Why was old testament God so darned ornery?

He didn't even restore the things of Job's he let be destroyed, after winning the bet the episode was based on. Just let him get new stuff. How was this to be construed as justice?

When asked by Peter, "Why have you come among us to spread a message of love, O Lord?" Jesus famously replied, "You're kidding, right? I mean, have you met my My Father?"

That's the Gnostic argument, the OT God isn't God at all but the Demiurge.

I thought the Muppets created creation (and obviously the Universe as is evidenced by their association with Universal Studios).

You're putting the cart before the horse. God does what He does and humans just try to figure out rules and regulations to avert trouble. When they are successful, the humble ones attribute it to revelation/forewarning from God, and heeding that revealed foreknowledge results in better outcomes than ignoring it.

It's like if your parent tells you not to cross the street without looking both ways and you heed the advice and don't get smashed crossing the street.

So it's not that God punishes you for not obeying rules and regulations, but that if you don't get and heed the good advice available to you by whatever channels, then you are going to end up reaping the consequences of failing to do so.


God is the power behind all existence. Whether you like/love Him or not depends on whether you can accept and like/love existence. The problem is you can't ultimately hate existence without making yourself more unhappy/miserable, so there is the blessing that comes with loving God and thus experiencing the universe and all that exists as containing and transmitting love in various ways.

Love is a good thing so it is better if you accept it as part of the same universe that contains hate and all the misery that comes with that.


Yes, they discovered that "the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Note: the wages of sin didn't stop being death because of the discovery of eternal life in salvation.


It was in many ways. God put a rainbow in the sky after the flood of Noah to symbolize He accepts that humans have a sinful nature and won't destroy them as a species.

The world is in a dynamic state of tension between sin/destruction and rebirth/salvation.

When we discover/accept salvation from the sin we can't escape, we realize that there is no conflict between the God who created the sinful world and the same God who forgives us for our role in the sin and saves/delivers us from its hold on our spirit.

But death is not a consequence if it is the experience of nonexistence . . . which is not even an experience.

"Consequence" literally refers to something that follows something else causally, not necessarily an intentional/arbitrary punishment but rather something that occurs because it was caused by a cause.

Lung cancer thus, for example, can be a consequences of smoking. It doesn't mean that God became angry that you smoked and decided to smite you for doing so, except in a metaphorical sense that may make more sense to your mind than the actual mechanics of consequentialities that lead from regular smoking to the formation of cell abnormalities that turn into cancer.

You can argue that God is cruel for creating lung cancer as a consequence for smoking, but it is built into the mechanics of nature that change can be stimulated in ways that are either beneficial or detrimental (or both) to systems that otherwise function sustainably.

In short, both life-sustaining activity and life-destructive/degenerative activity is possible within the universe of creation. The power of creation is imbued into all the energy/matter of the universe, and we are created in God's image insofar as we can consciously understand and attempt to steer creation with intentional action. So whether we intend and/or procure pro-life or anti-life effects with our actions depends on how our creative power interacts with the rest of the creative power it is connected with, e.g. the creative powers of others and/or the natural world and artificial systems that have been created.

"The wages of sin is death" is a general observation that harm leads to destruction and death in various ways. Have a look at all the connections there are between bad choices and detrimental consequences, and also look at how sins beget other sins, such as when greed begets theft and/or envy or laziness or adultery or gluttony etc. etc.

Religion emerged culturally in a time before there was disciplinary separation between physical and social sciences, history and fiction, etc. Nowadays psychology is divorced from metaphysics, morality, etc. but everything is connected and religious theology was 'interdisciplinary' before the disciplinary separations even existed that made the term 'interdisciplinary' possible to begin with.

https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/new-gods/271767/the-new-gods-movie-is-just-what-the-dceu-needs

Just tremble and obey for gods sake. You know you want to.