Objects in the rear view mirror
Aren’t always what they seem.
Winners write history, or so it is said, but what’s been happening is as the academics have become more and more liberal, they have been indoctrinating our children and slowly changing the historical record. The language itself has changed through the years, as well. What does the word “liberal” mean to you? “Progressive”?
At one time, those words meant “people who believed in freedom” and “People who believed in progress”.
Nothing like that these days, huh?
One of the recurring discussions between Pascal and I is the story of Abraham and Isaac. What does the popular culture say about this? Remember the song “Highway 61 revisited” by Bob Dylan?
Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a sonâ€
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me onâ€
God say, “No.†Abe say, “What?â€
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better runâ€
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?â€
God says, “Out on Highway 61â€
Our liberal, progressive, monotone non-guitar-playing friend Bob has God ordering Abraham to slaughter Isaac.
I bet that’s how a lot of people remember the story, too.
There’s only one problem with this, and it is that G-d does not ask Abraham to kill Isaac. He tells him to offer him.
The reason the “progressives” have changed this- and look around, you’ll find in many modern bibles the word is “slaughter” or “Kill” and not “offer”
What’s the distinction?
The Creator of the Universe told Abraham to offer his son. Offer. This was a test of faith, and Abraham had faith that even if he killed his son, the Creator of the Universe would fulfil the prophecy he gave to Abraham and ressurect him.
Instead the Angel of the Lord stayed Abrahams hand.
Abrahams faith was strong. He trusted in The Lord. He offered the most beloved thing he had, his son, and the Creator did not find Abraham’s faith lacking.
“Progressives” would love to anthropomorphise the Creator, to make the Creator “ordinary”. if the Creator of the Universe, due to subtle manipulation of His Word, can be made to seem petty or less than divine, it will be easier to “destroy” him, and that is the point.
We were given Eden, and we threw it away, because as humans we craved the freedom to make bad decisions. Because of this, we will always suffer on earth. Only the Creator has the power of redemption, but we have been given the ability to make one another’s lives better, or make them hell.
The anti theists and progressives and liberals want to remove the power of Redemption from the Creator, and bestow it upon themselves. They want to remove our voluntary ability to provide for one another and make it mandatory, with them deciding who provides and who benefits.
This is all minitrue. This is all the progressive, liberal agenda, gradually steering the “truth” to suit their plans. Ask yourself, what changes have already been made, and what have we missed already?
The people we just elected are a party to this, as surely as the people they replaced. And the ostriches who would “Live and let live” are enablers, willing to let anything happen to anyone as long as their own rice bowl is not upset.
33 comments Og | Uncategorized
Well said Sir.
…”Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!”…
I have no argument with your main points. But I wish to point out that the old saying about winners writting history is false.
The truth is everyone writes history, winners, losers and casual bystanders. At the end of every major war the losers write books and menoirs. Amost every southern civil war general wrote such a book. Many of the Nazi generals wrote books after WW2. Even in represive police states, the repressed political minorities write books.
If anything, the real danger today is that the losers are writing history to fit their own imagination. Comunism has failed spectactularly everywhere it was tried, yet American universities and news outlets continue to sing its praises.
Og, you are so right about the efforts to “correct” the historical record. It especially pisses me off when the re-writing besmirches our military veterans and is paid for by the federal government to boot. Take your blood pressure medication before you read the link. Bastards.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027580.php
P hale: that is the point I’m trying to make!
Holla back atcha. One of the greatest epiphanies of my life came when I realized that, if history is not a timeline — it’s a fractal. What has happened before will happen again, and again, and again, getting larger and larger and larger until something breaks the cycle. Knowing that, it’s easier to be sanguine about the coming unpleasantness; we don’t have a one-to-one comparison with history, but we can make accurate extrapolations about what will happen.
Likewise, the past makes much more sense when viewed through the lens of “the present ain’t nothin’ special.”
Progressives still believe in “progress”.
Problem with “progress”, of course, is that nobody can agree on what it consists in, or how to tell it from regression.
Brings to mind Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, really, though at least most Progressives don’t seem to believe that their agenda is Ordained By History Itself As Inevitable.
“Progressive” is no longer an adjective describing direction or intent, it is a noun denoting a specific agenda that goes back to the turn-of-the 19th Century, a reactionary impulse to the Industrial Revolution – how “progressive” is that? It’s disguised Ludditism.
