Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

"Do not worship false gods" really means "no idolatry." Many take this to refer to religions which practice sex rites, child sacrifice, and similar things, and Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other religions do not count. See this wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idolatry_in_Judaism

My Hebrew professor, a graduate of Hebrew Union and therefore thoroughly immersed in the rabbinic tradition, explained that the command against idolatry addresses basically two things: (1) worship of any god other than Adonai Elohim, and (2) worship of Adonai Elohim by way of false images, i.e., idols.

Forgive me for rejecting the views of modern liberal scholars, but it seems to me that the God of Scripture is a jealous God who does not desire people chasing after the illusions of false religion. He wants people to find light and life in their only true source, himself.

In about 60 AD, at a place called Ares Hill, a rabbi named Saul of Tarsus addressed the Greek philosophers. First he commended them for their religious practices and piety, but then he goes on to tell them that the True God does not want them to worship the false gods of pagan religion. He further explains to them that God was merciful and forgiving, but that the time had come for them to turn from their false worship and embrace the True God. That, I believe, is the task of all true believers--to point people beyond the shadows to the True and Living God. And that, I hope, is what I am doing here.

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Are you seriously comparing the ruthless, mob-mentality murder of one man to the murders of millions of innocent people for no reason, and the murder of innocent people for the only reason of forcing a system of belief upon other societies? I don't quite understand here, Didymus. If Jesus was God, why did he allow himself to die? Since he had the power of God on his side, what was stopping him from getting off of the cross and walking away? If he could have saved himself, why didn't he?


Tell me the difference between our God and the gods of paganism.

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That's why it was necessary.

Oh, and as for the murder of one man, the mentality is still the same. The high priest believed that by killing Jesus, he could completely eliminate all of his followers (cut off the head, the rest dies). It was an act if injustice designed to eliminate a whole religious movement.

And you've still missed the whole point: you cannot blame modern people for things that happened in history. If your grandfather committed murder, should you be forced to rot in jail for it?


That one's pretty easy: the God of Scripture is real, and the gods of paganism aren't. Or how about this: the God of Scripture created ALL THINGS, not just this thing or that thing. Zeus is god of the sky only, but the God of Scripture created heaven AND earth. Thor was god of thunder only, but the God of Scripture is God of the wind, mountains, and sea. As Tolkien once argued, the pagan gods are nothing but pale reflections of the One True God. So why should we be content with worshipping shadows?

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Because it was in scriptures that he was supposed to die. He had even said to his apostles that "The son of man will be killed, and on the third day we be risen." Now that's not the exact wordage, but the condense version. If you go and ask any Catholic priest that question, they will tell you the same thing. Along with a few things that I don't even know about.

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I'm in the middle here. I believe that before God changes our hearts, we all have carnal and wicked desires. God helps us to properly restrain those desires, and gives us new, righteous desires.



Actually lahimatoa, according to LDS theology, if that's your definition of constant, then there would have been no Law of Moses.

How do you know that in essence they aren't all just the same? How do you know that Zeus in Greek mythology isn't just one part of the one true God? What if the one true God is just representing himself as more than one god? I disagree that polytheists worship shadows. I argue that they worship a mosaic. Different peices that when put together, they form the one true God.

I'll do my best at making an analogy. Most people read words as whole words. When you read a word, you don't read it as individual letters, but at a word in its entirety. If there were a few people who did read each letter individually, they'd still understand the whole word, they just got to it in a different way.

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Another difference between the Gods of monotheistic and polytheistic religions is that the pagan Gods are attributed human emotion and often do things for petty reasons, out of revenge, lust, etc. The God of Judaism, Chrisitianity, Islam, and many other religions is beyond such things and is not nearly so similar to people. Interestingly, the idea that pagan Gods are reflections of the one true God is similar to some parts of Kabbalistic thought- according to many sects of Kabbalism, there are ten Sephiroth, or emanations, of God which embody different aspects of him yet are ultimately the same being.

