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  1. Wow. Interesting take on the story of Abraham and Isaac. It dovetails nicely with something I felt that I “received” (I make no claim to being “sure” that this was “personal revelation”, so I give it as my opinion) a few years ago when I was “pondering” and “praying” about this, because it has always troubled me:

    It wasn’t God’s idea. Abraham “went off the deep end” — I imagined him being almost obsessed with this one son that he had finally had with his beloved wife against all odds, and perhaps being afraid that he might lose him after all, and then having some sort of nightmare that God demanded a sacrifice, and coming to believe that it really was the will of God. God stopped him, but Abraham never realized that it was never God’s will in the first place, and God knew that he would be devastated if He told him, so He praised him for being “faithful” enough to offer his son (instead of chastising him for attempting to do something so horrible), and that was what went down in the “history” whenever Abraham (or whoever the author was) told the story.

    The idea that Abraham was repeating a pattern of abuse that had occurred in his own family when his own father tried to sacrifice him to a god, as well as the idea that a way was found to heal this pattern, was something I had never thought about from that perspective, even though it was once mentioned in gospel doctrine class, but in terms of how much harder it would have been for Abraham to “pass the test” since he would have known from his own experience how Isaac must have felt. I could never accept the idea that a good, kind, and loving God would administer such a cruel test to anyone, even if He did feel the need for someone to understand what it was going to be like for Him to sacrifice His own son.

    Although I was never severely physically or sexually abused. the LDS church did become an emotionally toxic environment for me, due to policies and practices that did more harm than good where my mental health and emotional vulnerabilities were concerned, to the point that it became necessary to end my membership, so I can really relate to what was said about feeling like you might be a “son of perdition”, and about feeling like the “Celestial Kingdom” would be Hell for you if you had to be with the abusive family you grew up in, although in my case, even though I still wanted to be with my beloved husband, I was afraid that it would be Hell for me if we ended up in a place that was ruled the same way that they run the LDS church on Earth.

    Thank you all (as always) for an enjoyable and enlightening podcast.

    EDiL13 (Elohim’s Daughter in Law)

    1. Post
      Author

      Sorry, David. I didn’t realize I hadn’t included the links to things mentioned in the show. I’ve now put them into the body of the episode’s writeup. Thanks for alerting me to this!
      Dan

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