Anger

[Pablo Rafael]

Originally Posted by antiochian

Despite the loving image of God which the New Testament shows, there are instances in the OT which depict God as fairly mean and temperamental, not unlike many Greek gods who could get torked at the drop of a hat.

Am I the only one who sees this lopsided view of God in scripture (nice in the NT, not always so in the OT)?

Jeff, I hear you on this point! I just finished a study of Deuteronomy. God really comes across as a militant God who is ready to strike down anyone who doesn't tow the line. Where is grace in that?

I know that much of the Old Testament is culture specific and that the holiness laws were to keep the people of a weak, insignificant nation from being aborbed into the dominant cultures around them.

And...I believe that God speak to us through the Bible and has a message for me in every section. I just don't know what the message is in a lot of the Old Testament. That being said, there is a lot of grace in the Old Testament, but sections like Deuteronomy make me ask, "Is this really the same God as the New Testament God?" It does bother me, I will admit. Still waiting for God to enlighten me I guess.

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by iowan woman

pnggrad

The grrr part was meant to be playful. I agreed with what you said.

I will keep my perceptions to myself. I am so very sorry to have intruded.

You are not the only one who is uncomfortable with male pronouns for G-D. In my head there is an automatic perpetual translating program that instantly checks every "he" or "his" I hear or read, and discerns whether I need to change it for myself in order to stay in the conversation or go on reading. I installed this software back in 1975 when I read Rosemary Ruether's Religion and Sexism and Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father. It was awkward for a long time, but as I said, now it's automatic and so completely embedded that I notice I rarely mention it; yet I feel more strongly about it than ever. And it astounds me that so many Christians seem to accept and use exclusively male G-D language without questioning.

I connected with Daniel's comments about the relationship between anger towards God and anger towards one's father. I have worked with children whose fathers have horribly abused them. They have been repeatedly told that God is father and God is love. Many of them find it impossible to reconcile those conflicting messages.

Thank you for bringing it up, playfully or seriously -- I appreciated it.

Polly

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by antiochian

Part of me hesitates to post this because I don't want people to think poorly of me, as many (though not all) are dedicated Christians. Whatever people think, this is how I feel and it scares me.

Antioch,

I have most often seen the quote at the bottom of your post attributed to Anais Nin,

"There came time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Thank you for taking the risk to put your anger "out there" and put everyone in mind of the psalmists and prophets and so many others. Worship that doesn't bring our whole selves, with ALL of our human experience and emotions, before G-D isn't authentic worship.

Polly

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by sailaway58

The only God we really see is what we see in others and from what I see at this site there is plenty of reason to have hope.

Well put, Sailaway; only I would add that G-D is also revealed when we experience ourselves being seen by others, and when we see that others see us having this experience -- what psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls intersubjectivity. It's the first place that the moving/not moving picture took me, and I believe that thinking this way is the best defense against succumbing to destructively dualistic thought characterized by subject/object splitting.

Polly

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by u-dog

Elie Wiesel said, in reference to the Jewish experience of the holocaust: "It is possible to be a Jew and love God. It is possible to be a Jew and HATE God. It is not possible to be a Jew WITHOUT God"

I think that is equally true of Christians and, really, of all human beings. Your anger (which MAY have festered into hate, but I doubt it.. we say "hate" when we really mean "so angry my heads gonna explode" ) will bring you closer to God. I know that that is true in my marriage. When I bottle up my rage (or Polly bottles up hers) -- either because its not "nice" or because we are afraid to hurt each other -- we drift further apart. Once we "have it out" we immediately feel closer to each other.


I believe that God honors and recieves any true and authentic thing that we bring him. Whether that is our sexuality or our INTENSE, BURNING RAGE or other passionate emotion. If we bring it to him rather than bottling it up inside or pouring it out on some poor innocent bystander... then it is holy. Read the Psalms! Every other one is telling God that he (the psalmist) is FUCKING PISSED OFF BY THE WAY HE"S BEING TREATED. Somehow he never gets the lightning bolt treatment. hmmm... why is that?

Youre in good company! Go ahead and be pissed! shout it to the heavens. Curse God and... don't die.

It might just be your route back to intimacy with the divine.

