirely appropriate.

Stop listening to crackpot writers. O’Brien was just another in a loooooong line of people who ignore the actual archaeological evidence in favor of crazy theories with no backing. His books are full of inaccuracies, assumptions, misrepresentations, and flat out falsehoods. He’s no better than other 18-1900’s “archaeologists” who made up stories about giant monsters in the Amazon, or an ancient race of technologically advanced white Natives. He is also guilty of the all-too common cultural sin of assuming that ancient people were just too stupid to do the things we see them doing, and so asserting that it’s necessary for some other more advanced race to have been the actual source of these wonders. In short, he was an idiot.

Seriously, do any research on the man and it becomes abundantly clear that he was just a loon looking for attention.
 
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I’ve been Catholic for 40 years and wanted explanations for things that the church couldn’t provide.

Using the oldest examples of writing we have, it’s apparent that modern “historians” don’t know what they’re talking about. How could ancient civilizations build sites like Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years ago when historians say humans just started using stone tools?

Don’t get mad, just open your mind to other possibilities. God is larger than either of us can imagine! Don’t put Him in a box.
 
See, I have no issue with recognizing that historians have a lot to learn. That’s not what I’m taking issue with in your statement.

My issue is that you are not merely saying that humans were more advanced than we think. You’re saying that the Israelites worshiped someone other than YHWH as God. I take extreme issue with that, especially when you consider that the OT lays the foundation work for the New, and that the NT fulfills all the prophecies of the old. If the God of the OT is false, then that means that Jesus, as the fulfillment of those OT prophecies, is also false.

A few other points you might find interesting. The early books of the OT reflect the Sumerian mythologies specifically because they were written in such a way as to refute them. The Genesis account of the OT is similar to the Sumerian creation account with one major difference. In the Sumerian myths, humans were a byproduct created as slaves. In the OT, humans were created as the focal point of creation out of the love of YHWH. They are structured similarly specifically so that God could present the accurate understanding of creation, and save His people from going down the Nihilistic / Hedonistic path pretty much all Pagan religions went down.

Gobekli Tepe doesn’t somehow prove your assertions. It means that iron tools were developed in some parts of the world earlier than others. There’s nothing bizarre about that, we just hadn’t had any evidence yet. It’s also entirely possible that stone tools were used to carve out Gobekli Tepe.

My point is, you are latching on to crackpot theories from a pagan religion. Jesus came from the Jews. Jesus used Jewish scripture. He quoted from it repeatedly. If Jesus validated the Hebrew scriptures, and you want to follow Jesus, then you must also accept their validity.

As for the questions the Church couldn’t answer, let’s hear some of them. Maybe we can turn this into an actually fruitful discussion.
 
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There are too many points to discuss here. I’ll start with the age of the tablets vs the first book of the OT. The tablets were written at least 1,500 years before the first book of the OT. Most scholars can’t even say for sure that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. How are we to put our trust in those since most of the stories were borrowed from the tablets?

Have you read the Books of Enoch? They also go into some detail about the weird encounters Enoch had with the shining ones. Jesus had to reference the OT since that is the only thing the Jews and Gentiles knew. Most of the time, he was providing new teachings that differed from what the Jews were taught in the OT like, for example, divorce. Do you think God the Father would allow divorce and then Jesus change it soon after or the one where God supposedly told them to stone a woman committed of adultrey and then Jesus say not to?

Jesus came to show us how to LIVE!

Humans with stone tools cannot create sites such as Saksaywaman in Peru or Puma Punku in Bolivia, or Baalbek in Lebanon . The stones in Baalbek weight up to 1,200 tons!

Here are some quotes showing the weirdness and demented actions of the Yahweh being:

Exodus 4

21 Yahweh said to Moses, “When you get back to Egypt, see that you show Pharaoh all the amazing things that I have given you the power to do. But I will make him stubborn so that he will not let the people go. 22 Then tell Pharaoh, ‘This is what Yahweh says: Israel is my firstborn son. 23 I told you to let my son go so that he may worship me. But you refused to let him go. So now I’m going to kill your firstborn son.’”
God tries to kill Moses but he can’t?? And then Zipporah wipes her son’s foreskin blood on Moses’ feet and God left him alone??? And why would God even be subject to anger??

24 Along the way they stopped for the night. Yahweh met Moses and tried to kill him. 25 Then Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’ feet with it. She said, “You are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So Yahweh let him alone. It was because of the circumcision that she said at that time, “You are a bridegroom of blood!”
Exodus 12

God kills babies??

12 “On that same night I will go throughout Egypt and kill every firstborn male, both human and animal. I will severely punish all the gods of Egypt, because I am Yahweh. 13 But the blood on your houses will be a sign for your protection. When I see the blood, I will pass over you. Nothing will touch or destroy you when I strike Egypt.

