Plenty of religions teach don’t steal, don’t murder, etc. What makes Christianity different from most is the teaching of turning the other cheek, NOT taking an eye for an eye, about loving one’s enemy, etc.
Now, whether most “Christians” actually live by those teachings is another matter. But doctrinally, that makes Christianity different from many others, and really against the grain of the time.
By a miracle? Why not?
This is not true.
Honestly, it’s pretty easy to find books that are mostly if not entirely made up of good morals, and entirely without the mandatory familial cannibalism. You don’t credit the writings of the Unabomber by appealing to the bits he gets right, you rightfully point out the insane terrorism and write it off - there are other neo-anarchist luddite writings that don’t do that.
Wisdom doesn’t lie in knowing what is wise. Any fool can tell you that. Wisdom lies in actually doing what is wise. I’m a teacher. I’m constantly seeing students making bad decisions, and when I ask them if what they’re doing is wise, they say no, and then do it anyway.
What prompted the first son to leave, that is most likely the state expressed by the second son.
This was answered in scriptures: Luke 15:31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me (and so is the other son), and everything I have is yours."
Bold mine
The second son just had to realize that he also was a son and not a servant. It is a learning process to step into the role and claim his inheritance. Again just like the other son, lost, not knowing who he is. The Father allows this for a time, but when we are ready to learn the lesson he will permit that as well.
Feeling them is not the issue, we can. Suppressing them is once sin has already established a foothold and is our own efforts to resist and too late. But the first moment we feel these things towards another, to also consider how it effects the other (and yes it does), and our relationship to them and choosing my a free will decision a better emotional response to a fellow human, member of the same family, is the split in the decision tree that leads to good or evil.
The Bible helps us realize where that split was and helps walk us through that healing process once we exceeded that and are turning to things like suppression or addiction.
Good thing you are not God, wisdom is often learned in making mistakes. As my fire chief said to the lieutenant during a training session, step the fuck back and let them make mistakes, that is how we learn motherf*cker.
It’s to the 3rd generation, not the 7th.
I don’t pretend to support Christianity as I studied the Bible independent of Christianity and never found such a loving God expressed in Christianity. Christianity is basically ‘Judaism light’ as it makes sense as the apostle Paul established Christianity by doing what he knew from Judaism in accomplishing his divinely appointed mission to spread the name of Jesus. In such it created a hybrid of the way that Jesus showed, and the old system, sort of a bridge between the worldly system and the eternal.
As for the grudges, and you mention the forbidden fruit. there is much to say of the wisdom of limiting our life under us eating the fruit and the difficulties it causes. If you had a child who despite your warning did something very harmful to them and limited their life, would you not still love them.
God’s grudges as you state it
kanicbird, The bible does not expressly state those moral lessons in the way you relate them. It is left to you to apply a degree of interpretation and yours is by no means the only way of reading them. Now either the bible is a book that gives a specific single message (clearly it isn’t) or it allows multiple interpretations (of which yours is only one of millions). If the latter then I see no greater value than any other writing on philosophy or morals. Aesop’s fables or the writings of the ancient Chinese, Greek, Romans et al.
So you may extract meaning from it but I suggest it is reflection on you as much as anything intrinsic to the book.
I won’t say that I read it and went, “Aha! Now I understand!” Because, at the time, I didn’t; not really. Oh, I understood the words well enough, and got what it was trying to say. But it didn’t really hit home to my teenaged self.
But, in time, which is kind of ironic, it became wisdom to soothe the soul.
Common sense?
Jesus is referencing the law in Deuteronomy that says you should have your son executed by the town if he is not obedient to his parents, and chastising the Pharisees for circumventing this law.
Not talked about much in church, those lines.
I would suggest that, to the extent that the Bible makes sense to you, it’s because the bits that don’t have been stripped out. But also that our society has been adapted to fit some percentage of the Bible teachings as well, such that those teachings seem natural.
