Civil1z@tion

Yaweh in the Old Testament is a bastard. Petty, jealous, and condoning things like rape, genocide, and slavery for a more or less randomly picked group. Yaweh will have his followers kill you, rape your wife, and sell your kids into slavery just because you happen to be squatting on the wrong piece of land. Even his followers get shit for doing things to honor him (like a guy getting zapped by lightning for things to prevent the Ark of the Covenant from falling). Not very nice there.

The New Testament god does at least talk about not judging and loving your enemy. But really all he's doing is changing who does the dirty work from his followers to himself. This god will have you tortured for eternity for the sin of not worshiping him. At least the Old Testament god leaves you alone once you're dead, Jesus's daddy inflicts infinite punishment for eternity.

Given that my vote is with the newer guy being more of a dick.

storytime

They are supposedly one and the same. The NT god-man comes along and attempts to sugarcoat the obnoxious sociopath portrayed in his Hebrew scrolls. Tries to put lipstick on the pig and cause people to drink the poison cool-aid. It's the death cult that did not change.

ApostateAbe

The new God substitutes the cruelty dealt out in the Earthly physical existence for cruelty in the spiritual existence. If the Gods objectively existed, then the New Testament God would be infinitely more tyrannical, as Robert G. Ingersoll wrote. Since I think of all gods as mere ideas, the New Testament God is far less cruel in practical concerns. Since there is no objective spiritual existence, the cruelty of the threat of hell is merely psychological. Unlike the Old Testament, the New Testament does not directly command death for those who break the rules or threaten the religion, and many of the such antiquated rules are happily dismissed or discouraged.

bacht

Hmm, yeah, maybe Zeus was better, blasting people with thunderbolts. Or Odin, with his mighty spear. How about Asshur, the god of those nice Assyrians, he only wanted the blood of his enemies. Or Amun-Re, or Baal, or Marduk... yeah, and that crazy Moloch, the one who demands child sacrifice, there's a sweet character

The God of the Jews and Christians is a shadow of his former self. I guess there's nothing like kicking a deity when he's down... or is it that he used to be our deity that makes spite so satisfying?

Eldarion Lathria

Mark Twain said it best. Not quoting.. the god of the Old Testament was brutal, but when it was unbearable, kind Death came and gave escape. But it was the god of the New Testament, and gentle Jesus meek and mild, that invented Hell, and took away the escape and made the suffering eternal.

Eldarion Lathria

Splarnst

NT, infinitely so. Hell is infinitely longer than any suffering on earth.

DCHindley

The God of Hebrew scriptures is definitely portrayed as very demanding, and continually punishing those who do not perform his commands promptly and correctly. However, there are other times where he is portrayed as having tender affections and forgiving to those who humble themselves before him.

Well, I think you have injected a certain amount of modern Calvinistic theology into what God is portrayed like in the NT. It wasn't until the most recent few centuries that preachers were warning the populace that they risk becoming "sinners in the hands of an angry God." This POV is heavily influenced by depictions of God in the Jewish scriptures, not the NT.

I am not offering any sort of detailed analysis here, but from memory the God of the NT offers a general "sin" amnesty to mankind if individuals meet some relatively simple conditions. Jesus' sacrificial death & subsequent resurrection serve as a sort of transition between the old order and the new. There are several statements that charge Jews with not living up to God's requirements of them, and not being willing to receive the predominantly gentile NT Christian message of a new amnesty.

Statements of Jesus, where he is made to say things like "If you sin on account of your eye, it is better to pluck it out and enter paradise maimed than to keep it and rot in Gehenna," is not necessarily a condemnation to eternal hell. It is more a contrast of the fate of the righteous dead in the future messianic age, who can expect to be resurrected to a blissful life, and the fate of the unrighteous, who would not be resurrected, and remain dead bodies.

You may be thinking of the Apocalypse of John, which does depict some being cast into a lake of eternal fire. It is notoriously difficult to interpret apocalypses like that, and this fate may be restricted to a specific group of people or disembodied spirits, not all of mankind who are "unsaved."

DCH

davidbach

Before we can answer this question, we must examine the differences. The key difference in my opinion between the old and new testament "gods" is that the old testament was institutionalised, the new is personalised.

Thus the old testament presents "the god of Israel". The emphasis is that the "god" (The Lord, YHWH etc.) protects the tribe(s) of Israel. The priestly class, strongly connected wth the ruling class, interprets and communicates "god's will". "god" legitimises the laws and the mores of society. To some extent this is legitimate - remember that in the marginal land of the middle east life was tough. Survival of a tribal group depended on the cohesiveness of the group, both in wartime and in the brief periods of plenty. Failure or famine were visited upon the tribe because the group were not cohesive or "godly" enough. Your tribal "god" was better than the other tribes "god"'s, and encouraged genocide, rape, pillage etc. It was a matter of identification and ultimately survival as a group. Note that the world-view was polytheist.

This "god", of course, still exists. Institutions such as the Papist church, Westborough baptist etc. claim that they have the only true "god", and presume to judge the rest of us. The same attitudes appear in the "ten commandments", "in god we trust", "chosen race" and other delusions, and even the creationist groups.

By contrast, the "god" of the new testament is a personal experience. One "accepts" "god" rather than having it imposed upon one. "god" relates to personal behaviour, not the mores of society. Although not commonly accepted, true Christians not only accept the separation of church and state, they welcome it. With this view comes the personal responsibility for good deeds and tolerant, non-judgemental behaviour. The stick is replaced by the carrot. Hell (not a big feature of the NT) is replaced by Paradise. "god" is no longer a tribal attribute but a universal monotheistic entity.

There is still a remnant of the "eternal torment" view, I see this as an invention of the pro-institutional crowd (Papists, Baptists and many other -ists) to keep the sheeple in place.

So which is harsher? Hard to say. In absolute terms the OT version is harsher. On the other hand, if you attribute the horrors of the genocides of our era to "god", then there is a strong case for the NT version being harsher. Particularly as the latter were not necessary for tribal survivsal.

David.

show_no_mercy

Matthew 25:46 also depicts people being punished for eternity.