njlauren
Posts: 1577
Joined: 10/1/2011
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyConstanze
Well I never studied theology but just common sense and a keen interest in science works.
Look, I'm not trying to take anybody's faith away, I grew up very Catholic, I'm friends with several people of different faiths, including a priest (I help him train his dog as it's a bit embarrassing that said dog likes to bite people who come to have a talk with the priest), personally for me the bible didn't do it, too many contradictions, I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic (in such that I find the existence of a god very unlikely), but due to growing up and being in a Catholic boarding school run by nuns, I'm very familiar with the bible....
Earlier on you quoted that if I don't recognize Jesus as my saviour, I'll burn in hell, strangely enough a priest disagrees with that, he thinks I'm a pretty decent person and the Jesus he worships would put more value on what a person does than what a person believes, as in actions speak louder than words.
However if you take the bible as god's word and believe in it, then how can you ignore passages? It's god's word or it isn't, if your god is infallible, then how can you ignore some passages? Wouldn't that mean hell?
As for the fathers of your babies, if I would be a believer, I would pray that your taste in men improves, leaving the nitty gritty about what the bible says about sex outside of marriage and divorce completely aside.
The answer to your question is that simply while the bible is the book of God, what that means is not easy. Fundamentalists believe that the bible is literal truth, that the words literally are God, and that if it says it, well, it is true...the problem with that is it totally throws away the bible and its inherent problems, the contradictions, the way it was written (the NT has no 'original' texts, it took 4 centuries to create an 'official' bible that Jerome cobbled together from the greek texts he had....and he himself wrote about the difficulties of that. The Catholic Church is not 'sola scriptura' because they knew the Bible was not perfect,they knew it had holes, it is why church teaching in Catholicism is as important as scripture.
The bible is a book of faith, those writing it were inspired to write it, but they were not God, the bible did not drop from the sky like the 10c's. The Hebrew Scripture was written over a period of almost 800 years, it was not 'locked down" until around 200 BCE and it was written in distinct periods of time, that shaped the nature of it. There are two accounts of Genesis because two different groups wrote it, Leviticus was written/rewritten in the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian exile and it shows that influence, and so forth. The NT was oral tales written down, we don't know by who, and they were hand copied time and again, often by illiterate slaves copying the Greek characters one by one......and the texts were edited, miscopied, and had comments written on them that because coded as scripture. Put it this way, there are around 1500 greek NT texts, dating back only to about the 4th century for the earlier ones, and there are like 350,000 discrepencies between them..so which is the truth?
You don't cherry pick (though Fundies do that all the time, though they deny it, they love to cite leviticus and its anti homosexual stuff but ignore the rest as "jewish cultural law"..really?). The bible needs to be read with discernment, and it needs to be pondered and thought out, God if you belive God made us gave us brains to think with, and emotions to feel with.....the people who wrote the bible texts felt something, and were trying to express it, but they were human, with biases and cultural beliefs that influenced how they wrote it. Both books of the bible say we are supposed to love one another, not judge one another and help one another, it is the sum of the law in both books, and if so that is likely something that is meant to be....but other things? Not eating shellfish? Paul's rants against women and sex? You have to try and comprehend it and in effect say "what is there between the lines".... the fundamentalist view of the bible is what you are kind of taking, and it simply isn't what Christianity was for so many centuries, Fundamentalism came about only around the 1830's, the idea that the bible was perfect, and to me it is as wrong as saying the bible is basically a book of myths, they both miss the point, that the bible's meaning is in its depths. Judaism has a major difference, and it is one I think is right, an observant Jew is supposed to read scripture, look around himself and say "What is God trying to say to me?". In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher, people are supposed to find the truth with his/her help, the whole Christian idea that the Church or priest can only intercede with God is something they created (the church), and it takes out the fundamental relationship people are supposed to have with God, and our brains as well as our hearts are supposed to be involved. Discernment is doing that, figuring out what it is supposed to be, so it isn't cherry picking, it is reading it for what it is trying to tell us.
|
RE: Christianity and BDSM - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread