I feel like I have overextended my “talents” but got nothing from it… what does God think of that?
I think the Bible (and God) makes clear what was the reason for that and how that could be rectified. God told Moses himself that He would withdraw His presence from the people so that they can go on into the promised land, because if He remains, He would wipe them all out in a moment because of their wickedness. But Moses prevailed and said he wouldn’t lead this people into the land without God, and so God stayed. But there were a lot more deaths because of it.
During the wilderness, God and His glory was right there with them and there are consequences to that. The cloud of His glory covered them by day and fire by night. The demons tremble and sin has no place in His Holiness, it’s next to being in heaven. But after they reached their destination the promised land and eventually conquered and settled, it was back to normal again.
Of course the Ark of the Covenant was the absolute symbol of God’s presence, there were rules about approaching God, it was only done once a year, and the priest had to be covered by the blood sacrifice or he would be killed instantly. As a matter of fact, they had to wear bells around the bottom of their frocks when he went inside with a rope tied around him, so that they knew he was still alive. If the bells stopped ringing, they would have to pull him back dead.
As for cowering out, it was the 12 spies, 10 of them brought a bad report saying there were giants in the land so couldn’t conquer them. The 2 good spies, Joshua and Caleb were the only ones of the original Israelites who actually made it from Egypt to the promised land. Even Aaron and Moses didn’t make it. They said we can conquer it, but the people were so upset that they tried to stone those two. Then God got upset and killed all the evil 10 spies. That was when He decided no-one living originally from Egypt would enter the promised land (except the 2 good spies). Then they took matters in their own hands and tried to conquer it, but God’s blessing wasn’t on it, and many of them died. They were in the wilderness 40 years so that all the original Israelites could die off because of their sin. Only their children could enter.
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After the church started growing, the glory of God came back in episodes and the scary stuff along with it. Many things were going on during this time, King Herod was getting praised and angel of God struck him down so he died of worms. A magician who was trying to prevent the gospel was struck with blindness. Saul, who is Paul, himself was struck with blindness until he repented.
It happened a lot associated with certain prophets who had the glory of God on them, like Elijah and Elisha. Elijah had fire come down from heaven and burn 2 companies of 50 men who the king sent to arrest him. Elisha blinded the whole Syrian army when they surrounded him.
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“…to he who has, more will be given, and he who has not --even what he has will be taken away.”
This appears not a basic truism, but a rationalization of poverty from the side of those who already have a lot… It’s a harsh, cruel and inhumane claim that repels mercy. There is a conscious divide between those who possess the right to gain and those who must lose because they have less. Perhaps it was spoken in the spirit of a lament? But it could as easily be spoken like a curse, opposing humility and insulting resignation, like a threat from those with wealth and power.
I can faintly see how there may be the old biblical scare factor at play, too… Think of the familiar irrational force behind the “protestant work ethic”, which, while enriching a few, also kept many slaving for too little too long… Work or die. What if I have something better to do than business?
(A tangent phrase that suffers from the modern semantic context, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”… Which means that the poor have a lot of spirit, more than enough… not that they are blessed because their spirit is lacking or impoverished…)
You might not like it, but that doesn’t make it false, and it has nothing to do with “rights”. There is something in it that reflects the nature of the universe, not just for humans but for all other organisms. A plant spouting out-of-place in a slightly unsuitable ecosystem will be rapidly overwhelmed by others that have a slight genetic advantage. The difference with humans is that we have more options than a plant. We can choose to do this, or that, to get into that “more shall be given” cycle.
What you seem to be missing it that it not a zero-sum game. You can be “given more” without taking away anything from anyone else, and in fact choosing to just sink into the mire instead of making an effort makes life a little bit worse for humanity at large - at the very least, other people have to watch you suffer, knowing that there’s little they can do if you choose not to help yourself in even the tinest degree, and are committed only to bemoaning how unfair everything is.
No. The guy with “wealth and power” in this story gave his servants a completely open-ended investment. He just said take this money, and do something useful with it. In some translations the phrase ‘gold coin’ is used, but in others it’s ‘talent’ - which is/was an absolute shitload of money. It was therefore an expression of extreme trust, and the guy who failed to do something useful didn’t merely let himself down; he insulted his master. If someone gave you a million US$ (a ‘talent’ would have been somewhere in that ballpark), and then came back and found that you’d literally just let inflation erode its value, how do you think they’d judge your character? Do you think they’d ever trust you with anything else, ever? Even putting it in the bank (as per the story) and spending the interest on whores and booze would have been better, because the monetary outcome would be the same but you would have at least got something out of it. To do nothing with your life is an insult to God.
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Several what today’s scholars would classify as gnostic sects, such as Sethians, tried to come up with an explanation for this. Some of the solutions claimed that the creator of the material world is not the supreme god, but merely a lesser being called Saklas or Ialdabaoth. Jesus is the son of the supreme god, who created the non-material world. Needless to say, they were labelled as heretics once there was a semblance of an unified church.
