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To: Rarebird who wrote (674)	9/6/1998 8:37:00 PM
From: Alan Markoff	Respond to of 1542

Hi Rarebird (from Nancy), <<Passion and making money honestly are good things. To not be happy is a sin.>> From my experience these things only cause superficial happiness that comes and goes. The happiness God offers is from within and is there in all circumstances (even death). How can you see satan in Job as loving life when he desired to destroy Jobs family and Job himself. I am sorry but that is deceptive. He desires destruction as portrayed in the text. <<God has dialogue with and is influenced by Satan>> The dialog was on how much God would allow him to make an innocent man suffer. Please!!! That is considered evil in Judaism. Nancy

To: Rarebird who wrote (674)	9/6/1998 9:03:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1542

Rarebird, between the ages of 10 and 12.5 I was raised in an orthodox orphanage. On my last Yom Kippur there, when I was beating on my chest and atoning for my sins, I finally realized that something is missing, it is not I that needs to atone, but the all mighty should atone to his "chosen" people for choosing them to live through thousands of years of misery, murder, inquisition, pogroms and finally the holocaust itself. That is when I parted company with the orthodoxy of Judaism and started to construct, based on Judaic traditions, my own set of moral standards by which I chose to live. Thus, not being a true representative of the pious stream of Judaism, my responses to your queries will be tainted by the agnostic path I have chosen. ) Was it immoral for God to ask Adam not to eat from the " tree of knowledge? " Is not knowledge good? Was not Adam's defiance of God an appropriate Jewish response? He loved learning. Nothing immoral about that, I assume the three of knowledge belonged to the almighty and it was his choice to let Adam have it or not. What bugged me, relative to this episode, if Adam was already going to sin and eat the forbidden fruit, he had only to step 100 yards to the three of "UNDERSTANDING", knowledge is quite of little value without the latter. 2) Testing one's love of God by asking a father to sacrifice his son. Sacrifice? From an ethical point of view, it is murder. From a religious point of view, it is sacrifice. As a father, I would never do it. Would You? If you take it within the historical framework of the period, when human sacrifice was as common as any other sacrifice in pagan religions, and even in the later Christian religion (after all, Jesus, "god's son" is sacrificed for the "good and salvation of others"), I think that this story is actually quite remarkable. After all, the God of Abraham, at the last moment, decided not to "go all the way", quite moral, but the God of Christianity lacked this moral virtue of not taking a life, he did go all the way. Maybe these two deities are not the same after all. Would I sacrifice my son? Who is asking me? I have sacrificed a good 80% of my family already and no one asked me If I wanted to participate in that rite, If I had a son at the time, no one would have asked me if I was willing to sacrifice him either. I surely would not do it willingly. Job The most enigmatic book of the old testament. It barely made it in when they "closed" the scriptures. They added to the book a last chapter of reconciliation to allow it in. Talking about democracy and the Jewish people, 2000 years ago they went through an heroic effort to allow within the holy scriptures the dubiety of God itself and its morality. Satan is a very small part of the argument there. The main argument is that old "tree of understanding". It really raises the major question of who are you little "turd of the earth" Human, to even question god's deeds and meaning. Can human understand the purpose of creating a leviathan? And, too many other deep philosophical question around the essence of monotheistic thinking and the true abstraction of the deity. Later generations could not grasp that abstraction and had to regress into a world of deities that are a little more concrete. Do I love Satan as I love the earth? Satan is around us in the form of scammers that push worthless stocks on timid investors, in the form of investment bankers structuring floorless debentures and other instruments of wealth destruction, in the form of a human being (representative are on this thread and they know who they are) that is so arrogant he knows that his perception of god is the only right perception and whomever does not agree with him and convert to his way of thinking or believing is doomed to eternal fires in hell, in Satan's company. To me Satan is (as in Job) one of the mythical angels, and frankly, as far as angels and mysticism go, they have nothing to do with monotheism and certainly nothing to do with pantheism. Zeev