|
WindOnReed2
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: WindOnReed2
Interests: life, love, 'wisdom,' philosophy, history (esp. ancient history, philosophy, and religion), Greek and Latin, psychology, consciousness, evolution, the role of will and the possibility of conscious/willed evolution, evolutionary potential, environmental issues, business ethics, music, piano, guitar, frisbee, writing, food, sex, sleep.
Expertise: none. but some older papers are on a website, www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity .
Face book: ask.
Occupation: student
Industry: education
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  walksinsky
MSN: bodhi7442
Member Since:
6/5/2006
|
|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| God is pan-sexual
My girlfriend's friend's boyfriend posted three articles on facebook, and they are so entertaining that I knew I had to share them.
1. From The Onion,
"This filthy anemone, which exhibits both male and female characteristics, is turning our oceans' intertidal zones into dens of sin and perversion." . . .
which is a spoof related to these next articles.
2. From LiveScience.com, posted: 16 June 2009 12:02 pm ET Examples of same-sex behavior can be found in almost all species in the animal kingdom — from worms to frogs to birds — making the practice nearly universal among animals, according to a new review of research on the topic. "It's clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies," said Nathan Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.
. . .
3. From the SF Gate, July 1, 2009, an article by Mark Morford,
. . . [excerpt] Because if homosexual/bisexual behavior is universal and by design, if gender mutability is actually deeply woven into the very fabric of nature itself, and if you understand that nature is merely another word for God, well, you can only surmise that God is, to put it mildly, much more than just a little bit gay. I mean, obviously. But let's be fair. That's not exactly true. God is not really gay, per se. God is more... pansexual. Omnisexual. Gender neutral. Gender indeterminate. It would appear that God, this all-knowing and all-creating and all-seeing divine energy that infuses and empowers all things at all times everywhere, does not give a flying leather whip about gender. Or rather, She very much does, but not in the simpleminded, hetero-only way 2,000 years of confused religious dogma would have us all believe. . . . [and another favorite quote from the article:
God's motto: Look, life is a wicked inscrutable orgy of love and compassion and survival instinct, shot through with pain and longing and death and suffering and far, far too many arguments about . . .
[and one more line:
. . . as normal as a warm spring rain falling on a pod of giddy bottlenose dolphins having group sex off the coast of Fiji . . .
Hope someone else enjoys the reading too.
| | |
| Moral Hypocrisy? -- Politics, Religion, Statistics
Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist for the NYTimes, wrote a very good piece for today's paper, and if you have time, you should read it.
The piece does a good job NOT of attacking someone for having an extra-marital affair, which is a fairly common occurrence and usually a private matter, but of exposing the hypocrisy of those who use moral claims ostentatiously for political ends and do not practice what they preach.
That is to say, there is often a huge difference between rhetoric and behavior.
There are Democratic sex scandals to be sure, but Democrats didn’t build a franchise on holier-than-thou moral rectitude. The Republicans did. They used sexual morality as a weapon and now it’s shooting them in the foot.
Sanford's hypocrisy is bad enough.
Sanford voted to impeach Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky saga. According to The Post and Courier of Charleston, Sanford called Clinton’s behavior “reprehensible” and said, “I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally” to resign. “I come from the business side. ... If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.” Remember that Mr. Sanford?
Yet so far, he says he has no plans to resign. I actually do not think having an affair is any necessary cause for someone to resign, if he is still capable of doing his job, ... BUT, does his failure to resign, in light of his own words, not render his previous rhetoric hypocritical?
Aside from that, one of the factual highlights of Blow's article is this graphic, which is indicative of the fact that the hypocrisy is NOT limited to the politicians, but is located among the voters themselves:
Graphic URL: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/06/27/opinion/20090627blowchart.html .
The statistics and the article show that
- And "subscriptions to online pornography sites were 'more prevalent in states where surveys indicate conservative positions on religion, gender roles, and sexuality' and in states where 'more people agree that ‘I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.’ ' "
- - - -
I am reminded of this article:
Talbot's article fairly accurately describes the situations of places such as the small East Texas town where I grew up. Fundamentalist evangelical Christians often oppose sex education, condoms, and birth control, and they preach against premarital sex as if it is something wrong and horrible that offends and angers what-they-think-of-as-a-righteuos-personal-God, BUT often their children still have sex before marriage anyway and are more likely to do so without protection. When their children do get pregnant, they are more likely to feel pressure to get married young and have the baby, and they are more likely to end up divorced, because the marriages they enter are not well-chosen.
