re: #108 Naso Tang

I we take the phrase “made in His image” to heart, and then consider what we would think of any human who acted the way the biblical god does (or for that matter, the one controlling what happens around us every day), then we would lock that human up and throw away the key.

Cognitive dissonance rules!

“Made in His image” means we were made with a mind capable of reason, specifically our ability to differentiate between good and evil, ethical and unethical. The lessons of Torah tell us how to spot these differences and why, like I say, there have been 1000s of years of study about it.

The lesson here is not that genocide is the answer, but that we do have to be vigilante when it comes to evil, both in recognition and action. When we are attacked, we have a duty to attack back. We don’t let AlQueda regroup. We hunt down their leaders. We try to make the world a safe place. In a personal way, we don’t allow evil thoughts to take form in our minds so that the lines of morality are blurred.

The idea that God indiscriminately “wipes out” whomever He pleases is not just a misunderstanding of what God is, but is rather ridiculous. God didn’t work that way in the ancient world, nor is that the lesson we should take away from scripture. What God wants from humans is to get to a place of clear understanding of morality and justice. And things, are indeed, right and wrong. In fact, by entertaining evil in our minds (ie genocide), we smudge the line between right and wrong which is another reason why we look to scripture to understand these complexities and not to go off willy-nilly with our own agendas lest we become the very thing we are supposed to guard against.