(urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 7, Issue 6

[maru]

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