The problem as I see it: God is bigger than you ... and you ... and you ....
Multiple translations will reveal shadings of language and a good Greek/Hebrew dictionary works wonders.
Literalism is as literalism does. If it was that easy, why separate in to the Catholics, the Baptists, the Lutherans, the Quakers, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Mennonites, the Kingdom Hall, the Episcopals,
ad nauseam?
If I say to a group of people that the car is blue, they will, without having seen the car, have different ideas of what that means. Joe might think of Cindy's blue eyes, and Cindy might think of sailing the San Juans with her father when she was 12.
Such as your response goes, I would ask that you take the instruction to honor thy mother and father, show how it is demonstrated or enacted in the Bible, and establish that the idea encompasses the whole of relations between parent and child. And then remember that, despite whatever examples you offer, I'll ask you to explain how it is that "honoring thy mother and thy father" comes to mean to lie there and take it in silence when Daddy comes into your room at night. This last, severe example is experiential of a sort. I need both hands to count the number of sex abuse survivors I knew in high school who didn't tell on Daddy because of the commandments. Or I could look to a friend who used to get into knock-down, drag-out fights with her mother, including one where the mother didn't like the boyfriend because the mother wanted the daughter to go to the prom with someone else.
No matter how much a Greek/Hebrew dictionary helps, I would take a moment to laugh openly at anyone who pretended to bear the right interpretation of the whole of the Bible--and therefore, as the assertion has it--the whole of God.
People have founded entire religions on one scripture. This is foolish.
I agree, in general.
The Bible is a multifaceted diamond
The Bible is a heavily-edited, politically-determined anthology.
What on the surface may seem contradictory is, upon further study, revealed to be perfectly harmonious.
Says you. Of course, while that's part of the point,
But when we get into ideas like original sin, the necessity of salvation, and the power of God, people tend to get very Biblical; I've heard it asserted that nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is omnipotent or omnipresent, yet that is the foundation for 2,000 years of religion, isn't it? And suddenly things don't work out so well.
For instance, I would look to you and simply ask you to describe the Devil. What is it? Who is it? Is it even a who? Whence comes it? Whence derives its power? What is its actual authority?
And, of the multifaceted diamond, do you know why there are four Gospels? Because of Irenaeus of Lyons, who noted that there are four compass points, four principal seasons, and four primary elements--why should there be more than four Gospels?
Yes, it really was that stupid. (Irenaeus' explanation, that is.)
And he might have gotten away with it for all time, except that we found a bunch of the missing Gospels at Nag Hammadi and other sites during the 20th century. As you study, what do you study? You are relying solely on human interpretation to tell you that this is the word of God. It's like a magazine anthology:
Twenty Years of Literature--selections from the annals of _____ magazine. Now you have, say, twenty of the "best" stories published in the magazine. But that hardly constitutes the whole of the publication catalog. So it is with the Bible.
As I study I run across things and think "Hmmm.... that seems contradictory." Upon further study, it usually works itself out quite clearly
Well, in the end, as long as it works out for you, that's all anyone can ask. Of course, the application of the concept becomes vital. For instance, those guys who got busted recently for their Bible study classes: it worked out rather nicely for them to not spare the rod. Until, that is, someone examined the merits of that resolution. They beat a child bloody for Jesus. Suffer the little children, indeed.
Leaving it simply at your own resolution is tantamount to being moral by setting moral standards designed to accommodate your existing habits.
I must respectfully disagree...
Fair enough ... as I look down the post, I see your reasons for that, too.
The Great Flood predates the Bible by millennia.
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Obviously if every human (or most humans) descended directly from the family of Noah they would carry the flood story with them as they spread out over Earth. Oral tradition would be passed down through the ages. It has been shown that nearly every race of people on Earth (including highly isolated primitive tribes) have somewhere in their oral tradition a flood story. Through the ages, some cultures put it into writing.
Fair enough. Except that there exists in cuneiform the tale of Ea warning Artarhasis of a flood. It predates the Old Testament by "thousands of years" (Wenke, 354).
Furthermore, the common gene among humans is called the "Eve gene" because it is found in women. If we were all descended from Noah, the gene would be found in men.
Probably will be in the next post. I have to do some digging. I think it's in Armstrong, though I may be wrong. It's a matter of searching through the right books. However, if I recall correctly, the idea springs from the period of the Hebrews in Egypt; Indus influence came in with traders, and this situation creates the exposure of Judaism to ideas that eventually include the concept of maitreya, the world teacher. I'll pull it together for you.
Which one is that? Again, could you be specific?