While the Bible does contain a lot of horrible things (including from Jesus and Paul), the New Testament’s emphasis on teachings like The Golden Rule have affected Western culture. An example I would give is comparing the 1001 Nights to the Arthurian Tales. In both stories, you have adventurers going around killing people, stealing treasure, raping women, etc. but the European version actually portrays some of those things as being bad and, where it doesn’t, at least tries to make it seem like there was no helping it. The knight fell in love! He couldn’t help himself when he used a spell to make himself look like the woman’s husband!
The 1001 Nights, on the other hand, has women being taken as slaves, raped, and tossed aside like nothing and it’s all described as the acts of a hero doing heroic things. And the key thing to note with that is that people of the Middle East - and even most people of the Victorian age, when they first encountered the work - do read the work as being about acts of heroism. People aren’t just pretending to go along when they read works that have a horrible message underlying them.
And I don’t mean this as a slam on Islam. I am just noting that the Bible is, genuinely, a more benign religion than most others from the ancient world and that has had an effect on how our society behaves and how we view things. And while it’s true that you could find all of the same awful stuff that is in the Koran in the Bible, you can find a lot more to mediate it (particularly in the New Testament) and that has affected our outlook on morality.
You have to ignore 95% of the book to get that mediating percentile, but that’s the 5% that probably seems like common sense to you.
But the reality is that “common sense” isn’t common sense. It’s common sense to millions of people that homosexuality is evil. It’s common sense to millions of people (of both genders) that women should be obedient to men. It’s common sense to millions of people that the harvest will be better this year if you leave rice balls for the spirit inhabiting a stone figure in the nearby woods.
Morality is not a thing that has any factual variant. People have been known to believe and support a wide variety of moralities that can include all forms of (by our standards) horrendous acts including human sacrifice, cannibalism, genital mutilation, pedophilia, etc. And, to a large extent, most of that has very little to do with the original teachings that they are based on. By all rights, the Bible is supportive of or at least ambivalent about abortion while being completely against divorce. (Protesting divorce is what lead John the Baptist to his death, after all.) That’s completely at odds with a modern Christian’s average understanding of the matter.
Overall, there is no such thing as common sense; the Bible is mostly ignored where it doesn’t follow common sense; much of what we still read from it and take to be common sense probably doesn’t mean what it used to; and to the extent that it does mean what we think it means, it only seems natural because that’s the culture you grew up in.
A big problem is a whole lot of what you deem common sense comes from the Bible, if you live in a Western culture. Christianity has left its mark on everything. Yes, it is true that other cultures have come up with some of Western values, but they definitely aren’t exactly the same, are they? If it was really just some sort of common knowledge all humans have, why are our cultures so different?
If you want a comparison, it has to be comparing the Bible to religious works unrelated to the Bible, not to what you personally think is common sense. You are swimming in the value culture that is firmly rooted in Christianity. That happens when it becomes “the official religion.”
Also, let’s not pretend that common sense comes from any innate factor of humans, either. What is common sense today was not in the past. We had to discover things before they became common sense. Not even “thou shalt not kill” is common sense to early hominids. Using tools isn’t common sense. That’s just a term for our collective wisdom of our species, acquired over time.
It’s why it can be so very, very wrong.
Wisdom from Solomon about discussions on message boards:
*“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.” *
— Proverbs 26:4
So…to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, Are we to accept that humans believed murder and theft was fine throughout 250,000+ years of evolution and only considered it verboten when Moses skipped down from the mountains with the lord’s most recent heavyweight bestseller.? I beg leave to doubt it.
Those pre-biblical societies must have operated a coherent set of behaviours built on simple,* “common sense”* rules that enhance the common good of the tribe. Stealing and murdering are bad things because they are bad for the society, someone acting alone and selfishly does not benefit the tribe and gets cast out…they die…they fail to pass on their genes and those harmful behaviours.
Primitive apes have such societal drivers as fair play, mutually beneficial activities, avoidance of incest, cooperation etc. And why? because it works, society works best for all members when they stick to those behaviours that we can easily recognise as moral or ethical behaviour, even in a prototypical form.