You cannot attribute Saul of Tarsus as embodying Jewish philosophy, since he was a Christian. He tried to tell the Greek philosophers that God wanted them to follow him and not their pagan Gods, but Jews did not try to do that- Christians did, which as I said before is one of the main differences between the religions.

Then God would not have needed to give that commandment, "You shall have no other gods." He would have been perfectly content to let people worship anything and everything.

Here's a better analogy. Let's take for example a married man who cheats on his wife. She gets jealous (and rightly so) and confonts him. He argues that there is only one woman in his life, and that all the other "women" are just manifestations of her. Do you think such an argument would fly? I'm not so sure.

I do like how Everybody! addresses the righteousness or holiness of the True God, versus the rather impulsive and passionate nature of the pagan gods. I can't imagine Adonai Elohim running around having affairs with every woman he saw, but Zeus did it all the time.

I will concede that Saul doesn't necessarily reflect the Jewish faith after his conversion. But prior to his conversion, he was thoroughly trained in the rabbinical tradition. He was, in fact, a disciple of Rabbi Gameliel, though he was certainly more hot-headed than his master. But I do think his ideas about idolatry do apply. It's the basic idea that God does not want people worshipping false gods, meaning any god but the one who made heaven and earth.

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He could have just meant not worshipping other people. You don't know what God meant because God knows everything and we certainly don't.


It would if she was a scizo and the other woman really was a manifestation of her


That is true, but if we are made in God's image, doesn't God have desires too, even though he is too holy to uphold those ill desires? If that's the case, then my arguement still sticks. Zeus could just be the part of God the would act on his impulses, but the rest of God does not, therefor God as a whole does not.

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Then are you implying that God cannot use language? Or that language itself is not to be trusted? Gorbachev sings tractors?

If he had meant, "Don't worship people," he would have said so. I've had similar arguments with Kef on other threads before. The moment you start claiming, "But you don't know what the words REALLY mean," then language itself becomes entirely pointless. "Tree" could mean "sit" and "burn" could mean "Volkswagen." I'm not willing to concede this. And just because God is omniscient does not mean that he is unable to communicate with us. Your logic does not follow.


Depends on what you mean by desires. I know that God desires intimacy with all people, but I certainly would not attribute lechery to him. The point still stands: Zeus is a mythical character, and God is the creator of heaven and earth. Just like with the language idea above, what you are proposing is essentially a logical absurdity, that a perfectly holy God is also a total lech. At best, you could argue that Zeus is perhaps a shadow of the True God upon whom sinful men have projected their own sinful nature. But this does not make God into Zeus, any more than it makes you Charles Manson. And God's response to that? "So, you people think I'm some kind of perverted lech, eh?"

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I think you misunderstood what I meant. I didn't say that Zeus was God. I was saything that the Zeus that people believe in in Greek mythology, is a part of God. It's just the way I look at it because I don't necessarily believe that polytheism is wrong. Polytheism came first, too. Thousands of years before anyone believed that there was one God. I don't want to be Charles Manson! I saw Assassins on broadway last year... Charlie messed Squeaky up sooo bad! "Unworthy of your Love" is a crazy song...

Wait... "burn" doesn't mean "Volkswagen?" I've been misinformed my whole life! Oh no!

How do we even know that God gave us the commandments directly. I know this may seem absurd, but, how do we know that when Moses was on Mt. Sinai, he wasn't just writing the ten commandments on the stone tablets, and wasn't receiving any contact from God? Moses was the only one there, and he's been dead for a very long time. I don't actually think that this is what happened, but I'm acknoweledging (sp?) it as a possibility.

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There were witnesses to the Mt. Sinai revelation. There was "thunder and lightning," and a "dense cloud upon the mountain," and a "very loud blast of the horn." It is also written that "Mount Sinai was all in smoke", "the mountain trembled violently", and "As Moses spoke, God answered him in thunder." (See Exodus:19) It's pretty clear that God himself was involved, not just Moses going up to the mountain, writing some tablets, and coming down.

Couldn't it just have been a foggy thunderstorm? It's not likely that it was, but it could have been. We can't trust everything we hear.

