Ouch. I’m halfway to starting a thread to debate his arguments on that. A very poor article. 
I’d like to rewrite *Ulysses * so I could understand it, too. And while we’re re-writing to fit our preferences, let’s change the ending to The Snows of Kilamanjaro, and let’s rewrite Kathy in East of Eden so she isn’t a whore. The point is, you go with the canon you get. I take a modernist viewpoint of the Bible and let it mean what I need for it to mean.
So, either I rewrite the Bible so it can’t be misunderstood, or I bear personal responsibility for mythological slaughters that occurred thousands of years ago? Or for someone else’s failure to have their children’s illnesses treated? Fine, and you accept responsibility for murders and rapes in your city because you didn’t personally rewrite the laws so they couldn’t be misunderstood by murderers and rapists.
Well of course modernist believers are more prevalent on these boards than in the world in general. How each individual decides which is myth and which is fact is up to him or her. Religion, as I keep saying over and over and over, is a deeply personal thing, and just because 100,000 of us recite the same Nicene Creed doesn’t mean that we are all lockstep with each other. Each of us shades it according to his or her spiritual needs and conscience. There’s really not a simple answer. Sometimes it’s hard to be a Christian. That’s why I lost myself in apostasy for over ten years – I just didn’t want to make the effort to be a Christian.
So, you all figurately rewrite Ulysses to suit yourselves?
While this does little in the case of fighting ignorance, an argument that is often seen is “God works in mysterious ways.” Moreover, calling God a cruel bastard relies on using the morality system that God Himself set up in the first place! (or not, depending on your beliefs, but then… why bother judging a God that you dont even believe exists). Humility before God is, (IMO) a fundamental concept of the Christian faith. The quote I like is “Can you catch the Leviathan by a fishhook? Where were you when the Behemoth was created?” Both from The Book of Job. Of course, humility does not require one to bury the head in sand and sing “la la la la la I cant heeearrrr you” on what seems to be logical deficiences. Thus, Christian Apologetics is born!
For the record, I only read the first page in this thread.
“Can you catch the Leviathan by a fishhook? Where were you when the Behemoth was created?”
Yeah, well I’ve defeated the Bandersnatch using nothing more than a phoenix feather, tamed a unicorn and spoken with the IPU herself. You say I have no evidence that I’ve done this? Well my ways are even more mysterious, and at least I can produce physical evidence that I exist, which means that you need even less blind faith than usual to believe my words.
You keep making these comparisons between works of fiction and the Bible, but you still don’t seem to get the point that nobody worships Kathy, and nobody asks me to swear on a copy of Ulyssess. I think your perception of the place and role of the bible in the world is sorely and terribly skewed.
Or I could just shrug my hands and say, “Gee, I bear no responsibility for how anyone else interprets the text, I just regard it as I see fit - the Government sure does move in mysterious ways!”
If it’s so personal, why identify yourself as a “Christian” and why hoist up a common book that you don’t understand and of which you have to pick and choose parts so as to not experience any ripples of cognitive doubt? It doesn’t sound very personal at all - rather the opposite.
I think you should
Gosh, thank you for clearing that up for me. Over 40 years I have mused and struggled with my spirituality and you seem to be able to cut through all of that in a couple of sentences. Maybe I should just worship you instead. Then you could tell me what I believe every time I start to get a little confused.
Is petulance next to godliness? I forget…
We all? Who? *Ulysses * is the quintessential modernist literary art form; it makes the reader the artist, allowing the reader to make of it what he or she will. That’s part of the very nature of modernist art – the artist is hidden, meanings are vague, the symbols stand for whatever the critic needs. Victorian literature was often allegorical, but modernist is symbolist. So yeah, everyone who reads *Ulysses * figuratively rewrites it as he/she reads it. What I was referring to, however, was literally rewriting it so it wouldn’t be symbolic at all, since **Hentor ** seems unwilling to allow me to view Bible stories as symbolic rather than literal. Oh, wait, I don’t owe anyone any explanation of how I use the Bible.
What the hell am I even doing here!? Off to MPSIMS!
I’ve never said anything about disallowing anyone to view Bible stories as symbolic. This effort to decry literalism has been brought up and shot down multiple times, and is irrelevant. The question is why one would even want symbolic stories of god to depict him as a psychopath.
I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO TAKE THEM LITERALLY.
For example, I don’t think that there was literally a talking animal named Henny Penny, but the message of the story (don’t believe everything that you hear) is nevertheless a useful one, not to be rejected. Wouldn’t one want their symbolism to represent something desireable about that which they worship, rather than something to be rejected or disregarded?
I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO TAKE IT LITERALLY.
