Just saw The Shift. It is marketed as a Sci fi flick. It is a heavy handed blatant retelling of Job. It was so hard to sit thru the whole thing. The Sci fi made no sense and all the science was just a tool to preach the message. After it was over I looked up who put it out. The same people who did Sound of Freedom. Totally deceitful. When the story ended, the lead talked to the audience giving a QR code to buy tickets for other people to come and see the message of ‘hope’.

Well I’m here to warn all of you: don’t bother.

old.reddit.com/u/Haunting-Ad-9790

  • ApostleO@startrek.websiteEnglish
    81·
    10 months ago

    Job was the story that turned me away from Christianity. I was in a youth group, and we read it. I started asking questions, and the youth pastors could not form a cohesive defense of God’s actions. They got upset that I wouldn’t drop it, and they basically asked me not to come anymore if I was going to be “disruptive”.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      122·
      10 months ago

      It really only makes sense if you remember that the ancient Jewish god was basically a big bad motherfucker who would fuck you up if you did anything he didn’t like.

      • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        10 months ago

        Given the book is an adaptation of the earlier dialogues on suffering, The Babylonian Theodicy, it “only making sense” given Judaism’s portrayal of Yahweh really isn’t the case.

        The dialogues are about how there is no knowable rhyme or reason to suffering.

        If anything, the Job version is worse than the original as they felt the need to add a preamble to set the stage, which is also plagiarized from earlier. In this case, bearing a close resemblance to the beginning of the Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat where Anat goes to El to petition killing the son of Danel the protagonist who finds out his son is dead at the same time he finds out his livelihood is ruined and tears his clothes in mourning.

        So the Biblical story is basically two earlier stories stitched together, but so poorly that during the monotheistic reform they just change the supernatural goddess petitioning the chief of the pantheon to be an unmanned adversary (‘Satan’), an editorial change that caused quite a lot of fanfiction down the road.

        Though my favorite aspect of the story is that while the author certainly intended that Job’s suffering was because he was persecuted by Satan (the meaning of ‘Job’ in Hebrew), arguably his greatest source of suffering was that the way he was conducting his life was with an expectation of a reward, and when that reward was lost he had an existential crisis because he had been so ‘good’ all his life. So it’s a bit ironic that though entirely unrelated etymology his name went from meaning ‘persecuted’ in Hebrew to “doing a task with the expectation of a reward” in English today.