Recommended religious/philosophical texts
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Author Topic: Recommended religious/philosophical texts  (Read 1192 times)
DemPGH
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« Reply #25 on: November 19, 2012, 02:46:14 PM »

Nathan deleted his response which is in part good because it was a little uncharacteristic of him .

I was going to rewrite it in more detail and with less exasperation later on, probably sometime tomorrow, if that's all right with you. I'll be able to address the things you're saying here too, then.

A lot of what you're saying does touch on why I think the whole exercise is pointless and a little offensive to people who do see value in the supernatural portions of these stories; frankly it seems like a dismally dreary thing to spend one's time on if one isn't going to be a Christian anyway. And that's part of why it irritates me so much, to the point of writing responses that I then realize need to be reconsidered.

From my perspective it's not a dismally dreary exercise if you're referring to the Bible, because with philosophical and historical works (especially one as broad and diverse as the Bible), it's almost never an all-or-nothing deal.
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Nathan
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« Reply #26 on: November 19, 2012, 04:44:03 PM »

Nathan deleted his response which is in part good because it was a little uncharacteristic of him .

I was going to rewrite it in more detail and with less exasperation later on, probably sometime tomorrow, if that's all right with you. I'll be able to address the things you're saying here too, then.

A lot of what you're saying does touch on why I think the whole exercise is pointless and a little offensive to people who do see value in the supernatural portions of these stories; frankly it seems like a dismally dreary thing to spend one's time on if one isn't going to be a Christian anyway. And that's part of why it irritates me so much, to the point of writing responses that I then realize need to be reconsidered.

From my perspective it's not a dismally dreary exercise if you're referring to the Bible, because with philosophical and historical works (especially one as broad and diverse as the Bible), it's almost never an all-or-nothing deal.

No, it's not, it's just, I mean, why the Bible of all books in that situation?
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #27 on: November 19, 2012, 06:55:40 PM »

Secondly, there are plenty of examples of prophets telling people to do better on this Earth. Suddenly Jesus shows up, says "I am the Son of God." committing a capital crime in the process, and for what? Making the world a better place? I just don't see it happening. People don't risk death for theological claims if they don't believe them themselves.

He may have believed his own claim. There were dozens of would be 'messiah's' walking around Judea at that time; Simon of Peraea in 4BCE, Athronges in 3CE, Menahem Ben Judah and so on. That doesn't mean he (or they) were correct or courageous.

Yeah, and there's another possibility. It seems there's a history, at least in the Bible and in Christianity, that when someone really, really, really wants other people to do something or to live a certain way, they invoke God. "God pulled me aside and told me to tell all of you people this or that." Which seems very strange to my limited, rational mind. If it's enough to get God's attention, I think God would just tell people. Not leave cryptic notes lying about or speak through the gibberish that is the Revelation.

So your argument boils down to conjecture about Jesus' real intentions against his documented words. On an unrelated note, I think Lenin was secretly a reactionary capitalist. He obviously just invoked Marx to push the message Roll Eyes
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #28 on: November 19, 2012, 07:19:38 PM »

On an unrelated note, I think Lenin was secretly a reactionary capitalist. He obviously just invoked Marx to push the message Roll Eyes

At least we have texts Lenin wrote to use as an absolute record of what he was saying.  We have no such texts written by Jesus.
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DemPGH
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« Reply #29 on: November 20, 2012, 08:36:26 AM »

Nathan deleted his response which is in part good because it was a little uncharacteristic of him .

I was going to rewrite it in more detail and with less exasperation later on, probably sometime tomorrow, if that's all right with you. I'll be able to address the things you're saying here too, then.

A lot of what you're saying does touch on why I think the whole exercise is pointless and a little offensive to people who do see value in the supernatural portions of these stories; frankly it seems like a dismally dreary thing to spend one's time on if one isn't going to be a Christian anyway. And that's part of why it irritates me so much, to the point of writing responses that I then realize need to be reconsidered.

From my perspective it's not a dismally dreary exercise if you're referring to the Bible, because with philosophical and historical works (especially one as broad and diverse as the Bible), it's almost never an all-or-nothing deal.

No, it's not, it's just, I mean, why the Bible of all books in that situation?


I would say, why not the Bible? To start with, there's the off-quoted John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." That's a pretty good reason, in other words to really zero in on what the man was teaching. Second, the basis is rationalism. Brent D. Glass, historian, summed it up this way: "By removing all references to superstition and supernatural, Jefferson made clear his admiration of Jesus as a great teacher and moral philosopher while, at the same time, reaffirming his belief in and commitment to the power of reason as the basis for understanding life and the natural world." Absolutely. Something like the virgin birth is simply not, I would add, congruent with what we know about the natural world. It's fantasy.