It is surely easy to draw a line from there to a more advanced and codified set of expectations in the higher animals and early hominids, one that would be apparent and obvious to ancient civilisations regardless of whether the bible exists or not.
The bible is a product of its time and it shows, good stuff and horrible stuff with no real way of divining the difference other than your inbuilt moral compass that renders the scriptures irrelevant anyway. You claim too much for it. It is one clumsy stab among many at explaining why we behave the way we do, long before evolutionary psychology came along and explained it more elegantly.
ISTR that Buddhism covers the same basic concepts (both on non-violence and on avoiding attachment to anger and negative emotions), and Buddha had 500 years on Jesus.
I’m not harshing on the fat guy in the lotus position. Yes these truths ‘Dharma’ are universal truths that we all can discover and become enlightened. The biblical principal that demonstrates this is seek and you shall find. It does not require a bible or religion to find such things, just to seek, which Buddha did. The finding part is God’s promise and responsibility. This has been going on basically forever. And the seeking is part of something intrinsic in us when we start coming to ourselves and trying to figure out why thins are certain ways in our lives.
Again yes as you support different words for the same universal principals.
I understand what you say, however I believe it does teach universal truths which will be in agreement with each other, such as stated in the previous posting, in agreement with Buddhism, which as they pointed out, what I learned in the Bible is also supported by Buddhist teachings.
The Bible itself is not all in all, it is a textbook that God uses with some, but it says everything, including every scripture, every book, every movie is also created by God. In that everything turns to scripture and is useful for the purposes the Bible states, but yes in it’s proper context. This is also a Buddhist teaching, ‘everything is scripture’.
As for why the Bible seems unclear , the reason as I have seen is it’s describing things that have many more dimensions then our ‘3D world’. It uses the Karate Kid’s Wax On Wax off method to teach us what we need to learn in a way we don’t at first understand. Example: How do you explain 9 dimensional reality to beings living in 3D. You really can’t at first as we have no reference point to comprehend that which we have never experienced. New ways of thinking and new neural pathways need to develop and interlink till we can see the bigger picture, enlightenment is Buddhism. So yes the Bible will seem not clear, as what it’s trying to do is build new processes which don’t naturally possess.
As for other Scriptures, yes they all are and in agreement with the universal principals.
Just to add, then why lift up Lord Jesus so much in Christianity if it’s universal? As we lift Him up we lift ourselves up, as we are Jesus. It is the reason we pray in the name of Jesus as the Father views us as Jesus, we get the spirit of Jesus, and the gifts that Jesus demonstrated. It is to lift US up to the place we belong. In Christianity that lifting us up to the level of the divine comes primarily through grace (four fold grace in Buddhism), basically realizing we are worthy.
These verses were the subject of my minister’s sermon a few weeks ago. 
We’ve been working our way through Matthew.
You’re totally misunderstanding them. Let’s have them in modern English.
Jesus is scolding the Pharisees, not for not killing their children, but for putting their traditions above God’s law. And also for criticizing others of not following the law. This is a common refrain of Jesus: religious leaders emphasizing nitpickerly adherence to the law, while ignoring the spirit of the law.
There are a lot of things that are hard to figure out on your own, but seem obvious after someone tells you the answer. I’ve always found Newtonian physics to be pretty intuitive, but it took the work of many geniuses centuries to actually figure it out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the moral lessons in the bible are like that. I know that I didn’t figure out morality all on my own. My parents and others have taught me.
Which is not to say that everything in the bible is good. It contains plenty of nonsense too. But maybe the stuff that seems so obvious to us now, wasn’t so obvious back then.
Uh, like support and/or no condemnation of slavery?
Incidentally I have to say that IMHO there is a very dedicated effort to interpret “slave” as “servant” in current bible translations nowadays. Leaving aside the whitewash effort, IMHO it shows that even old time religions do recognize that some “wisdom” of the past days is no longer operative.