I grew up in a crowd of evangelicals. We all naively thought premarital sex was a great sin, trusting NOT in authentic communication from a real God, trusting NOT in nature or biology or logic, but trusting in tradition and the Bible and much pretense of communication with "God" out of youthful credulity and lack of education. I honestly think that most of my fellow students had premarital sex anyway. Those who did not, because they wanted so desperately "to please God," were at least in some cases over-eager to get married at a young age, and I know that there were plenty of divorces in the lives of youth-group members as they grew up.
- - - - -
I am also reminded of this short TED presentation:
"Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most."
Haidt identifies five fundamental moral values shared to a greater or lesser degree by different societies and individuals:
- Care/Harm for others, protecting them from harm.
- Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
- In-group Loyalty to your group, family, nation.
- Respect/Authority -- Respect for tradition and legitimate authority.
- Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.
Haidt's Conclusion: Americans who call themselves liberals tend to value Care and Fairness higher than In-group Loyalty, Respect-for-Authority, and Purity. Americans claiming to be conservative put relatively less emphasis on Care and Fairness, and they put more emphasis on Ingroup Loyalty, Respect for Authority, and Purity. BOTH groups give Care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives value Fairness the lowest, whereas liberals value Purity the lowest. Regardless of whether you are Republican, Democrat, Independent, or whatever, this talk does an interesting job in explaining the similarities and differences in the general morality of Democrats and republicans. Both groups have strong senses of morality, but they have different focuses.
Does it make sense to you? What do you think about it?
More on morality: Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct.” January 13, 2008. NYTimes. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html "The Evolution and Relativity of Judeo-Christian Morality," an outline of mine, - http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/EvolutionOfJudeoChristianMorality.htm“Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior,” by Nicholas Wade, NYTimes, March 20, 2007, re: Dr. Frans de Waal, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html More on Sanford and "moral" scandals: "A Nation of Candidates," by Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes June 20, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/opinion/20collins.html "Sanford Case a New Dose of Bad News for Republicans," By Jim Rutenberg, NYTimes, June 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/us/25repubs.html
"Mysteries Remain After Governor Admits an Affair," By Robbie Brown and Shaila Dewan, June 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/us/25sanford.html “Genius in the Bottle,” by Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, NYTimes, Published: June 27, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28dowd.html
| | |
| Biblical Cosmology and Its Problems
That the Bible has problems with its cosmology is an old and uninteresting fact to plenty of people. However, I live in a world in which there are still too many other people who take the Bible far too seriously, making claims that it is perfect/inerrant. It is with such fundamentalists in mind that I post the following:
3-tiered Cosmos:Very many ancient people, including plenty of Jews and Christians and the writers of various books/verses of the Bible, believed in a 3-tiered universe:
- the heavens above,
- the flat earth below (a flat circle/disk or a flat square, although this changed with time),
- sheol/ hades/ hell/ tartarus beneath the earth.
e.g.
• Php 2:10: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth"
• Rev 5:3: "no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth"
Every knee "under the earth"?
Really?
Heaven IS the sky in the Bible:
Ancient people believed God, or the Gods, lived up in the sky. In Hebrew, the word for sky is shamayim; in Greek the word is ouranos. People did not have two different words for sky and heaven; they were the same place. Only moderns make a distinction. So when English Bibles translate shamayim and ouranos sometimes as sky and sometimes as heaven, they mislead modern readers into thinking there was a difference. In the Bible, the shamayim/ouranos is a place
- where god lives;
- where the angels live;
- where the sun and moon move around;
- where the stars are;
- where rain, thunder, and lightning come from;
- where there are storehouses of hail, snow, and wind;
- where the clouds are;
- where birds fly.
If you will do a search for the occurrences of shamayim/sky/heaven/ouranos in the OT and check out the original languages, you will see that this is the case. Do you have a Strong’s concordance of the Bible?
The Firmament:
Genesis 1:6–8: “God [Elohiym] said, ‘Let there be a firmament [raqiya] in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God [Elohiym] made the firmament [raqiya], and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God [Elohiym] called the firmament Heaven [shamayim]. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
The Hebrew word used for "firmament" is "raqiya,” an extended solid surface or flat expanse, considered to be a hemisphere above the Earth. The word is derived from “raqa,” meaning "beaten out" or to spread material by beating/hammering/stamping (like metal). That’s why Elihu asks Job, “Can you beat out [raqa] the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal?” (Job 37:18). In the 400’s, Jerome used the Latin word firmamentum, “support, prop, mainstay; support group” to translate the word.