God condones slavery!!??

44 “Any male slave you have bought may eat it after you have circumcised him.
 
Exodus 19

God comes down to Moses’ people and tells him to kill people if they touch the mountain he’s coming from??

10 So Yahweh said to Moses, “Go to the people, and tell them they have two days to get ready. They must set themselves apart as holy. Have them wash their clothes 11 and be ready by the day after tomorrow. On that day Yahweh will come down on Mount Sinai as all the people watch. 12 Mark off a boundary around the mountain for the people, and tell them not to go up the mountain or even touch it. Those who touch the mountain must be put to death. 13 No one should touch them. They must be stoned or shot with arrows. No matter whether it’s an animal or a person, it must not live. The people may go up the mountain only when the ram’s horn sounds a long blast.”
God doesn’t want people to see him or he will violently kill them!!??

20 Yahweh came down on top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain. So Moses went up. 21 Yahweh said to him, “Go down and warn the people not to force their way through the boundary to see Yahweh, or many of them will die. 22 Even the priests who are allowed to come near Yahweh must set themselves apart as holy, or Yahweh will violently kill them.”
Exodus 21

God condoning slavery again!!

2 “Whenever you buy a Hebrew slave, he will be your slave for six years.
God condones the death penalty!

12 “Whoever strikes someone and kills him must be put to death.
God wants people who curse their parents to be put to death!!

15 “Whoever hits his father or mother must be put to death.

16 “Whoever kidnaps another person must be put to death, whether he has sold the kidnapped person or still has him.

17 “Whoever curses his father or mother must be put to death.
Exodus 22

God wants to kill those who make a sacrifice to another god.

20 “Whoever sacrifices to any god except Yahweh must be condemned and destroyed.
God wants the best wine for himself!!??

29 “Never withhold your best wine from me.
 
Exodus 25

God commands them to build him a tent so he can live with them and gives them exact dimensions with a table and a lampstand with 7 lamps for light!!?? What the heck!!
Exodus 31

God wants people killed who work on the day of worship!!!

15 You may work for six days, but the seventh day is a day of worship, a day when you don’t work. It is holy to Yahweh. Whoever works on that day must be put to death.
Exodus 32

God gets so angry with the people he wants to kill them and then changes his mind after Moses pleads with him!!??

7 Yahweh said to Moses, “Go back down there. Your people whom you brought out of Egypt have ruined everything. 8 They’ve already turned from the way I commanded them to live. They’ve made a statue of a calf for themselves. They’ve bowed down to it and offered sacrifices to it. They’ve said, ‘Israel, here are your gods who brought you out of Egypt.’” 9 Yahweh added, “I’ve seen these people, and they are impossible to deal with. 10 Now leave me alone. I’m so angry with them I am going to destroy them. 14 So Yahweh reconsidered his threat to destroy his people.

Oh wait, nevermind, he killed them anyway.

35 So Yahweh killed people because they had Aaron make the calf.
Exodus 33

God gets so angry that if he were with the people he would kill them!!??

5 Yahweh had said to Moses, “Tell the Israelites, ‘You are impossible to deal with. If I were with you, I might destroy you at any time. Now take off your jewelry, and I’ll decide what to do with you.’” 6 After they left Mount Horeb, the Israelites no longer wore their jewelry.
I could keep going and going about the demented character of this Yahweh being. But I won’t.
 
First of all, you’re not going to win any arguments by calling God the Father demented. Shame on you!! If you want to come onto CAF, be respectful of God. You are taking these verses out of context and misrepresenting God’s character.

He has patiently borne with humanity through our millenia of turning away from Him…He has guided and helped humanity as we grow up into full knowledge of Him. Jesus does not contradict the Father’s will…He fulfills it.

Second, since events like Creation, the Fall, the Tower of Babel, and the Flood actually happened, and not everyone who survived kept following God but diverged into various errors and man-made religions prompted by Nimrod and his descendents, etc, you would absolutely expect to see the stories of what happened in those important, cataclysmic events recorded in all ancient languages and peoples.

The fact that other ancient people have records of the Flood and Creation is proof of the Hebrew God, not the other way around. It’s not about who has the oldest written record but who has the correct one.

I would expect other pagan religions to have passed down corrupted memories of what happened to their ancestors.

The faithful remnant through Shem and Noah passed down what actually happened, and the Holy Spirit guided Moses to record it in the way that God wanted him to.

Try reading holy and faithful Doctors of the Church. If you are reading these quacks who make you lose trust in the God of the OT, then logically you must lose faith in Jesus as well. They are One and the Same.
 
I’m not calling God the Father of all of creation demented. I’m calling the Yahweh being demented. You must not have read my posts above.
 
I’m open to some good explanations of some of the quotes above.
 
Alright, I literally lack the time to respond to all of these points.
In general, your issues seem to stem from three primary misunderstandings.

