Senate Christianity Discussion Thread

They didn't make the final cut, so God never wanted them in with the Scriptures. The Book of Enoch didn't make it into the Bible, so it's good for a historical narrative, but it wasn't meant to be part of the Scriptures.

EDIT: I apologize, I was mostly picking on the Gospel of Judas as demonic. I still don't believe the other ones to be noteworthy, though, we have it in the greatest, truest story ever told, through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

 

I have a question for the historians among us: When did the idea that free-market capitalism is one of the putative "Judeo-Christian values" that our country was founded upon become a mainstream idea in political discourse within the Republican Party? Yes, there's a spotty history in the latter half of the twentieth century of Leftists grafting Jesus' teachings on to structural Marxism, but while that was a bit of an overreach, the sort of blithe and contemptuous attitude towards the poor that is so prevalent among the Far Right today is clearly not concordant at all with the compassion and empathy advocated by Jesus in the Gospels, and that's just some sort of eccentric Leftist exegesis--it's one of the things Jesus is most direct and passionate about.

 

God could very well intend for them to be used as supplemental narratives. I mean, just because God never intended something to be in the Bible, doesn't make it devilish. Some of them are stupid, yes, but others are pretty cool. I really loved Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels. It was very interesting and also really wasn't ever anti-Christian, like some people said. It's just showing that different philosophies were once considered compatible with Christianity and, in my opinion, many of them should be again.

 

Save for the few who still attempt to persuade you that the T-Rex loved salad bars, and wasn't a meat eater until what's her face at the pomegrante.

 

Those were always fun discussions.

 

Now I'm just imagining some hypothetical Gospel of Bob, the Guy with Bad Memory.

"And Jesus said, 'Consider the lilly.' And then some other stuff. It was pretty good. The mountain was pleasant enough, I think."

 

And you're fine holding to that opinion. I just wanted to make mine known. I believe that all I need is my inerrant King James Bible, and a Strong's concordance for when I come across a word I don't understand.

 

Sure, I mean, your opinion is your opinion. I'm just curious. Do you read or utilize any other theological writings, like the early Church fathers or C.S. Lewis or anything, to inform your spirituality or help it develop or to help yourself with greater understanding? fAnd do you also not use any other versions at all, even for explication of the King James? I mean, King James is my preferred version as well; it's just the most aesthetically beautiful and emotionally powerful, but I see the value of certain other translations, though we certainly have proliferated to a ludicrous degree. Anyway, I find your stance on "King James and Concordance alone" to be really interesting. I mean, in a sense, if you carry that through, you wouldn't even want to go to church and listen to someone preach out of the Bible. Talk to me about where those lines are as far as what you accept as helpful to your spiritual walk and what you don't.

 

I exclusively use the King James, but I attend churches and youth groups where it's not always the only Bible preached out of. What I simply do is I read alongside the passages out of the KJV, and if I find something glaringly different out of what I read than what I hear, I'll go up and speak to him later about what I found. It's not as though people can't be saved out of newer translations, but I believe the whole message isn't there in most of them. Not to mention the codes that can be found in the KJV and not in other translations, but that's for another topic.

 

All these newfangled Bibles having this revised "New Testament" thing... I prefer my "Old Testament" thing...

 

I prefer Biblical interpretations which don't consider not speaking English to be a high heresy.

Edit: Particularly as they owe their mere existence to a German.

 

wait.

1+1+1 does not equal 4. I know you're not a fan of science, but math now too? commmmmeeee onnnnnnn

 

what makes the king james so special? it's not like that's the first bible ever written or anything. it seems really arbitrary to just pick one random translation and be like "this is the word of the lord!"

 

Honestly though Satan's a much better writer than the hack-fest that is the bible. He'd write something more metal.

 

I have to say, dp, that I did once approach a Jewish lass I worked with and asked her what the Jews found objectionable about Christianity. Her reply was "It's because you made a ****ty mess of Judaism. You guys are Britney Spears doing a cover version of AC/DC's "Back in Black"."

I think she was joking.

 

Well, there's a bunch inherently wrong with reconciling Christianity to Judaism, even if you don't accept Christ as the Messiah. It's too long for this thread, and I covered some of it in Thunderdome, but really it primarily stems from not accepting Christ as Messiah.

But yes, she's probably joking...

 

I wanted to return to this, because it is arguably the single ellision you've made over and over in this discussion to date. Certainly, we must take contextual factors into account. But that doesn't somehow morph the genre away from being an apocalyptic prophecy. This pattern is entirely typical. The Xhosa cattle-killing movement was clearly a reaction to the increasing encroachment of white settlers in Africa. But that's not to say it wasn't also a sincere belief. People killed thousands of cattle with the fullest expectation that there actual ancestors would descend, drive out the whites, and bring new wealth. They were shocked when it didn't pan out. The Ghost Dance movement that culminated in the Wounded Knee massacres has clear origins in Native American tribes being systemically dispossessed and abused by the United States government. But we know from an overwhelming number of accounts that the idea was not just to create some symbolic, allegorical outlet for their grief and frustrations. It was a bunch of people who literally thought a magical dance would herald the exile of white people and the return of the buffalo herds with a complete restoration of the traditional lifestyle. The Boxer Rebellion wasn't about metaphorically thinking that the Chinese could overcome white imperialism. It was people standing in front of actual rifles because they were sincere in the belief that their mastery of martial arts and spiritual powers had rendered them invulnerable to bullets.

