Although the age is determined by language and can't be discovered in English.
Which translation do you recommend?
Their taunting phrase was saying if Elisha was really a Prophet, he would have already ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire like Elijah did.
Admittedly I have set the old testament down for a long time, and I realize combing over this that I was reading the NIV iteration - which makes no mention of this but instead illustrates them as saying "Get out of here baldy!". Upon checking NASB, I saw your case and point.
I don't feel I veered off too far from this in later posts, since this does recurr in its various ways, but this is a detail that is still important and I am shocked that it doesn't make its way in some other translations.
I'll respect your choice to remain ignorant because if you wanted to know, this is easily knowable.
You dastardly agent of synchronicity, I have been lazy and wanton. Back through the old testament I go, though to my "processed atheist" eyes, it seemed like a precarious thing to include among everything Elisha would go on to do. As I saw it, it was a transfer of authority and an illustration of exactly that and the general unfaithfulness among the kings and the people throughout. What were the two kingdoms of israel and judah if not children before bears?
I still personally like his foundational falsehoods of creationism series.
As for matters of Heaven, it is difficult to explain - but think of a hierarchy of that energy organized by category of its logical expression as a narrow but infinitely fractal golden string. Hell is a free-radical densification heat-death across the strata of all meta. You may continue to partake of what others call the "samsara", but it results in nothing but noise. It will keep happening. It is always happening at all times.
The reason we are as important as we are is because we broke the code and obtained for ourselves the perfected jewel of biochemistry with the advent of language (language is more than spoken or written word, and it is alive) and chronicle, and began to frame context as we had recursively become its frame - every possible outcome was/is already present as we continue to explore them (It's easier to understand these things, even people, as events). Aesthetic theories would have it that beauty is essentially the sublime given a set of rules and it is in this way that we are both a rising beast and a fallen angel; simultaneously made in his image as we rose to his image, becoming the highest assembly and expression of those rules and given liberties within their subsets, within which another genesis occurs. We have always held the germ of divinity.
Every word we speak contains all-potentiality, therefore, we align it with the highest virtue with hope to achieve heaven. Just like a flower is hardcoded by its genetic expressions to reach for the sun, we reach towards his similitude.
My first mystical experiences hit me like a freight train when I was 27. Seems to be around this age where things of the sort start. I might aswell have been AronRa up to that point (surprised he still makes videos, and I appreciate that he atleast tries to read the material).
Late 20's seems to be where you start reaching into the bottom of the bag and find that there really is no bottom.
It's a strange paradigm shift, but before I was Christian I was an atheist. I was exposed to so many Kent Hovinds, Ray Comforts, and Joel Osteens that I genuinely hated Christianity.
These people follow an afterimage, and often a material centric idol of prosperity, the authentic Christ finds you in strange places that only a skeptical eye and an ecclectic mind can take you.
I know for a fact that I won't convince you, that isn't up to me, nor should it be.
I'm going to give you a piece of advice.
He who controls the past, controls the present, controls the future. Self-prophecy is extremely important whether you believe in a god or not, things that we take as even mere fable have a direct lineage in our actions and are directly manifest if not biologically significant in even the most secular sense.
Don't let doctrines of any kind fool you, and if Christ should call - answer.
I am someone who simply lives the truth of the word and it took a long time to get to this point.
I still believe that the scientific abstractions are very useful in explaining natural phenomena, but my beliefs are also interconnected with my own admittedly idiosyncratic understandings pertaining the germ of language as a living entity, a self-decoding reality, an almost kabbalistic understanding of our simulacrums through our technological advancements, the meta primordial soup of ergregoriac super organisms, and the true mystical Christ-body and its transcendental singularity within the event of Jesus, etc.
inb4 schizo!
Yes.
Is it? Give reading the whole thing a try. Turn your back on God and you will be hunted by the lion and the lamb - this is a lesson that repeats itself over and over throughout the old testament.
The moral seems to be along the lines of - "those with superficial understandings of God's guidance shouldn't play around bears, for they will devour even the innocent among you".
And pray tell, who was cast out to the wilderness once more to be hunted by the lion, the lamb, and all beast bearing crests after those resentful children of israel turned their backs to the Lord their God and mocked his authority yet again when they flayed his skin and thrust a hateful spear into his side?
It was their generations onward - their children and their children's children, condemned to scurry the nations of Christendom and foreign gods like a hoard of rats being chased from one hole to another hunted all the same.
This one is more abstract and one that I'd readily point to when I was an atheist and it is a good point to fixate upon because it really does come out of nowhere and with very little context. It is almost unanimously agreed upon that this passage pertains to the authority Elisha represented - granted, I believe this reaches deeper into a context that is recurring within the old testament where younger generations grow resentful and contest this authority and are very often cursed having done so, going back to the curse of Ham - respect of one's elders and of culture is of particular emphasis. I believe Judges details some of this progressive trend towards resentment aswell. Worse things than bears have come to devour those who hated tradition and law, especially in those times.
God within the old testament is very intermeshed with worldly circumstance, nation, heritage, and the transcendental sublime; Jesus' appearance shifted the occulus to the latter.
If you were to take my word for it, Jesus was the completion of the old testament; which is to say, forbearing my own interpretations, that much of what we read of the old testament is the vein of context throughwhich he is brought into the world - like the stages a flower goes through before it comes into the totality of its blossom. None of these stages are savory to the palatte save for the appreciation of the flower and the harvest of its fruit; and by its fruit the good vine is known.
A culture of slavery is obselete, I liken it to the bitter bud, but there is still a lot you can learn by observing its development. There are others who still live as if it had not come to season however and conduct slavery in other ways (they're not Christians mind you).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bioAhR4PB9c
Sometimes life becomes a parody of parody.
Owning slaves was the order of the day and played significant economic role across much of the ancient world - so naturally, there had to be rules regarding their acquisition and treatment, and very naturally this is how you survived the bronze age onward past the various forms of serfdom of the ages after unto the industrial revolution.
With any mind toward the proliferation and preservation of your core population, you could not break the backs of your fighting men which ranged around a measly couple hundred thousand during the Exodus (and this was with nations all around you trying to kill or fuck you over), nevertheless you had to have a workforce which was comprised of the lowest members of your society; and like any nation, a sort of caste system follows which might be an entire point unto itself. Those Hebrews who did become slaves were often in debt (which could be paid) or were petty criminals; and went free on the 7th year and you would furnish his departure. Non-Hebrew slaves were either captives or traded, but even they had certain rights and could escape their captivity under various circumstances and had protections thereunder.
It was a farcry from the types of slavery that manifested within adjacent cultures and what still manifests around the world today.
So you admit that your entire political angle is thinly-veiled spite? You do realize that this depends entirely on our "empathy", the most demonstrably finite emotional faculty known to man?
You essentially admitted that we were right in having none. Consider also that westernization actually brought something to the table, where as "cultural diversity" adds nothing. Our lack of empathy is morally superior to the passive acceptance you depend upon to smugly assert this point.
This occurs multiple times throughout - especially with regards to describing the wrath of God. Gruesome as it is, it serves a message - the memetics of your culture will be lawfully reprised and your progeny (in many ways more than actual infants) will be undone in a particularly brutal way. Blessed is it that what goes up should also come down.
I can only ever hope that this type of reproach occurs to the bastard child ideologies of our current captivity.