#1: God is GOD. He is our creator. He is the author of life. To give life and to take it are His right. So yeah, God kills people and orders the Israelites to kill people. That’s His right.

If you know so much about history, you know that the groups God ordered the Israelites to kill were sacrificing children to their pagan deities. They were evil, degenerate cultures. In short, their cultures deserved to die.

As for the Egyptian children, yeah, God killed them. It is certainly a tragedy from our perspective, but we all die eventually, and none of us are guaranteed any amount of life. Life is, once again, a gift from God. He can take it when necessary or good. Those people were judged like all the other pagans who died, and those who were open to Him were likely saved, while those who were not were damned. That is the judgment we all go through, regardless of how old we are when we die.

That taking of life was what ultimately freed the Jews and allowed them to begin their journey to the Holy Land. Without it, salvation history would have not followed the path God deemed necessary / best.

#2: God does not have emotions the way we understand them, but that sort of language was necessary for our comprehension.

God doesn’t get angry the way you or I get angry, but the authors attributed anger to Him to convey the evil of what the Israelites had done. They acted against Him, and in His justice, He reacted against them. We can only perceive things within the scope of our understanding, and we cannot understand God’s state of being, so we apply human language to realities beyond our comprehension in an attempt to better understand them.

#3: Just because there are rules about something in the OT does not make those things morally acceptable. There were rules about divorce, yet Jesus clearly says divorce is a no-go. God allowed it because of the Jews’ hardness of hard. Similarly, He allowed polygamy for a time (though none of the examples we have in scripture work out well for the husband), as well as slavery and other things we now know to be moral evils. This is because preparing the Jewish people was a process, not an instant thing. Just like with a child, you cannot teach them all the rules the moment they are born; they gradually learn and adopt good behavior as they become capable of understanding it. I know it’s hard to grasp, but these early cultures just weren’t to the point of rejecting slavery yet, it was too integral to their culture (and pretty much every culture on the planet).

Another small point of consideration when it comes to slavery; it was either that or death. We can debate which is worse, but that was generally the only alternative.
 
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mattw699 said:
I’ll start with the age of the tablets vs the first book of the OT. The tablets were written at least 1,500 years before the first book of the OT. Most scholars can’t even say for sure that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. How are we to put our trust in those since most of the stories were borrowed from the tablets?
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The point at which something is written down isn’t necessarily the point it was created. The OT survived as an oral tradition for centuries prior to being written down. As for the stories being borrowed, prove it. You’re making a pretty massive assumption there. It is equally plausible that the Sumerians borrowed the stories from the Jewish tradition, and just wrote them down earlier since they developed a written language earlier. It’s also possible that neither borrowed from the other, and that the Jewish stories were developed in such a way as to specifically counteract the Sumerian ones (as with the creation account example I gave).

You’re making a ton of assumptions that have no real backing.
Have you read the Books of Enoch? They also go into some detail about the weird encounters Enoch had with the shining ones. Jesus had to reference the OT since that is the only thing the Jews and Gentiles knew. Most of the time, he was providing new teachings that differed from what the Jews were taught in the OT like, for example, divorce. Do you think God the Father would allow divorce and then Jesus change it soon after or the one where God supposedly told them to stone a woman committed of adultrey and then Jesus say not to?
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I have not read Enoch, nor do I care to. It was not accepted as scripture by the Jews, and neither was it referenced by Christ. It’s no better than the Gospel of Judas, or any of the myriad of other false works that circulated in the early centuries of the Church.

I’ve already covered divorce, and the stoning of the woman falls under the same header. God moved the Jewish culture away from barbarism gradually, culminating in Christ’s teachings.

You cannot change an entire culture overnight, and we see how much the Jews rebelled against God each step of the way.
Humans with stone tools cannot create sites such as Saksaywaman in Peru or Puma Punku in Bolivia, or Baalbek in Lebanon . The stones in Baalbek weight up to 1,200 tons!
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Prove it.

Seriously. People nowadays thing these cultures were so infantile, and incapable of doing anything. They were still people, they still had complex logistic skills, and they still knew how to solved problems. We assume certain things about what they knew or how they did things, but it’s all just that, an assumption.

Up until about three years ago, we had no clue how the Romans made concrete that lasted for thousands of years. This is just another example of the method of construction / movement being lost. We’re pretty sure we finally figured out how the Egyptians built the pyramids, and we only managed that because they left us pictorial references for construction.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
Just like with a child, you cannot teach them all the rules the moment they are born; they gradually learn and adopt good behavior as they become capable of understanding it.
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What!!?? So you mean that the “sin” Adam and Eve committed isn’t valid since they were in the “infant” stage of humanity and it doesn’t apply to every human being who have ever existed since them!!???
 