Sorry, Og, but that’s sophistry.
KJV Genesis 22:2: “And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon…”
Was he going to burn him alive, or kill him first?
And in the Papist version, we have: “He said to him: Take thy only begotten son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and go into the land of vision: and there thou shalt offer him for a holocaust…”
Maybe “holocaust” is different in the Roman Catholic lexicon, but it doesn’t mean “picnic” to me.
I have to side with Tam on this one, actually.
(Although that doesn’t change my point about history being a fractal and not a line.)
(I’m kinda proud of that.)
Your right about the wording in both Tam. But we living in postmodernist propagandized schooling for the last 60 or so years tend to overlook (if we ever knew) that child sacrifice was common in Abraham’s time.
The purpose of the command to make the offer was so that God could turn down the formal offer. To show the world that the God of Abraham did not require the same kind of human bloodthirstiness that was common to holocaust requiring gods such as Moloch.
And now we are living in a world dominated by neo-pagans. The radical greens of our gun-monopolizing globalist Statist have the goal of eliminating 12 out of every 13 people on the face of the earth. This is what happens when a large segment will not or cannot believe what Abraham told Isaac on the way up to Mt Moriah “God will provide.”
Our radical green priests figure that the world can provide only if it houses no more than 500 million people.
So maybe you do only see that the request of the offer was to actually do the deed. But the reality is God said “NO! This is not required by ME!” That is the fact of what happened. Why do you — or anyone else — not see that?
Og — CS Lewis warned us, didn’t he?
Joanna, the verse in question actually was THE fractal. A break with the cycle of death that was common at the time.
I was picturing the Mandlebrot Set — an expanding, repeating pattern consistent to the smallest level.
Another lesson to take from it is that if a) I believe God is good (and I do) and b) God does or orders something that I don’t believe is good, then c) my idea of good needs to be adjusted. “Let God be true, and every man a liar” — who the hell am I to decide the eternal verities?
Which then brings it back around to Abraham’s decision to trust God and proceed with the offering, and why I’m siding with Tam on the wording: God was asking for nothing less that Isaac’s death, so that he could show he didn’t need it. Softening that demand, now that I think about it, is actually pretty insulting — it’s trying to adjust God so he conforms to our ideas of what “good” is, instead of (as above) expanding our idea of what “good” can mean.
(I dunno about you guys, but I’m having fun with this.)
Child sacrifice wasn’t only popular back there and then, it was popular among the Maya and Aztecs too – only the Aztecs like to use other-people’s children instead of their own. Kinda like the Eco-Pagans.
Sophistry, perhaps, but on whose part?
Strong’s concordance lists the word used here, …”for a burnt offering”… as Hebrew #5930.
It’s worth looking into, especially when you go to the prime;
http://www.abibleconcordance.com/40H-5900.htm#h5930
It may also interest you to read the preface to the original KJV 1611, paying heed to the Translators to the reader section.
http://www.kjvbibles.com/kjpreface.htm
You nailed it!
“But we living in postmodernist propagandized schooling for the last 60 or so years tend to overlook (if we ever knew) that child sacrifice was common in Abraham’s time.”
Well, that makes it okay, then…
But it still invalidates our host’s thesis.
See, Here’s the thing, Tam:
The Creator of the universe- you know, God? Infallible, all knowing, all seeing, etc.- that guy?
He doesn’t err. yeah, I know that’s kinda difficult for humans to grok, but let me remind you of Isaiah 55:9.
“For as the heavens are exalted above the earth, so are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts. ”
See, If the Creator of the Universe wants you to sacrifice something, he says so. Witness Exodus 20:24, “An altar of earth you shall make for Me, and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I record My name I will come to you, and I will bless you.” or Leviticus 14:19
“Then the priest is to sacrifice the sin offering and make atonement for the one to be cleansed from their uncleanness. After that, the priest shall slaughter the burnt offering”
There are more, but the point is the same. When the Creator of the universe wants a Sacrifice, he asks for it by name. He wanted Abraham to offer his son, nothing more.
Sophistry? No, just the words that are written in the book. For Sophistry, you have to speak to Calvin and Luther. They’re the type that would twist the Word, as it stands, to suit their purpose.
Unless it comforts you to “believe” that the Creator of the universe is an idiot, or likes to change his mind, or says one thing and then does another. Which of course flies in the face of that whole infallibility thing.
