Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
If you have been a good boy (Catholic "works") or if you have been chosen (Protestant "grace")
Yeah, the specifics vary from denomination to denomination, and are at times controversial inside a given denomination.
I tend to think that regardless of such concerns, the right thing is to be all you can be, including being a good boy, for the simple reason that the right thing is the right thing. I'm not concerned with "sin" (i.e. gross misses), or with "salvation", or whatever. Nor am I inclined to act a particular way to gain some supposed reward, or to avoid some supposed punishment. If, by chance, some sort of afterlife should await (a big if, not one to base life on), and said afterlife should be subject to some sort of judgment (yet another big if, again not one to base life on), then I will be judged as who and what I am. That's either good enough or not, and I won't compromise myself to fit someone else's standards.
If the big guy wants something, he can tell me and I might be inclined to listen (after verifying that I'm not hallucinating), seeing as I'm a rather big fan and all. But whatever may or may not have been said in the past, the best we can hope for at present is that a core idea is still present there. And what I read as the core idea happens to agree with my take on things.
quote:
Otherwise, everlasting pain and suffering in the fires of Hell for you, bro. Your soul damned for eternity.
Yeah, yanno, the original was that if you "failed", you would simply cease to exist. Hell and all that was invented later. Keep all the people in line with a handy threat or two. It works for most people, what with the law and all that being based on it. I stick with an idea of right and wrong. If doing the right thing earns me a spanking, so be it.
Anyway, it's arguably a useful idea for the vast majority of people if you change the politics in it (e.g. patriarchy), since it's a well established fact that people who believe their actions to be observed, or who believe their actions will be judged later on, make a lot better decisions and exhibit a lot more discipline in sticking to their better decisions. The two problems with that, of course, is a combination of a lack of sufficient belief in it being so and a doctrine that has accumulated a lot of politics over time, much of it all fucked up.
I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that the original pantheons were those of Ea (later El) and Asherah, Ba'al Hadad and Anat, Leviathan, the melachim... oh, and this guy called Yahweh, who became fairly popular later on, recast as Yahweh Elohim after a merger with El in terms of the cults that worshipped them. You could go back further, of course, if you're going to skip on some requirements of continuity, as the cult of El goes back through the days of Marduk to Ea, Anu, Enlil, Ninlil and Enki, and so on. To say that a few things were changed along the way would be a gross understatement, and one of the main changes was that a few central redactors took out a lot of the original diversity, harped on women, and went amok with the whole monotheism bit.
The New Testament era reintroduces the notion of an unseen deity behind the pantheon, consigning the rest of the various gods and goddesses to the role of intermediaries and human ideas and so forth, and makes an attempt at reintroducing some of the feminine sides of the religion. The Romans do not approve overmuch of this, being extremely patriarchal, and the Catholics go through several changes from the very beginning, including one guy that was driven almost exclusively by his poor relations to women, and the whole thing gets buried in politics.
Hell is one of many tools used to get a political result, unrelated to the core idea through the ages, which is pretty gnostic in nature.
The details of what kind of sex you choose to have is secondary to the greater whole of what kind of relationship you have.
The bible is about life, and people make it all about death, which is missing the point (the very definition of sin).
IWYW,
- Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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