It’s very intriguing to me that modern beliefs around the Bible’s God as a divine parent completely disregards Solomon’s test to evaluate a true parent vs a false one.

Sitting in the middle of the Bible is a story about how the wisest guy puts forward a test to distinguish the two.

The false parent is the one that only cares about recognition and is willing to see the child harmed to achieve that.

And the true parent was the one who cared more about their child continuing to live as their unadulterated complete self even if that meant never being known to the child.

Yet the popular religion based on all this takes the surrounding material and emphasizes a divine parent that sounds remarkably similar to that false parent there, and broadly dismisses the idea of universalism.

Similar to the quote “don’t expect a man to understand a thing his salary depends on not understanding” I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that clergy see it this way when their livelihood depends on convincing people that their salvation depends on employing said clergy in effectively handing over one’s salvation to be lent back to themselves at interest.

But the part that’s always baffled me is the depressing self-harm inherent to deciding to believe in the version where you are inherently undeserving of salvation such that it makes sense a divine parent would only make it accessible by way of layers of preconditions and hoops to jump through. Why are we so broken that given multiple options from as early as antiquity we’ve collectively gravitated generation after generation towards increased belief in our own inherent damnation?