THINGS I CAN'T ANSWER

God said, “You shall call him Emanuel.” But no one did?

Why did Yeshua have to die?
Believe it or not, the reason was probably partly financial. Priests made a very fine living being paid to pray for blessings and healings, to eat the best meat off the sacrifices, and be respected by their communities. They were a bit put off by a man who broke the commandments, but the fact that he said no one comes to the Father but through him was going way too far. If people listened to him, not only would the priests lose their jobs, but their children (priesthood being passed from father to son) would lose their inheritance, too. He flouted their Laws. They didn’t believe him to be the Messiah, and to be fair, they did give him a chance to defend himself. In their view, he was a heretic, and execution was a quite common penalty for that. And by the way, the Romans had no problem with that idea, and they were the ones who did the actual killing.

Why was Cain’s offering of food plants not good enough? Is it really so different to kill a sheep as a sacrifice than to kill edible plants? One reason for praise, the other for scorn? We’re omnivores – if there’s that big a difference, shouldn’t someone explain the reasoning to us, that we not err?

When Cain was marked so that “no man” would kill him, who were these people who wouldn’t know him? Adam and Eve (his mother and father) and his brothers and sisters didn’t need a mark to identify him, and that’s all there were, right? Cain went off and married and built a city. Who did he marry, and was the ‘city’ just their kids? There were no other people, right? (Wrong. Remember, Yahweh was only God of the Jews. Other people just weren’t worth mentioning.)

The warning that if Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would surely die must have been meaningless, because not having a share of the fruit of the Tree of Immortality, they were going to die anyway. There was no warning that they’d be cast out of the garden, toil and pain and all that…And if God knows everything, was the whole thing a trap? Why didn’t He step up and say, “Eve, don’t listen to the snake!” Any parent would know better than to leave a chocolate cake in a room full of two-year-olds indefinitely and hope they wouldn’t touch it because you told them not to. In fact, God lies in this story, because he tells them if they eat of this tree, they shall surely die. But they don’t.

If you ask your father for bread, will he give you a stone? Yes, and beatings and sexual assault and intolerable cruelty and sometimes death.

If I can knock and it will be opened to me, why can’t I get back into the Garden? If I ask and it will be given, why can’t I get back into the Garden? Yeshua’s sacrifice absolved me of sin, right? At least after baptism and communion and other ritual forgiveness? So I should be clear to go in now, right? Has anyone gotten back in? Call me if you have.

If the three Magi were so wise, why didn’t they report back to their own people that they’d visited the new king of the Jews, and he was laid in a trough? It seems like it would be worth remarking.

If incest is forbidden after the time of Moses, but it was okay before that, weren’t there a lot of malformed, mutated, and retarded births before then? Perhaps we didn’t so much “evolve” as “mutate horribly?” Could this explain the “Giants” mentioned in Genesis?

If Lot was too drunk to know his own daughters (or to realize they were the only females within miles)(for two nights running), wasn’t he too drunk to ‘perform?’ And in spite of impregnating his two daughters, he was considered ‘a good man,’ good enough to save out of Sodom and Gomorrah. But his wife, having turned to look back at the destruction of her home, was turned into a pillar of salt. This does not seem just.

Why was Abraham rewarded, when his chosen career was con-man? He lied, stole, and encouraged his wife to commit or at least mime adultery. He blackmailed her victims – isn’t that covetousness? Yet from him descend all the tribes of Israel. God did punish Abraham’s victims, though. Later on, when arguing about Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham asks God, “Is not the author of Justice Just?” And this strategy won. But he didn’t mention that disparity when it was his own victims who were being punished unjustly.

In the book of Exodus, God deliberately 'hardens' Pharoh's heart, then torments him and his people with plagues for being hard-hearted. Fair?

If Astrologers and Soothsayers/witches should be put to death, why do some of the wisest of Biblical men go to consult them?

"If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “move from here to there” and it will move." (Matthew 17:20) No one’s known to have ever achieved this, and even Yeshua himself didn’t give a demonstration. Mohammad noticed this, and said that if the mountain wouldn’t come to him, he’d come to the mountain. Does that mean his faith was less than a mustard seed?

I'm just saying...