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But God's glory followed them from Sinai as a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. That's one freaky fog/storm!

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Anyways, back on topic.


Maybe that is because the monotheist God is the MOST truthful, and that's why the commandment was given.

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Actually, I will say your line of reasoning has merit, but I just think you were following it the wrong way. It's not terribly different from a theory that Lewis picked up from Tolkien, essentially that behind all pagan mythology is a grain of truth that points to the True God. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man had a similar idea. Basically, according to them, there was a time when men worshipped only one God, but as men and their languages became more diverse, so did their understanding of this True God. The next thing you know, people are worshipping all sorts of things as gods. Meanwhile, the True God is forgotten in the shadows, waiting for men to return to him. Now that I think about it, this sounds very similar to this passage in Romans:

But to these men (and to me), this line of reasoning only lends a partial merit to pagan mythology, because God still wants men to seek him, and not the vain images and ideas that they construct for themselves.

This is why divine revelation is such an important concept in both Jewish and Christian theologies. God basically shows up and says, "Here I am. I'm the one you've been looking for."

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But didn't man constuct all modern views of God? Man wrote the Bible, and the Torah, and the Qu'ran. Angels didn't descend from heaven, hand someone a Bible, and hope that they'd reproduce it: it didn't work like that. They were all written by someone. No one can truly know all of the nuances of God, all they can do is believe what they are told. Didymus, if no one ever told you that God existed, would you still believe in God? No, of course not. I mean, you could have created the idea yourself, but you wouldn't have had the intense belief that you actually do. People teach the word of God, God doesn't.

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Men may actually do the writing, but it is God who reveals what they are to write. (Actually, God DID write the original Ten Commandments). When Ezekiel wrote his prophecies, he wrote just what God told him to write. When St. John wrote Revelation, he wrote what God showed him (albeit, the images themselves were representative of people, institutions, nations, etc.). To say, "But men wrote it, not God," would be the same as if I claimed, "But Houghton Mifflin wrote The Lord of the Rings, not Tolkien."

It may be one of those things which can only be understood by faith. But to me, just because it was St. Luke's hand that wielded the quill--or Isaiah's or Joel's--does not undermine the fact that it was what God intended to communicate to us.

And for me, this is underscored by the fact that Jesus taught from the Tanak. For me, if he accepted as divine, then so do I.

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But if someone today wrote something, and they told you that God was writing it through them, would you suddenly go by its law?

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Probably not, unless they could raise the dead or something like that.

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That would be pretty cool

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Unless they're brain-eating zombies. Then it would like totally suck and stuff.

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My sister would be safe

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As would mine, if...I...had a sister?

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I've been raised Christian, but now that I've actually thought about some of the things the Bible says I don't buy it anymore.

I was agnostic for a while, then deist. Now I'm pantheist. I get around


PS: I know that a while ago I swore that I wouldn't touch this board, but I've decided that there's no real point in excluding myself.

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"They've taken Mr Rimmer! Sir, they've taken Mr Rimmer!"
"Quick, let's get outta here before they bring him back!"

I've got a similar deal, Jerome. My theological beliefs are constantly changing. I was raised a theist. For a very long time I was interchanging between an atheist and agnostic. Right now I'm pretty sure I believe in God, but I'm also fairly sure that I don't believe any Holy Scripture to the extent that most people believe.

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Pantheism doesn't make any sense to me. When I look around at this messed up crazy world in which we live, how can anyone believe that THIS is God? How can anyone believe that Saddam Hussein, or Osama Bin Laden, or that really mean German guy whose name you're not supposed to mention, be God? What I see in all this is a world that is SEPARATED from God, not a world that IS God. Otherwise, I end up looking at a God who is just as horrible and dispicable as these men are, in fact more so because he also IS the tsunami, Hurricane Charlie, and Mt. St. Helens.

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I am such a Jew it hurts.

I voted the wrong thing on the poll! ::sob::

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How about some Pan-Asian cuisine?

How so? I mean, if you were a dude, and it had something to do with circumcision...

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