BMaker11 said:
When you said "internet guys", I thought that was just a generalization, meaning a new age of people that don't see the Bible as "good" and are vocal about it. They're only vocal because we have the means to have a message spread to millions at once. As opposed to having no advanced technology and having to use carrier pigeons to spread news, like we did hundres and thousands of years ago. And I responded, to that understanding, in that there are people who study the Bible, right now, at face value, and take the words to mean what they say. Just because some theologian from 500 years made a bunch of interpretations and made some things metaphor doesn't mean that I or anyone else doesn't have the ability to look at the Bible and not see certain declarations from Jesus as metaphorical, but as declarations. Did you see Reza Aslan interview on Fox News? Yes, it was bad, but someone like him has been studying religion for a long time and he looks at Jesus in a historical fashion. Despite his credentials, should I not trust his interpretation of looking at Jesus in the context of his time in favor of the interpretation of some people hundreds of years ago that made the sweeping judgment that Jesus is "nice" and all this stuff that can be taken as bad or mean.....don't really mean what the words on the pages of the Bible say, and they're just metaphor? Just because I'm not from hundreds of years ago doesn't mean I can't study the Bible. And it doesn't mean that if I come to a different conclusion than some old theologians, then my opinion is invalid. We have much better tools for analysis of the Bible, in today's day and age, than theologians from hundreds of years ago, so I can look at the Bible with much more scrutiny than days passed. It'd be different if the information would continue to compound and result in the same results, like a scientific theory. Gravity, for example. Newton may have come up with his formulas back in the day, but Einstein had better tools of analysis. And instead of completely debunking Newton, he added on to Newton's principles (in practical settings. Not near light speed). But the Bible, on the other hand is different. As time has passed, it has come under more and more scrutiny after we've analyzed it more deeply. For example, "if a virgin is raped, she must marry her rapist" is no longer a moral law given by the creator of the universe that must be upheld, but rather, an abhorrent law from a culture that's no longer applicable to the world we live in. It's not just "internet guys" that came to these conclusion. Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertand Russell, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, David Hume; and then current people like Hitchens and Dawkins who read the Bible and came to such conclusions. Are they to be discounted because they don't agree with the fanciful notion that God is nice and loving, a notion that was convenient for Kings and church leaders to tell the lay people in order to keep them in servitude, because they'll "be rewarded later" (remember, they didn't want the people to be able to read the Bible on their own at first, that's why they kept it in Latin, which only royalty and the church could read)? They are to be ignored, because when they see the story of Abraham, and how God told him to kill his son, they saw it at face value: that God knew what the result of the test would be, because he knows all, yet he still made a man almost kill his son; instead of saying "oh this is just a wonderful tale of man's faith in the Lord"? Well, I'm sorry that you feel sad that I and others won't do mental gymnastics in order to make the Bible seem nice, logical, trustworthy, or otherwise something to live our lives by. I'm of the kind that calls a spade a spade. When Jesus says "sell all your possessions and give them to the poor", that means sell all your possessions and give them to the poor, not some "metaphor" theologians came up with to mean "be nice to poor people". When in 1 Timothy 2:12-14, referring to within the church, it says that woman shall not teach or have authority over man, she is to remain silent because Adam came first, not Eve, and Eve transgressed against God, not Adam it means that women cannot have authority over men in the church not "something we have difficulty with and here's why [insert long winded explanation]" <---- look up any apologetics on that chapter, and that's what they say. I call it like I see it. I understand what similes, metaphors, and allegories are. But a lot of the stuff that I brought up was terrible. What were they metaphors of? What were they allegories for? What were they parables for? Analogies, similies, metaphors, etc. relate one topic to another through words, but the relation that the one topic is talking about is the same as the relation another topic is talking about. So what allegory is he relating to when he says to sell all your garments to buy a sword? |
What a long post.
I can agree with and understand some of your points, to some extent.
Yes, people have been manipulated through Church history. Leaders wanted people to remain ignorant. But that's nothing new.
Yes, anyone has the right to make an attempt and interpret the Bible and yes, we have better tools today. But despite this, I find it funny that Christian doctrine today is pretty much unchanged compared to the doctrine of 2nd century Church fathers. They had their differences on some doctrine, but so do we have between all our denominations and heretics today. But fact is that biblical scholar interpretation in modern days hasn't changed theological dogma in any significant way.
I have no respect for Hitchens, Dawkins and all those politically correct rats who only dare to attack Christiany but are afraid of muslim rage.
Yes, I can understand how you, or an unbeliever in general, can regard the Bible and even Jesus as "not so very good", that some of it reminds of a brutal, tribal religion. But mostly those arguments are used by atheists as rethoric and strategic attacks to ridicule Christianity, rather than being a sincere and honest attempt at understanding and interpreting the God of the Bible. Just like you do above, you twist everything into directions I really think are farfetched (Abraham's sacrifice of Isak. Jesus and sword passages, Paul's opinions on women's roles in the Church).
God allowed and even commanded very brutal and unhumane things in the history of the Jews. But that doesn't automatically mean he is a barbaric and evil God. That's the conclusion of Russel and Hitchens and the others. I don't come to that conclusion. The brutality had a function in a specific time for a specific group of people, you can't extend it to be God's relation to all of mankind for all time. The world is cursed, it's in a state of evil, suffering and death, ever since Adam and the fall of man. Salvation history is complex and not easy to understand in my opinion, and yes it can probably make even a Christian question the whole belief system under certain circumstances, but I don't demand to understand everything, I don't demand perfect harmony. It is what it is.
But yes, from a worldly point of view Bhuddism seems much more innocent (at least in its Western form) than Christianity. I have no problem with that.
About Reza Aslan: those guys come dime a dozen. People who try to diminish the historical Jesus figure from all sorts of angles. His analysis is weak and his conclusions disturbingly biased.
