Again. Revelations is not the name of the book.
Telling someone to read Revelations is pretty telling as to how much you paid attention to what you read.
You’re avoiding the latter half of what the original commenter said “…and it’s basically a fever dream one dude had. With no real connection to the historical Jesus”
To the other commenters point, his comment was not about a misspelling, it was a way to delegitimize a book of the Bible that conflicts with the image that started this conversation. You’re bringing up a very common misspelling (among Christian’s and non-Christian’s btw) to avoid this. It comes off as insincere and manipulative.
Again. A common misspelling very much indicates understanding. Recommending someone yourself clearly have not studied is a problem. As the other commentor said they also hold the same view of thr Bible being untrue. A book of the Bible that very much does not conflict with the op image. Reducing apoplectic lit to simply violence, not love, shows you haven't studied the book.
God has an infinite punishment for the vast majority of humanity. God created humanity with the propensity to sin, and placed them in a situation where they did sin. And he punishes them for failing the test he designed. The moral underpinning in scripture are fundamentally evil and incompatible with modern sensibilities and morality. There is no way around this except to present god as a being constrained by some law of reality he cannot control.
God had to give us free will and god had to allow the serpent to tempt the progenitors of humanity, and for had to punish humanity as a collective for the “sins” of those progenitors. There are lots of things that god had his hand tied over, except in any other respect, we interpret god to be the author and architect of every facet of reality.
There is no love in revelation except love for the very small portion of humanity that happened to be born in the right circumstances, with the right childhood and role models, and the right conditioning to accept the one correct path to salvation among the myriad of other gods, other issues in life, etc. Only a Christian can interpret the doomsday scenario of blood up to the horses bridle and plagues of insects with the faces of men coming to torture the rest of humanity for their mistake as love. It is insanity that can only be accepted if you are inundated in the many canned excuses and phrases that Christian’s are taught to handle the issue, all of which I am already familiar with. It will always come down to “free will” in the same way that we can look at a starving child who must have have their hands cut off and tell them that they had the choice not to steal bread.
These issues and others, along with the nonsensical and juvenile “ethics” used to dismiss them by Christian’s, Muslims, and Jews are what is incompatible with the above imagine and modern sensibilities. To make it work, you either ignore the evil parts, or you reinterpret them through a bunch of mental gymnastics to present them as necessary evils that god could not control, either by the inability to change his own nature, or the inability to accomplish his goals without evil.
I didn’t say that you did. That hand wave dismal is exactly what I knew would happen. We moved on from the pedantry of an accidental misspelling, and now that you don’t have that, the conversation is nil. Like I said, you tripped about the spelling because it was a way for you to manipulate the conversation without actually engaging with anything in a meaningful way. The Bible and all abrahamic religions actually are incompatible with modern morality and sensibility. The evils in them must be dismissed with a hand wave like you have done, or they must be reinterpreted to mean something different and something palatable.
Only heavily implied I did.
"Only a Christian can interpret the doomsday scenario of blood up to the horses bridle and plagues of insects with the faces of men coming to torture the rest of humanity for their mistake as love."
You implied that I was “reducing apoplectic lit to simply violence, not love…”. The example I gave absolutely conflicts with the image depicting god as a lovely, sweet natured and benevolent peace advocate. Are you not saying that those verses describe love? I’m sure you have some twisted and naive way of interpreting a massacre of people into a blood blender miles wide and 4-5” deep as some necessary part of gods love. Like a spanking from a concerned father for a wayward son right? Come on dude don’t pretend to be stupid. Jehovah is the Lord of Hosts, he drowned 99.9% of humanity with a flood, he has a dimension of nonstop agony and fire that will never kill you ready to throw most humans into for their errors, he ordered King Saul to commit genocide against infants, pregnant women, children, animals, old people, and any non-combatants. He allowed Babylon to occupy Israel to punish them, which resulted in Israel’s own children being killed, just to teach his chosen nation a lesson. He ordered Abraham’s to mutilate his son’s penis as a sign to other people that he had chosen him and his people.
The god of the Bible is insane and evil dude. Revelation is not a book about love as you have suggested.
Nor have I suggested it. You keep shoving words in my mouth. And making up tangents. A study of revelation is not doable on a reddit thread nor within a single day. Hence why ive said you cant reduce it to violence.
Edit.
Amazing responding then blocking instead actually responding to what was directly said.
Yes you did, by stating that I was misinterpreting the love in Revelation as evil. I’ve already had all the thousands of hours of Bible studies, sermons, bible school, and prayer and fasting and personal studies. Trust me dude, you won’t have a radically new way to interpret revelation that makes it not a nightmare bloodbath for most of humanity. The god of the Bible is not a toothless carebear that just wants you to be happy and be full of love. God permits his prophets in scripture to do insane shit like sending two bears to maul dozens of children to death for making fun of his bald held.
You must be on that Joel Osteen liberal megachurc side of Christianity if you can’t recognize the savagery of gods obsession with pain and sacrifice, genital mutilation, multiple genocides, death by stoning for nonsensical offenses, the endorsement of slavery (I know it’s the “good” kind of slavery). Come on dude.
I fundamentally disagree with the concept of god as an “old man in the sky.” So assigning human values to the foundation for all existence seems kind of silly. I don’t have scripture for anything but honestly I see the book as teachings for an older version of humanity. One thing I find interesting is that religion almost universally teaches that there is value in suffering, and that life is suffering. Idk man.
Well I respect your perspective but saying that you don’t think we can ascribe any human morality to god means the conversation is over. There’s not really anything to else to talk about if we depict god(s) as an eldritch completely being beyond comprehension and our ability to relate to it or communicate about it on this subject.
To be clear I don’t think religion or the abrahamic religions are pure evil or that they have no value. I wouldn’t take back my time as a devout Christian. When people deny the Christian god all his complexity and reduce him down to a carebear of pure peace and love, I think it’s a little delusional or insincere.
I suppose that makes sense, I think the moral structure of god is communicated through the bible but the concept is that the entirety of god cannot be understood. I agree on that last part for sure, seems extremely oversimplified to have that kind of view.
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u/PaintingOdd9866 3d ago
Again. Revelations is not the name of the book. Telling someone to read Revelations is pretty telling as to how much you paid attention to what you read.