- Genesis 1:14-17: “And God [Elohiym] said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth": and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: the stars also.
- The firmament has windows that El/Yahweh opens to let rain come down (Gen 7:11, 8:2).
- Job 28:32 speaks of “the storehouses of the snow” and “the storehouses of the hail” in shamayim.
- Ezekiel 1:22: “Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like a firmament, sparkling like ice, and awesome.”
Today we know this is erroneous. The "heavens" are not a firmament. The "heavens" are not a vault.
Shamayim/Ouranos/Sky/Heaven and Yahweh/El/God are above the earth:
- Job 9:8, “...who by himself spread out the heavens [shamayim]...”
- Job 22:12, 14: "Is not God [Eloah] in the heights of heaven [shamayim]? And see how lofty are the highest stars! . . . he goes about in the vaulted heavens.' (n.b. El/Eloah/Yahweh (god) is in the sky.)
- Psalm 19:1, “The heavens [shamayim] tell out the glory of God [El], the vault of heaven [raqiya] reveals his handiwork.”
- “In them [shamayim], a tent is fixed for the sun, who comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, rejoicing like a strong man to run his race. His rising is at one end of the heavens, his circuit touches their farthest ends; and nothing is hidden from his heat (Psalm 19:4-6).” (n.b. The sun moves in the heavens in circuit over the stationary earth. Geocentric model.)
- Psalm 102:25, “...the heavens [shamayim] were thy handiwork.”
- Isaiah 40:22: “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” This ancient Jewish writer pictured God sitting on a throne (like a human king) way up in the sky, so high that humans look like grasshoppers.
- Isaiah 45:12, El says “I, with my own hands, stretched out the heavens [shamayim] and caused all their host to shine...”
- Isaiah 48:13, “...with my right hand I formed the expanse of the sky [shamayim] ...”
- “You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God [El]; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High God [Elyown]." (Isaiah 14:13-14).
- Ezekiel 1:22-26; Ezekiel 10:1. Above the vault is a throne of sapphire (or lapis lazuli). Seated on the throne is “a form in human likeness,” which is radiant and “like the appearance of the glory of the Lord.” Ezekiel saw a vision of God sitting enthroned on the vault of heaven.
- Joshua 10:13. “So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself . . . The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” This fits the ancient view that the sun and moon both move in the vault of heaven, while the earth is stationary.
- Stars can fall from the sky to earth according to Daniel 8:10, Matthew 24:29, Mark 13:25, Revelation 6:13, Revelation 8:10, Revelation 9:1 and Revelation 12:4 (It is sometimes claimed that these "falling stars" are meteors, but such is a lame attempt at apologetics; the writers of these tales were ignorant and made no distinction; the swipe of a dragon's tail dislodges "one-third of all the stars in the sky" in Revelation 12:4. ).
- Isaiah 34:4: “All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.
- Daniel 8:10: “It grew until it reached the host of the heavens, and it threw some of the starry host down to the earth and trampled on them.”
- Mark 13:25: “the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.”
- Matthew 24:29: "Immediately after the distress of those days 'the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’”
- Revelation 6:13-16: “...the stars in the sky [ouranos] fell to the earth, like figs shaken down by a gale; the sky [ouranos] vanished, as a scroll is rolled up...they called out to the mountains and the crags, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of the One who sits on the throne...”
- Shamayim has windows which God can open to let the waters above fall to the surface as rain (Genesis 7:11, Genesis 8:2, Isaiah 24:18-19, Jeremiah 51:15-16, and Malachi 3:10).
- Job 28:32 speaks of “the storehouses of the snow” and “the storehouses of the hail” in shamayim. And Jeremiah 51:16: “He brings up the mist from the ends of the earth, he opens rifts for the rain and brings the wind out of his storehouses.” Ignorant ancient people, such as the writer of this book of the Bible, believed that there were storehouses of snow, rain, and wind up in the sky where God lived.
- Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:4-7: "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens [shamayim], so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." . . . But the LORD [Yahweh] came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD [Yahweh] said, . . . “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
- Exodus 19:11: “be ready by the third day, because on that day the LORD [Yahweh] will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.