We could go on like this all day. It is of course possible to appreciate the undercurrents in what might drive a particular belief or movement. From a sociological standpoint, we can understand the role that different practices or ideas had in peoples lives, and how it helped meet their needs. We can even read to think about how we can apply texts to meet our own. But none of those facts voids the specific content of what happened. While the “point” may be that these people derived comfort and meaning from these various beliefs, it is also true that it had this effect because they believe in them, and thought they were worth acting on. By your method of analysis, only something that is completely meaningless to a person's life can be credibly taken as a belief, since otherwise you tend to assign all value to the underlying function of the belief, and then claim that it was never actually held, or that holding it wasn't important. I don't see how you can support that view.

You either don't understand what taking something “literally” means, don't understand what “interpretation” is, or both. Your objection here is just factually wrong. Every expressed communication requires interpreting. To read something literally is one manner of interpretation, as opposed to others, like making a metaphorical reading. Further, it has nothing to do with whether the text is straightforward or complex, easily comprehended or sloppily written. It is about whether we should take, at face value, whatever the author's words are trying to communicate. A literalist would argue that a discussion about the creation of the animal kingdom is trying to communicate about the historical origins of animals. A non-literal interpretation is any one that does not hold this view. Period. An interpretation that says two accounts exist because everything happened twice is not non-literal. It is still holding that the things the text says happened did happen.

On what authority do you make all this up? It's a long chain of assumptions which are not particularly supported. In particular, you equate being interested in addressing humanity once (or even several times) with making it impossible that humanity should ever be mistaken about what that message was. Where do you get that from? Certainly, no one has asserted it. The Bible doesn't, either. The only one to put something like this forward is you. There are a vast array of motives and possibilities you simply ignore to get to the end point you want to argue against. Unsurprisingly, you can't really disprove something happened merely by pointing out that it's not the way you personally would have done it.

I will clarify that the statement you quoted above was in reference to Master Penn's specific point about songs within the text of the Bible, like Miriam's commemoration of the escape from Egypt. I would of course agree with your point here, though I think it's much more a problem for you than me. Particularly, Dylan and Key never claim these things about their work, while these are claims that the Old Testament makes about itself. It also how these books were received. Any reading should have to account for authorial intent in a way that I haven't quite seen you do yet.

While this strain is definitely present, I tend to think entirely too much is made of it. Ahab as reviled as one of the most wicked of Israel's kings, and also scores a huge, staggering victories over the Syrians that are also historic in nature. He does this even while openly sinning in the self-same military campaigns. Those rounding out the rest of the list of the worst have some of the longest reigns on record. Saul, likewise, is scoring victories while flaunting his disobedience to God. The accounts of the conquest of Canaan deal frankly with their difficulty in doing combat against chariot corps. These defeats are not attributed to any sin or fault in the camp, but simply the fact that the force they were fighting was a better one. All of these notes are strongly discorded with your suggestion that these are fictions composed primarily to reinforce cultural and religious identity. If in every other instance authors freely attributed historical events to religious causes in order to give things a sense of meaning or support their rhetorical goals, why did they drop the ball in all these places? There were literally hundreds of years for someone to have fixed it, and no one ever did. Why would they deliberately first create and then leave in things that were only embarrassing to their own position?

Let me try and summarize some things here. First, I don't see your point as very well reasoned at all. What you describe here is simply intellectual diversity within an interpretative school. To suggest that this somehow implies illegitimacy is not a sustainable argument. I've yet to encounter any movement that doesn't contain multiple strains. What does this have to do with it's legitimacy? Likewise, how does the inability of millions of people to agree on a single definitive reading of a text imply that there is in fact no such reading? People disagree even when writers have explicitly spelled out their intentions in latter works. You can't hold one person responsible for all the thought encompassed in an entire school of thought. That's just as bad as Jarren Lee Saber's accusation that all feminists secretly want to rule the world in an oppressive monarchy against men. It is literally the same thing. Just because they fit under the same broad banner, you assume it's alright to be lazy about appreciating the differences that exist between them. That's unacceptable, and certainly not up to any standard of intellectual rigor.

More broadly, though, I find this whole discussion somewhat disingenuous. The point of contention here is not really whether the census in the book of Numbers is correct, or whether a cherub's wing in Solomon's temple decorations actually measured out 5 cubits instead of 4.93. The divide here is those who are willing to take the fantastical or miraculous elements of the Bible as true (crossing the sea to escape Egypt, water from rocks, a garden now protected by an angel wielding a giant flaming sword, worldwide floods, etc) and those who are not. People like Saintheart and Master Penn, for reasons I don't entirely know and won't speculate much on, are uncomfortable with accepting the veracity of these accounts, and instead seek to justify a much more allegorical take on all of them.

