Bleh..
It’s amazing how little I actually knew about the Bible. For some odd reason I’ve always felt vaugely resentful of Christianity – perhaps because I was forced to go to church – and so I never actually learned until very recently what it said.
I’m still worming my way through the new testiment. Who knows how condemned the whole book will say I am.
Sorry. I promise that’s the last religion that will appear in my journal for at least a week. 😉
October 28th, 2005 at 4:22 am
You’re reading the wrong book for condemnation. The Old Testament has all the fire and brimstone stuff. The New Testament is all about love, from what I’ve seen. Then again, I stopped reading in the bloodiness of Kings.
October 28th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Almost
the first four books of the new testament (the gospels) are mostly all about love. They do criticize some people, but mostly they are people that it makes sense to critize (those doing business the temple, hypocrites, etc)
The acts of the apostles start getting back into the fire and brimstone, and by the time one gets through the epistles….
It’s amazing how fast one’s disciples can twist one’s words and meaning.
October 28th, 2005 at 11:26 am
why do you care if the bible condemns you?
October 28th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
[info]sheer_panic
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It depends on whether
A: God exists (I think it’s just plain nuts to think we’re at the top of the universe’s totem pole, so I think some kind of God or Gods exist)
B: God is Christian or honors the Christian value system
C: We have a immortal component.. that is, when our time is up, we don’t just cease to be.. [other possibilities include that we loop back around to the beginning just like a counter rolling over and other, far stranger things]
if A, B, and C are true, then I’m probably screwed. Beyond all the stupid mistakes I’ve made that have hurt other people, and my general confusion about who God is and what *e wants from me, and my recurring doubts over whether Jesus appeared in physical form or not [I’m pretty clear that he was the son of God.. but I’m not clear that I’m *not* the son of God], there’s all the kinky sex stuff that I’m into. And there’s my repeated pride in being me, and.. [sigh]
I still don’t see how a God of love could condemn any being to eternal suffering. I just can’t make that fit in my worldview. But, when I die, I may find out I was wrong.
I had a experience with drug addiction this year that very nearly killed me, so all of this has gotten somewhat more concrete than academic for me lately.
October 28th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
Signals deteriorate. It’s a fact.
Half the world seems always bent on killing the other half, when it’s pretty obvious that this is a counterproductive way of life. We’ve got a serious problem with signal deterioration here. People get ideas in their heads (and I include myself in this) and then they hang on to them, however wrongheaded, false-to-fact, or twilight zone they might be.
A movie that I saw a while ago (that certain of my LJ friends have completely hated) went on about how when Columbus first arrived in the Americas, most of the Native Americans simply could not see the ships – they were adults and their pattern-matching software was already hardened, and those ships weren’t in it. At the time, I thought that was BS, but lately, I stop and wonder. How many things do I not see simply because I am incapable of accepting them as input, because my brain strongly beleives they are ‘impossible’?
For that matter, I have absolutely no way of knowing that my brain isn’t insulating me from the ‘real’ world in any number of ways.. for all I know, reality is completely different from what i’m seeing, and my brain is generating some kind of VR shell around it that’s designed to protect me – or make me happy or unhappy – or be pro survival in any number of ways.
There are some things that are just unknowable.
I don’t have that hard a time beleiving that Jesus’s followers might have had their own agendas that were seperate from his. One college professor that I saw claimed that the gospels weren’t written until 10 years after Jesus died, when Paul [originally Saul] decided that the story should be told. Originally Paul was one of the Romans responsable for stamping out the Christian cult, apparently, and he decided that it was better to try and perpetuate it instead.
But all of it happened several thousand years ago, so it’s really not possible for us to know. Which is kind of the point, I guess – you have to take it on faith, or not. There seem to be all kinds of people on both sides of the fence. I side with Love, whoever that is.
I’m convinced (for the moment) that I can’t possibly understand what’s going on on the diety level, being just a human and all that. Some part of me is slightly skeptical that what we’re *told* is going on and what *actually* is going on is the same thing. Maybe just because of the way our government seems to operate sometimes. Not to mention our media. 😉
This is a really, really strange world. But, it keeps 6.5 billion people alive and thinking, so in that sense it’s a thing of beauty.
Remind me someday to natter on about Memewaves.
October 29th, 2005 at 11:53 am
The ‘can’t see the ships’ thing pretty much has to be, at a minimum, misrepresented. I’d buy that they might not have recognized the ships at sailing vessels, but not that they coudln’t see them at all. In the case a a society that did not yet have boats of any type they might scan more as a large lump of wood, but the Native Americans we are speaking of had canoe-type vessels, so likely they understood very well.
