Wow. I was born in 1970, raised Baptist, and heck yeah they were presented as “real”. You guys got something different?
Czarcasm is making a rather sweeping statement: that when he was growing up, Christians in general considered all of these characters real and historical.
Certainly that was true for certain denominations, Southern Baptists most certainly included. But far from across the board.
I used to get dragged to my parents’ Presbyterian church while visiting home, and I remember one Christmas Eve service, shortly after a new Minister had taken over, there was a Communion, with wine and wafers and a church full of suburban Pretestants looking at each other, puzzled, and asking (literally) “Wait, did we go Catholic all of a sudden?”
That seems reasonable, but it also seems to be not so different from doing the same with Greek myths, the Iliad, Gilgamesh, and Aesop’s Fables.
BTW, I read in the Times today that the Southern Baptist Convention is in the process of expelling churches who have the nerve of having women as pastors. I guess they are going with Paul on this. Metaphor or not?
Since my guesses have been reasonably good, I’m guessing you are against this nonsense, and that you can find other Bible passages supporting women. My take is that each person’s secular ethics controls which Bible verses they appeal to. Thus the wide range of moral views coming from the same set of books. What it boils down to is that nearly every religious Doper, at least, is far more moral and ethical than the God of the Bible. If only the general population was the same.
Again, this is the children’s version of the Bible. I read the story of Eden as a parable about the human consciousness of separation from the Divine. Just for one alternate take on the story. There are many others but I find mine to enrich my understanding. There are such stories in many many cultures.
Science-minded folks still get a variant of that. We know that simple rules lead to behavior that’s far beyond human understanding. Even simplified versions of the laws of physics lead to arbitrarily complex behavior.
So we can look out at the universe, bask in its glory, and know that we will never truly grasp it. And yet we can understand its underlying principles, which don’t require a god, and know that they are enough.
This fact–that complexity comes from simplicity–is itself remarkable, and something that we could only have found by math, science, and so on. The religious believe that a complex universe requires a complex creator. But that is not true, and the understanding of emergent complexity is worthy of awe in its own right.
Æsop’s fables are stories of morality set with cast of characters. There is some of that in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, but there is much more as well. As I mentioned above, the first story of creation in Genesis is a retelling of Gilgamesh, but with a monotheistic theme instead of a polytheistic theme. The Hebrews learned from the Sumerians about story telling, and they wanted to tell their story of creation. Borrowing and modifying stories was not uncommon at that time, and there are themes in the Gospels that retell, or clearly refer to Hebrew scripture.
I have been watching the SBC drama unfold with interest, because one of the churches is a couple of miles where I lived a few years ago. This is not an issue for me because we have been ordaining female priests since 1976, and our previous Primate (or Presiding Bishop, first among equals and the leader of the American church) was Kathryn Jefferts Schori. The Presbyterian and Lutheran churches have been ordaining women for years as well. The SBC takes a conservative, literal reading of some of Paul’s letters, and some of the pastoral letters in the Christian Bible that say that women must not have any leadership role in the church, and that they are to sit quietly with their head covered. These mentions were written at a time when the Greco-Roman family unit was the only acceptable family organization, where the husband was the head of the family and made moral and religious decisions for all members. The SBC’s literal reading of these passages, out of historical context, is the reason for the current defrocking of female pastors. The interesting thing is that Paul commends several women who were leaders and deacons in the early church, but that is conveniently glossed over in the current, modern desire to maintain a patriarchal power structure in the SBC. In this case, God has nothing to do with a woman’s place in the church. This is a purely human decision to emphasize tradition.
The first time I saw a map of the major and minor biochemical pathways in a cell, I was in awe over the complexity, and that it worked.
Not everyone follows the flawed and damaging theology of Original Sin as outlined by Augustine. There have been many responses that negate that idea. However, there is a need on the part of some people to feel superior because they have been beat down by Original Sin. It is a doctrine that has caused a great deal of psychological and spiritual harm, but it is not a doctrine held by all Christians, nor is it strictly scripturally based. I reject it out of hand myself.
The book of Job was written as prose to tell a story that explores theodicy. It was never written as a factual story, and to read it that way is to misunderstand the point of the story. A major point of the story is that despite all of the bad things that happen to Job, and despite three friends who lay blame on him for his misfortunes, Job never gives up faith in a benevolent God (recall that it is the satan, the prosecutor, who does the terrible things to Job). He also vehemently rejects his friend’s attempts to lay the blame on him for his misfortunes. It is not useful to view God as an omnipotent being who is obligated to save us from every hurt or evil because that point of view inevitably leads to a loss of faith.
