benja burns

Why would God have a chosen people? Wouldn't he want to save the entire world instead of a certain group of people?

Magus55

Thats not what being the chosen people means. Jews are the chosen people because they are the people that God brought the world salvation through.

Chris Weimer

God's a rascist

philbo

I think you'd better explain that to the Israelis - they seem to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick

the Devil's Own

Well, the Immortal Super-Being has been known to be a tad sadistic, from time to time. :wave:

bfair2all

Quite true. Apparently God never figured out to just pop up in the sky one day and say "Hey, I'm God, I really exist and you better worship me or I am going to torture you for eternity".

So he came up with this screwy plan to basically use and abuse a middle eastern tribe for a thousand years or so, and then become one of them and commit suicide by cop.

It all makes perfect sense, after a couple of bong hits...

Ojuice5001

Because Yahweh exists, but is not as the Christians conceive him to be. He is not the one true god, the Supreme God, although he works, almost always with success, to make humans think he is. Let's start at the beginning.

The gods have always had the world divided into territories, but in ancient times, it was much neater than today. The gods revealed in any given mythology were tied to the cultural areas that knew them. They probably had some ability to act in other places, but they didn't ever reveal themselves to the peoples far from the lands that worshipped them.

So every pantheon, in fact, was tied to some culture in the same way as Yahweh was tied to the Jews. Yahweh was unusual in being the only god associated with the Jews, but as of 500 BCE, he had no ability to reveal himself to the Gentiles. The pagan gods wouldn't have allowed it.

Eventually, of course, Yahweh did begin to realize his global ambitions. But by then, he had already formed a relationship with the Jews, a relationship that continues to this day. He wants people to think he is the Supreme God, but he ended up deciding it was best to continue to acknowledge that he does have this relationship with the Jews; in Regis Philbin terms, Gnosticism was not his final answer. The way his followers understand it is to say that the Jews are his chosen people.

That is how the idea came about that the Supreme God has a chosen people: a confusion between Yahweh and the Supreme God, deliberately fostered by Yahweh himself. (Whether there is a Supreme God or not, I think Yahweh is not the same as the Supreme God.)

bfair2all

Dude, I thought all you gnostics were killed off a long time ago.

Ojuice5001

I'm not a Gnostic, but I think their view of the God of the Old Testament was pretty accurate.

Mageth

All the other tribes were taken.