/lit/ - Literature

>>14564661
This was the story that made me call my parents out for sending me to sunday school

>>14564661
imagine being an old testament hebrew. God must have seemed like the biggest dick of all time. Then Jesus came to earth and got tortured to death. like it doesn't make perfect sense to us, but at least we can see that God clearly isn't a dick if He let Himself get tortured to death by us. like you think "man, why does my life suck so bad, why is God doing this to me," then you remember that God also went through worse so its like, okay whatever just do it, just suck it up and get through it i guess. i don't know, you look at Jesus and things just make sense and you can sack up ad deal with shit, but old testament guys didn't even have that. maybe thats why God let them get away with so much degeneracy. my point is that what it was like under the old testament is just completely incomprehensible to any of us. Literally everything that is now, is because of Jesus.

What do you mean by justify? That's a religious word you know, and it means what's right according to God. So everything God does is justified.

>>14564661
It's a Jewish fable so you can't understand it if you're not Jewish. Familiarize yourself with the story please

>>14564706
You know exactly what I mean. Explain.

>>14564819
Justify according to what, your personal morals, the Norwegian courts, some Aborigine tribe, or Europan sea creatures? If you're justifying it according to something other than God how can you say that thing takes precedence over God?

>>14564661
To demonstrate what God already knew: that faith is not meant to easy and that when the chips are down His followers will rise to the occasion and refuse to be swayed

>>14564875
So wait, your way of making sense of God's will is to appeal to moral relativism? Or is your argument nothing more than, "I'm saying that when the president does it, it's not illegal?"

Imagine being so retarded that you couldnt understand the point of a parable.

>>14564661
It's pretty clearly a fable. The god/Satan bit is just a set-up for the theological discussion on the problem of evil. Doesn't really need justification.

>>14564928
You can choose to follow any moral system you want; that's free will. How is God analogous to a president? He's more like an emperor. Nobody beholds God to any law except himself.

>>14564955
>How is God analogous to a president?
Your argument is that, to make Job make sense, we need to hold God to a lower standard than we held Richard Nixon.

>>14564955
not OP but god is more of a dictator than an emperor.

>>14564661
Santa is the prosecutor

>>14564965
how often do you caress your dick? why do you think you're qualified to hold God to any standard?

>>14564818
Yeah if you haven't got Jewish blood you can't read this book coherently

>>14564965
Lower standard? No, I'm saying he's above any standard. There's no standard we can place on God, only he can place a standard on himself, because he's the creator, the arbiter, the one who sets the standards for us, his creations. Nixon was an elected official, after many elected officials before him, and he just vetos laws not create them. But imagine you created a fictional world, you are above the world, outside its constraints, you set the laws and rules, so do you expect this fictional world to set you to some moral standard as set by one random character within it?

>>14565022
>>14565061
Why not? It might not be our place to do so, just as a peasant is not in his place to judge the morality of his king, but there's nothing logically inconsistent about engaging in the exercise. The standards by which we judge our fellow man, applied to God, do not reflect him very favourably.

Maybe it is incorrect to do so, but the only fallacy we may commit upon doing so is informal, not formal. You do have to admit, it's not a very high bar for a benevolent Creator to be failing to meet.

>>14564890
Having said the above, I do agree with this line of thinking more, and believe that trying to defend the morality of God's actions misses the point of the actual story. What point is there to argue about theology like an atheist?

>>14564661
I'll do it with one word:
Repetition.

>>14564661
Where were (you), anon, when etc.

>>14565027
No, you can also convert

>>14565151
Not really

>>14564968
>doesn't know what the words mean

God is in the process of converting satan.

>>14564968
But God does not define the morality, he defines the commandments.

The commandments and various other articles of his word are a grand foundation for something incredible which we are still figuring out every day.

If you can’t see this then just read more. Nietzsche was wrong: the Jews have not surmounted morality, God defined the best possible rules for people to follow given reality how it exists. :3

Job is a phenomenological book, and it can be applied today, to ‘the nobody’ etc etc. God is real and interacts with the universe how he will. What you’re trying to do is to not follow this will and that is wrong, quite frankly.

>>14565718
Moronic doesn't begin to describe you.

