JustARide said:
First of all, Christians cannot even decide "what kind of literature" they are reading.
That's a very broad statement, you know that. And not very helpful. You can't force us to believe we're reading fairy tale you know.
Second, we're right back where we started. This thread was posted by someone who is looking for truth and not finding it, or rather, he is finding that everyone's "truth" is really so much interpretation. You have simply offered another interpretation -- so did slave owners who made the Bible into a pro-slavery pamphlet. And this is a fundamental problem inherent to all religion: the undecidability of interpretation.
He wasn't looking for the truth, by his own admission. He was making fun of some interpretations of the truth, feigning sincerity. What he found was his own interpretation, closed for discussion. Like people who wished to justify slavery or racism closed their interpretation and labeled it right.
Nothing in the Bible or outside it can be justified on the authority of interpretation alone. Interpretation is a tool for discussion and a step on the road to greater and common understanding, or it is useless and serves only the individual. Likewise, any interpretation that tries to lessen the significance of greater principles isn't worth considering. Like trying to use the Bible to justify a purely symbolic God, or a practically inane Christ.
And yes, the matter of literal/figurative is vastly important when interpreting religious texts. The Bible speaks of Hell, for instance. Well, what if that was a figurative vision of what a tormented conscience looks like and not anything we will really experience in the afterlife?
Then it's still not eternal life with God is it? You could water it down orspice it up any way you like, the question isn't whether it's really literal or really symbolic, but really real. God created it for the instigators and propagators of sin, and unless you can somehow manage to make evils like injustice, immorality and deceit not explicitly
sinful (I know some try to justify their lifestyles this way), it is a sufficient description of judgment. Judgment is not nice, it's not somewhere people deserve to go or wish to go. But it's a requirement for justice not to
also be just a figure of speech, a doctrine designed to scare childen into washing behind their ears and keep the essentially honest world under minority control.
You seem to be implying that, in religion, we should suspend the matter of literal/figurativeness and just concentrate on what it tells us to do. In other words, it doesn't matter what Hell is -- it's bad and God says you don't want to end up there. 'Nuff said. Well, to cast the idea in modern terms, what if the "weapons of mass destruction" aren't there? Should we just blindly believe an argument because of its supposed source?
Weapons of mass destruction threatens our existence and our lives. But they present no worse reality than death, which many people believe shouldn't be threatening at all, since it's only natural. But your life isn't the figment of someone's imagination, and death isn't a jsut pleasant companion to life. God made sure death or hell would not have be
real threat to anyone; He provided life and continues to do so. It leaves us to concern ourselves with the details of being alive and sharing life, without constantly being at defcon 1 shouting "every man for himself!"
Consider the idea of two different interpretations of Hitler:
1. When Hitler said he wished to eliminate the Jews, he was in fact referring to "Jewishness," which he interpreted as the negative qualities oftentimes attributed to Jews. He merely wanted to "exterminate" these bad qualities and replace them with good ones.
2. Hitler really wanted to kill Jews.
"1" is more threatening, since nobody could really measure "Jewishness" and I suspect everybody would feel they have some in them. It would become really important to find out whether he meant exterminate in a literal sense (he was after all influenced by eugenics), or just that he would institute a system of government that would educate people and discourage those qualities. Fortunately, he only meant "2", since we're not Jewish. Fortunately? Would you have praised Hitler for enforcing his ideas "humanely" on
everybody, instead of picking out the Jews? Evil is evil, literally and figuratively.
If we are to "believe" a text, it must be examined for credibility, and so the matter of whether or not the slaughter of unbelievers depicted in the Bible was in fact real and ordered by God or a perversion of God's will is important. It would mean the difference between believing in a God of sacrifices and violence versus believing in a God of peace whose message has been distorted.
First you would establish why the slaughter was carried out, where the authority came from and why it was considered "just" (coming from a just God) or injust (sin against a just God). Certainly nobody was killed for being an unbeliever. If anything, all the Israelites ever did with unbelievers is flee frm them. The Amalekites were killed for being and promoting a murderous, thieving, terrorist society. Israel were in much the same position as America after September 11. Strike and show the power that was behind them, show bin Laden who he was dealing with, or turn the other cheek and let innocent people live in fear. Now people wonder whether America is a land of freedom or a land of justice, when it claims to be both. What did America have to sacrifice for its freedom? Does that make its people inherently violent, or inherently fearful?
You make it sound like an easy decision. Bush would have been blamed either way. Well, Israel waited 400 years to deal the final blow of a warning that was given by God himself. Not against their unbelief, but against their sin. They gained their freedom against all odds and wished to carry it to a land of their own - a promised land. This wasn't a figure of speech, and their God wasn't a figurative God.
