Mr. Infidel,
Hi Again,
I have been away quite a long time. You all have travelled far and wide in my absence. I just wanted to, in the short time I have, answer a few of the questions you posed to me what seems so long ago now.
Thank You.
First, again you are assuming you are speaking to a fundamentalist Christian when you speak to me. You are not, sir.
No, I am just trying to get people to see that when they take the label "Christian" it comes with a butt load of baggage.
The Old and New Testaments are mythological in the main and are not to be literally interpreted by you, me or anyone else.
Thank You, that was at least part of the point I was so unsuccessfully trying to get across. My point is if something HAS to be interpreted for you then it is a weapon to be used against you by those who do that kind of thing. I totally agree the whole bible is mythological and not to be taken literally.
That should handle your questions about the Old Testament god. Moreover, if I am a Christian, I am really looking only to the New Testament, not the Old, except as a useful tool to understand how New Testament writers used the Old to interpret Jesus' life and death. I take very little literally from the Old Testament, unless it gives me insight into ancient Jewish people, culture and their beliefs.
Sounds good to me.
Second, if you want to understand how non-fundamentalist Christians look at passages from the New Testament that you cite, you must understand that we see those passages as fully of their time, place and culture and filled with nuance. They cannot be taken out of their context without doing a great injustice to their meaning. Regarding the anti-family passages you cite, I agree with John Dominic Crossan on his interpretations of sayings attributed to Jesus.
What I want to understand about non-fundamentalist christians is why they stand by and let fundamentalist define them, let them speak for them, and let them manipulate them. Taking out of context is everyday practice by most, so when I do it, it is just as valid as when they do it. Of course, I know that wrong, that is also a point I am trying to make.
He says:
"If the supreme value for the 20th century American imagination is individualism, based on economics and property, that for the first-century Mediterranean imagination can be called to the contrary, groupism, based on kinship and gender. And there were really only two groups -- the familial and the political, kinship and politics -- to be considered. But we have, precisely against both those groups, biting aphorisms and dialogues from the historical Jesus. There is, first of all, an almost savage attack on family values and it happens very, very often.
Certainly agree there, however, the point was that one never hears that acknowledged. Thanks for that.
The family is a group to which one is irrevocably assigned, but [as to the whoever does not hate father, mother, etc., saying], that given grouping is negated in favor of another one open to all who wish to join it.....Imagine the standard Mediterranean family with five members: mother and father, married son with his wife, and unmarried daughter, a nuclear extended family all under one roof. Jesus says he will tear it apart. The usual explanation is that families will become divided as some accept and others refuse faith in Jesus. But notice where and how emphatically the axis of separation is located. It is precisely between the generations....The attack has nothing to do with faith but with power. The attack is on the Mediterranean family's axis of power, which sets father and mother over son, daughter, and daughter-in-law....The family is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, hate and be hated, help and be helped, abuse and be abused. It is not just a center of domestic serenity; since it involves power, it invites the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point that Jesus attacks it. His ideal group is, contrary to Mediterranean and indeed most human familial reality, an open one equally accessible to all under God. It is the Kingdom of God, and it negates that terrible abuse of power that is power's dark specter and lethal shadow."
That explanation is the best one I have heard to date. How many of the "ordinary christians" do you think know this? Very, very few is my guess.
Crossan also explains what Jesus means, given what he is trying to do and teach, this way:
"...the family was a group to which one was assigned....Jesus downplays the family in favor of another kind of group that is open to all who wish to join it. For Jesus, the given family unit, the kinship unit, is no longer primary. What is primary is a new community of persons who become "family" to one another in their common effort to do the will of God in the world....[Jesus'] ideal group is contrary to customary human social arrangements, a group that is open and equally accessible to all under God. In the Kingdom of God there is no abuse of power. All are welcome, all are equal, and all are alike under the will and purpose of God."
Damn, it is too bad that the majority of christians do not believe this or practice it. All are not welcome, all are not equal, this group is not open, with equal accessibility. If this is the way it is supposted to be, how come I do not hear an out cry from the christians against their leaders who teach the opposite?
Now, I am one of those non-fundamentalists who think that the "family values" Republicans have a lot of explaining to do given what Jesus was REALLY trying to say. (For me, what Crossan says convinces me there was a reason Jesus never said a word against homosexuality.)
Thank You!! I really wished I could believe you are the majority, rather than a small minority. This Jesus I could get behind, even if I believed he was a myth. The Jesus I hear preached is a monster of manipulation and hate, of course, that is really the man doing the preaching. Also another point.
