(lacking imagination is your worst foe).
Well this answers a lot for me. Lacking imagination is your worst foe when reading the bible. That's it. It all hinges on this. Each person reads the bible, mixes it with their own imagination, and that is how they come to so many different conclusions. Sab imagines that Christ and Moses were the same person. Tec imagines that only the good stuff written about Jesus are true, and she also imagines he said many things that weren't written. Which would get him off the hook for never condemning slavery and other atrocities.
We have two people that read the same book and come to nearly opposite opinions on some pretty key points. What is the difference between the two? Their imaginations. They each fill in the gaps and make the connections according to their own imagination.
Sab's Christ and Tec's Christ are very different people. Sab's Christ supported rape, killing and slavery, while Tec's Christ would never do any such thing. The difference is their imaginations.
Tec asks what we use to pick and choose when we look at the Bible. It's not that we pick and choose, because it holds no authority for us, but we marvel at how those that it does have some authority to as they pick and choose. For Tec, it's as though most of the law of Moses, a law that God's people lived by for thousands of years--even while he is reported to have been communicating with prophets and setting things straight--hardly has any validity at all.
This God never punished these people for keeping that very corrupt law. Idolatry---SURE---they got punished. Selling daughters to rapists--nope, never punished. So we see what was important to this god. His ego. While he turned a deaf ear to the suffering of his worshippers---to the women being stoned for not bleeding the first time they had sex---for the young girl sold to a life of abuse with her rapist---to the Canaanite children who were slaughtered wholesale--- but he got really grumpy if they played with other gods. Or took credit when they shouldn't. Or took a census when they shouldn't. These were his priorities.
Unless you talk to Tec. Then the story is that if Jesus wouldn't do it, according to her imagination, then it was never part of the plan. Inaction does not mean consent, no matter how powerful the observer may be.
On the other hand, Sab's Christ embraced it all with gusto.
Imagination. It can be your friend---but it can really make for a puzzling outcome too.
