Your first post with this story had much merit in its context. Repeating it here just plain misses the point. We should all be tolerant of even this religion because most adherents do not emphasize the killing part of it and are kind and peaceful and the western way of tolerance to allr eligion is a superior moral approach. But what if you couldn't play your music because one bully insisted only his could be heard?
This thread is about being afraid to post here because many are ready to attack. Did I miss the point when I recalled that in the Marines we loved to argue but were as civil as Doc and Festus? That's related to musical tolerance. It was fresh in my mind because
@Jeremy McCreary posted here, and he also posted about listening to his song list when he rode. He said his list was "carefully edited." Everybody picks songs he likes for his list. Why make a point of saying so except to brag, "I'm a snob!"
Such public preening makes all us snobs look bad. Talking about enjoying other people's music was my way to pretend I'm not one. If we could all fool each other by pretending not to be snobs, that might increase resistance to negative thinking by 17% or more.
@Chargeride brought up religion. Did M mean Muslim? Why didn't he say so? What did that have to do with hostility on this forum? Right after my post, he said, "I believe the followers of M religion are conditioned to accept their fate." ... "Don't ask questions, accept the inevitable and your mind will be at ease. You upset people with your lack of faith and we can make life difficult for you."
Why would he post that? It seems he was expressing contempt for Marines and Muslims alike.
Then he said, "The most overlooked sentence in the Bible, 'God gave us free will' its the basis of most of our legal systems."
@Chargeride makes me think of another scholar who can quote verses that aren't in my Bible: my very favorite current American president.
The closest I can come to "God gave us free will," is the myth of Adam and Eve. They were allowed to do what they wanted except gain the knowledge to tell good from evil. Jesus said we had to be better than the scribes and the pharisees if we wanted to see the Kingdom of Heaven. The scribes were the professors who interpreted and transcribed scripture. The pharisees were the lawyers.
The listed ages show that Adam and Eve and their descendants were hunter-gathers, like the native Americans of Maine and the plains. They couldn't stay in one place all year because crops alone wouldn't support them. A man counted his age in moons, starting at approximately 150 moons or 12 years. Hunter-gatherers knew they had to leave a place like the Garden of Eden before they depleted its resources beyond recovery, if they wanted to stay there in the future. Obviously, the original story said Adam and Eve destroyed the Garden of Eden by choosing to ignore the harm they were doing. The scribes altered the story to say their downfall was in failing to turn a blind eye.
There were plenty of Hebrew words for "boat" and "ship." "Ark" meant "box." Forty days of rain is a monsoon. Archaeologists have found that the Dead Sea was 300 feet higher than now, between 2950 and 2200 BC. Due to climate change, that part of the world had 750 years with monsoon seasons. Empires grew between the Euphrates and the Nile due to booming agriculture. Climate change brought booming agriculture to Britain about 1000 AD. Booming agriculture brings invasions. Tens of thousands of castles were built in Britain. When Noah built a box 450 feet long and 45 feet high with only one door, that was obviously a castle, to protect people, crops, and livestock during inevitable invasions. Scribes interpreted "ark" as "ship" to support their blasphemy that a genocidal god drowned everyone else in the world.
Why pick on Islam? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are Abrahamic religions and as such, potential expressways to hell. John, who had known Jesus personally, said he wrote his gospel because the first three were pagan. His gospel says Jesus infuriated Scribes and Pharisees by saying God did not speak to Abraham. That's obvious to anyone who reads the account in Genesis.
The scribes claim it was a miracle that Sarah had her first baby when she was 90 and Abraham 100. People didn't count their ages annually until the Roman calendar, 2,000 years after Abraham. Before the Roman calendar, people counted their ages in half years, as we may count ages of children and animals. The word "year" originally meant "season." The Hebrew calendar is still based on equinoxes. Sarah was 45 when Isaac was born. That's well within normal childbearing years.
Abram was 37 when he headed south from Turkey with a large herd of cattle, lots of servants, 32-year-old Sarai (whom he sometimes called his wife and sometimes his sister), and Lot (son of his deceased younger brother). In Egypt, he introduced her as his sister. Princes told the pharaoh that she was not to be missed. He was so impressed that he paid Abram extravagantly. Later, he sent for Abram. The royal household was shunning her because Abram was claiming she was his wife. Abram said she was his wife as well as his sister, but he'd been afraid jealous Egyptians would kill him if he said so. Whether or not the pharaoh believed him, he told Abram to take her out of the country so she might escape the scandal. He sent Hagar as Sarai's servant and companion.
Abram left a rich man, with lots of gold and silver and purchased servants in addition to what he'd already had. Purchased servants are slaves, but Egypt didn't have slave labor. The army would pacify areas where fatherless boys roamed by arresting and selling them. It was really foster care, intended to last until a boy grew up. People may have wondered why Abram, a 40-year-old bachelor, was buying lots of boys. That may be why he claimed he was married to Sarai.
