Hi, Greg. We are well! Thank you, and I hope you are well and happy, too.
Your post is a tempting invitation to get into the game of picking and choosing among the many, and not always consistent, characterizations of God to be found in the Old and New Testaments.
Is there some debate as to whether CL's particular description of a Biblical event was accurate? In it, the claim is made that God, displeased with the morality of a mother, vowed to strike her children dead. Was that a misquote?
Modern psychology does have an explanatory, or descriptive, category for those people who find a singular way of dealing with the existence of an arbitrary and cruel power exerted over them. It's called "the Stockholm Syndrome."
Here's a stanza of a poem by Robert Lowell I find moving, and that is relevant to our exchange:
Far off that time of gentleness,
when man, still licensed to increase,
unfallen and unmated, heard
only the uncreated Word--
when God the Logos still had wit
to hide his bloody hands, and sit
in silence, while his peace was sung.
Then the universe was young. |
