Friday, December 6, 2013

(NOT FOR LMHS) Sodom and Gomorrah

Yet another story from the book of Genesis centers around two cities of the plain, Sodom and Gommorah led by kings Bera and Birsha respectively. These two cites were described as being full of sinners in the eyes of the Lord and wicked. After a bloody takeover, three angels went down and met Abraham and Sarah in the desert, where they told them that the two cities would be destroyed by the Lord. Abraham then attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the two cities spared if God could find at least 50 righteous people in the cities, which number kept decreasing to a measly ten. Afterwards, two angels went to visit Abraham's nephew Lot in Sodom, where they stayed in his home and ate with his family. A crowd showed up however, and demanded for some odd reason to have sex with the two angels, talk about akward. Anyway, Lot told them off but offered his two virgin daughters as a replacement (so much better right?). Luckily, the angels step in and blind these pervs and tell Lot and his family to get out of the city because it's about to go down-literally. And so they pack up and hightail it out of the city as fire and brimstone rains down. Except Lot's wife who directly ignored the word of God (very, very bad idea) and looked at the city, which turned her into a pillar of salt and a lyric from "Viva La Vida".

So anyway, I really don't know what to think about this punishment. On the one hand, what those people in the crowd did was very obviously wrong as the angels weren't consenting. (the two guys issue I really don't care about, as long as your consentual and safe I don't care what you do or who you do it with, okay spontaneous libertarian editorial over). But on the other, I am not sure what the other inhabitants of the city did to deserve certain death and the destruction of their city. I thought God usually let you do whatever on the pretense that if you didn't repent you were going to hell. But in this case, God was mad I guess and acted more like his Roman counterparts and destroyed cities.

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