Thanks, Og. Nice Essay.
The diagnostic of the word ‘offer’ (both point and counterpoint) clarified things even more.
Even the naysayers have a place in G-ds, plan, no? :)
My cup runneth over. This is going in my archive.
@Stephen
VERY interesting article. Historical Revisionists indeed. It smacks almost if Ideological Warfare aimed at weakening the people of the Unied States’ belief in their country.
I sent this video to Og a week ago that talks about Idealogical Warfare and how the enemies of the US attempt to attack the beliefs in our country through historical/idealogical distortions when one of their kind has taken the intellectul high ground in our education systems, mass media and government. Please enjoy the interview of the ex-KGB agent (and disregard the Obama tripe):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iz3VjoHXLA
Unless it comforts you to “believe” that the Creator of the universe is an idiot, or likes to change his mind, or says one thing and then does another. Which of course flies in the face of that whole infallibility thing.
I think you’ve each got half of the picture.
If I say “I want you to get a haircut,” but I stop you before you go into the barbershop, it doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind or made a mistake. It means I was more interested in your intent than your (no pun intended) execution. But the fact that I asked you to cut your hair remains.
Sacrificing Isaac wasn’t the goal of the exercise; Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, even though it flew in the face of all the promises, was the point. God said “I want you to offer Isaac”, not “I want Isaac as an offering”; but that doesn’t change that he was, in fact, asking Abraham to kill his son.
Arriving a little late, but I have to agree that God asked Abraham to kill Isaac. I think “offer for a holocaust” implies killing him.
I also agree that God never meant for him to go through with it which is why the angel said, “Now I know that thou fearest God and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake.” He was testing Abraham’s faith, and the only true test was whether Abraham, believing he must kill his own son, would go through with it.
Maybe what the progressives have warped is that our faith in God must be absolute, and not just lip service.
And, Tam, are you trying to be offensive with the “Papist” thing? I don’t interpret nuance well; I’m just asking so I understand correctly.
If this were just me saying this, it might be possible that any of you would have valid points. It is not. This is not my opinion but the resullt of biblical and hebrew scholars’ study for thousands of years- Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, the scholar known as Rashi the Holy, came to this conclusion in the 11th century.
I’m happy that “offer” now means to seal the deal. there’s a nice pickup truck, late model, well decked out, close to my house with “make an offer” on the windshield. Think I’ll oiffer them $12, now that I know that making an offer means they have to take it.
Sorry. Offer means offer. Sacrifice means sacrifice. Words have meaning, and you can’t change them to suit your personal idea of how the Creator acts, because his actions are beyond your comprehension. Certainly Abraham felt the Creator expected his son as a sacrifice, that’s the whole point! If Abraham didn’t feel that sacrificing his son was what God wanted, the test of his faith would ahve been somewhat less impressive. but God did not say “sacrifice”. he said offer. The distinction is subtle but vital. And from comments it’s obvious that the manipulation of the language to suit the “progressive” agenda is coming along nicely. God does not requestr human sacrifice of us, but Minitrue does.
Clearly your research is more thorough than mine – it would almost have to be ;-), so I’ll take your word for it.
“a nice pickup truck, late model, well decked out, close to my house with “make an offer†on the windshield. Think I’ll offer them $12, now that I know that making an offer means they have to take it.”
You may never have attained ordination Og, but you clearly have what it will take to reform postmodernist teachings at divinity schools.
I’ve made the point that offer is all was meant forever. As events on this thread stands witness, I might as well have turned blue in my face for all the hearts I’ve reached.
If you could so easily reduce more issues over biblical understanding this well, the world would soon become a better place.
Pascal: Marry me?
Marry you to what?
Test:
“Progressives”Incrementalists“Progressives” low-lifes
Joanna: you’ll have to excuse pascal. He’s oblivious to the advances of women. On the other hand he’s a bright, well off widower in great physical shape.
That’s okay. I’m only a young, intelligent, pretty woman who cooks like a fiend, nothing to see here … :D
Lol. Joanna, you have as good a shot as any! Both P.’S kids are much older than you, though.
very elucidating Og.
What the people also loose sight of is that Isaac was a willing participant as he was a grown man and not a boy as often portrayed. He knew what offering a burnt sacrifice meant and also put his faith in God providing a scapegoat.
Us humans always want to drag God down to our way of thinking… it does not work like that.