Yep. I think one of the reasons it is so hard for human beings to find the courage to share our anger with God or with each other is because our culture is inundated with primarily destructive expressions of anger, and because too often we don't distinguish between the emotion itself and the way it is expressed. I'm always amazed when I ask clients, "how was anger expressed in the family you grew up in?" and I so often hear "oh, my parents never got angry with each other." Huh?

Polly

[antiochian]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, y'all. Unmasked, I'm afraid your answer doesn't satisfy me. I can't picture a truly loving God killing someone for any reason. What about the parts of the code that call for certain folks to be stoned? I can't see a truly loving God instituting such horrid laws.

Like Pablo, until an answer comes I will just have to accept the fact that there are some things we just don't understand. If I cling to the Christian God at all, it will be that image of God on a cross who loves us, not a god demanding blood sacrifices and stonings (that's the god of many fundamentalists, no?).

[Unmasked]

Jesus said that Godde loves mercy rather than sacrifice and burnt offerings. I'm willing to bet that a few of the guys who wrote the book had some screws loose, and that a good deal of the laws and punishments were man-made rather than Godde-breathed.

[scott snedeker]

Originally Posted by andrewlittle

Oh, no you don't. Oh, sorry, I mean please don't do that. They are important - the thoughts you expressed earlier especially. I spent three years in Iowa, following a year in England, following 37 years in Ohio. I a here to tell you that a great many churchgoers think that God does, in fact, have a penis. What they think God does with it, I don't know.

Andy, It's very clear what Pan did with his! To act in godly fashion as a follower of Pan is very different than many other faiths. But making love as a way of sharing spiritual energy connects people intensely and profoundly. Once I began learning to combine spiritual sharing with love-making my understanding of love of self and love for others love has grown exponentially.

Originally Posted by andrewlittle

Then the fallback is almost always that the Bible says God is a "he". Well, no it doesn't - not always anyway. Let's talk about the breasts of God and the womb of God as it is discussed in Hebrew Scripture. In both Hebrew and Greek, the pronouns can mean "he, she or it." Let's talk about Jesus calling God "Father" using the Greek which means both "father" and "parent".

What were these gender-inclusive pronouns? We could really use some nicer nomenclature these days to not taint our feelings with the mysogyny that laces our language

Originally Posted by andrewlittle

The real reason is tradition - without knowing why the tradition became that way. That tradition was formed when the Latin Vulgate became THE BIBLE - you know, the same time men decided there should only be an all-male priesthood, and they should be called Father. The tradition developed to maintain male dominance in a "religion" named after an egalitarian.

Personally, Iowan woman, I am very glad you said you piece.

Blessings,
Andy

P.S. I hear you on the ill-mannered, bad-tempered cheapskates as well. What kind of tip do we think Jesus would have left?

What a great question! As usual Andy, you evaporate my phobia of a christian belief paradigm.

I'll bet he would have communicated unconditional love to the heart of any who served him. Any futher tip would have been unnecessary and would have taken away from the message.

[paul]

Antiochian,

I love, love , love your honesty.

You have gotten some wonderfully honest responses...you are doing Gods work.

If there is a "God" who is the "way, the truth, and the life...", I believe you become one with that God in honesty.

I think anger is just hurt with a protective shell. It's maybe a little harder, still, to say you are hurt if you are a guy. Socially, it's still considered a sign of weakness by many for a guy to cry, though it seems to be changing. But try replacing the word "anger" with "hurt" and see what you get. Most here do not know a God who body slams you for being angry (only people do that). Probably because most here believe in a God who sees that the anger is really a cry of pain. It's a weird and sad part of our culture that tears will get you compassion but anger will get you reproof and rejection. Yet anger is often the extreme expression of severe hurt. So, dear Antiochian, I am sorry that you have been hurt, that you have been injured. If you can grasp that your anger is hurt and express it as such, you may find that some will reach out in compassion and you will find healing, whereas anger will keep most at a distance. Anger is designed to do that, keep others at a distance, to keep further hurt from happening. But I think u-dog is right, I don't think you "hate" either...I don't see it, there is to much consideration in your make up.