Ask your dad if he can see a microchip or any of the other things that have come into being since he turned fourteen, eighteen, twenty one or any other appropriate number signifying adulthood. (A microchip, specifically, because it doesn’t at all resemble it’s predecessor except in function. I’m certain other examples exist)
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/bleep.html . The statements at the very end of the article about Dr. Albert’s views being essentially the opposite of those portrayed are of particular interest.
(I have other thoughts on this, but only limited time. I will continue in a later comment)
October 29th, 2005 at 11:54 am
s/at/as
October 30th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
I dunno. Sacrificed the wrong kind of animal lately?
C’mon, yo. The bible =/= modern christianity. It’s an ancient set of stories, filtered through dozens of translations. I’m convinced, for example, that you learn more about 17th cen. England reading the King James version than about the Isrealites. Why not take Gilgamesh as your sacred book? or the stories of Innana? Or Zarathrustianism as your religon? Or Rastafarianism? It all makes about as much sense, historically. You just were born in a Protestant place in a Protestant time, and so it resonates the most with you.
(When I was in Arkansas Verla said, chipperly, after watching the very same aforementioned movie, “I think Jesus and Buddha were brothers!” John looked at her with, you know, that look, and said, “Well, Buddha would have to be the elder brother, then”. That’s pretty much the thing about Christianity: they were awfully late to the scene, if they’re right and stuff).
Remember that modern religions and collections of mythologies are only loosely associated, for the most part. Whether you’re Christian doesn’t have a damn thing to do with whether you’re a good person, and we don’t really need religion as a social control in this day and age. Or do you think all your non-Christian friends who are moral people are liable to firey burning, too?
If so, I’ll bring the marshmallows.
November 11th, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Unfortunately, there is an entire branch of modern christianity (it could be called Modern American Fundamentalism, or a number of other things, it cuts across the usual sects [i.e. it’s not purely Baptist or belonging to another sect, though the southern Baptists are wrapped up in it pretty deep, but it also includes people whose churches are independent of any larger sect and some who ‘homechurch’ due to their perception of increasing corruption and ungodliness in all of the churches near to them, and often in ‘The Church’, which is, well, complicated]) that believes, specifically, that the King James Bible is the unadulterated literal word of God, meant to be taken literally. Very unfortunately, they’ve been pushing for political power for some time and have acheived quite a bit of it.
This bit of literal word of God is somewhat dodgy, because even a literal reading must end up with interperatation somewhere, and there are a lot of bible study programs put out by these folks that manage to have the same interperatations, some of which are all out of whack with a literal reading (esspecially to those who know ancient history). But knowing what the folks who are pushing for Intelligent Design theory (because their world falls apart if it’s over 6k years old) and spearheading pushes (that are supported by more moderate Christians, other religions and other secular organizations) against women’s rights and homosexuality is useful in fighting them (Sun Tzu, “Know your enemy”, Damn Right). Reading the New Testament in that light is, well, rather englightening.
November 11th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
S’true. I think *reading* the Bible is a great thing; it’s clearly an important document of our time and others, and it will give you reams of cultural context. I don’t have any issues at all with that, and I didn’t mean to imply that. All I’m really trying to get at is that reading, understanding and enjoying the Bible, and understanding and enjoying modern Christianity, are two entirely different animals (I know that Sheer doesn’t support southern Baptist politics, for example, and for all my atheistic tendencies, I love spending time in cathedrals.)
As for the “literal word of god” folks, I think they’re delusional and hypocritical. If they want to take the thing literally, they should be reading it in Aramaic. After all, the creation of the King James was, itself, a political act; not much has changed since the 17th century, it seems.
November 11th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Supposedly God himself made sure that King James got everything right. Of course, the 6k years thing makes the whole thing…well…my concern is minimizing the damage caused by them to the rest of us.
I thought the new testament was in greek originally..
November 11th, 2005 at 3:26 pm
Are memes as to memewaves as photons are to light waves? I hadn’t seen the idea yet, but it makes sense.
Going back to the ships, it’s unlikely that your brain is creating a VR shell in the sense of creating the perception of actual physical things that aren’t there (or not passing on the perception of things that are). If it were happening, we’d know, and we’d know because there’s a sort of ‘conscensual reality’, and people who see things way outside that conscensual reality tend to get caught and declared psychotic. The meaning of those physical surrounds, otoh….
I worry less about correctness of ideas (which is a somewhat meaningless concept, when one comes down to it…in some very simple cases it has meaning, but it loses it at some point) and more about how people with conflicting ideas can live in ways that don’t end up hurting eachother.
You’ll have an even less hard time believing that others had agendas once you’ve finished reading ….