Fucking excruciating stupidity.

>>14565720
Butterfly has started to agree with me on these various points given what I am doing in reality and who I am. It’s possible to prove that God exists.

It’s possible to give your all in life and pray for God to be there and he will. You don’t have to rely on blind faith. :3

>>14565723
You’re a Muslim right? Is there a white Muslim movement growing or something?

>>14565099
And what bar do you suppose God is failing to meet?

>>14564661
Humanity is Satan.

>>14564661
>Why is Satan's opinion even relevant?
It's not.

>Justify why Satan's opinion drives God to torture a pious man as if to "test" something. God knows everything, so why does he have to test?
Can't be done and logically if god is omnipotent he wouldn't need to.

However human beings are not omnipotent so you could argue that god let it happen as a demonstration to other humans about god rewarding faith and piousness.

Your problem OP is that much like a child once you learn something you don't comprehend that not everyone has also learned that thing. God knows the outcome, humanity does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective-taking#Autism

>>14564661
>Justify why God asked for Satan's opinion about a pious man. Why is Satan's opinion even relevant?
Allegorical. God is able to take any and every perspective, Satan is one of God's perspectives. The conversation is the absolute understanding a contingent/relative being (Job) relationship with the absolute.
>Justify why Satan's opinion drives God to torture a pious man. God knows everything, so why does he have to test?
One important aspect of this is that this is a story that is written down. God knows everything, but Job doesn't know everything. We don't know everything either. The story is God telling us that the one thing that he can't take away from us is our relation an dependence on himself (so much for the idea that Hell is "separation from God." We cannot be ontologically separate from God since we are dependent on him.) All of the things we tend to focus on can be taken away from us either by God or just by the unreliable aspects of the world around us.
With regards to the moral aspects of this, what God tells Job at the very end is basically it. It is impossible or even nonsensical to try and find out God's intentions as we understand our own.

>>14564704
What are you, fucking twelve?
That was the dumbest and most broken rant I've read on this board.
Also, justifying the giant turd on the sandwich by saying "Hey, it's a good sandwich".

>>14564661
Imam al-sharawi puts it like this:

A physics professor already knows which students are likely to pass or fail a final test, over the year he spent teaching a class ,he knows who the smart and stupid students are ,he knows which students were studying hard and which were slacking of ,and yet a test has to be made at the end of the year.

>>14566856
he's right, you know. There's a reason we count years AFTER JESUS. because it's lierally a different kind of time. a time when God has become man and holy spirit.

tl;dr: Job lived not in our time A.D.

>>14566911
If you're admitting that God is able to change or become better over time, then he doesn't deserve our Divine worship because consequently he never retained an aspect of perfection to justify it.

>>14564661
“Good things and evil… are from God.” (Eccl. xi. 14.) All blessings such as riches and honours and all misfortunes such as sickness and persecutions come from God. But mark that the Scripture calls them evils, only because we, through the want of conformity to the will of God, regard them as evils and misfortunes. But, in reality, if we accepted them from the hands of God with Christian resignation, they should be blessings and not evils. The jewels which give the greatest splendour to the crown of the saints in heaven, are the tribulations which they bore with patience, as coming from the hands of the Lord. On hearing that the Sabeans had taken away all his oxen and asses, holy Job said: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.” (Job i. 21.) He did not say that the Lord gave, and that the Sabeans had taken away; but that the Lord gave, and that the Lord had taken away: and therefore he blessed the Lord, believing that all had happened through the divine will. “As it has pleased the Lord, so it is done: blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Ibid.) Being tormented with iron hooks and burning torches, the holy martyrs Epictetus and Atone said: ”Lord, thy will be done in us.” And their last words were: ”Be blessed, eternal God, for having given us the grace to accomplish thy will.”

>>14566956
Divinity is beyond our concepts of perfection and process. An imperfect entity in a process twoards perfection is still perfect from a perspective of eternity. See Kant, then Hegel.