I guess I personally don't understand this view. Any objection that can be raised to these events is more or less true of asserting that some guy was actually God, and that he subsequently resumed being alive after he was already clearly dead. Those two facts are the central claim of this whole religion. So I'm not sure why you would balk at these lesser things. Ultimately, it's not my business to know, and nor do I really much care. I can say, however, that your attacks on those who disagree with you are not very passable. Accepting these stories as true is, historically, in line with what many believers thought about them since their creation. It is not at all an occasion for embarrassment on anyone's part. Do you not find it possible to justify your own views without impugning all those that disagree? Because for you in particular Penn that seems to be colored with the same sanctimoniousness that you otherwise spend a good portion of time denouncing.

 

Can't speak for Prenntecost, but my discomfort with accepting the veracity of these accounts springs chiefly from the following:--



These two accounts of creation are not reconcilable on a literal reading of the text unless by very heavy metaphorical interpretation and leaps of language. Genesis -- and by extension the literal wording of the NT per the quote from Mark above -- asserts the former. But of these two timelines, the latter one has a hell of a lot more evidence in favour of it than the former does. The entire Creationist school is the intellectual equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears or asserting that a supernatural force has been putting about scintilla after scintilla of false evidence in support of evolution and the geological record. It also comes about because, as I've laid out at length in other threads, Creationist thought is pre-modernist thinking, while our current picture and practice of science is modernist.

You are also asserting a false dichotomy -- an intellectually dishonest debating tactic -- in that you seem to be suggesting there are only two forms of intellectually dealing with the Bible: either people who accept all of the miraculous events in the Bible as taking place literally, or those who dispose of all miraculous events entirely. On the contrary, there will be some who interpret the Bible as being literally true in some respects but not in others.

For my part, my objection is against what I would term the hard-literalist school: that school that asserts the literal, i.e. on its face truth of the Bible in its entirety, every word being placed there at divine intent, at divine dictation as it were. Leaving aside evolution, our knowledge of how energy behaves in the physical universe, and the geological record, William of Ockham stands as the chief objection against that school, and so far as I've seen any answer to Ockham's Razor by the hard-literalist school invariably spirals back into itself or simply demands the listener accept an irrational explanation. So be it: but neither should that school assert a logical basis for believing the Bible literally true in all details, because really there is none.

The other problem with the hard-literalist school is what I'd sum up from the Jed Bartlet speech from The West Wing, and which I won't bother to link to here, and which actually stands against the more important message of the NT: love one another as I have loved you, not love everyone except those who get sexually aroused by their own gender. The hard-literalist school in particular has been drawn on for multiple forms of bigotry even to the present day -- in particular anti-Semitism and discrimination against homosexuals -- and in that respect it deserves protest and condemnation as a justification for that. Not only because it is unsupported by what we know of the physical world (right down to homosexuality being theorised as a genetic disposition rather than any choice or conditioning entering into the process), but also because it is unsupported by the driving message of the New Testament for loving at agape rather than hating for another's choice of eros.

 

yeah i'm cool taking something literally if a.) it looks as though it's supposed to be taken literally, and b.) it's coherent when taken literally. that's the problem with the bible, or the ot. i just don't think that poems and songs and **** are meant to be interpreted literally, and even if i did i wouldn't know which poems and songs to take literally at the expense of not taking others literally, because they contradict each other.

 

im just gonna point out that i dunno what paul's deal was but "agape" sounds pretty gay

 

Try platonic for gay instead

 

if a man's "agaping" he's been up to some buggery, is all im sayin

 

You keep saying this. But I don't entirely understand your meaning. Elijah didn't call down a huge fireball to consume dead cattle soaked in water in a "poem" or "song." It happened in one of the historical books that was giving a prose recounting of events. While the escape from Egypt by crossing a large body of water as if it was dry land is later commemorated in song, there are multiple accounts in prose. Likewise, the Hebrews being immune to snakes. The sun freezing in place. Et cetera

I don't see how this clarifies your actual position. Are you saying that you accept every miracle that was written in prose? What, further, is meant by "coherent?" I'm not really aware of any that are incoherent in the sense that their meaning cannot be understand. Do you mean to imply that it agrees with something external to the Bible itself?

I see no responsibility to reconcile a Biblical account of creation with a non-Biblical one, and so don't quite understand why there's a need for heavy metaphorical interpretation of anything (Nor, on the other hand, do I see the need for all the attempts to prove the Bible via modern science: it's irrelevant in either direction.). I would fully agree that the former mode of thought is pre-modernist. However, even an examination of present day traditional societies that still employ "pre-modern" modes of thought demonstrate how fulfilling and happy such an existence can be. I don't think it's anything to especially strive for, but nor do I see why it's a label that someone should want to avoid. What's ultimately so bad about it?