Tag Archives: reputation

The Story of the Ten Plagues
The Exodus from Egypt

The king kills countless kids

The Israelites (the descendants of Jacob) were getting so numerous that the new Pharaoh was afraid of them. So he decided to enslave them and have all their baby boys thrown into the Nile River.

Jacob’s great-grandson Amram and his aunt Jochebed had a baby boy, so they put the baby in the Nile… inside a waterproof basket, with their daughter watching over it. Pharaoh’s daughter found the baby in the basket while she was bathing in the Nile. She adopted the baby, named him Moses, and hired his mother to nurse him for her.

After Moses grew up, he was watching his fellow Hebrews working, when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. So Moses killed the Egyptian. When Pharaoh heard about that, he tried to kill Moses. The other Hebrews weren’t happy with what Moses had done, either. So Moses ran away from Egypt and lived in Midian until that Pharaoh died.

The Israelites were still slaves under the next Pharaoh. So when Moses was 80, God spoke to him from a burning bush and told him to go tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. On the way back to Egypt, the all-good God tried to murder Moses for some reason. But Moses’s wife touched his feet with their son’s foreskin, which convinced the never-changing God not to kill him.

Moses and his brother Aaron told Pharaoh that the God of Israel wanted his people to go out into the wilderness for a festival. But Pharaoh didn’t know that god, so he refused to let them do that.

God could have instantly overcome that obstacle in a peaceful way, like by making Pharaoh no longer want to keep his slaves, or by teleporting the people out of Egypt. But God cared more about showing off than about the freedom of his people and the wellbeing of all the innocent people of Egypt. So instead, God decided to cause a lot of unnecessary death and suffering, and to let his people continue to be mistreated in the meantime.

Continue reading The Story of the Ten Plagues
The Exodus from Egypt
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The Story of Dinah and Shechem
Somebody's in Canaan with Dinah

Jacob ran away from his angry brother, and married his cousins Rachel and Leah and their servants Bilhah and Zilpah. They had twelve sons and a daughter named Dinah.

Shechem, the son of a ruler in the nearby city of Shechem, raped Dinah. When Dinah’s brothers heard about that, they were furious, because Shechem had sex with Jacob’s daughter. Nobody should have sex with Jacob’s daughter!

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Somebody's in Canaan with Dinah
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Should people do good things publicly?

Yes.

It is written: God’s people should let their light shine by doing good deeds in front of others, so everyone can see how good God is. They should do what is right in view of everyone, displaying their good works to both believers and nonbelievers. Hiding your good deeds would be stupid,1 like lighting a lamp only to cover it up. Only evil people are afraid to let their deeds be exposed.

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