Only because it’s his death day today:
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I am sorry… I can’t resist… 
Our knowledge of God’s personality depends on biblical tales. That’s all we’ve got. However, in the world I live in, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any sign, much less witnessed any personification or anthropomorphic manifestation of God’s slowness / quickness – or not – to get angry, or to forgive… Maybe once or twice a bird, or a dog, said something cute or snide to me. But I’ve never gotten any closer to the divine than maybe not falling off a cliff because God put a rock for my hand to grip as I fell down… at any rate, I would say that ordinary people tend to behave in opposition to images of divine wisdom and the holy ideal… 
As to the sects parallel and unrelated to Judaism and Christianity – like gnosticism, well. They’re all coming from ancient languages we don’t understand well today.
The bible new and old is at best a collection of fictionalized accounts of events that we cannot know certainly ever happened. So, the bible is a selection of myths a lot like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. We don’t even know if Homer wrote them. Likewise, we have no idea who wrote the bible!
And gnosticism is basically gibberish, insubstantial and subjective chatter-jabber, à la blah-blah-kabbalah et al.
If God is real… yeah fine… But WHAT a BIG “if”… 
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One way to explain away the contradiction is to do what the early Christian followers of Marcion did and conclude that there must actually be two gods - the angry and petulant god of the Jews depicted in the Old Testament and the loving benevolent god of Jesus depicted in the New Testament. Reading some of these early Gnostic Christian gospels that still exist and didn’t make it into the final canon is very interesting, particularly when considering that this seemingly radical interpretation could very well have won over what we now consider to be the orthodox interpretation. It’s also interesting to think that this question around the seeming incompatibility between the gods of the Old and New Testaments has been wrestled with by Christians since the very beginning.
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My fav example of NT peevishness is Mark 11:12 — Jesus has the munchies and sees a fig tree and he sez to said fig tree which has only leaves and no figs, “oi, gimme some figs!” When the fig tree fails to magically sprout figs, Jesus gets pissed. “Fuck ye, ye fruitless fucker, forevermore!” And sure enough, the poor innocent fig tree withered and died. What makes JC’s tantrum especially funny is that we are explicitly told it was not even the season for figs!
Still can’t hold a candle to all the depravity and hardcore violence committed by God’s favourites in the OT though
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Interesting symbolism there
Another interesting one (though I don’t remember hearing it on Sunday) is Jesus killing 2000 pigs.
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Exactly, he could have just used his superhero magic powers to turn the demons into cute little demon daffodils or something instead of harming the pigs… it’s hard to imagine Confucius or Gautama Buddha doing something like that. In his “Why I am not a Christian” Bertrand Russell actually cites this business with the pigs as evidence that Jesus was less than morally perfect
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What’s peevish is getting all worked up over someone cursing a tree.
It doesn’t have feelings.
He’s spot on. Like Kierkegaard said, God eats followers, not admirers.
The Parable of the Fig Tree is similar to Finley’s explanation of the Talents. What doesn’t bear fruit is useless, which is a common theme in many of Jesus’ parables and even John the Baptists talks of unfruitful trees being cut down and burned in the fire. That’s a picture of sinners, who don’t bear righteous fruit, they become a curse to earth and others around them, and in the end, they will be cut down and burned, which is hell, as Jesus explains clearly in Matthew 13.
I might add something to Finley’s economics. When you have free markets, usually the rich people are savers, entrepreneurs, and they invest, they build new companies, which provide jobs and bear a lot of fruit that benefit many people. Under socialism, the opposite occurs…you take away from the fruitful and give to the unfruitful. Many poor people don’t have habits of saving, they spend everything, which is how they get poor and stay poor. If they started saving, they could work their way up the ladder. The way to become rich is to save.
So these unfruitfuls become a black hole, you could give them $1,000,000 and it would all be gone after a few years and be back at square one. So distribution a la socialism works against the welfare of society as it squanders and discourages the fruitful. It goes against the grain of what the Bible teaches. The solution isn’t socialism, it’s making unfruitful people fruitful…learn how to make their own fruit.
As for the pigs, Jews weren’t supposed to have them, they were an unclean animal.
Well Jesus addressed the tree and cursed it… so presumably it was a sentient fig tree, right? And if it was a regular ol’ fig tree… Jesus chucking a hissy fit and cursing it seems like sub-sage behaviour.
At an allegorical level the story isn’t any better: menacing Israel for not recognising God’s prophets (i.e. him!) And this is only one example of the 玻璃心 complex he seems to have inherited from his dad: recognise me and worship me or be cursed! Bit of a falling off from the ethical eminence of Confucius’人不知而不慍 不亦君子乎, isn’t it.
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No. That’s called an Ancient Near Eastern simile curse.
Not being a pussy is not immoral.
Love these explanations of how the parables of Jesus were actually little lessons from your friendly neighborhood bank.
Now do the one that tells how, no, really, the Fye of the Needle was a gate in Jerusalem (that nobody had ever heard of) so it wasn’t really about cursing on rich people- Jesus loved the wealthy and spit on the poor…
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