- Exodus 19:20: “The LORD [Yahweh] came down to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain.”
- Numbers 11:17: “I will come down and speak with you”
- Numbers 11:25: “Then the LORD [Yahweh] came down in the cloud and spoke with him.”
- Joshua 10:11: “The LORD [Yahweh] hurled large hailstones down on them from the heavens [shamayim]”
- 2 Kings 1:12: “Then the fire of God [Elohiym] fell from heaven [shamayim] and consumed him and his fifty men.”
The New Testament is just as bad:
- Luke 10:18: He [Jesus] replied, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven [ouranos].”
- In Acts, Jesus is depicted as rising into the sky until a cloud hid him from view (Acts 1:9-11).
- This is comparable to other ancient people's beliefs about gods descending from the sky where they live, or heroic god-men ascending to heaven at or after their deaths.
- Example: Romulus: According to Roman histories written before Christianity developed, Romulus, the first king of Rome, son of God/Mars by the virgin Rhea Sylvia, ascended into heaven from a mountain when a cloud hid him from view. Some sources said there was an eclipse of the sun at the same time. Romulus subsequently appeared to a Roman senator and sent him with a message for his people explaining what happened and prophesying the future greatness of Rome. Romulus was then known as the God Quirinus, and he received prayers on behalf of the city. The story can be found in Livy (1st century BCE), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century BCE), and Plutarch's biography of Romulus (c. 100 CE), and it is mentioned by Cicero (1st century BCE) and Ennius (239 - c. 169 BCE).
- Example: Heracles: According to ancient Greeks, Heracles / Hercules was son of God / Zeus by Alcmene. Heracles went to Hades and back, and he brought at least one mortal back from death, Alcestis. Heracles was tortured by a poisonous cloak and died painfully on a pyre, but he rose ino heaven to live forever as divine. Greeks believed he was real.
- Many Romans believed that Julius Caesar ascended to heaven and became divine after his death. Augustus Caesar, his adopted heir, thus called himself "son of a God" and printed this on his coins.
- The early Christian movement was compelled to invent a story at least as miraculous as these earlier stories. How else could it trump the other superstitions of the day?
- Revelation 1:7: "Look he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him..." (flat earth and imminent eschatology).
Yes, some really believed that divinity was anthropomorphic and lived up in the sky.
The earth is stationary:
- 1 Chronicles 16:30: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable.”
- Psalm 93:1: “Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm ...”
- Psalm 96:10: “He has fixed the earth firm, immovable ...”
- Psalm 104:5: “Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken.”
- Isaiah 45:18: “...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast...”
- The following speak of earth's foundations: 2 Samuel 22:16, Job 38:4, Psalm 18:15, Proverbs 8:29, Isaiah 24:18, etc.
The earth is flat or a hill, not a sphere:
- Daniel 4:10-11. The king “saw a tree of great height at the center of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” In the writer’s imagination, the earth is flat, so an extremely tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” but this is impossible on a spherical earth.
- Matthew 4:8: “Once again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory.” Obviously, this would be possible only if the earth were flat. Either the inventor of the story thought the earth was flat, or this was meant to be a symbolic parable and not a real event in a historical biography, or both. Some say the sight was "spiritual," but if so, why would the "high mountain" be necessary?
- Revelation 1:7: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye shall see him...”
- Jeremiah 51:16: “He brings up the mist from the ends of the earth.”
Hell is below the earth:
The Bible teaches that just as the sky/heaven is above the earth, so is hell below/within the earth. Consider the following:
- Mt 11:23: "You will go down to Hades." (also Lk 10:15)
- Mt 12:40: "For as Jonah was 3 days and 3 nights in the belly of the sea creature, so the son of man will be 3 days and 3 nights in the heart of the earth."
- 1Pt 3:18-20: "He was put to death in the body but made alive by the spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago..."
- Php 2:10: "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth"
- Eph 4:9-10: "What does 'he ascended' mean except that he also descended to the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the very one who ascended far above all the heavens in order to fill all things."
- 2Pt 2:4: "God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgement." (Tartarus is the lowest region of the underworld in Greek mythology.)
