God commanded Abraham to take his one and only son, Isaac, and sacrifice him. So Abraham took Isaac, two servants and a donkey on a 50 mile journey. Isaac, completely oblivious, thought the lamb were to be sacrificed. But instead, Abraham bound his son with ropes and placed him on the stone altar.
Just as Abraham was about to murder his child, an angel called out to Abraham and stopped him.
Okay, I am going to try and sum up the rest of this blog post without being offensive to anyone of any cultural or religious background. Recently, reading through my peers' blog posts, I (along with many others) have noticed that a lot of the responses have been very one-sided and biased accounts of biblical stories. Even though I am not a Christian, I recognize that it is very, very disrespectful to ridicule a very real religion that many people have complete faith in. And a lot of my classmates have been doing that.
Because sure, on one hand, you could say "Wow, here is yet another testament to how much God sucks." It's easy to defend that position. Here he is, not only destroying cities and wiping out humanity in the great flood, but also making a man (almost) sacrifice his one and only son. Who would do such a thing? But as a friend told me, these stories are thousands of years old and they are all open to interpretation. Are you really going to read into each story with face value? Perhaps these biblical passages are meant more for lessons and symbols, than to show the true history of Christianity? Either way, while we can all agree that killing your own son is an abhorrent act, the true message that Christians point to is the sacrifice and complete faith that Abraham had instilled in his God.
But I also consider the other side of the coin. Perhaps people blindly point to the "true sacrifice" and "complete faith" to avert attention away from the fact that God asked a faithful servant to murder his own son. Perhaps people pick and choose what is to be seen as a lesson rather than a literal recount of history so that they feel better about horrific acts that went on. Perhaps people choose to interpret things one way - the way that puts God in a glorified, merciful light - or another way - the terrible, unforgiving, humanity-destroying light - simply because they don't want to question what is in the middle and what that exactly means.
I don't know what that "middle" means, either. And I've been trying to figure it out for quite some time.
No comments:
Post a Comment