Response to response
1) I think faith is believing something that can't be proven; and that can be a worldview that colors your hopes, a religion, or any system that helps you cope with this world or the culture that you grew up in.
I tend to agree with you on most counts. On all counts, yes, if we remember that some of coping with culture is factual in that it is empirical and can be validated testimonially, at least. It is not faith, for instance, which compels me to demand that my society treat all people equally. It is, in that twofold model, personal sentiment having experienced various inequities, and also an affirmation of what I know when I observe the social turmoil taking place all around me as a result of a world dedicated to inequity. But I suppose there are faith considerations involved when addressing the situation directly. Foremost is the silly consideration of what is good or bad for the greater idea of humanity. We are a species, and the first on this planet--and known to our scientific, historical, and cultural perception--capable of choosing to destroy ourselves. Thus I find the idea of population control through attrition reprehensible. But to challenge the validity of such considerations as faith would seem to push us into the arena of the laughably existential:
Why bother existing? More directly, there is a degree of faith, as well as empirical fact validated variously, guiding how one addresses a "culture". Is a scathing letter to the editor of the local rag
really the best way to make a valid point? (Note: I have exscinded here a long digression justifying first the King riots in LA, and then eventually the Seattle WTO riot for different reasons .... Can I just plead that the point is slightly abstract right now? The stories I tell to make this elusive point about addressing the culture become longer than the rest of this post should be.)
2) Tiassa, does 'expunged' mean 'taken out'? My understanding of the Early Church Fathers, is that they put in to the Bible, most everything that is in the Catholic Bible, while Protestants left out what they felt was not 'inspired' by God. And unless we are bible scholars, & all those Greek terms, we have to take it on faith that our view of the correctness or falsehood of the Bible, is true.
My religion teacher in high school even boasted of the trimming to the four. Catholics are generally quite proud of declaring a number of gospels heretical.
The four gospells collected in the New Testament were canonized around 200 CE, apparently by a consensus of churches ... they were chosen not necessarily because they were the earliest or the most accurate accounts of Jesus' life and teaching, but precisely because they could form the basis for church communities.
The canonical gospels were not by any means the only accounts of Jesus' life and teaching .... Some twenty years after Jesus' crucifixion, when Paul traveled to synagogues in Antioch, the capital of Syria, and in Greece and Rome to proclaim "the gospel of Jesus Christ," there were as yet no written gospels. According to Paul, "the gospel" consisted of what he preached, which he summarized as follows: "that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day" (1 Cor. 15.3-4) .... (Pagels, The Origin of Satan
Two quotes taken from the
Gospel of Thomas, cited by Pagels:
Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'Lord, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fishes will precede you." (NHC II.32.19-24)
"Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father." (NHC II.32.25-33.5)
"When will the new world come?" Jesus said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it." (NHC II.42.10-12)
Note: NHC =
Nag Hammadi C____(?) I cannot remember the name given to the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi. (Whoops)
Pagels notes, of
Thomas:
Why was this gospel suppressed, along with many others that have remained virtually unknowns for nearly two thousand years? Originally part of the sacred library of the oldest monastery in Egypt, these books were buried, apparently, around 370 CE, after the archbishop of alexandria ordered Christians all over Egypt to ban such books as heresy and demanded their destruction. Two hundred years earlier, such works had already been attacked by another zealously orthodox bishop, Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus was the first, so far as we know, to identify the four gospels of the New Testament as canonical, and to exclude all the rest. Distressed that dozens of gospels were circulating among Christians throughout the world, including his own Greek-speaking immigrant congregation living in Gaul, Irenaeus denounced as heretics those who "boast that they have more gospels than there really are ... but really, they have no gospels that are not full of blasphemy." Only the four gospels of the New Testament, Irenaeus insisted, are authentic. What was his reasoning? Irenaeus declared that just as there are only four principal winds, and four corners of the universe, and four pillars holding up the sky, so there can be only four gospels. Besides, he added, only the New Testament gospels were written by Jesus' own disciples (Matthew and John) or their followers (Mark, disciple of Peter, and Luke, disciple of Paul).
Few New Testament scholars today agree with Irenaeus .... (Pagels, 69)
* Gospel of Thomas
* Gospel of Mary
* Gospel of Mary Magdalene
* Teaching of Silvanus ....
