Atheist Book of Bible Stories

by crystlew123 76 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Knowsnothing

  Hey Sulla. Sorry I took so long to get back to you. I've been busy.

  I think it bothers you to hear anybody who is religious speak this way about scripture, but it is really an off-the-shelf version of Catholic and Jewish

  thinking.

  What is the official version then? I went out with a girl that was extremely Catholic. She believed Catholic Mass should go back to be read in Latin, with the priest not facing the crowd. Pre-Tridentine Mass.

  Can you tell me more about your specific interpretation?

  But didn't Jesus address this question? He said, "You were allowed to divorce because y'all were knuckleheads, but I tell you now that marriage is a lifetime proposition.

  Jesus said a lot of things. "Just as in the days of Noah"..... er herm.......

  Again, convinient to site the words that support your position.

  To say you don't care how the Jews intended their books to be read, or that you don't care what the Catholics were trying to do by collecting this group

  of books and not some other group is simply a declaration that you don't intend to read the work honestly.

  Re: schismatic history. Which official source again? Pharisees? Saducees? Pope yoo-hoo, Church Fathers, Pius IV.....?

  Let's cut to the chase. The Resurrection? I don't believe it happened. What "manner of reading it" can make such an event any more or less true? That's the heart of all Christian doctrine. No resurrection.... no nothing.
• 

  Christ Alone

  I began to read the "Cure for Fundamentalism", and had to stop after just a few verses. It was ridiculous. The writer obviously did not do research and understand the basics of what was being spoken of.

  Just one of many examples, it says: Gen:2:4: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

  According to the above verse God created heaven and earth in a single day, so how could it be that God created the earth on or before the first day (Gen. 1:1-5) , and didn't create the heaven until the second day (Gen. 1:7-8)?

  If the writer had even a basic knowledge of Hebrew, he would understand that the word "Day" (or yowm) has several meanings in Hebrew, just as the word "Heaven" does in Hebrew.

  Yowm is defined in "Lexical Aids for the Old Testament" as: "A day; a number of days, some time, year, life, today, in the daytime, on the same day, the present. A point in time and a sphere of time are both expressed by yowm. It is the period of light which is not darkness. It can be 24 hours, time in general, a specific point in time, or a year."

  The writer of this article trys to say that this is a contradiction. Obviously this particular case is NOT a contradiction.

  Also, I find it hard to believe in alleged contradictions that happen within the same book and especially when they happen within a chapter or the contradictions are close together. The writer would have noticed the contradiction and fixed it. Most if not all contradictions in the Bible can be easily explained. And that is why the Bible, unlike any other scientific document, is still referred to and believed after thousands of years of attacks against it.
• 

  Unlearn

  this Sulla person sounds like a jerk.
  
  respectfully speaking, that is.
• 

  Sulla

  Totally correct, Unlearn. Watch this: hey, Unlearn, go fuck yourself!

  What is the official version then? I went out with a girl that was extremely Catholic. She believed Catholic Mass should go back to be read in Latin, with the priest not facing the crowd. Pre-Tridentine Mass.

  And you let her get away?

  Can you tell me more about your specific interpretation?

  Well, in a typical Catholic discussion of how to read scripture, there will be a thing about how the fundamentalist (of JW) version of inerrancy is not the Catholic approach. What Catholics mean is that scripture, taken in its whole, does not lead to error but leads to a truer understanding of our relationship with God. This is true when, and only when, the tradition and teaching of the Church are taken into account. The claim of truth is limited to God's plan for human salvation.

  But there is no expectation that scripture will get all the facts right about historical events. In fact, we read lots of books engaging and rejecting stuff that came before. One example is Jeremiah questioning the theology of Deuteronomy (where God is said to curse the wicked and bless the righteous).

  Another is Job. Psalm 8 wonders that God so much positive attention to man, while Job wonders why God bothers to dump so much shit on one man.

  So, the scriptures are a very long conversation with themselves and with us. The proper attitude is one of engagement, if you care to. But pointing out the errors, contradictions, mistakes, bad theology, and whatever else is simply beside the point. Serious readers know all that is in there. It is supposed to be in there because we are supposed to engage with the questions we are forced to ask.

  But the key is engagement. If you read it like a JW, you find the story of the Fall to be as stupid as the JWs say. But if you think it through, there an interesting story there. Isn't knowledge a good thing? Then why would God tell them not to have knowledge of right and wrong? One thought is that the meaning of the story is simply that the first couple learn what the world is really like and that it is this knowledge of humanity that ends innocence. But the point is to think it through, with some level of sophistication, the way we would approach any ancient and serious text.
• 

  Sulla

  Also, I find it hard to believe in alleged contradictions that happen within the same book and especially when they happen within a chapter or the contradictions are close together. The writer would have noticed the contradiction and fixed it. Most if not all contradictions in the Bible can be easily explained. And that is why the Bible, unlike any other scientific document, is still referred to and believed after thousands of years of attacks against it.

  I disagree. I thnk it is exceedingly unlikely that Sarah and Abraham had two separate cases where she attracted the attention of the local boss and Abraham said she was his sister. And that this whole thing was repeated in the next generation with Rebecca. Contradictions and so forth as simply part of the natural process of collecting these stories -- often more than one tradition / source existed.
• 

  Knowsnothing

  What Catholics mean is that scripture, taken in its whole, does not lead to error but leads to a truer understanding of our relationship with God. This is true when, and only when, the tradition and teaching of the Church are taken into account. The claim of truth is limited to God's plan for human salvation. - Sulla

  Ahh... here we go at the heart of the matter. Catholicism is tradition, plain and simple.

  Since Adam and Eve weren't real, what exactly do humans need salvation for? What are we to be "saved" from?
• 

  Sulla

  I think "tradition" has a substantially greater meaning than you are attaching to it. But, yes, the historical Christian view is that what Jesus left us was a Church and that the Church is the way in which salvation history now unfolds. As such, the collection of writings that the church feels are crucial to understanding what it says are given their special status by the church that says so. It is, in this view, the Protestant error to suppose that the writings are somehow prior to the Church and can be interpreted without reference to that antecedent.

  So, perhaps not quite so plain as you make out.

  What do we need salvation for? Well, the very wide understanding of human nature is that it is, how to say, fucked up. It wants things that it cannot have, it has an infinite longing for things like truth and beauty (which you may capitalize if you see fit) that cannot be obtained. It is bothered by injustice and death, viewing death as somehow unjust. We do evil things.

  And so the perception is that we are not who we are meant to be. Neither do we seem to have the capacity to fix this on our own. So somebody else needs to fix it, if it's to be fixed.