charles brough
Registered Senior Member
I read more of the Bible than many Christians, but I read differently than they do. When I come across something that is not right, I notice it. I think about it and try to figure out what is going on.
Most Christians, however, do not do that. Instead, they intuitively slip back into ancient times and read it from a sort of Medieval perspective As soon as they start reading, they are transported back to a world filled with “annoitated kings, “covenants, the ”smiting” of cities and the “seeing of evil.” When they come across one of the patriarchs offering to sacrifice his son in order to achieve atonement from God, it is read without the modern perspective and without judgment. It is interpreted only as it would be were they there themselves. To the believer then, it is alright to sacrifice one's son for God! Or it is alright to sell your slave, for Luke to kill unbelievers (Luke 19:26-27), for Abraham to pimp for his wife can be forgiven, for Lot to sleep with his daughters, the same. All that is accepted---including the right to have concubines. The Christian mind reads all that stuff in a sort of dumb trance in which good judgment and even decent ethical standards are, for the moment, all set aside.
This mean that Christians who take the Bible literally would revert right back to Medieval morality should we become totally disillusioned with our secular belief system and the moral prerogatives we accumulated since the Reformation. We would again condone torture, rape, and slavery.
It is not just morality which would regress. It is also science. During the Age of Enlightenment, science grew only at the expense of the Old Faith, an eminentally reversible process. The process also reversed late in the Ancient Egyptian civilization as well as in Babylonian and the Muslim civilization after their great ages. We can only go back to the old faith by giving up what we learned. It would mean returning to the Medieval mindset and the end of our Age of Science and Technology.
Charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com
Most Christians, however, do not do that. Instead, they intuitively slip back into ancient times and read it from a sort of Medieval perspective As soon as they start reading, they are transported back to a world filled with “annoitated kings, “covenants, the ”smiting” of cities and the “seeing of evil.” When they come across one of the patriarchs offering to sacrifice his son in order to achieve atonement from God, it is read without the modern perspective and without judgment. It is interpreted only as it would be were they there themselves. To the believer then, it is alright to sacrifice one's son for God! Or it is alright to sell your slave, for Luke to kill unbelievers (Luke 19:26-27), for Abraham to pimp for his wife can be forgiven, for Lot to sleep with his daughters, the same. All that is accepted---including the right to have concubines. The Christian mind reads all that stuff in a sort of dumb trance in which good judgment and even decent ethical standards are, for the moment, all set aside.
This mean that Christians who take the Bible literally would revert right back to Medieval morality should we become totally disillusioned with our secular belief system and the moral prerogatives we accumulated since the Reformation. We would again condone torture, rape, and slavery.
It is not just morality which would regress. It is also science. During the Age of Enlightenment, science grew only at the expense of the Old Faith, an eminentally reversible process. The process also reversed late in the Ancient Egyptian civilization as well as in Babylonian and the Muslim civilization after their great ages. We can only go back to the old faith by giving up what we learned. It would mean returning to the Medieval mindset and the end of our Age of Science and Technology.
Charles, http://humanpurpose.simplenet.com