Well, there is no one name, as the pagans never went on Inquisitions of such a grand scale and specific intent. Maiden/mother/crone is the most common triune goddess known to the Western new age movement; I'll pull up some broader data, though. However, we can look at this point to Irish history and start out with Banba/Fodhla/Eire, with whom the Milesians dealt in their taking of Ireland. Dianic paganism seeks the mysteries of the ancient triple-goddess Diana, of Roman influence--there exists throughout Western history an association with triune figures.
No, respectfully, it doesn't. The Bible clearly states numerous times that IT is truth and all others are false.
Well, if we assume, for instance, that the story of Noah and the Flood is the only legitimate retelling, then I see how we can assume that any other philosophies borrowed from other religions are only legitimate when morphed into Christianity. Personally, I find the notion laughable and arrogant, but that's just me.
I am continually sickened by the trelevangelists. When I see them on TV I always think "They are doing much more harm than good." The Benny Hinn, Jesse Duplantis, and Kenneth Copeland's of the world are really attacking Christianity from the inside out. They are humiliatingly bad. But we needn't toss the baby out with the bath water. Just because they are what they are doesn't mean all of Christianity is that way.
You think about the harm, but what do you or any of your Christian neighbors do to protect and defend the message of Christ? If it is God's will that these false speakers bear so much influence on His Word, well ... God works in mysterious ways, indeed.
I agree that there is a problem in the Catholic Church.
Gosh, so many people are so willing to put their focus on the Catholics. On the other hand, whatever problems the Church is having--it's God's will. Whatever it is that God intends to accomplish by such a Plan, it is well beyond human comprehension.
None that I know of. I am a Baptist.
I hung out with a Southern Baptist Convention crowd for a short period by proxy of my high school girlfriend's interest. She did not remain with the congregation long; she could not stand to be told that she could not wear pants. And she could not stand to be told that she should not engage in college and career planning because women belong in the home.
Be specific. This inflamatory remark begs specifics
One ... two ... three ...
seven. I can mark seven points in my life when I gave counsel to sexual abuse survivors who did not report the abuse at the time it happened because, as they were taught the commandments by family and preacher and congregation, "Honor thy mother and father" means to not say anything bad about them. To say that Daddy hurt you like that is to say something bad about Daddy, and that makes God angry ... yadda, yadda, yadda, and a bunch more Sunday-school crap. A couple of them even tried to tell what was going on at the time and were rebuked by their immediate community for speaking ill of mommy or daddy. Regardless of what any one person tells me they think the Bible means, nobody can erase or fix what has happened--nobody can change the human result.
I am a creationist. I see huge problems with evolution yet it is taught as fact in public schools. The Christians I know want equal time. Teach both and let the children decide. But the evolutionist will not tolerate any other view taught in school as they know the theory of evolution as they know it would soon cease to be.
How would you propose we give that equal time? Creationism is
not science. Equal time? How many hours would you like children to be in school each day? How many hours would you like to be spent on each of the major myths? Christianity? Hindu? If we teach it as anthropology, a general survey of creation tales can be examined--I have a whole book of them somewhere in the house. It would be an interesting course, I admit.
When "other people's sex lives" result in billions of dollars of disease control and hospitalization, not to mention welfare for single mothers, these "private" actions suddenly impact my life directly. This is painfully obvious every April 15th.
Wow. Where to begin with that?
We'll start with single mothers. Why blame only the mother? What about the fathers who leave them to welfare?
Should I wonder about Christians and sex education? It's well enough to demand that parents should educate their kids about sex, except that they demonstrably, collectively do a horrible job of it. Simply saying, "Don't do it, don't talk about it, don't feel it" doesn't actually work. Pretending that kids aren't having sex at 12 and 13 is idiotic. And no, don't talk about declining standards. We find in the footnotes of Lysander Spooner that in 1875 the age of consent for females was 10 years old, and that buying their consent with gifts and money was legal. (Of course, drinking alcohol on Sunday was a heinous crime.)
I would ask you to be specific about the billions of dollars spent on disease control and hospitalization. After all, I would hope you're not referring to HIV, since in the US, President Reagan chose, based upon his Christian conscience, to not take any action against the spread of HIV because he viewed it as "God's punishment for gays". According to C. Everett Koop, Reagan did not use the terms "AIDS", "HIV", or "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" until the sixth year of his office, preferring instead to ask, "Everett, how's it going with that gay measles?"
And as to April 15th--talk to the Defense Department, the Republican party, the Drug Warriors, and the like. But as to how
painfully obvious, and assuming that taxes are generally too high anyway, what portion of your taxes goes to pay for the negative results of "other people's sex lives"?
