Physics Guy wrote:The Biblical title "Lord of hosts" is still repeated today, but I wonder how many people who hear it think that it means God gives dinner parties. It means "Lord of armies".
I try to think of it as indicating God's superhuman ability to look after lots of small details without losing the big picture, because armies were (and probably still are) the extreme example of large, complex groups trying to achieve difficult goals. The original meaning was presumably that the God of the Old Testament remained a war god for quite a while.
I forgot about the "Lord of Hosts" thing. Yeah, it pretty much means "God of War."
honorentheos wrote:I think if we simply agreed morality wasn't objective that we would be largely in agreement on the rest.
That may be true. And objectivity is hard even to define. If one is defending objectivity, but also if one is attacking it, it's hard to avoid begging questions and going around in circles.
In practical terms I'm willing to recognize extenuating circumstances in the past, or even in distant places today, but I think some things are hard to extenuate. If someone were hurting me I'd hope that not everyone would just declare that my tormentor's values were different but equally valid and therefore decline to help me. And I figure that principle shouldn't just apply to me.
I would agree with this as well. My take on it is that our evolution as eusocial animals, to borrow from E.O. Wilson, resulted in certain behaviors having survival value that result in a biological source for human ethics of some kind. Does that rise to the level of objective ethics? I don't know. As you point out, to take a firm stand against that would requiring begging questions as to what that means on a case-by-case basis. In that sense, I see morality as something tied to the human condition with certain universal traits that for all intents and purposes behave like objective morality might even if they would disappear without humans or possibly become "other" given enough time and evolutionary pressure in the right direction.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
The Battle Hymn of the Republic Song by Julia Ward Howe Lyrics
Mine eyes hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel; "As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal"; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel, Since God is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet; Our God is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
,,,,,
I do not think any folks see or understand a God being exclusively a God of War. That was a dimension of a Gods activity. I can see that thinking about God goes through some change in the Old Testament. I do not think the God of War thing ever goes away. It really is foundational to the Bible. God is at war against the powerful oppressors and a protector of those in need of protection. That is how he is seen by people then. I think he still should be seen that way.
huckelberry wrote:I do not think any folks see or understand a God being exclusively a God of War.
Who claimed they did? Certainly not me.
I am simply pointing out that it appears that the earliest conception of Yahweh was probably that he was the war deity in a polytheistic pantheon. Then he became a "jealous God" and evolved to be more. You can see the fingerprints of this in the way the portrayal of Yahweh evolves. Of course the people who compiled and edited the final version of the Old Testament had the view that he was something much more and impressed this a little bit on the earlier stories. But that's why we have the textual critics, to analyze the styles and try to see if it makes sense to separate out the sources. Nothing's for sure, but they have good reasons to think what they do.
Read the Old Testament again and see if this reading fits. I think it does. Lord of Hosts (Master of Armies) is already a big clue, but Yahweh's earliest behavior betrays his identity as the God of War.
ETA: Battle Hymn of the Republic is not really germane to the point as it was composed in modern times and does not say anything about the earliest conception that Yahweh's followers had of him. However, it is interesting in that it shows how strong the psychological desire of humans to follow a strong alpha personality is. Some part of us wants to be on the biggest gorilla's team, and many people see Jesus as the ultimate big alpha.
honorentheos wrote:[O]ur evolution as eusocial animals ... resulted in certain behaviors having survival value that result in a biological source for human ethics of some kind. Does that rise to the level of objective ethics?
It could just be that I can't imagine how many other ways evolution might have gone, but I think it probably does.
The idea that pure chance is the only alternative to divine design is creationist nonsense; in fact natural law imposes tons of constraints. Evolution is less than perfectly efficient and some traits persist just because there is no pressure to eliminate them, but some traits are so valuable that they have evolved independently many times. It seems to me that in sufficiently intelligent species altruistic instincts must just be too powerful a survival trait to pass up, because as more intelligent organisms get more and more options there are bound to be lots of Prisoner's Dilemma scenarios in which unrestrained selfishness endangers the whole gene pool but just a little bit of altruism can save the day.
So altruism is a survival trait for selfish genes, but I think it's an equally accurate description of the same facts to say that there are objective reasons why some behaviors are the right thing to do. Genes aren't sentimental. They're ruthless. If altruism has evolved it can only be because avoiding altruism is not something genes can do, any more than they can go against gravity.
Julia Ward Howe wrote:I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on.
I don't think this 19th century hymn is quite irrelevant to understanding how the concept of God evolved in the Bible. The Battle Hymn is a modern example of something that was probably also happening back in the Bible.
By the 19th century most Americans thought of God as much more than a war god. They had come a long way since Canaan. Yet there came a time, even in their times of steam engines and telegrams, when a lot of modern civilians who had never planned to be warriors found themselves in a war and were glad to recall that their God of cosmic love was also an experienced badass.
So the evolution of God in the Old Testament from war god to capital-G God of monotheism does not have to have been a steady progression that left the old views behind as it advanced to the new. We should perhaps instead expect the older picture of God to persist along with the new, with some adapatation and change of perspective. If the war god imagery persisted into the late 19th century then it could certainly have persisted throughout the Old Testament, without necessarily excluding a broader understanding of God growing up alongside it.
Physics Guy wrote:I don't think this 19th century hymn is quite irrelevant to understanding how the concept of God evolved in the Bible. The Battle Hymn is a modern example of something that was probably also happening back in the Bible.
It is definitely interesting point, but it isn't evidence of what the early Israelites thought, was all I was trying to say. It does show that it is possible to hold "war god" beliefs along with more expansive beliefs, I just don't see a lot of evidence in the earliest parts (parts composed earliest) of the Old Testament that the Israelites held more expansive beliefs.
I think their covenant with Yahweh was more of a business contract with a person of power to get them special benefits. I don't think they saw Yahweh as the guy who was out to right the moral wrongs of the world, just a guy who was going to help them kick ass and get what they needed if they did what he said.
Physics Guy wrote:I don't think this 19th century hymn is quite irrelevant to understanding how the concept of God evolved in the Bible. The Battle Hymn is a modern example of something that was probably also happening back in the Bible.
fetchface wrote:It is definitely interesting point, but it isn't evidence of what the early Israelites thought, was all I was trying to say. It does show that it is possible to hold "war god" beliefs along with more expansive beliefs, I just don't see a lot of evidence in the earliest parts (parts composed earliest) of the Old Testament that the Israelites held more expansive beliefs.
I think their covenant with Yahweh was more of a business contract with a person of power to get them special benefits. I don't think they saw Yahweh as the guy who was out to right the moral wrongs of the world, just a guy who was going to help them kick ass and get what they needed if they did what he said.
fetchface. I was not trying to contradict the picture of a polytheistic past developing in stages to a monotheist view. On the other hand if one reviews the important festivals and sacrifices which compose the ancient bedrock of the belief I think you will find they are agricultural not war celebrations.
huckelberry wrote:In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
For Americans, I suspect that familiarity has dulled the weirdness of those last three lines. I mean "the beauty of the lilies"?
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
