Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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fucktoyprincess,
I've sometimes been accused of being sensible. To whatever extent that may be true, I've carried that over into my spiritual life, as well as applying it to my religious beliefs. I have a distillation that makes sense. It will take a long time to type that out. If I ever complete it, you'll be welcome to audit my logic. In the mean time, you're invited to distil your own worldview, beliefs, morals and values for me in a manner that makes sense to me. If you can do so and I don't spot any glaringly obvious flaws or omissions and I can't do the same for mine to a similar standard, I will be duly impressed with you and duly disappointed with myself.
As you say, I oversimplified in the second passage you quoted. If you read it again, you will find that I specifically stated that I was doing so intentionally. That being said, I have been accused of oversimplifying quite often, and indeed I usually do, this being a forum and not a thesis paper, but you're right in implying that I make some small effort to keep things nuanced enough to be useful, or entertaining if not. Insofar as it holds true this time, you may be missing my point.
Religious texts are not religious beliefs.
That is a crucial point to bear in mind.
Further, churches are not religions.
What lies at the heart of being a religious person, as opposed to just a literalminded submissive, is to be discerning and intuitive at the same time, without falling into the trap of more pedestrian cultural conservativism in the process. To look at an instance and derive the class. To go from the expression of a principle, to the principle itself, and even to the intent underlying it. Further, to oneself express the principle in any context one is in. For the truly ambitious, in some cases, there is also the question of striving for perfection, that being the process of seeing the complete and unbroken whole in its pure state, free of the accumulated detrius and corruption our minds project on it, involving quite a bit of work on oneself to get there, if that's even possible without gnosis.
Classic churches offer an alternative to being religious, and a way to get together with people of a similar disposition, some of which are religious, but most just being churchgoers that listen to someone they believe to be religious. Of course, this is also encouraged. And it is not without its parallells. Judges are still interpreting the secular law these days. We don't call them priests anymore, of course, and we bring more grievances before them than we used to, even though the difficult questions have been shifted onto the media instead. But the bottom line remains: thinking was the first job humans thought to outsource, and outsourcing it is as popular as it's ever been. Churches provide a service in that field.
Now, granted, if one views a religion as a law to follow, codified in some text, then obviously the question becomes one of following the whole law. Most people don't follow the whole law, whatever law we're talking about. That's a thing about humans and laws that I doubt will ever change, and I fail to see how religion is a special case in that regard. I think religion is at a much higher level of abstraction than mere law, though. An atheist friend of mine called it "lobbing a bundle of insight down the ages and hoping someone will catch it", which is certainly a possibility. Either way, law doesn't really seem to be an adequate approach.
See, from my perspective, even if one follows the "law" to the letter, one is picking and choosing, rather than actually grasping the idea and living the underlying principles, because those principles imply laws that have not been put into the text, and implies the invalidity of some that are in the text, and that's just dealing with the inadequate and beurocratic notion of religion as law-centric. Back when the civil rights movement started out, the issue may superficially have been rights for black people, but the greater issue is universal rights. For this reason, I think rights for one minority was picking and choosing in this sense. The Desmond Tutu quote someone here uses as a signature line is one that springs readily to mind.
When looking at something through a warped lens, one gets a distorted picture, and so obviously source criticism remains a healthy idea, as does the thing I mentioned earlier about arriving at the underlying from the superficial. This applies to women as property, too. After agriculture, first women, and later also men, became owned livestock. As you should remember from American history, it's not trivial to tell people that such a thing is wrong. That's the cultural context in which the superficial is expressed, attested in the texts, but from which we must extract the underlying meaning to be able to express it in our own context. Doing so may be exceedingly difficult to some, and is not exactly simplified by the presence of a history of people fucking things up for their own reasons. In Christianity, several misogynistic pricks have messed with the text and the living traditions, plus passing through the Graeco-Roman period doesn't exactly do anyone any favors as far as women go.
An eye for an eye introduces porportionality as a limiting condition, which is a very strange and revolutionary idea to anyone not used to it. Body parts are not what it's about. If you poke my eye out and I don't poke yours out in return, it's not because I'm disregarding this, even if the text isn't being adhered literally to. Similarly, taking a hammer to my laptop does have some consequences that are covered by this principle, even if the text doesn't spell out anything about computers. And it's a simple principle, after all. Moving forward is, then, discovering the rest there is to it.
You can no doubt form the plural of the nonsense word "klomper", which would be "klompers", and the past tense of "frobs", which would be "frobbed". This is because you grasp the idea of English, not because you're good with a dictionary or because you've read a copy of your style manual of choice. Refusing to form "klompers" and "frobbed" is as much an omission, whatever the dictionary says, as would be the forming of "reet" instead of "roots" when you're pluralizing "root" (a matter of pattern dominance; though the actual pattern itself was correctly applied).
But let's take the analogy one step further. If I ask my dear to pluralize "walkman", she will render it as "walkmen". For a native speaker, it is generally instinctive to render it as "walkmans" instead, and "walkmen" usually "doesn't sound right". If I ask you about the passages you quoted, you pretty much render them as "stone them bitchuz". As a native Christian, I have to say, that "doesn't sound right".
We getting any closer to an agreement here?
IWYW,
— Aswad.
P.S.: If you feel there's a point I failed to address, I'll be happy to go back and do so.
_____________________________
"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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RE: Now God intended rape to happen. - 
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