Your raillery actually highlights the crux of the issue. Hentor the Barbarian isn’t telling you what to believe or demanding your worship or subservience, nor is he holding up Ulysses as an exemplar for any kind of belief system or moral guide. Comparing the Bible–the sacred “Good Book” that is supposed to be the overarching guiding tome from which members of the collective Christian theology derive their beliefs–to a work of literature universally regarded as fiction is a disingenuous argument that avoids the essential question: what bits of the Bible are ficitonal mythology intented to do nothing more than entertain in morbid fashion, and which are “the Word of God” from which one derives the requisite understanding of requirements and obligations, regardless of the factuality of the actual story?
Why are the accounts of Genesis and the death of the central martyr in gospels of the New Testament inconsistant and Rashomon-like? Which moral lessons do you take home to the family, and by what objective standard–we assume that a just, merciful God doesn’t arbitrarily change the rules to conform with the modern societal standards of His Creations–are those selected? These are all basic questions, the answers to which distinguish between a consistant set of moral principles and an ad hoc, modify-as-it-suits rationalizaton that merely serves to find a passage to justify our indefensible behavior or moral outrage as something distasteful. Claiming that “the stories were all written by different authors” explains the lack of consistancy, but also undercuts any claim that the Bible is anything but a work of historical fiction, possibly referring in abridged and adapted sense to actual historical figures, and offering no true insight to a god or gods which may or may not act in the despicable manners described in said work.
And no point yet stated has seriously contradicted Dawkins classifications of the behavior of God in the Old Testament. Whether you prefer to justify it in terms of deific prerogative, or set it aside as a fictionalization, or argue that there are hidden variables that determine the absolute guilt or innocence of the affected parties, or that God is a small boy who has every right to abuse his box of toy soldiers, or whathaveyou, the stated descriptions of the behavior still stand as an apt accounting of the behavior of the Judeo-Christian god portrayed in the Old Testament.
Stranger
Even the OT God compares favorably to the mythology of the ancient Greek gods; who at one time or another did every selfish, savage cruelty imaginable and justifed it as “whatever the gods do is right by definition, because we’re the gods”.
I don’t get to rewrite the Bible. I either use the Bible as it comes to me or I turn my back on it. I tried turning my back on it. It didn’t work for me. Now I go to church. When I go to church, I use the Bible that exists. I don’t want to create my own religion. I don’t want to write my own Bible. And because the Bible is a collection of Semitic and Christian myths, I can use the lessons in it to live a better life.
How am I not making this understandable?
I don’t know. I wasn’t there when the stories were created. I first heard of them in the mid-1950s when I was a child. My area of expertise and research interest is English language literature, not theology.
It occurs to me I don’t even belong in this conversation. I don’t think I even understand the questions.
The question is: how do you select what to believe as truth or divinely-inspired moral fable as opposed to errant mythology that does not accurately represent God’s actions, intentions, or moral precipes, in a way that is not merely justifying your own (or some other person’s) arbitrary preconcpetions, prejudices, and rationalizations?
Stranger
I didn’t want you to think I was ignoring the question, but I don’t know how to answer. I guess you’re looking for some kind of rational procedure and there isn’t one. It’s religion.
Fair enough.
Stranger
To add my own answer: you think/pray/meditate/talk about it. I start with the Greatest Commandment and work my way from there.
In my opinion, the essence of liberal Christianity is that there are no clear-cut answers to anything. You have to think about it and decide for yourself. You go to church for the social aspect, and also to help you figure out what it all means to you.
Biblical literalists seem to want everything explained to them in black and white. They don’t tolerate areas of gray (or us liberal Christians ). They avoid the complexities of world and lose out on the beauty of the creation as described by science.
Some atheists want everything in terms of rational arguments, similar to the way science works. But like Sunrazor says, religion isn’t rational. Don’t expect it to work that way. Rejecting all of the Bible as nonsense ignores the useful parts of it.
So, how to decide how holy/useful/inspired/sane any given bit of the Bible is? Read it and decide for yourself. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, or rational, or literally true. You’re allowed to make mistakes, change your mind, postpone your decision.
Or in terms of Stranger’s question: yeah, someone’s interpretation could be arbitrary preconception, prejudice, and rationalization. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, just unprovable.
But how did you decide to start from there? What criteria did you use to select that passage and not Proverbs 20:30?
Dawkin’s argument from The God Delusion addresses this. Religion may not be rational, but morality is. You chose your ‘moral start point’ rationally. You reject the passages you don’t agree with rationally. You do this with a criteria independent of the religion, created in part from society, from your own personal logic, etc. Sometimes the internal logic fails and bad morality is chosen, but it’s still done personally, with independent criteria.
It isn’t the Bible that athiests reject, it’s the supernatural. The Bible does have some good stuff in it, regardless of whether you believe it was divinely inspired. But that’s the whole point, you don’t have to believe it was divinely inspired to benefit from it. All the supernatural stuff is unnecessary. Just take the good stuff for what we can show it to be: ideas from people. You can take your morality from the book without god being involved at all.
Pretty much.