Well, you have to get around what god was telling them to do. Things like genocide, rape, pillage, etc. This is not the Israelites starting off wrong, this is the Israelites obeying god's commands.



You can't make a whole of ordered rape and love. That's insane. And that is what is happening when people insist that the Bible is inspired by god with all the crazy rules in the beginning and the not as crazy rules at the end.

I understand the need to keep the bible true because whole lives are based on the myth that this book somehow has a magical inspirational quality. To me that is making a god out out of the book, which, to me, is essentially what Christianity is. In the absence of evidence for the invisible god of the Bible, the book itself has become the god.

I think it is far better to take from it what works and resonates with our higher self and chuck the rest.



There is no difference between this god taking away the life force and killing someone. It is very simple. If someone is on life support in the hospital and we pull the plug, that is considered killing. One is simply less violent than the other.

This argument is a red herring. In your universe god is responsible for life and therefore is responsible for death as well.



From my study, the idea of sacrificial appeasement comes from paganism. And I have no need to try and make sense out of nonsense.

There are so many other meaningful ways to engage with life, without this immature need for someone to "pay for our sins." If this god can create the universe with all its laws, its seems that he could figure out a solution that didn't involve someone having to die a painful and torturous death.

Look at it this way, if alien beings came down and saw us worshipping a god nailed to a cross they would think we were crazy. "Why are they worshipping another human being tortured on a cross? They must be barbarians." This makes just about as much sense as the Aztecs sacrificing people. To the Aztecs, death was instrumental in the perpetuation of creation and gods and humans alike had the responsibility of sacrificing themselves in order to allow life to continue. In fact there are some strange parallels with the method of death.

There are so many other more reasonable approaches to this.

you were going to die. forever. and for many it has been a painful, tortuous death. look at the 100s of little innocent children dying of starvation. look at the people, and children, now suffering in haiti.

and etc.

bottom line is you were going to die. eternally. whether tortuously or not.

The Bible doesn't answer the problem of suffering either. Suffering is still senseless. Even though Jesus dies on the cross, that can't make up for the suffering that happens on this planet.

The death of innocent children actually argues against a loving all powerful god.



And that really is the bottom line. The only reason to believe in this god who saves is because one is afraid to die. It is essentially self-centered after all.

It isn't really concerned with the suffering of the innocent, but is really focused on personal salvation.

And this has been my point all along. Christian belief is not based on love, but on fear.

Here is a description from Wikipedia on the Aztecs. Notice the need for their gods to die.



So this idea of a god dying is not unique to Christianity. The idea of blood being a source of life and being used for cleansing is also not unique to Christianity.

Maybe the common themes and their importance and centrality to worship of a deity between these widely dispersed cultures indicates a common source and ancestry. Likewise there are creation stories and major flood stories that exist among many of these cultures. And perhaps the differences merely reflect the influence of limited human comprehension or understanding of the original message received, rather like the end result of the old party game we called "Gossip". Things get garbled over time and widely dispersed people groups without further interaction to keep the story straight fill in gaps, elaborate, etc. to make sense of the ideas within the context of their cultural and knowledge.

While we may accept the validity of our Judeo-Christian view of these things, we should carefully consider those common elements as significant and not easily dismissed as just some strange cultural fable or coincidence. Just maybe God was trying to get through to all people groups, some more successfully or with more detail than others. Just maybe there is a thread of Ultimate Truth running deeply through all of this.

i believe the points gail brought up all have validity.

God does not withhold anything good from us. adam clarke in his commentary said that blood was indigestible and we all know what eating fat does to us, now. perhaps that is why God chose the "fat" to symbolize sin.

the pagans did, and do, believe in drinking blood for the reasons given.

but thanks to the questions pnattmbtc brought up elsewhere about "blood" and the pioneers stressing "for the life is in the blood" when touching on the subject, it made me think, pray and study to understand the meaning.

what i have come to is that the "blood" symbolizes Christs sacrifice. not just His death but His life from conception to death and resurrection.

Christ sacrificed Himself, first by becoming eternally man and so giving up certain qualities of divinity. it was which would make sense thinking about it. to be shrunk into a cell, well, for me it is incomprehensible.

His whole life was one of sacrifice. He was born into poverty instead of riches, lived in crime-ridden slum instead of a good neighborhood.

He sacrificed whatever He could have been here to live only for us and let the Father alone be seen in Him.

the sacrificial system for sin was to keep in mind that as a results of sin we die-as opposed to God will kill us because we sin-and pointed to the ultimate sacrifice for us, a double meaning.

but the blood, for me, symbolizes christs perfect life that He wants to give me, that He is presenting in the most holy place right now. the life that is available to us all as a free gift, as much as His death is a free gift.

my clumsy attempt at sharing the understanding i am coming to. and a most pathetic disservice to the meaning of Jesus life and death.

agreed. :)

We do have a common astrotheological source. It's called Egypt. We know there was some kind of connection between South America and Egypt because we find tobacco and cocaine in the burial wrappings of mummies. It is thought that cocaine was a source of alternative states for priests in the Egyptian ritual and is associated with the lotus flower.

All of these death rites are connected with sun worship. And Christianity itself is also connected with sun worship. You can read the church fathers refer to Jesus as the "sol" or sun of god. There are clearly common ritual elements in both the pagan and Christian worship of the sun/son.

Alexandria and the Jewish mystic Philo were major influences, if not the actual origin of Christian belief until it was taken over by the Roman orthodox priestcraft. There are strong syncretic roots to sun worship in almost every religion.



If there is a god setting up this Ultimate truth, this god is certainly not that effective at communicating its message. I see no evidence that a supernatural source is involved. I see a lot of evidence that this is an evolutionary process.

Billy Graham did his doctoral thesis on this idea, and assumed that god placed this blood sacrifice myth in every culture so that when Christianity came along it would awaken this universal truth, but there is a tribe in Brazil today that has been atheistic for centuries. This negates this idea completely because they have naturally resisted conversion by any Christian missionary for hundreds of years.