>>14567013
>Divinity is beyond our concepts of perfection and process.
That's a massive fucking cope. You just tell yourself that to ignore the mess that is the book of Job, which either testifies that God is a massive dick or that most of the Old Testament is supposed to be taken metaphorically, not literally.
>An imperfect entity in a process twoards perfection is still perfect from a perspective of eternity.
God is supposedly outside space-time. If he is not perfect then he will not tend toward perfection over time, so from a perspective of eternity he will never attain perfection. Namedropping Kant and Hegel won't help you here.

>>14564661
>book of Job
like you fucking read it
i myself have not read it
but from looking at the layout of the book
it seems to be mostly about job monologues and dialogs
your questions are insulting to the average intelligence
you are here on lit and you judge a book by it's cover?
you questions are concerning only the superficial framing story
fuck off, read the book, and come back with some meat for our brains
here is a question for you: which of jobs dialogs did you like the most?

>>14567081
well, I won't type in 870 pages about Kant and Hegelon on an anime image board, cause that would be necessary to get the full notion of a major dispute in philosophy. Is God outside space-time? In a way yes, in another way no.

>>14564661
if you want a "justification" you missed the point, read the last few chapters again

>>14567128
This seems to conflict with your "Divinity is outside our grasp" sentiment

>>14567167
sorry, that was phrased poorly. I didn't meant out of our grasp, but out of our everyday non-philosophical understanding of such ideas. I don't mean to annoy you with philosophical definitions. I'm just hinting at interesting ideas that are beyond high-school philosophy class reasoning.

>>14564661

We have this thread on a regular basis:

>>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=mosaic+sin

>The story itself is ironic in that the principle of Job being innocent is completely absurd, and people taking it as dogma are themselves exemplary of Job's perverse "innocence". It is implied that God could have destroyed everyone and everything around him, and Job would have thought nothing of it. Worse still, that he only thought about it once he became afflicted, was utterly unrepentant in his ignorance, but still self-aggrandized in both refusing to admit fault and refusing to consider that, if he is indeed innocent, anyone and everyone that God likewise tormented could have been innocent as well, making him the disciple of a monster. So many mutually aggravating offenses that they indeed make lesser "Mosaic" sin redundant and Job formally innocent thereof. God's non-reply being not only perfectly adequate in mirroring Job's casual monstrosity, but quite merciful as well in letting Job carry on as usual.

>>14564704
>I don't like having my testicles electrocuted every day, but it turns out my torturer has a masochism kink and electrocutes his own testicles for fun, so really it's not all that bad

>>14564890
read the book, Job laments against God, his friends defend God's actions, and then God comes down and says Job was speaking the truth and his friends are full of shit

>>14564706

Including giving you a faculty of Morality?

>>14564661
Read the book, Elihu and God himself say you cannot understand why God does what he does.
God is a different being than humans, he has been around forever and can do anything.
That's the point of him discussing controlling Leviathan and everything else. You cannot understand why God does what he does because you are just a man, not God. Alls you can do is be faithful and pray.

>>14566995

What would make such a God distinguishable from a Satan or a Yaldabaoth?

>>14567306
Why don't you read the book? God himself claims there was no reason for what he did

>Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason.
Job 2:3

and then God says Elihu was wrong

>After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.
Job 42:7

bump

>>14564661
because "young yahweh" was vain, overly passionate, and desired a sense of accomplishment
he chilled out with age, like we all do

>>14564661
read The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer and the Babylonian Theodicy.

>>14567452
Elihu isn’t included in the numbered friends of Job it’s a common misunderstanding, God vindicates Elihu

>>14569068
God literally pretends Elihu doesn't exist though

what is the best scholarly commentary on Job?

>he doesn't get Job

>>14566956
>doesn't deserve

I don't think you understand how God's economy works my man. There is no getting out of it

>>14564661

It's. A. Story.

It's not meant to be taken literally. Only morons (Christian morons and strawmanning fedora tippers, ironically) take it as such.

Job is the biggest bro in the whole book next to Jesus. Chad faith keeper!

>>14564954
This is the only fucking good response in this whole dog-shit thread and it got ignored.

OP, if you can't understand that it's a parable, you're an illiterate retard and should fuck off.

>>14564704
an interesting idea...thanks for getting the noggin jogging friend!

>>14569482
But as a fable, all it does is establish why the problem of evil is such a problem.