- Rev 5:3: "no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth"
- Rev 5:13: "every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea"
Commentary:
Many ancient people, including the the writers of certain parts of the Bible, held such beliefs as these:
- that hell was under the ground,
- that the earth was stationary,
- that God or the Gods or their angelic servants made the sun and moon move across the sky above the stationary earth,
- that God or the Gods had emotions, senses, and personalities, just as humans do,
- that God or the Gods lived up in the sky [although many had come to believe the more abstract and somewhat contradictory belief that God was everywhere, making it necessary to explain away older references to a God who was not omnipresent (cf. Gen 11:4-7)].
If a single one of these is wrong, then the Bible contains error.
It was only 400 years ago (in the time of Copernicus, d.1543, and Galileo, d.1642, whose theories the Church at first condemned) that science overturned the geocentric/earth-centered model of the universe and began to drive ancient geocentric cosmology from human minds.
[Earlier Greek discoveries had not gained sufficient acceptance.]
Now we know that the cosmology of the Bible (and much other ancient literature) is incorrect. Most people nowadays will admit that the earth moves around the sun, but the fundamentalists need to face the facts that such truths contradict certain passages in the Bible and that the Bible was written by fallible humans. The same goes for the age of the earth and human origins, about which the ancient Christians and the writers of the Bible had no clue -- (cf. Genesis and Luke's genealogy of Jesus, with its 77 generations of humans from God to Jesus through Adam -- http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/OTChrono.html.).
Some, both ancient and modern, desire(d) to imagine heaven and hell as existing in some invisible dimension, but as demonstrated above, numerous passages in the Bible do say that heaven is above the earth and that rain, snow, angels, stars, the sun, and god are there, and multiple passages say that hell is below the earth. The attempt to remove things to "another dimension" is an evasive effort to salvage primitive ideas by relocating them to an imaginary place inaccessible to scrutiny or evidence.
In Acts, Jesus is depicted as rising literally into the sky until a cloud hid him from view (Acts 1:9-11). Did that really happen? A cloud? Why? And in Revelation 1:7 a Christian writer says, "Look he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him..." Such descriptions are clues that the ascension and other stories are fiction, and at the very least should not be taken as literally true.
It would be pointless for Jesus to have gone up into the sky; nothing is up there but air. And if heaven were in some other dimension, Jesus could have simply disappeared into that other dimension; there would be no need for an ascension. Over which country are Jesus, Romulus, and Hercules hovering in the clouds right now? The fact that the Christian story depicts Jesus going up into the air to heaven simply betrays their ancient world view that heaven was the upper sky; and this is one of the many clues that the story is a fabrication along with other ancient stories of ascending man-gods like Romulus and Heracles.
Also, many early Christians, such as the writer of Revelation 1:7, thought Jesus would come back down in the clouds and that everyone would see him, and they thought he would come back so soon that his murderers would still be alive!
[n.b. Many early Christians erroneously thought Jesus was coming back soon, within their lifetimes: Mk 9:1;13:30; 14:61-62; 1 Thess 4:15-17; 1 Corinthians 1:7-8; 7:26, 29; 15:51-52; Romans 13:11-12; 1 Peter 4:7; Revelation 1:1-3; 3:11; 16:15; 22:6, 7, 10, 12, 20. Now, believers often feel forced to try all kinds of re-interpretations of these embarrassments, just as with other problems.]
They did not know the earth spun on its axis, and many did not know that the earth was an oblique spheroid; so they did not have a problem thinking everyone at the same time would be able to see Jesus come down from the heights of heaven. Today, those Christians who still hold this belief feel forced to try to resolve the issue by saying, "Maybe it will somehow be a spiritual event that all will see in the spirit." Idle and silly talk. Spiritual clouds? Cloudy ideas. Then there are those, believe it or not, who have claimed that this was a prophecy of satellite television -- i.e. We will all see him on television when he returns (a view at times advocated by Pat Robertson in the 1990's, ignoring the imminent eschatology)!
Even those too fearful to admit the truth of these last points should admit that some aspects of the cosmology espoused by the Bible were/are erroneous if taken at face value.
http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/ .
| | |
| Some Problems with Ancient Concepts of Sacrifice and MoralityI am once again using xanga as a place to post a comment to avoid taking up too much space on another person's facebook/xanga.
