Being Honest About the Book of Job
Suppose Job was inflicted by a man instead of God. Is it rational to say, “well, my boss gave me some sh;t, but then he took it all away and let psychopaths murder my family, blessed be the name of my boss” ?
Does this sh;t make any sense? Is this an intelligent response? (This is the vital question: not what the authors of Job want us to think, but what does reason tell us the rational response should be?)
But the story is loaded from the outset with a magical Genie named God, which is nothing more than the ultimate rhetorical device of man.
We can still read this literature intelligently, as long as we don’t read it as duped believers, having fallen prey to this rhetorical device.
So the story is absolute nonsense, because God, in reality, is just a human construct. So if bad sh;t happens to us, we learn from this story that it’s dumb as f;ck to bring any notion of God into it.
Isn’t the moral of the story that we should strive to created social conditions where sh;t like this doesn’t happen in the first place, so mtherfkrs don’t have to lean on imaginary human constructs? And, when sh;t like this does happen, we have created societies of compassion that people can fall back on and find comfort in?
Isn’t this the concrete, non-idealistic reading of the book of Job?