Ditto the gender thing gang, I find myself just referring to God as God. It makes for some strange sounding sentences, but who cares. I don't think it's a stretch at all, in a Judeo-Christian context, to consider God to contain both sexes. If you take the creation story, God created people in God's image. Genesis 1:27 says: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." If you look past the "hes and hims" it's pretty clear that God is as much female as male. God's ambisextrous, so I guess bi people are the closest approximation we have to God.

[pnggrad79]

Antiochan,
I believe, and once again, only my belief, that the OT was merely an arrow pointing to the New Testament and our extreme need for a Savior-Jesus. I believe that God put into place the Holiness Code, the Ten Commandments, all that to SHOW our stubborn hearts and minds that we not only COULDN'T live up to God's ideal of perfection, but that we WOULDN'T. I believe the wrath God showed in the OT was the animosity he feels toward sin, and why he felt he needed to provide a way around it. He knew there was no way except our death that would pay for it, so he made himself pay for it through the person of Jesus Christ. I believe the book of Hebrews talks about that. We needed his salvation. We needed his grace. We needed Jesus. It wouldn't have been enough for Jesus to have just appeared on the planet had we not seen and been through all the Jewish laws and the Greek domination and the Persian domination and the Roman domination. The Bible says that Jesus came in the fullness of time. That means when all had been accomplished. When Israel had been split up, taken away to captivity to Babylon, then a remnant allowed to come back to rebuild the temple, then Roman domination, it was time for a savior.
I don't understand the brutality of the OT either, but I do know that God had his reasons for doing what he did and it is not mine to question God. I know He will reveal to me what He wants me to know in His time.

Bless you in your questions and in your anger, Antiochan. Keep seeking.

[sailaway58]

God, not male?...
If he is not male then I am in trouble. I figured I had a chance with a male God, you know, occasional cigar, a couple beers now and then. Stuff only another guy would understand... or at least not get pissed off about. Plus I always piss women off, they don't think I am very funny. Not that I talk to them much, I mean I am never in the kitchen.
No, God has to be male or I am damned for sure.

[u-dog]

Originally Posted by paul

God's ambisextrous, so I guess bi people are the closest approximation we have to God.

Oh man!! Don't let Polly hear you say that! She'll be insufferable!!

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by sailaway58

God, not male?...
If he is not male then I am in trouble. I figured I had a chance with a male God, you know, occasional cigar, a couple beers now and then. Stuff only another guy would understand... or at least not get pissed off about. Plus I always piss women off, they don't think I am very funny. Not that I talk to them much, I mean I am never in the kitchen.
No, God has to be male or I am damned for sure.

So just in case you ARE wrong, in order to reduce your chances of eternal damnation, why not spend the rest of your life using female pronouns to refer to the Divine, just to balance things out.....like, uh, affirmative action?

Polly

[Zerbie]

Originally Posted by paul

. God's ambisextrous, so I guess bi people are the closest approximation we have to God.

Omigosh how'd I miss this?!?


(Thank you Dave, for pointing it out. )

Fwiw, I'm accepting offerings of flowers, fresh vegetables, cuddly plush animals, and dark chocolates, any time. . . .

[pnggrad79]

Originally Posted by u-dog

The writing and collecting of Scripture covers a HUGE TIME SPAN -- a couple thousand years at least. Our human understanding of who God is has evolved over time. It evolves over the span of time that it took to write and collect the books in the Bible. The God that Paul knew is the same God that Moses knew... But Paul knew MORE about that GOd than Moses.

I would say that Paul knew God in a way that Moses didn't, not that he knew God more or less. Moses knew God pre-grace, and under the old covenant. Paul knew God, post-Jesus, under grace, and in the new covenant. Totally different circumstances. Who knows....

[paul]

Originally Posted by Zerbie

Omigosh how'd I miss this?!?


(Thank you Dave, for pointing it out. )

Fwiw, I'm accepting offerings of flowers, fresh vegetables, cuddly plush animals, and dark chocolates, any time. . . .

of course you know I was thinking of you when I wrote that, Zerbie.

But seriously, as I read it, God is both.

[rainbow7]

Originally Posted by Zerbie

Omigosh how'd I miss this?!?


(Thank you Dave, for pointing it out. )

Fwiw, I'm accepting offerings of flowers, fresh vegetables, cuddly plush animals, and dark chocolates, any time. . . .

Paul: ambisextrous??? Brilliant, I love it!

Polly