Someone named T.. left the following comment on K's post:
"The point of the law in the Old Testament was atonement for sins. The law contained certain legalistic requirements that seem strange to us today, but it was God's instructions to the Jews on how to be "made clean". You have missed the entire point of the New Testament, which is that no human is capable of perfectly following the law and that the law (please remember that Romans 2:14,15 is referring to Old Testament Jewish law) has been made obsolete because Jesus has paid the price for our sins, if we will just believe and accept Him."
- - - - -
My response:
Practically all the ancient people living around the Mediterranean Sea had a system of animal, food, and drink offerings to god(s). Yes, people made offerings to atone for violations of law/custom/religion, but also simply to please the gods, to win the gods’ favor. Such ideas were around long before Israel (not to mention the Bible) even existed. Customs/Laws against stealing, murder, adultery, bearing false witness, blasphemy, etc. were also common. These things were considered immoral by many nations long before the Jews ever developed their national literature or invented their god Yahweh.
Sacrificing animals/food to god(s) is a primitive idea. So is the human-divine sacrifice of the New Testament. It would be superstitious and unjust to punish the innocent for the mistakes of the guilty [more below in the last 2 sections]. The sacrifice of innocent/spotless animals, people, demi-gods, Jesus, etc. can not cosmically or “spiritually” atone for sin or personal mistakes. And mistakes are merely the breaking of local/national/social rules/morals/laws; they involve no offense against any real personal deity up in the sky.
For another example of the primitive nature of ancient Jewish and older Gentile ideas of sacrifice and God(s), consider how they believed that the smoke from sacrifices went up to the sky, where God(s) lived, and the smell pleased the God(s). About 39 times, the Torah speaks of Yahweh smelling the "pleasing aroma" of burnt animal sacrifices: Gen 8:21; Ex 29:18,25,41; Lev 1:9,13,17; 2:2,9,12; 3:5,16; 4:31; 6:15,21; 8:21,28; 17:6; 23:13,18; 26:31; Num 15:3,7,10,13,14,24; 18:17; 28:2,6,8,13,24,27; 29:2,6,8,13,36. Example:
"...sprinkle their (an ox, sheep, or goat) blood on the altar and burn their fat as an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to Yahweh."
What kind of deity likes the smell of burning flesh? Why isn't it clear to everyone that this is ancient superstition? The attribution of a human-like mind and physical senses to sky god(s) is merely a common ancient superstition. Israel adopted this belief from older neighboring nations. For one example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is much older than Genesis, after the great flood Utnapishtim made a sacrifice to the gods and they smelled the sweet aroma, just as Yahweh is said to do in the Pentateuch. More at http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/OTChrono.html
- - - - -
>> “it was God's instructions to the Jews on how to be "made clean".”
The idea that the “Mosaic Law” was really given by a sky god is groundless. All the ancient nations claimed that their sacrificial/religious systems were ordained by god(s), and they quite often claimed that their political systems were divinely ordained too. Such lent authority to rulers, laws, morals, and custom, but it was fiction.
If seen in historical context, there is nothing about the Old Testament law that makes it look divinely inspired. It is merely an ancient Jewish version of once typical moral and religious concepts.
It reflects human, not divine, custom/morals.
You can see this if you examine a list of questionable morals in the Mosaic Law: http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/EvolutionOfJudeoChristianMorality.htm#OTMorality .
The Mosaic Law was not "God's instructions to the Jews" any more than Hammurabi's Code (1700's BCE) was inspired by the Gods Anu and Bel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi). The Mosaic Law is but the Hebrew adaptation of ancient Middle-Eastern religious law codes.
Not only that, but the stories in the Old Testament involve at least as much fiction and myth as history, .. probably much more, as I show here in plenty of detail: http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/OTChrono.html .
The Jews had their myths just as the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans did. It is tragic that Jewish mythology ever came to be seen as historical fact by so many people. Unfortunately a large segment of the US population is insufficiently educated in ancient history and, thus, still thinks the Bible is true.
- - - - -
>> “The law contained certain legalistic requirements that seem strange to us today,”
Of course they seem strange, because ancient people invented them. They were not really given by "God." Look at the examples at the link I posted, http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/EvolutionOfJudeoChristianMorality.htm#OTMorality . New Testament morality has some problems too, as I point out at the page linked above [scroll up after the page opens].
Morality changes over time as culture changes. Life evolves.
- - - - -
>> “the law … has been made obsolete because Jesus has paid the price for our sins, if we will just believe and accept Him.”
Obsolete?
