The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I stumbled across this on a Catholic website, and as one whose paganism is firmly rooted in the natural world, I was struck by it on several levels:

FORUM: Mother Nature Is One Unreliable Lady


http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/forum-mother-nature-is-one-unreliable-lady

"And the consistent Biblical message is that this Creator God is not like the arbitrary and capricious gods of the ancient world; rather, he is reliable, rock-like in his steadfast love, more dedicated to human beings than a mother is to her child"

...to which one immediate reaction on my part was: Is he nuts?? Has he read the Old Testament? Just off the top of my head (and I know the Christian bible poorly at best)--the story of Noah and the great flood, in which his god kills virtually all of humanity, not to mention the rest of land-based life; that's a "consistent Biblical message" of a god "rock-like in his steadfast love"??

I read this quickly, so I want to go back and read it more carefully to critique it fully, but I'd love to hear others' specific refutations or, for that matter, affirmations of what the author proposes.

And BTW, I *adore* the ad that the author references and dismisses as “just more tree-hugging extremism”--he might want to get right with his now environmentally minded pope on that bias. I posted something about this ad here at the Cauldron a while ago, but here it is again, for those who are interested:

 
I find this highly amusing since it comes from a guy who's god allowed babies to be slaughtered to protect his own kid.

What?

I think she's referring to the story about Herod the Great and the massacre of the male children in Bethlehem?

But that's not what happened? God didn't "allow" it. Herod made it happen. If Herod had had his way, Jesus would have been killed, which  would have meant Christianity would not have been a thing.

Well, it's also likely that the massacre itself never actually occurred, so there's that....

Well lots of myths never happened, that doesn't make them not important

I agree. That wasn't my point.

Well, it's also likely that the massacre itself never actually occurred, so there's that....

 
On the one hand, there are no attestations of the event other than the Gospel of Matthew, including in Jewish tradition, and Matthew is (if I'm remembering right) the text most interested in coming up with ways of spinning Jewish prophetic work and tradition to indicate Jesus was intended; on the other hand, Herod was well-known for offing people who he thought might possibly be a danger to him; on the gripping hand, "the dictator controlling this region killed a half-dozen to a dozen people in a village" is, well, Tuesday.

The numbers claimed in some versions of the story are certainly incorrect; there weren't enough people to kill that many people!  Particularly not in a tight age bracket!  At plausible actual numbers it could go either way.

(Thoughts brought to you by some half-remembered Stuff and some quick internets research.)