He settled in Bethel, 10 miles north of what is now Jerusalem. Soon there was strife among his cowboys. Lot agreed to take much of the herd and the disgruntled cowboys across the Jordan to the Plain of Jordan. Now it's uninhabited desert, but in the rainy centuries, it was lush with grass. Lot would have been a teenager, so the cowboys he led must have been boys Abram had purchased in Egypt.
When the Plain of Jordan was invaded, Abram brought 318 armed cowboys to help defeat the invaders and rescue Lot. That's when Abram got the ambition to rule all the nations from the Nile to the Euphrates, 700 miles away. When he was 43, Hagar fled because she was pregnant. The story says a voice from the sky persuaded her to return. I think in the original story it was a deputy sheriff, responding to a report of a woman alone in the wilderness.
The story says Sarai had acknowledged that she was barren and invited Abram to sleep with Hagar so he could have a son. It says when Hagar got pregnant, Sarai changed her mind and Hagar fled in terror. That's far fetched. Even if Sarai had been dangeroulsly unstable, Hagar would have been under the protection of Abram. One would assume the father was one of the cowboys. Sarai would have advised them to elope, but they couldn't be seen leaving together. I think an informant told Abram, who found a way to detain the cowboy. She would die of thirst waiting for him, and he would die brokenhearted, and Abram would gloat.
Abram had been at Hebron 5 years. Neighbors would have wondered why a rich man his age had no children. When Hagar returned, Abram saw his opportunity. Claiming paternity would prove he was a successful heterosexual and permanently subjugate Hagar; she wouldn't dare elope with the cowboy if people chose to believe her boss was the father of her child.
At 49 he claimed his god had again promised him an empire and countless descendants. This time, Abram was to circumcise every male in his colony. This included Ishmael, 6. He was also to change his name to Abraham and Sarai's to Sarah. Like branding cattle, circumcision was used in Subsaharan Africa to identify runaway slaves. Ishmael was old enough to walk 10 miles at a time. I think an informant told Abraham that his parents planned to escape with him and settle under assumed names. "Branding" the boy and his father would deter escape. Circumcising only Ishmael and the father would have encouraged speculation, so he had every male circumcised, claiming his god ordered it. I imagine there was a constant drain of disgruntled employees after that.
Rumors of Abram's claimed incestuous marriage would have followed him from Egypt. It seems he changed their names so he could pull the same scam again. He was sitting in front of his tent one morning when three men came up, and one was the lord. The scribes would have us believe this was god, disguised as a man. Hah! This lord, who needed bodyguards and lunch, was a king who came to see if Sarah was as beautiful as they said.
Abraham invites them in and tells Sarah to bake them some cakes while he fixes lunch. He selects a calf, butchers it, and barbecues it. He must have been gone for hours, leaving Sarah along to entertain the visitors in the privacy of the tent. One would have expected a cattle baron to turn the whole task over to employees while he entertained. He was playing Cupid.
As the guests leave, Abraham accompanies them. The king stops and asks a question whose answer is obvious: "Where is your wife?" Abraham says she's in the tent. Hah! As a matchmaker, Abraham would have called Sarah his sister, but now the king knows this is the rich guy who calls his sister his wife. The king says, "I'll come back next year, and Sarah will definitely have a baby." Listening behind the doorway, she laughs inadvertently.
The king asks Abraham, "Why do you think she laughed? Did you think she was too old? With me, all things are possible." Seeing his implication, Sarah gets scared and says, "I didn't laugh." The king says, "You laughed."
The scribes would have us believe this meant she was too old to have a baby. In fact, she was at an age when it was ordinary. The king is asking if Abraham thought she was too mature to be swept off her feet the minute he turned his back. He implies that seducing her was easy for him. Sarah realized that her laughter had sounded like a startled confirmation that this had happened. She later told the author, probably Isaac, why she had laughed. "After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?" Laughter was her unguarded response to the apparent presumption that she would be sleeping with Abraham or any other man. She'd never had that pleasure, and now she felt too old to interest a suitor. In other words, Abraham was not heterosexual, and he'd wrecked her life by using her as his beard.
In claiming he'd seduced Sarah, the king was testing Abraham, who didn't mind at all. This meant he did not consider Sarah his wife. He accompanied Abimelech on the next leg of his journey. Then he moved his camp to Gerar, where he delivered Sarah to Abimelech. She was soon pregnant. Then Abimelech made a shocking announcement. God had come to him in a dream, saying Abraham was a holy man and Sarah was his wife. He said he'd married her in good faith, after each had assured him they were brother and sister, not husband and wife. He was glad he hadn't touched her because he was afraid of God's wrath. He had no choice but to return Sarah to Abraham.
