Yeah. And not a word about torture, either. Or domestic violence, or child labor laws or environmental degradation. WTF?
Posts by Sulla
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114
The Bible-- Full of Errors And Inconsistencies?
by Recovery ini noticed in the "magic" thread many former jw's no longer adhere to the bible as the unerring and accurate word of god.
if you feel this way, can you please list any specific reasons/arguments as to why not.
this thread isn't for debating purposes, but simply for listing.
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Sulla
Of course. And I wish you better luck as you attempt to write and edit a work written over a thousand years, based on several streams of oral tradition, written and redacted by hundreds of people, relying on many different viewpoints and memories, in three languages, through dozens of wars and political crises, etc.
Then, of course, you have to deal with criticism that the work fails to live up to a completely illegitimate and arbitrary standard, invented by illiterate Jehovah's Witnesses.
Tough gig.
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These rent-a-refs have got to go!
by Theocratic Sedition inwtf!?!?
anybody catch the worst decision ever made at the end of a game?
wow heads have got to roll!.
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Sulla
Pay Ed Hochuli. Just pay the man. It's pretty obvious that his skill set isn't easy to find, right? Pay the man.
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Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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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.
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Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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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.
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76
Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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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.
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Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Sulla
The problem is that I have a hard time distinguishing the reality from the myth in the Bible, especially in passages where it claims Jehovah spoke or gave a command.
Not sure why this would be the case. For example, just yesterday I picked up a book on the very early history of Rome: Everitt's, The Rise of Rome: The Making of The World's Greatest Empire. And in the preface found this comment about what his book contains:
Legend, the age of kings, wher most of the events never took place, at least not in the manner described; Story, the conquest of Italy and constitutional conflict, where fact and fiction cohabit; and History, the Republic as a Mediterranean power, where literary sources make a serious attempt at objectivity and accuracy.
So, the OT is like the stories about Rome: a mixture of legend, stories, and attempts at real history. The Flood is a legend, the Patriarchs are stories, and David is history (though not perfect, since history isn't perfect even now, as you know). 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.
Sometimes, his commands were brutal. I can just give an example on Jehovah regulating slavery. This is problematic for you.
I hope you can understand that the question, "Why weren't the Jews of 1,000 BC abolitionists?" doesn't even make sense except insofar as you approach the OT with some sort of fundamentalist approach. I keep trying to emphasize this point and nobody keeps listening. Why stop there? If the Jews were God's people, why didn't they have representative democracy with universal suffrage, child labor laws, and the EPA?
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." Baby steps, KN, baby steps. That's how it works. Or, if you don't care for Jesus, how about Martin Luther King: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." Same idea.
Again, I could care less how they are "supposed to be viewed", whether by Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or whatever "authority".
Well, now, you are making an error that is beneath you. Surely you learned in school that you must approach literature with an understanding of context. Who was writing, for what purpose, with what audience in mind, how he eas planning to make which point, etc. 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. You insist that you should be able to read scripture as if it were the universe's most accurate newspaper and, when you discover that it isn't, you insist it isn't worth anything at all. I'm sorry to say, that's not an educated way to approach any piece of literature from any time. And that really does mean you are doing it wrong. -
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Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Sulla
EP: What, exactly, are we learning from the book that only it can provide?
Pace bohm and, to be honest, as an actual answer rather than a passive-aggressive insult, there happens to be a Christian response to that question. Of course, it only makes sense if you begin with the idea that Jesus is God, so most xJWs begin with a bit of a disadvantage. In any case, we learn the history and traditions of the people whom God chose to use to fix mankind. Scattered throughout the OT, according to Christians, are insights about the nature of God as man. Christians read the OT in light of the New.
And, no, it isn't supposed to be, like, the most accurate and perfect newspaper ever! And, no, it isn't a collection of stories of people who were happy little non-violent M.L. Kings and Ghandis who happened to live in the Bronze Age. And, it turns out that God doesn't ordinarily use conceps that haven't been invented (and won't be invented for a couple thousand years) to interact with the world.
But pointing out this is greatly offensive to folks like bohm, who insist that the OT should be a really accurate newspaper. Only, like, the perfect newspaper, since it is inspired and all. Pointing out that this is dumb because 1) nobody ever did that until the fundamentalists and JWs invented the idea and 2) not every piece of literature is a newspaper and 3) inspiration hasn't meant anything like "absence of conflicting accounts of events"
This is just basic stuff, really. It requires a small amount of investigation and an even smaller ability to suppose that your own, conflicting assumptions (given to you by the JWs, who got everything else wrong, by the way) might not be exactly on-point.
And it turns out that that's asking quite a lot.
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email from father in law
by outsmartthesystem ini've been a little busy recently.
but in accordance with some of you (and against the advice of many of you)....i did send my 607 research to my fil.
his response is below.
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Sulla
I endorse Ann's recommendation. The JW plan is to offer up full-spectrum defense -- otherwise known as changing the subject. You have your opening with the comment about "assumptions," grab hold of it and don't let go.
"You mentioned assumptions that everybody uses. Can we go through the list of kings to see what those assumptions are?"
Good luck, you'll need it. Just make sure you don't go talking about more than one thing at a time. That's the JW game.
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76
Atheist Book of Bible Stories
by crystlew123 inok so i dl'd this book.
and i immediatly began reading it.
i am about 50 pdf pages into it.
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Sulla
I'm celebrating the real Sulla. Amazing fellow, really.