And because the Bible is the most owned and read book by FAR in the West, and has been misapplied in order to perform so much harm through the ages (witch trials, heresy trials, Crusades), focusing directly on what was being taught by its supposed founder seems a very reasonable and even necessary course of action.

Unfortunately, what actually happened is Christianity became co-opted by bureaucracies and fringe personalities, dangerous people who in my opinion got off message and got consumed by all that supernatural myth and out of it invented a religion of rigid orthodoxy and mysticism. They used Christianity to justify slavery (how that can even happen is beyond me) and the other things I mentioned. Now what Jefferson did was maybe the wisest thing anyone ever did with the Bible. It showed how most of Christian behavior through the ages didn't match the teacher.

BTW, anyone see or read The Last Temptation of Christ? I'm a fan of Scorsese, and I loved his movie. I've not read the book. Good old Harvey Keitel as Judas was a bit of a stretch, but it marks the movie as a Scorsese picture. Smiley
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DemPGH
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« Reply #30 on: November 20, 2012, 08:41:23 AM »

Secondly, there are plenty of examples of prophets telling people to do better on this Earth. Suddenly Jesus shows up, says "I am the Son of God." committing a capital crime in the process, and for what? Making the world a better place? I just don't see it happening. People don't risk death for theological claims if they don't believe them themselves.

He may have believed his own claim. There were dozens of would be 'messiah's' walking around Judea at that time; Simon of Peraea in 4BCE, Athronges in 3CE, Menahem Ben Judah and so on. That doesn't mean he (or they) were correct or courageous.

Yeah, and there's another possibility. It seems there's a history, at least in the Bible and in Christianity, that when someone really, really, really wants other people to do something or to live a certain way, they invoke God. "God pulled me aside and told me to tell all of you people this or that." Which seems very strange to my limited, rational mind. If it's enough to get God's attention, I think God would just tell people. Not leave cryptic notes lying about or speak through the gibberish that is the Revelation.

So your argument boils down to conjecture about Jesus' real intentions against his documented words. On an unrelated note, I think Lenin was secretly a reactionary capitalist. He obviously just invoked Marx to push the message Roll Eyes

Many people claimed to be the son of God. It helps get the point across! Smiley

Second, you can't take everything literally in the Bible, that's been established. And if you do, the further back you go in the Bible, well, I guess you'll have to kill your neighbors for being infidels if they don't worship as you do.
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Nathan
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« Reply #31 on: November 20, 2012, 08:42:01 AM »
« Edited: November 20, 2012, 08:43:51 AM by Nathan »

That's all well and good, the problem is, as I've said before, your third paragraph is a hugely odd view of early Christian history. John, in particular, is a gospel that I really don't understand attempting to quote (or quote-mine, as the case may be) in the services of a less-than-supernatural-laden interpretation of Jesus, and I don't think most scholars do.

Last Temptation is excellent. I'd strongly recommend the original book to you, or to most anyone.
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afleitch
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« Reply #32 on: November 20, 2012, 10:38:38 AM »

I think DemPGH, the New Testament has been used to justify just about every good action and every bad or contrary action conceived over the past two millennia. As a moral guide it is sub par, inconsistent even as I explained early in parts explicitly immoral But for those who want to believe in the supernatural, life after death and other comforting phenomena it's good stuff. So let them have it.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #33 on: November 20, 2012, 12:34:52 PM »

Secondly, there are plenty of examples of prophets telling people to do better on this Earth. Suddenly Jesus shows up, says "I am the Son of God." committing a capital crime in the process, and for what? Making the world a better place? I just don't see it happening. People don't risk death for theological claims if they don't believe them themselves.

He may have believed his own claim. There were dozens of would be 'messiah's' walking around Judea at that time; Simon of Peraea in 4BCE, Athronges in 3CE, Menahem Ben Judah and so on. That doesn't mean he (or they) were correct or courageous.

Yeah, and there's another possibility. It seems there's a history, at least in the Bible and in Christianity, that when someone really, really, really wants other people to do something or to live a certain way, they invoke God. "God pulled me aside and told me to tell all of you people this or that." Which seems very strange to my limited, rational mind. If it's enough to get God's attention, I think God would just tell people. Not leave cryptic notes lying about or speak through the gibberish that is the Revelation.