I believe Abraham deliberately destroyed the marriage so he could play the role of a successful heterosexual, dominating wife and son. Moving his colony to Gerar made scandal inevitable. At the mass circumcision, he had announced that God would reward him with a son. He couldn't have been talking about Hagar, whose son he called his. He had to be talking about Sarah, whom he called his wife. Now, a few months later, she was pregnant.
Legally, the baby would be Abimelech's, but rumors about his paternity could plague him and his mother and keep from the throne. If he returned Sarah to Abraham, that would end rumors of infidelity, and the child would inherit a fortune.
Abraham established a base at Beersheba, 27 miles inland but still in the kingdom, where he would have Abimelech's protection. Eight days after Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him, permanently marking him as a slave. Without baby food available, Isaac may have been weaned after he was 2 or older. That day, Abraham hosted a feast. Then he gave Hagar a bottle of water and a loaf of bread and banished her and Ishmael. They were soon lost in the wilderness without food or water.
The account jumps back to Beersheba, where the sheriff is filling Abraham's wells. Abimelech arrives and tells him to stop. He has Abraham swear never to harm him or his son. What son of Abimelech could that be but Isaac? Abraham claimed Sarah had demanded that he banish Hagar and Ishmael because she wanted Isaac to be the sole inheritor of Abraham's fortune, and Hagar had been mocking Abraham. Of course Sarah had not ordered the deaths of Hagar and Ishmael. Anyway, why would Abraham want to kill his son because he'd been told Hagar had mocked him?
Most people don't demand to inspect the genitals of men they encounter, so circumcision would not have deterred Ishmael's father from escaping. I think Hagar's "mockery" was in divulging to someone that she and Ishmael planned to slip away and join his father. News like that would spread, and an informant would tell Abraham. He sent them to die of thirst to protect his reputation as a heterosexual. Somebody got word to the sheriff, who found the pair, escorted them to the circumcised cowboy, and went to fill Abraham's wells because a monster like Abraham should not be allowed to reside in Abimelech's kingdom.
Abimelech had a different perspective. If Abraham were driven off, Abimelech's son Isaac would have nothing to inherit. So he let Abraham keep his homestead. Abraham offered Abimelech sheep meat, instead of a barbecued calf as he had three years earlier. Climate change had begun. Beersheba no longer had enough rainfall for cattle. There's another footnote. About 14 years later, Sarah died at 62 in Hebron. Abraham, who lived in Beersheba, went there, introduced himself, and said he was her relative. The townspeople said they'd heard of him. In other words, Abraham had not even been allowed to visit the town where Isaac grew up. When Abimelech made Abraham swear not to harm Isaac, he had moved Isaac and Sarah to Hebron and told Abraham to stay away.
That explains the presence of the two boys who intervened as Abraham attempted to cut the throat of 7-year-old Isaac. Besides the boys, Abraham brought a donkey loaded with firewood. He said it was time to teach Isaac to immolate animals, and today it would be a goat. When they neared Abraham's special place, he told the two boys to wait with the donkey. Abraham carried his special knife and made the little boy carry the firewood up the hill. He had Isaac pile the wood on a rock. The puzzled boy asked, "Where's the goat?" Abraham told him to lie on the wood, then tied him. The situation wasn't clear to the boy until Abraham raised his knife. He screamed. The teens came running.
Abraham explained that it wasn't what it looked like. His god had promised him career advancement if he would cut Isaac's throat and burn his body. The scream was an angel telling him his god was rolling on the floor laughing, and he could stop scaring the kid now.
He'd figured it would be a perfect crime if his unwitting accomplices fetched Isaac from the town that was off limits to him, and then he burned the body. The mass circumcisions had occurred 8 years earlier, which means those teens would have been 4 to 10 when he painfully mutilated them with that very knife. Now he'd presented them with the opportunity for their own perfect crime. I guess they thought corroborating Isaac when he told his mother, would be better revenge.
When Sarah died, Abraham told his trusted steward Eliezer that it was time to get Isaac, 17, married. He heard that his brother, back in Haran, 500 miles north, had a granddaughter. He told Eliezer to take camels up there, find Abraham's relatives, and bring her back. Thirty years ago, Abraham had driven cattle from Haran. Now they needed camels. That's evidence that it was about 2200 BC, when land that had been desert before 2950 was reverting to desert.
Eliezer reported that the evening he arrived, he couldn't imagine how to find Abraham's relatives, a family who had been there at least 4 generations. Watching the town well, he prayed to Abraham's god. A voice from the sky told him it would be a damsel with a pitcher on her head, and she would give him a drink and water his camels. A damsel with a pitcher on her head interrupted the voice. After she filled her pitcher, Eliezer ran up and asked for a drink. She poured him one. Then he asked her to water his camels.