True, BUT … if the Mosaic law is obsolete then you should admit that certain parts of Old Testament prophecies were lies.
According to the Jewish prophets in the Old Testament, the law of Yahweh given to Moses was to last FOREVER, and even Gentiles would one day acknowledge it and follow it: Isaiah 2:1-4; 8:20; 19:2; 42:1-9; 42:24-25; 51:4; 56:6-7; 60:1-22; 66:19-23; Jeremiah 33:17-18; Ezek. 37:24; Ezek. 40-48,; Micah 4:1-3. If you take the time to read such passages and look at Jewish history, you will see that their ideas of the future were quite different from later Gentile Christianity. The Jews wanted the law and sacrificial system to last for all time. They wanted their nation to be great and to rule the world, but they could not make it happen. They wrote in their scriptures that Yahweh would exalt the law, even in “the last days,” and they never said it would become obsolete because of the death and resurrection of the incarnate deity. Christianity twisted Jewish scripture. I examine the whole thing in depth here: http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/MessianismPreChristian.html , especially in the appendices and epilogue.
With the possible exception of Matthew 5:17ff. (likely written by a Jewish Christian whose community still followed the law), the rest of the NT says the opposite about the law.
Rom. 10:4: "Christ is the end of the law."
Eph. 2:15: speaks of Christ "ABOLISHING (contrary to Matthew 5:17) in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations."
I list several other important examples here: http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/MessianismPreChristian.html#epilogue .
There appears to have been a battle in early Christianity over whether Gentiles should keep the law of Moses; it was assumed that Jewish Christians would do so, and at first Gentile Christians seem to have kept the law too. However, factions pushing to consider the Mosaic law obsolete eventually won out over the other factions. This was helped by the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE, by the loosening of ties to Jerusalem, and by the fact that Gentile Christians had come to vastly outnumber Jewish Christians. Such was one aspect of the evolution of Christianity away from being a sect within Judaism and toward accommodating Greek and Roman beliefs/mores.
- - - - -
In real life, mistakes do not need cosmic atonement and there is no personal, anthropomorphic sky god keeping tally. Rather, when someone makes mistakes and sees the negative consequences that naturally follow, he or she should learn to turn away from such behavior. Every society developes customs and rules for behavior. Such is natural and logical, and educated people should no longer need to appeal to ancient superstitions or divine inspiration in order to see the importance of behaving in such a way as to promote the general welfare.
- - - - -
>> “Jesus has paid the price for our sins”
Part 1: No forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood ??
What have YOU personally done that is so horrible that innocent blood should be required, that a death should be required, in order for you to obtain forgiveness? Seriously, no joke, what have you done that is THAT BAD?
This is #20 on my list of reasons to reject Christianity: (http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/ListofReasons.html)
What kind of god is unable to forgive sins or mistakes without the shedding of blood?
The Bible teaches that "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness" (Heb 9:22). It teaches that Yahweh required animal blood to appease his anger, and that his son became the final sacrifice once for all. Such a god, if he existed, would have a serious anger management problem, and would be less loving and civilized than most people I know personally. I forgive people all the time for doing things I do not like, and I do not demand any blood. Am I then more forgiving than the Christian god? Are you? And what have I done that is so horrible that blood should be shed? I have been a gentle, loving person since I was a teenager.
What if we all acted like the Christian god of the Bible and demanded blood sacrifice anytime someone did something we did not like?
Some Christians, attempting to defend what they would detest if they hadn't been brainwashed, say God does this because he is so "righteous," but I do not buy that lame defense anymore. One need not demand death and bloodshed to be righteous. Such is absurd.
A God who would lovingly, personally, clearly, and openly counsel those who err would be much more righteous, much more worthy of devotion than the imaginary god of Christianity; yet not only does the Christian god fail to show up and lovingly, personally counsel those who make mistakes (like a real father would), but Christians can only point to an ancient story-book to tell others what their god thinks or demands, because he cannot speak for himself, and they themselves have no actual communication with their Jesus or their "Father," despite their pretensious claim of a "personal relationship" or their claim that his "spirit" dwells in them.
