[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
Well, since I believe all of it to be a bunch of hooey, it doesn’t make a lick of difference to me. I’ve always thought there was something disingenuous about believers who twist the bible around to suit their purposes rather than just living by it as the scary novel it actually is. I don’t like fundies, but there’s a certain honesty there.
The catholic (or any) church doesn’t know what god’s intentions are any more than the fundies do. If everyone is allowed to pick a handful of guys to do the interpreting, the text, in essence, becomes rather meaningless.
[/QUOTE]
To me, the issue here is, you can find contradictions and bizarre congruences galore. (Did you realize that there’s an advantage for males, if they want to have casual heterosex, of doing it within earshot of a town?) Trying to do an honest job of living by Biblical commandments is next door to impossible, unless you lay atop them a template of your own preconceptions. (Like, for example, the “proof” that the only relationship God counts as marriage is heterosexual monogamy, one man and one woman, by quoting Matthew 19:4-6 out of context. (“It’s talking about divorce, not gay marriages, ya blitherin…”)
For example, marrying your brother’s widow is either forbidden, mandatory, or both. (So don’t get caught in the “both” situation – God doesn’t like Catch-22’s any more than you do. In fact, His punishment for people who “disprove” Him with semantic/logic-based paradoxes is to crush them beneath a rock so heavy that He can’t lift it. ;))
But in this whole mess, is there one element that elucidates and clarifies the morass of commandment and counter-commandment, teaching and paradoxical contradictory teaching? Well, first, separate out God from man in its creation. The problem here is that some fundamentalists believe that He is responsible for the whole thing, right down to the verses that Paul said are not from Him. But if you peel off “allegedly said by God” from “allegedly said by human” and narrative, you reduce the contradiction by some, but unfortunately in the direction of greater arbitrariness.
But suppose we look at Jesus? After all, He’s supposed to be God in the flesh, His speech the words of God not filtered through Moses, Jeremiah, Haggai, Paul or whoever. Did He say anything that might help?
Well, yeah. Three times He identified a twofold principle as key to the Scriptures (though not science and health ;)): love of God and of one’s fellow man. Once He explicitly says that that summarizes the entire Law and Prophets. (The fact He borrowed this from Hillel does not matter; He taught it with authority, as a commandment form God.) In one other place He names something else as co-equal in authority: the Golden Rule – which is of course in essence the Second Great Commandment stated in more pragmatic form.
Equipped with these, one can then find a guiding principle running through His teachings: one of holding oneself to high moral standards, but refusing to sit in judgment over others, of returning good for evil, of providing practical aid and compassion wherever it is needed. And He’s pretty explicit on how the whole thing holds together, too: if you judge others, you will be judged with the same measure – and context suggests strongly He’s talking about God’s judgment, not just karmic revenge. Whatever you do or do not do for another, He will hold it as done or not done for Him. God loves everyone, and forgives readily – but He despises hypocrisy, and in particular holding others to rules for which you’ve found your own self loopholes.
Oh, and one added benefit on a very practical mundane basis: this completely divorces you from all the arguments about purpose and function of the Bible, whether it’s a rulebook or not, propriety of imposing its rules on other citizens, and the whole shebang. You have your marching orders, straight from your Lord and Savior, and they have no loopholes or wiggle room.
My viewpoint here is, of course, seen by conservative Christians who look to the thing as a lawbook, as being unprincipled, a refusal to identify and decry sin and instead a willingness to condone it. I know I’ve experienced that more than a few times in arguing the point, even from atheists who see accepting God but not the fundy theses about the Bible as somehow inconsistent.
I see it more as something like Constitutional Law. You have a bookshelf full of statutes, and multiple rooms of case law. But here, confined in a few pages, are the principles that shape and underlie the rest of the library. The archaic statute may still be on the books, but if it violates the basic principles of human freedoms and limited government power enshrined in the Constitution, it’s without power to affect you and me.
Jesus is my Savior and Lord. He said what’s the most important things to do. He left no room for exceptions or compromise. He detailed how He expects it implemented, in broad terms. And provided us with a Comforter and Advocate, to consult in times of confusion.
To me, it seems like everyone picks and chooses from Scripture. The evangelist who comes from a dinner of scallops in his wool/linen suit to denounce homosexuality probably has no clue how ironic his accusation that we liberals are cherry picking Scripture really is. But in my case, my sole choice was to elect to follow Jesus. He did the cherry picking for me, and I find His selections to be the right way to live.