I also think critics are missing the boat entirely if they don't first get a big picture notion of what Jesus was about and then, second, interpret what he said within that big picture. Jesus lived in a different time in a different place. His metaphors speak to those people in a very specific way. If we keep that in mind, it is easy to understand what he is trying to say to us all.
This I will never understand, why did he not speak in plain language? Why the stupid metaphors to create need for interpretation? Why not state plainly? I can not trust anything that needs interpretation, there is just too much room for manipulation.
There is simply no such thing as "plain" meaning. Reading is a process of interpretation always.
Of course, but there is a marked difference between "Ennis had sex with Jack" and "Ennis was stemming the rose with Jack". One is straight forward, and the other requires interpretation. All it takes in the second is for the interpreter to tell his followers that "stemming of the rose" means "killing infidels" and we are right back to where we are with religion now.
The fundamentalists don't get it.
Absolutely true. What I do not get is why there is not a big up roar against them, but there is not a whisper, therefore one has to conclude there is nearly total agreement.
Neither do non-believers who read passages without any understanding of context.
Why should the non-believers be any more knowledgeable than the people who profess to believe? If they use passages out of context, then to expect the non-believer to not do the same is irrational. He is going to try and turn the weapon against him to his advantage. To fight fire with fire. They stop using out of context passages as weapons, they will not find them being used against them.
Of course, an added complication is translation. The Bible wasn't written in the King's English. Literalists will constantly sink into the complexities that constitute the written word. If any human being's philosophy or theology or world view consists of slinging biblical passages at one another, it is a mighty poor intellectual and moral foundation indeed.
Absolutely agree. However, being the one having biblical passage slung at him, having biblical passages used to make laws that prevent freedom, having biblical passages used as proof of evil, how does one fight this? The turning of the other cheek has been tried, they take that as a success and press on to limit even more.
Focus on the myth and the arc of the stories. That's where the gold lies. Jesus was a peasant living in a time of crushing imperial Roman power and inequitable social and religious rules. He advocated religious and economic egalitarianism. When reading what he is alleged to have said, this big picture needs to always be kept in mind.
For me it is nearly impossible to separate what is being said and taught day to day, and this. For me, it is much more simple to dismiss the whole myth, and use my own loving, conscious being to know right from wrong. I always try to come from a place of love, though that is very difficult sometimes when I am dealing with hatred wrapped in a cloth of make believe love. The very word "christian" brings up all sorts of barriers and assumptions. You was hit with some of them. Are they unjust? Perhaps, but necessary if one is to be left sane.
Jesus' response to oppression and his teaching of the way to an unmediated relationship with something called the Divine had everything to do with our day-to-day treatment of each other. His message was that the only way to fight oppression or encounter the Divine is to build a life of love, of equal treatment, of justice in our relationsihips with each other. He, in fact, taught that this was God's will. This was the nature of the Kingdom of God.
Then why is the congress trying to pass laws again gay unions? Then why are open gays not welcome in many churches? Then why is there such shame attached to being gay? They all profess to worship this Jesus, but where is his teachings then? Where the hell is this Divine to build a life of love, of equal treatment, of justice? Do you see my point? Your belief is wonderful, and I only wished that more believed as you do. I believe as you, but not because of a Jesus or teaching, but because I love, and want love and acceptance. More or less the golden rule. However, when one is meet with hatred... it is very hard to not give that back.
I'll end with Crossan:
"The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just on the level of Judaism's strictest purity regulations, or even on that of the Mediterranean's patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at the most basic level of civilization's eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations. [Jesus' program] did not invite a political revolution but envisaged a social one at the imagination's most dangerous depths. No importance was given to distinctions of Gentile and Jew, female and male, slave and free, poor and rich. Those distinctions were hardly ever attacked in theory [by Jesus]; in practice, they were simply ignored."
Those man made distinctions should be ignored, and the loving, conscious human being seen and accepted. Agree.
I don't know when I'll have time to return. I think this pretty much says all I have to say about interpreting Christianity or biblical passages. You don't have to believe that Jesus was the son of god to understand he was a thoroughly dangerous man. Just my type.
I do not believe "Jesus" ever existed as one being, but as a aggregate of many. I know there is a lot of positive in the bible, but the same can be said for many, many books. I am not sure that myth is the way to teach, especially myth that is so far from our time that it has to be interpreted. That brings me to another point, why do we put stock into a book that is 2,000 years old, when in no other area of our lives we do the same?
Much love to you, Doug, darlin'.
Same to you. Thank You for taking the time to explain youself, you have done what no other person do date has bothered to do. Usually, because they have no idea what they are talking about.
Take Care,
Doug