Lastly, do you eat meat? Do you drink any alcohol? Do you drink coffee? Do you drive a car? Is your home heated by coal or oil? What is your local electrical source? When we get into paying for the damage done by the conduct of others, it becomes painfully obvious that we're paying for
that, too.
Hell, my tax money just went to pay to kill people in Afghanistan and other nations. And it goes toward the killing of Americans, the theft of private property and money, and the destruction of American lives as we see in the Drug War. And it also goes to pay for
fixing some of that damage, though the government
hates fixing the damage.
Such is life.
You must mean "in public".
No, I do not.
In several states of the Union, and I believe Georgia is one of them, Louisiana, I think is another, and I've heard either five or seven states, consensual fellatio in the privacy of your own bedroom is felonious.
Seldom reported? Well, perhaps. But destroying a life unnecessarily, here and there, for Jesus, is a good thing? Think of the sodomy laws. Georgia I'll laugh at specifically here. The state won the right to make anti-sodomy laws in
Bowers v. Hardwick, before the Supreme Court, but the majority had no legal, constitutional support for their decision, relying instead on the presumption of religious values and seeking justification in
English laws dating back to the 16th century.
This is not cowardice! It is passive witnessing
Sneaking into stores to surreptitiously hide tracts? Having worked retail before, I've pulled many, many tracts off the shelves. Wouldn't be so bad if it was a bookstore, but they're rather conspicuous and ugly among crystal and fine wood. Shoving them into the coin slots of phone booths? At least the insane man in Hawaii who gave me the sickeningly dangerous AIDS tract had the courage to stand on the streetcorner and bellow and spit all over people while his assistant practically chased them down to shove tracts into their hands.
Would you rather have someone getting in your face?
I would rather that, since many Christians feel the need to be evangelical, they do it with some respect and some taste. I should go from church to church on Sundays hiding Satanic pamphlets in the hymnals. Better yet,
Hustler pinups.
Most people will put a contact number on the back, so the person can call if they decide to accept Jesus.
Can't say I've ever seen it on a Chick tract. I've seen it on a couple of other tracts, but why should my Gatorade tell me I'm a sinner when I take it off the shelf? Who the hell put that end-of-the-world-is-nigh proclamation with the popsicles?
Give me a break. This is hypercriticism.
Sorry, no breaks on this one. Imagine standing before God: "I did your work, Lord. I spread your word. But I was afraid of being criticized, so I trespassed on private property, violating local laws and rules, so that I could hand out tracts, never have to think for myself, and never have to explain it to anyone."
How about if these Christians give the rest of us the break, eh?
Yeah, I'm sure God is up there scratching his head alright.
Well, considering that those who accidentally follow the wrong version of the Word of God (after all, there is diversity among Christians; they don't all believe the same things) receive the same punishment as those who never bother in the first place, I think it's fair to say that whatever God's plan is, it's mysterious.
No need to get condescending.
Well, I'm not the God who created a human being to be unsatisfactory to my needs by the simple fact of birth. Quite frankly, the idea of being born in sin is offensively ridiculous.
However, in terms of the corrected statement, I still must take issue. Or a couple. If nothing is hidden from the angels, it seems there is no learning curve. Thus, the Devil cannot repent, and God/Jesus' love and redemption has specific limits.
Of Satan's fall, most people attribute more details to the Bible than are actually there. I invite you to demonstrate biblically the statements you have made about the Devil.
That God makes us with free will and then requires faith only reaffirms that humans, by proxy of their blessed creation by God's will, are unsatisfactory in the eyes of God.
Hey, if I thought God was miniscule I wouldn't waste my time on him either. But "[my] God is an awesome God."
The Seattle Mariners won 116 games last year. My team is an awesome team.
However, the range of what God is and can be is entirely miniscule. Something can exist that is separated from God. This is only because so many restrictions have been placed on God that you can fit him into the nightstand of an hourly-rate motel in the red-light district.
The Bible as it exists is God's word -- in my opinion.
Fair enough. I won't deny you your opinion.
And Mike ... if I truly do sound condescending at a few points: Honestly, what am I supposed to think when two-thousand years of difficult and intellectual work cannot solve certain riddles, and then modern Christians either ignore the riddles entirely or treat them as solved? Your doctrine of angels, for instance. I look forward to it because, generally speaking, most angelic doctrines are too narrowly-constructed to accommodate the whole of angelic lore. If, for instance, such doctrine can be set clearly, you can become the first person in the world to definitively prove the necessity of the Devil in the Christian scheme.
I'd buy you a beer for that, at least.
thanx much,
Tiassa