I finished off Psalms in the Bible. I am now 2/3 of the way through the Old Testament, just 200 pages to go. I must say that it is hard to make significant progress in my Bible reading while the Starcraft 2 beta is available to me - I am weak and blowing stuff up is just so much more appealing than self improvement.
Psalms is actually pretty funny to summarize. It basically has a few simple things repeated over and over:
-God is kind and gentle to all.
-God crushes the evil people.
-God raises up the good people and gives them everything they want.
-I am good and righteous but God is crushing me. Please stop crushing me God.
-I am surrounded by enemies who are angry at me because I love God so much. Please crush them.
-I am surrounded by enemies who are angry at me because I am so wonderful. Please crush them.
-Wow I love God, God is so great to everyone!
-God crushes people who aren't Jews so well. Go God, crush those non Jews.
The prayers are utterly focused on either begging God to maul one's enemies or on telling God what a fantastic fellow he is. The thing that is most appalling however is that this is a big chunk of the Bible devoted entirely to grovelling. Begging, supplicating, whatever term you choose it is people going on at length about how great God is, how worthless they are compared to him and how wonderful it would be if he would go smash the evil people. This God is incompatible with the God of Genesis - he isn't all powerful or all knowing, he has competitors, he desperately cares if people compliment him or not and he is extremely interested in the petty vengeances of his followers. A loving, all powerful Creator this God is not, in fact he seems entirely like a savage, random, invisible, megalomaniacal human male.
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