I did read it. But as the Jews will testify, YHWH is God the Father, the Creator’s revealed name, and you are using it in an extremely disrespectful manner.

God has revealed Himself to us using many different names and titles. Each name/title reveals a truth about Himself. It does not mean that there is more than one God…it shows the depth, majesty, and mystery of God who cannot be limited by only one name and title.

There is God in three Persons, then there are man-made false “gods,” and then the orders of angels, who are not gods but do God’s will, and the fallen angels.

I don’t think it’s worth debating you verse by verse since you are trying to separate the Creator from His revealed name for Himself. Since you have rejected the inspiration of Scripture and the traditional teaching/interpretation of the Word by the Holy Church, which has remained unchanged for 2,000 years, I don’t think it would be a profitable discussion.

You seem to think that the Church and the Jews have both been wrong about who God is for millennia. Do you really think that the Jews were worshipping someone other than God the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe for thousands of years? The God of the OT is not separate from God the Creator.

Perhaps you feel like the lone wolf who is calling out perceived heresy in the Church, but in this instance, it’s the boy who called wolf who is wrong. The only wolf is those who reject God as He has revealed Himself through the Church. God has protected and provided for the Church…He would not have let the Church go so far astray in our perception of who He is, nor did He allow the Jews to get it wrong. Whenever they strayed, He sent prophets and judges to bring them back to Him.

Since you are swimming against the stream here, why don’t you take your concerns about God and go back and read the Doctors of the Church like I suggested, and see if you can understand their reasoning. They might convince you. It would be helpful for you to read their point of views, since none of them agree with you.
 
mattw699 said:
Most of the stories from the Old Testament can be traced back to Sumerian stories from clay tablets where the stories are told in much more detail.
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I don’t plan to get into this discussion but I have one comment in passing.
I consider the Holy Scripture to be more authoritative than modern translations of ancient Sumerian legends.
 
Indeed what you are doing is describing the G-d that Jews worshiped and still worship as demented, thereby denigrating the Jewish religion. This may be the real message of the author from whom you got these ideas. The problem is that all the verses you quoted from the Hebrew Scriptures supposedly illustrating the dementia of YHWH have their explanations, but you are not aware of them because you most likely have little knowledge of Judaism, its Written Law and Oral Law. Slavery, for example, was NOT condoned; it was tolerated in its LEAST harsh form (note that even one’s manservants were required to rest on the Sabbath). Why was it tolerated at all? Because G-d in His wisdom knew that putting an ABRUPT ending to slavery would not be followed by His people, who themselves were so accustomed to being in bondage for so many years and thinking of THEMSELVES as slaves. A slave does not immediately cease thinking of himself as such when granted freedom. So G-d understood that the institution of slavery (actually servitude in Hebrew culture) must cease gradually so that people might adjust their attitudes towards self and others with regard to servitude.

The numerous admonitions that this one or that one must be put to death are hyperbolic language designed so that G-d’s people would not disobey his commandments. In point of fact, the Oral Law stipulates that the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, disobedience to parents, and so on has a very high threshold, requires knowledge that one is committing a crime, and two valid eyewitnesses to the crime who are willing to testify against the perpetrator. Such extreme penalties were rarely, if ever, enforced but remained on the “books” (literally) as a constant reminder that such behavior must not be tolerated and preferably changed (i.e. repentance) rather than terminated by means of death.

Knowledge such as the above is the domain of Jewish scholars, rabbis, and rabbinical students who study day and night the Midrash, Talmud, Torah, and Tanakh to decipher the justification for the commandments, their finer interpretations, the cultural context, and, in some cases, their ambiguities. Thus to be critical of the Judaism of the Hebrew Bible, one must engage in some kind of systematic study of its contents, which the author whom you quote has apparently failed to do.
 
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Wow… just… wow.

Man, it’s like you purposefully ignored the majority of my post, and focused in on one thing you could twist to suit your needs.

Are you sure you’re not a politician?

To answer your assertion, no, that is completely and totally incorrect. Adam and Eve were created perfect, with direct knowledge of God and control over their appetites. They made a willful choice to act against God, thereby cutting themselves off from His grace. Their children and following descendants, lacking this direct knowledge and grace, eventually fell into barbarism. Then, some time later, God stepped in with Abraham and began lifting them out of it, slowly but surely. Eventually, this culminated in Christ, when access to grace was reintroduced to humanity.
 
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meltzerboy2 said:
Why was it tolerated at all? Because G-d in His wisdom knew that putting an ABRUPT ending to slavery would not be followed by His people, who themselves were so accustomed to being in bondage for so many years and thinking of THEMSELVES as slaves.
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You are making my point exactly as I described it above for Jesus. Jesus knew he couldn’t just tell the Jews that everything they knew was wrong, he had to use their laws and understanding to explain to them a new covenant. A covenant based on love of God and love of each other.
 
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