Monday, October 17, 2011

Genesis 4

Now this is the story of Cain and Abel. Most people look at this story as one that highlights the reason that jealousy is bad. I've got two things to say about this before I even start reading.
1.) Jealousy is a sin, yet God is a jealous God? That seems kind of hypocritical.
2.) God caused the whole debacle between Cain and Able. If He would never have shown favor to one of the boys over the other, then Cain never would have killed able and they would have been a happy family. It was silly for god to expect them to bring the exact same portions of their respective goods. So inevitably God would have chosen to show favor to one of the brothers over the other no matter how close in quality they were. But apparently choosing one brother over the other is the best way that God could figure out to show how bad jealousy is.
Okay, now that I'm reading the scripture, I was wrong. Apparently abel brought the right amount of the best quality of his goods to god and cain did not.
I wonder why God carried on this whole dialogue with cain. I mean god knows everything so he clearly knew where abel was when he asked cain, or better yet, god could have prevented abel's death by stopping cain. It seems like a pretty shitty reward that god gave abel for doing what he was supposed to. This is especially true when abel's death is a direct result of god's choice to show favor to one and deliberately not show favor to the other. That is basic parenting knowledge, you can't show favor to one child and not the other, it causes problems. Seems to me that the ultimate parent (god) would know this.
So Cain's punishment is for god to keep people from killing him and he gets to be out of the presence of the god that indirectly caused and allowed his brother's death? That doesn't sound too bad to me. It seems pretty freaking backwards to essentially allow the good kid to die and be murdered and then save the bad kid receiving the same fate that he gave his brother
So what happens is that god allows the good kid to be killed and then sends the bad one off to repopulate the world...real smart.
Apparently god doesn't reside in the place called Enoch? How is that so when he is omnipresent? Interesting...

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