She poured her pitcher in the trough, then began going back and forth between the well and the trough. A camel can drink 32 gallons and the cowboys were busy resting. Eliezer asked her name. She said Rebekah. Seeing that she was the one God had provided, he put a ring in her nose and bracelets on her arms. He asked to spend the night with her. She agreed, telling him to bring the whole gang and the camels. She ran to tell her mother.
There, he met her father and her brother, who, he reported, had the first names Abraham had told him to look for. They told Rebekah to beat it so the men could talk. He showed them the loot the camels had brought. They realized this could be their lucky day. He said Abraham's god had chosen Rebekah to marry his teenage son, who would inherit his vast fortune. They said they could not defy the will of Abraham's very generous god, but there was one more formality. The shouted for Rebekah and asked if she was up for it. She said yes, she and her nurse.
They were ready to go in the morning. Rebekah's mother asked Eliezer to stay 10 days so she could get to know the men who were taking her daughter. Eliezer said he didn't have time. Several attendants accompanied them. The cowboys walked and the ladies rode the camels. On the evening they arrived, Isaac was in a field and walked toward the approaching camels. Seeing him, Rebekah jumped off her camel and asked Eliezer who he was. Eliezer said it was Isaac, and she quickly pulled her veil over her face. To jump from a camel, she was exceptionally daring and athletic, and the camel may have been walking. At the same time, hiding her face from her intended shows she was exceptionally proper.
A damsel who had a nurse and several attendants would not have been fetching water at the public well. What's more, the one at the well disregarded propriety. Phonecians had brought the ring-in-the-nose custom from India. The bride's nostril would be pierced in the wedding ceremony, and the groom would insert the ring. She would wear it when she dressed up. Otherwise, the piercing would show her marital status. The girl at the well had her nose pierced as if she were an affluent wife. When she saw unfamiliar men loitering at the well, she continued to advance, alone. When one ran at her, she showed no alarm. She must have known he was coming and pierced her nostril because he was bringing a ring. She must have been Eliezer's childhood sweetheart. He was from Damascus, 200 miles north of Beersheba.
After decades, how were they to recognize each other? The Phoenicians had recently invented the alphabet, which was quickly adapted for Greek and Hebrew. They could plan through letters. She knew the loitering men were probably his group. If they weren't, the proximity of neighbors would keep them law-abiding. Eliezer, on the other hand, knew only that she was one of dozens of women who drew water from the town well. The first test was to run toward the well as soon as she filled her bottle; a stranger would quickly head for home to maintain a comfortable distance. She passed that the test. The second was to ask her to fill his cup: why should she indulge a stranger too lazy to draw his own water? The definitive test was asking her to water the camels, performing an arduous chore while the strangers watched. I'm sure she didn't to do it; agreeing was what removed any doubt. He put the ring in her nose and they were married; at their age, they didn't need permission.
The other girl, Rebekah, was rich. Even if she'd wanted to run off with a stranger who said she'd been chosen remotely, her parents wouldn't have allowed it. This was arranged through people her parents knew. If they'd been Abraham's relatives, the cowboys would have bought more camels rather than walk 500 miles home. Eliezer told Abraham he'd left without getting acquainted because he didn't know anything about Abraham's relatives.
When Sarah died, Abimelech was concerned for Isaac. Through his relatives and connections, he probably thought Rebekah would be perfect, but she was a teen. They needed someone to fill Sarah's role, keeping the household running, as Eliezer did for Abraham. Eliezer was probably in contact with Abimelech to keep tabs on the homicidal maniac. He was probably in contact with Isaac as Abraham's go-between. I think Eliezer recalled the light of his life as a woman who would probably be perfect as a household mother or butler or steward. She moved in with Rebekah's parents, and they agreed. She went to the well to meet Eliezer, passed the identifying tests, got instantly married, and served as the lady butler that Rebekah and Isaac needed.
The couple settled next door to Abimelech in Gerar. Is there any doubt that he was Isaac's father? They had lots of servants, and Isaac was a very successful farmer. It appears that Rebekah's family was a means for Abimelech to fund Isaac without rekindling the controversy over paternity. Abraham died at 86, when Isaac, his only heir, was 36. He came under increasing pressure from Abimelech to settle on Abraham's land at Beersheba. Isaac resisted because climate change had turned Beersheba to worthless desert.
Abraham attracted attention with repeated assertions that his god had promised him a great empire and innumerable descendants. He ended up with no descendants and some worthless desert, but three main religions point to him as their patriarch. No thanks. I'll stick with Jesus.
www.infinitescroll.us
en.wikipedia.org