You do have a point, though, about the Maccabees and other books in the Catholic Bible. Anecdotally, I feel the need to relate to you a friend's father, Seventh-Day Adventist who believes the Pope is the antichrist, actually taught his daughter that Jesus said of charity to let the money sweat in your palm until you know to whom you are giving. I find it amusing that he taught his daughter a Catholic tradition found, I believe, in the
Didache. However, the more relevant point is that some gospels are heretical while some intentional corruptions of Jesus' sayings have lasted. This is a curious aspect.
But that's about what I mean by expunged.
3) Your right, but was their motivation as Christians or as greedy, murderous, landgrabing liars? Did everyone that came over here to steal land do it as a Christian? Or as people looking for opprtunities, riches, fame, etc.? By the way, Native Americans had no immunity to Old World diseases, so those that say that Asian, African, or other non-Scandinavian people were here are 99% wrong. Otherwise it would not have killed so many, so quickly. That 1% were the Vikings, there's proof. The others would have brought dynasties, language, customs, iron, steel & immunities to a stone-age peopled hemisphere.
It has been asserted by Christians at Exosci, on at least two occasions that I can recall, that the United States is a Christian nation by foundation and tradition. One poster even went so far as to suggest that we owed Christians privilege for all the hard work they did civilizing the rest of us. (Ask black slaves, native Americans, and Chinese railroad workers about Christian civilization .... ) Of the tribes, the knowledge of their susceptibility to disease resulted in a curious practice where, instead of burning smallpox blankets from epidemics, they were traded to the tribes in an effort to wipe them out. No matter how you cut it, the white Americans made a damn strong run at genocide. Furthermore, I just can't believe that Satanists, atheists, and Jews did all that damage on their own. Manifest Destiny, however derivative we can make it by the simple applicaton of Christianity, most definitely is not the fault of the Jews. It needed people to believe that God wanted them to conquer sea to shining sea. While this is hardly a new concept historically, it is also fair to note that most of these people doing the conquering answered to Jesus Christ. Regarding the importing of people to the continent, I think the physical evidence of Punic Ogham (Phonecian) shipping contracts, temples of Bel, and inscriptions on the rocks near the Rio Grande indicate someone made it here. To this end, I would recommend the book
America B.C. by Dr. Barry Fell. (Pocket/Simon & Schuster, 1989) As I search for an issue of
Scientific American buried somewhere on the bookshelf, I'm tempted to say that an article on mitochondrial DNA from last year implied that sometime in the last few-thousand years, something happened in a couple of regions of North America--new DNA. Inasmuch as anyone could tell, it's northern European. Incidentally, I'm off that idea for the moment (until I find the article) because the first website I came to on mtDNA (
http://www.chattanooga.net/cita/mtdna.html ) says something about Polynesian mtDNA. However, the point is that relatively recently, though less recently than the post-Columbian empires, it seems that someone arrived from somewhere. Perhaps that 1% Vikings. But that would also support Dr Fell's theory, which links alphabets and even languages across the ocean. I'm of the opinion that people arrived frequently. Not many people, mind you. Maybe a few every century. Not all of them were bad guests, either.
I do not refute the lack of immunity to disease, however. I agree 100%. I still think it was ridiculous to
exploit the situation, though. Biological warfare is a common idea today, and it was probably around during plague times, too. But it may have been just a little excessive on this continent.
Those stone-agers may well have had electricity ... there exist in the record some curious clay pots with paper-like configurations inside them that seem to have held acidic chemicals. (I have only read one brief article on this.)
4) No one, neither Tony1, Tiassa, or Randolfo can tell who or what is a Christian, since God is the ultimate judge of that.
You'll find no argument from me within what I believe your context to be. And I'll leave it at that for the sake of killing digressions.
5) I think we all assume wwe are right, we rationalize our worldview, because we are the center of our world. Those rules apply.
You have a point there, except that there is a merit to complexity. The more factors you recognize, the less factors you are ignorant of. It is simpler to think that nothing could come of an extinction of a given species. What happens if it's at the bottom of the food chain? Suddenly the issue becomes very complex. As individuals strive toward their goals, they must keep in mind that there are, indeed other people. Macrocosmically, we have seen leaders in some nations attempt to achieve harmony through attrition. More to scale, we might point to my complaints about religion and politics: it has nothing to do with disrespecting diversity, except that one of those diverse opinions seems to demand exclusivity. If we recognize the diversity (complexity) of society, then we are able to get along without stomping on people. If we recognize the complexity of history, we might avoid some of the nagging quirks that have slowed the progress of civilization.
thanx,
tiassa
