God was such a dick about this. Punishing the innocent people of Egypt, when they lived under the thumb of an absolute monarch. God forbid God actually hold the powerful responsible for their own actions.
Want to know how I would handle it? Here’s my Moses speech:
"Let my people go. If you don’t, one week from today you’ll get a fever bad enough to lay you up in bed. One week after that, you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, and your right arm like clockwork, two hours apart. One week after that, if you still haven’t let my people go, you’ll just have a heart attack and drop dead.
Your successors will have one week after assuming power to let my people go, or they will die of a heart attack. If they try to weasel their way out of this by putting a baby or other figurehead in charge, whoever is actually pulling the strings will have one week to let my people go before dying of a heart attack. God will just keep bursting pharaohs until he finds one that is willing to listen."
There. Direct and instant accountability. The only people who get hurt are those who actually have the power to do something. Was it really necessary to kill a bunch of innocent Egyptian children? No, it wasn’t! God should have just sat there and popped off pharaoh after pharaoh. How many pharaohs do you think it would take? Something tells me it’s not many. I think by the time you got to the third or forth, one would say, “fuck it. Fuck my pride. I’m only pharaoh because of this Yahweh fella. I should probably just let his people go. Yahweh does NOT fuck around.”
But nah, that would be too easy. Instead has God has to go and punish a bunch of completely innocent Egyptians who hold no political authority whatsoever.
To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh…
… Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah… God also ‘hardens his/Pharoah’s heart’, which compels Pharoah to not comply.
Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened… God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.
This happens multiple times.
So now… God isn’t just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death… God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events… he was in total control the whole time… God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will… when this was not the case.
This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.
Its abuser mentality.
What are you talking about? That’s not what happened.
God was such a dick about this. Punishing the innocent people of Egypt, when they lived under the thumb of an absolute monarch. God forbid God actually hold the powerful responsible for their own actions.
Want to know how I would handle it? Here’s my Moses speech:
"Let my people go. If you don’t, one week from today you’ll get a fever bad enough to lay you up in bed. One week after that, you’ll break your left leg, your right leg, your left arm, and your right arm like clockwork, two hours apart. One week after that, if you still haven’t let my people go, you’ll just have a heart attack and drop dead.
Your successors will have one week after assuming power to let my people go, or they will die of a heart attack. If they try to weasel their way out of this by putting a baby or other figurehead in charge, whoever is actually pulling the strings will have one week to let my people go before dying of a heart attack. God will just keep bursting pharaohs until he finds one that is willing to listen."
There. Direct and instant accountability. The only people who get hurt are those who actually have the power to do something. Was it really necessary to kill a bunch of innocent Egyptian children? No, it wasn’t! God should have just sat there and popped off pharaoh after pharaoh. How many pharaohs do you think it would take? Something tells me it’s not many. I think by the time you got to the third or forth, one would say, “fuck it. Fuck my pride. I’m only pharaoh because of this Yahweh fella. I should probably just let his people go. Yahweh does NOT fuck around.”
But nah, that would be too easy. Instead has God has to go and punish a bunch of completely innocent Egyptians who hold no political authority whatsoever.
God is a dick.
To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh…
… Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah… God also ‘hardens his/Pharoah’s heart’, which compels Pharoah to not comply.
Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened… God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.
This happens multiple times.
So now… God isn’t just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death… God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events… he was in total control the whole time… God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will… when this was not the case.
This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.
Its abuser mentality.
What are you talking about? That’s not what happened.
If that is what happened, it wasn’t that bad.
If it was that bad, you deserved it.
Also has the added entertainment benefit of basically turning God into Rem from Death Note.
To the death?
No, to the pain.