The idea of blood sacrifice comes out of the distant past when fearful, unknowledgeable men tried to appease imaginary invisible gods by offering them food, drink, and blood. The Hebrews borrowed the idea from their neighbors, and Christianity just modified the Hebrew idea with a touching story of self-sacrifice. And the Hebrew law demanding blood sacrifice was not really given by a god to Moses on a mountain after a great and miraculous Exodus from Egypt anyway; it was written by priests well after the supposed time of Moses (see my paper Old Testament Chronological and Historical Problems - http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/OTChrono.html ).
- - - - -
>> “Jesus has paid the price for our sins”
Part 2: Substitutional Sacrifice?? Really? Is that a good thing?
This is #21 on my list of reasons for rejecting Christianity: (http://www.geocities.com/investigatingchristianity/ListofReasons.html)
Should we not question the validity of a substitutional sacrifice
(a) for moral/ethical/logical reasons,
(b) for its lack of value and appropriateness in changing people's behavior,
(c) for its relatively low ultimate effectiveness in appeasing the alleged god's wrath and persuading him to forgive?
(a) In Texas, the law allows the death sentence for certain crimes. What if a Texas judge who sentenced murderers to death decided to pardon everyone on death row, but to satisfy their death sentence he killed his innocent oldest child instead? What would we think of that judge? Honestly.
(b) What would we think if many of the criminals continued to act as they had before and the sacrifice did not end bad behavior? The vast majority of Christians I have met certainly are not more moral or “righteous” than non-Christians I know; a great many are far less moral. They even admit that they continue to err. One need only examine the history of Christian Europe and compare it to a modern secular society like Japan to see that Christianity does not make society morally superior. Anyway, there are obviously other, less violent means of changing people's negative behavior than substitutional sacrifice. Some Buddhists seem to me to be very moral; plenty of religious non-Christians and irreligious atheists live honorable lives. If there are better ways to change behavior than by killing someone, why would a supposedly loving, merciful God demand bloodshed? Was it only to appease his wild anger? Absurd.
(c) On the whole, according to the story, the sacrifice really did not soothe the New Testament god's anger all that much. (1) If you do not believe the story despite the contrary evidence, he will allegedly fry your soul in burning sulfur (Mk 16:16; 1 Jn 2:22-23; Rev 21:8). Thus, the softening of "His" vehement anger applies to a minority of all the humans who have ever lived, and mostly to gullible people who believed a weird story based on hearsay without solid evidence because they heard it at a young, impressionable age. (2) Even if you do believe the story but continue to "sin" on occasion, he will allegedly fry you anyway -- i.e. if you lie, or slander someone, or get drunk, or have sex with someone you are not married to, etc. (1 Jn 2:4, 3:6-10; 1 Cor 6:9-10; Rev 3:16; 21:8). Lots of "Christians" would fit into this second category. The vast majority of all the humans who have ever lived fit into one of these categories, most of them probably simple, hard-working, long-suffering people.
At any rate, blood sacrifice and substitutional sacrifice are immoral, primitive holdovers from the ancient world. These concepts merely distract people from the truth.
| | |
| The Moon BoatLast night . . .
we saw the waxing crescent in the sky.
Hearts beat faster,
because the door is open,
the window is just our size,
and the moon boat is at the shore.
And we know it!
Yes, tonight will be a sweet night and we will embark upon a holy journey.
So we climbed the mountain in the nearly dark.
We sought the path through the trees and brush.
With step on step we pushed the earth farther and farther beneath us until we reached the upper shore,
and lay at the brink of the sea, warm in each others arms.
Two
One
Alone
Above
In Light
In Love
In sacred Night,
Surrounded by
our scintillant smiling,
silently singing
brother-parent-sisters,
We sailed the swarthy sea.
Close eyes open
Union in a star
Up in the islands,
Upon tall mountains we rested our winged craft,
One and then another visiting;
Far and near in space and time
we saw the history of our Love as one long ineffable gaze into our . . . .
And, too, aloft on each high hill
I asked her to be my companion forever.
I loved you then,
You loved me too.
E’en before we were,
We knew.
Walk with me, dear,
Know and be known.
I always have,
I always will.
They will see us waving from such great heights.
And now we drew a circle,
and set inside, we made a picture so that maybe some others would understand at least a little of where we’ve been and what we’ve seen and what in the . . .
Well, any way, we will wear it on her finger.
Having returned eventually to our own shore,
we have
come down now
in some ways,
But we have also decided to live there forever.
Such is the magic of the moon boat.
That much of the song is sung;
the rest is cherished with unarmed all embracing joy.
| | |
|