So your argument boils down to conjecture about Jesus' real intentions against his documented words. On an unrelated note, I think Lenin was secretly a reactionary capitalist. He obviously just invoked Marx to push the message Roll Eyes

Many people claimed to be the son of God. It helps get the point across! Smiley

Second, you can't take everything literally in the Bible, that's been established. And if you do, the further back you go in the Bible, well, I guess you'll have to kill your neighbors for being infidels if they don't worship as you do.

Sure, but the question is what they believe, not how many of them exist. The bulk of would-be messiahs think they are in fact messiahs, no? This is a question of how context and intentions. "He said, "I am the son of God."" is fairly clear cut, especially without evidence indicating that Jesus did not view himself to be God.

As for literalism, I view most, but not all Old Testament law being specific civil law handed down to the Israelites, which should have been taken literally then. It is not moral law
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Yelnoc
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« Reply #34 on: November 20, 2012, 01:15:31 PM »

To the OP:

Definitely check out the Universal House of Justice's One Common Faith.  You can read it online here.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #35 on: November 20, 2012, 01:38:00 PM »

The Bible relies (at a fundamental level) on a dense structure of symbolism, metaphor, allusion and other fun stuff, and this is as true of its second part as its first. Stripping this away is actively idiotic as well as entirely pointless.
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The Mikado
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« Reply #36 on: November 20, 2012, 03:04:24 PM »

The Mikado / Nathan:

Absolutely agree with you both regarding the supernatural in ancient texts. Indeed, human beings had absolutely no concrete knowledge about how anything worked (outsiders like Democritus were onto some things, yes, but they were rejected), including reproduction, which is why we get fantastical stories about virgin births. we also get stories about talking snakes, the Earth stopping and starting magically, God having a son who is really him and who he sends on some sort of suicide mission from which he'll rise from the dead, magic gardens, a man lying in the stomach of a fish for three days, raising the dead, and so on. Complete nonsense.

Now this is the wonder of the Jefferson Bible and Jeffersonian Christianity (and these days if there was such a thing as a Jeffersonian Christian, I would be one, but in the absence of such I am an agnostic): People like me don't need the supernatural. It's childish and produced by a culture that hadn't even evolved to conceptualize laws, let alone the subjects that discovered them: physics, chemistry, and biology. For me, church (and organized religion) are completely insufficient. Both fail, in other words. They fail critical analysis, and if any belief system fails critical analysis, it ain't sound.

Jefferson's compilation / edits comprise a rational text for a rational age. The heart of the matter is not hocus-pocus, it's a message about how to build a better community, which I think is what was at the heart of Jesus Christ's concerns.

I suppose you don't consider Aesop's Fables, one of the most insightful glimpses into human nature readable by children and adults alike, relevant because animals can't actually talk?
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CatoMinor
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« Reply #37 on: November 20, 2012, 03:55:43 PM »

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
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DemPGH
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« Reply #38 on: November 21, 2012, 08:39:17 AM »

The Mikado / Nathan:

Absolutely agree with you both regarding the supernatural in ancient texts. Indeed, human beings had absolutely no concrete knowledge about how anything worked (outsiders like Democritus were onto some things, yes, but they were rejected), including reproduction, which is why we get fantastical stories about virgin births. we also get stories about talking snakes, the Earth stopping and starting magically, God having a son who is really him and who he sends on some sort of suicide mission from which he'll rise from the dead, magic gardens, a man lying in the stomach of a fish for three days, raising the dead, and so on. Complete nonsense.

Now this is the wonder of the Jefferson Bible and Jeffersonian Christianity (and these days if there was such a thing as a Jeffersonian Christian, I would be one, but in the absence of such I am an agnostic): People like me don't need the supernatural. It's childish and produced by a culture that hadn't even evolved to conceptualize laws, let alone the subjects that discovered them: physics, chemistry, and biology. For me, church (and organized religion) are completely insufficient. Both fail, in other words. They fail critical analysis, and if any belief system fails critical analysis, it ain't sound.

Jefferson's compilation / edits comprise a rational text for a rational age. The heart of the matter is not hocus-pocus, it's a message about how to build a better community, which I think is what was at the heart of Jesus Christ's concerns.

I suppose you don't consider Aesop's Fables, one of the most insightful glimpses into human nature readable by children and adults alike, relevant because animals can't actually talk?

Oh, absolutely not. In fact, fables are a good thing to bring up. No one is claiming that they are literally true, literally happened, or are the word of God! Fables and science fiction, for example, exaggerate purposely human behavior in order to make statements about society. That's not what the Bible is doing, and alliteration and symbolism are not why people read the Bible.
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