If you're not familiar with it, Ecclesiastes is a rant by an angry, elderly atheist that through some editorial oversight found its way into the Bible.
Not an atheist. Ancient jews believed in God but not in the afterlife.
Not an atheist. Ancient jews believed in God but not in the afterlife.
Anyway, my research, such as it is, took me as far as the Wikipedia article on Ecclesiastes[0], which maybe provides soft support for the claim?
The presence of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is something of a puzzle, as the common themes of the Hebrew canon—a God who reveals and redeems, who elects and cares for a chosen people—are absent from it, which suggests that Kohelet had lost his faith in his old age.
Anyway, I hope that this won't discourage people from reading the entire thing, which I thought was well written and well worth the time.
Yhwh is indeed the God of his own people, and fights alongside his people, against other peoples and their god(s).
Sometimes he gets upset with his people and punishes them, usually very harshly (mass drowning, mass fires, getting them lost in the desert for generations, etc.)
The role of prophets is mainly to try to talk God into being a little more lenient and maybe not kill everyone this time.
The idea of a benevolent God is fairly recent. (Conversely, the argument that God doesn't exist because there is so much evil in the world is fairly weak. The God of the Old Testament doesn't have a problem with evil, he just wants his team to win.)
Oh well, at least he can take solace in
> that no matter how bad my talk, it won't be remembered.
Please, try to understand what others try to do before throwing unwarranted insults in the conversation.
That was a joke. So? There are a lot of people that ignores what I said. I wasn't attacking the author, just adding some rare facts to the conversation for people that could be unaware of it and wonder wth the author was meaning.
Now your comment, what exactly does it add to the conversation?
Edit: your response (that I can't responde to) is even worse. <sigh>
I wasn't responding to your original comment, which I thought added value.
I was responding to "It doesn't matter."
You're dismissing someone else's perception of the context in which the statement was made.
Sure, humor might not matter to you.
To some HN users, it might even matter less than factual correctness to a granular level. But to say it doesn't matter, full stop? That's just rude.
> Now your comment, what exactly does it add to the conversation?
It circles back from your dickish dismissal with an excerpt from the webpage for the sake of humor.
Try lightening up. Or, at the very least, maybe try to not be a dismissive jerk to other people. It costs very little to be kind.
EDIT: If you want to respond, click the "x minutes ago" to access a comment directly and you'll get the reply box. i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=16107228
Please don't do tedious tit-for-tats on HN. As the guidelines say in another context, it never does any good and it makes boring reading.
Please don't do flamewars on HN. You guys have managed to produce almost half the thread at this point. That's some low-quality yield.
- Pedantry - Rude - Dickish dismissal - Dismissive jerk - Unkind
And then "lighten up" :)
on a serious note, i already knew they didnt have their facts strait, and it was clear they were going to paint the article with some sort of rhetoric.
i'm sure you enjoyed the article and it has good content, but it wasn't for me and i moved on.
> i already knew they didnt have their facts strait
Deducing this from this joke alone is irrational, so to be charitable let's assume you had other reasons for dismissing the talk. Why not expose them instead?