So, let me condense this. You believe God never truly needed or required sacrifices, but man created the idea anyway after his realization that he had sinned and needed to atone. But rather than tell these well-intentioned people that those types of sacrifices (animals, food, etc.) were unneccessary, God chose to not only allow the essentially pointless (however well-intentioned) sacrifices to continue but, in fact, went so far as to encourage them and codify the idea into law.
Their intentions weren't that good most of the time, and even when they were (like when they gave thanks to Baal at the foot of Mt Horeb), they were more often wrong that not. Let's see if you understand "God's needs" as well as you say. Can someone be justly forgiven while they refuse to acknowledge guilt? Even if they were forgiven, wouldn't their refusal imply that forgiveness is not what they seek, but justification for their crimes? Can justice justify crime? Why should God? I think it says much more about God's forgiveness that He would accept an animal or grain offering - things He provided himself - instead of the life of every person guilty of sin, when that is what justice requires. Punishment could be a temporary measure, but even that won't be popular. Instead, God cut laws out of hearts of stone, cutting away the sin little by little, so that there would be less and less to atone for. But to cut out sin by the roots would require their whole lives, just like perfection requires a whole life. And He anointed a king of their own to judge over them, permitted a sanctuary to represent his presence, chose Levites to approach Him with the sins of many, and taught them how to survive before they could thrive.
God gave a concrete framework that would accompany his covenants and promises. Not because He required such a framework, but because the very ideas of creation, justice, and love are based on conditions He embodies. How these conditions are expressed by people is a human thing, but they are no less indicative of what was
truly required. The expression of them is no less necessary, they still serve as indications to measure ourselves by - for others to measure what we can really only measure ourselves. They serve to make our sins public, so we can deal with them in the open, rather than have God deal with them when we have gotten attached to them.
This is patently ridiculous. Why not inform people that their intentions are noble but misdirected? Why allow and encourage them to fritter away their livestock in some misguided attempt to win his favor?
A tenth is always a tenth, whether you have thousands or just 10. The best tenth, the firstfruits of what came from God in the first place. They already
had his favour. That point was not to take God or their lives for granted. When they started straying from Him, they didn't bring
more sacrifices to restore the relationship, they gave them to other gods!
That was the sin: when their intentions were misdirected - at themselves and at other gods.
Suppose, when you were a kid, that you started going out and randomly murdering neighborhood cats in order to please your parents. While your parents might have been happy that you so wanted to please them, would they not have taken you aside and said, "Look, son. There are other ways of showing us you love us. Leave Miffy alone..."?
Sure, but we're not talking about a bunch of kids. We're talking about complex people like you and me, adults, hardened men and women who made a living off the desert. Unless you mean by "cats" your livelihood and subsistance, it wasn't the same thing. Nations take longer to learn, and it seems humanity might take forever to learn. Even after God took them aside asd said "Look, children. I haven't been hard to please, I've looked for every excuse to show you my love, and enable you to approach me without fear of judgment, but that has only made you more determined to do only what you want, and less willing to be obedient to the little I required".
Also, the fact that the Israelites sacrificed fewer organisms than others at the time is irrelevant; the point is: they made sacrifices and they said God wanted it that way. You make it sound as if only sacrificing animals and barring human sacrifice (neverminding that the entire religion is based on the crucial sacrifice of one carpenter who lived 2000 years ago) represented some great cultural step forward. This is similar to your previous apologetic arguments for Biblical slavery (i.e., sure, the Israelites had slaves, but they treated them much better than many other cultures). Well, whoopty-freakin'-do, my friend. Twist it any way you like: the Israelites engaged in exactly the same ritualistic, superstitious behavior their neighbors did.
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And I never denied that. Israel wasn't the only nation to make any progress either. That's not what made them or their laws special. It was that God enforced them, and had a relationship with Israel in particular that had bearing on more than just their needs. Christ wasn't a human sacrifice in a religious symbolical sense, he was one in the real sense. Someone who laid down his life to give it to countless others. The only solution for sins that could be final, more final even than death or judgment itself, which was the point.
You can't wish away sin, especially not the whole human history of sin. It has no elegant solutions or quick fixes. What we see in Israel is not a shining example of perfect laws - there's no such thing. If it wasn't slavery, sacrifice, death penalties or ritual cleanings, you would have found fault with almost everything the did in the Name of God, because that's what this is really about: that you wouldn't believe in God even if He required none of those things and didn't care what you did or how you did it either way.