With God’s permission, as a bet.
Yes, with God’s permission. That is the author’s set up to tell why Job does not lose faith, that God is not responsible for evil that happens to Job (or us). It is a response to the theology presented in the book of Deuteronomy that does lay blame on people for the evil they experience as God’s punishment.
No, Czarcasm is NOT making that statement.
Yes, He just hired the hitman, He didn’t actually pull the trigger.
I’ve read Gilgamesh, and don’t remember the creation story. The Flood story, yes. No matter, I consider the Bible as a work of fiction (mine is filed in my sf collection) and as such I agree with pretty much everything you wrote.
The Gospels definitely show knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, including stuff that isn’t even there. Including most tellingly the story that puts Jesus, a person clearly from Nazareth, in Bethlehem to be born. That’s why I accept a historical Jesus - if the Gospel writers made him up, they’d have him be from Bethlehem. They were clearly dealing with a real person from the wrong place.
I was taught in the 60’s and 70’s in various churches that, if the Bible said it happened, then it happened. Denominations attended were The Nazarene Church, The Presbyterian Church, Pentecostal Church, various non-affiliated Christian Churches, and on-base churches at Chanute AFB and March AFB.
Both Matthew and Mark wrote their Gospels for a Jewish audience, and both were showing that Jesus was fulfilling scripture, or paralleling it. In Mark, Jesus can’t be the Messiah because he is from Galilee, so Matthew rewrites Jesus’ birth to be in Bethlehem, and quotes Isaiah to show how the prophet’s words have been fulfilled. Additionally, Matthew has Jesus, Joseph, and Mary flee to Egypt, to return later, echoing the story of Joseph being sold into slavery to Egyptians, and the later the Hebrews returning to Judea led by Moses. There is a parallel presented here between Jesus and Moses.
I admit my post was based more of the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible but my basic point still remains that despite an alleged omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God horrible things happen to good people, some evil people have great lives, babies die, only some of the faithful have their prayers answers, etc. How does Christianity have an answer for that? According to some Christians I have known good things are God’s blessing (so why do bad people get good things) and bad things are God testing you (so did God kill/let die my daughter as a test?! Fuck you God!). And honestly that idea is so dehumanizing. Got that great job after years in the industry? Had nothing to do with your education you earned or your years of dedication to your profession and extra work and nothing about all of the networking you did. No, it was all God’s doing. Oh, and he gave you stage 3 liver cancer to test you.
Some people are in the main cast-They learn lessons.
Some people are extras-They are used and discarded to teach those lessons.
This is something I have to disagree with, and it was a major factor in my deconstruction. The Bible gives a very clear picture of what a world with God looks like - it’s a world of shocking, clearly supernatural miracles. The whole Earth being flooded, 186,000 killed in one night by an angel, the ten plagues of Egypt, the Red Sea being split, Jesus walking on water, dead people resurrected, etc.
The fact that our current world today looks nothing like that was a major “suspicion” thing for me.
You are right, and I have heard your response from many priests, pastors, and ministers that it is bad theology. It is bad theology because it places blame on the victim for their misfortune, and trivializes the very real pain and suffering they experience from truly random events. A book by Kenneth Haugk addresses this kind of theology, and it has been one of my references for providing pastoral care in my parish. I have heard bad theology from people in my church, but I heard it more often from evangelical Christians because of how they read and interact with scripture. Ultimately, we’re talking about theodicy, or the problem of evil in the world. In my ministry formation classes, I learned that there has been no satisfactory solution to unexplainable evil in Christianity, so we are left to come up with a solution that works for us individually. Some of those solutions are what Haugk calls “pink thinking” or whitewashing the uncomfortable feelings from having experienced evil. In my chaplaincy training, I learned very quickly to sit with someone in crisis where they were emotionally and spiritually and be a witness to their pain, anger, doubt, and sadness, and not fix them. This is a hard thing to do, especially for those who wield scripture like a hammer and see everything as a nail to be driven. My own solution to unexplainable evil is to ask “What does this mean to me (you)? How to I (you) feel about it? How will I (you) respond to it? Where do I (you) go from here?” Much of our reaction to unexplainable evil is grief, and so it is grief that I look for and address when I hear it. Job was wracked with grief, and yet in his grief, he did not abandon his principles. I see this abandonment in some stories of young black men, harassed by law enforcement for DWB, who lash out in anger and bitterness with a gun in hand.