God:
Kill these people, take their stuffAlso God:
HEY, don't kill people and steal things, wtf you are damnedYou have to ask permission from your Sky Daddy before plundering the countryside.
Say that God told you to feed and shelter the poor: Go to jail
Say that God told you to kill, maim and commit wanton acts of depravity:
It all makes a lot more sense when you see this "God" as the Demiurge.
The other option is of course "Just As Panned/ I meant for you to sin all along sucker because the reconciliation is the point".
Sidestepping theism/atheism because i seriously couldn't care if somebody does or doesn't believe, but personally I like the concept of eyn sof, or the 'first cause' to describe the real creative force behind the universe - and anything lesser is basically just a roided up version of a human soul, which is to say, flawed and created - and anything close enough to us to appear to us or issue dictates to prophets or w/e is probably something created and therefore beneath worship.
I feel like any kind of actual creative force behind existence probably doesn't give any particular shits about what we're getting up to.
"I have created man and woman!"
"I have also made women icky so they have to go hide in a tent for 1/4 of their life"
Okay whatever weirdo.
"I have created shell fish! Do not eat them!"
Strong agree here sea bugs are gross. Point; god
"Hey, this is a mixed residential area! Zoning prohibits buildings over three stories! Aight you little shits try building a skyscraper when half of you speak swahili and the other half speak dutch!"
Petty, but funny. God win.
I love me some clams. But a good chunk of those religious dietary restrictions were made with solid reasoning.
"Don't Eat Shellfish" is the ancient world equivalent of "Don't ride in a helicopter"
At the same time, how many of you let your Sims live their happy little routines in their comfortable consumerist cocoons and how many of you figured out you could delete the ladder when they were in the pool?
Well, Im not supposed to be conceptually incapable of evil.
I think we have sufficient evidence that the conceptually incapable of evil part is obvious propaganda
SimCity had a whole top-level menu dedicated to summoning disasters. We never stood a chance.
I didn't know it was possible to kill them until somebody else told me, and I felt so bad the couple of times I did it that it destroyed the fun of that household.
God made heaven and earth during his cringe phase and can no longer look at it
Makes me think of the gnostic meme where Sophia asks the Demiurge if he's winning and Earth is on literal fire.
This here though, is a clear example of religion being used to explore concepts which may be taboo in other lenses (or unavailable if you go back far enough) and all said concepts are human social construct ones. God figures are in our image, just like our social reality to a large degree.
I once tried to write a scenario where we were made initially as entertainment, creation itself being a kind of sandbox where different ideas got toyed with, earth and its dramas being a fairly specific little sub project that largely served to be interesting - if the creator deigned descend into and experience any given life, he had a reasonably unique experience to undertake. This was achieved by making storytelling machines, basically governors of different aspects of creation, and placed them somewhat at odds, but ultimatley in a context that meant the tug and pull was collaborative - the archons of the apocryphon of john were my inspiration there - with a chief governing storyteller that more or less set an agenda- a mix of archon stuff and demiurge stuff - basically he didn't make the table, but he sets the table.
As the creator got bored, eventually experiencing all but a derivative subset of experience - he moved on, and appointed the head storyteller - the demiurge basically - to rule in his stead.
Then he came back, realizing humanity itself had some interesting properties that were worth elevating, but the storytellers basically rebelled because they were used to bossing these little deranged ape-things around and couldn't imagine letting them rise above them, when there was no real path for them to ascend beyond their own station.
Because of the powers abdicated to the storytelling machinery - and because they're all a subdivision of the divine will, we're caught in a stalemate - the fall of heaven detailed in stories like Enoch are the driving theme for that material - basically satan is merged with the concept of archons and the demiurge - is largely due to a quirk in how everything we experience was generated - the supreme will abdicated power to a subset of itself in the interest of making sure humanity had some kind of guidance and found it wasn't as easily revoked as it was given
anyway i didn't finish the story because i'm shit at metaphysics and i have the attention span of a weevil.
also i didn't know how to reconcile omniscient omnipotence with a situation where the divine will could be defied, even by itself.
