urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 7, Issue 6

maru · 22 Mar 2005, 16:34 · from 2005-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (maru)
Date: Tue Mar 22 16:34:30 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 7, Issue 6
In-Reply-To: <4f6a8691322cd7853123fe2c88ad8ab7 at ou.edu>
References: <20050321234958.01A6884D2B at che.dreamhost.com>
	<4f6a8691322cd7853123fe2c88ad8ab7 at ou.edu>
Message-ID: <4240B961.2080801 at gmail.com>

Kieran Mullen wrote:

>
>     This is reminiscent of Kierkegaard's [1] problem of Abraham in
>     'Fear and
>     Trembling'.
>
>     The problem being:
>
>     1) Abraham is credited with being moral and the father of the faith.
>
>     2) He almost sacrificed his son because God told him to.
>
>     3) If _I_ did that, I'd be regarded as slightly psychotic.
>
>     4) So why is 1) regarded as true?
>
>
> My favorite answer to this was the one provided by Dan Simmons in the 
> Hyperion novels. One of his characters claims that actually Abraham 
> had to go through with this because /he was testing God./ That is, any 
> God who would actually make you go through with such a demand was not 
> worth worshiping. He had to carry it out to the end to see what would 
> happen.
>
Another Hyperion fan!  Excellent...
Simmons answer is rather ingenious, but also still flawed.
I mean, suppose he had tested Yaweh, and Yaweh turned out to
naught but another flase god, that apparently abounded at the time
of the Pentateuch's composition; Abraham would turn out to have
been not just a sucker, but also a... whatever -cide applies to a guy
who just killed his son in a rather nasty way.

~Maru

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net