Noah
Posts: 1660
Joined: 7/5/2005
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: anthrosub]My point in saying all this is that the Bible's content and the religions based on it are all doing the same thing...taking ideas and putting together a story to explain things and expecting everyone to simply accept them. You read the Bible, it tells you the story...end of story. Nothing more needs to be asked if you're a good Christian (or Jew)
All kidding aside--and it is ripe territory for humor--I have never encountered a Christian, not even the most literalistic bible-thumper, who holds what you attribute across all Christianity, though there may be some silent monk in a cave somewhere for whom it happens to be true.
Any preacher or proseltyzer who does more than quietly point to the book acknowledges that the Bible is not the whole story. Each word that preacher dares to say beyond scriptural quotes is an addendum to the story.
The gospels, offered as four accounts by four men (whatever the historical case may be) set this pattern. The story can't be told in one telling and it can no more be told in four. It continues to be told, and not just retold, and not only told in writing or in speech.
In fact in various places the Bible makes clear that it is not the whole story. It says that Jesus said these things and others which were not written down. This indicates that there is more truth to be found. It says to look to the natural world for divine truth revealed: "the lilies of the field." It says that "the story" it purports to tell is delivered in any number of ways and continues to be delivered, that it is never all told.
So never mind the idea of the Bible being "the whole story." The Bible itself rejects this.
As for your claim that the Abrahamic religions (all) expect "simple acceptance," well that's just silly. Start with Abraham's own story. Do you see a willingness to sacrifice your own son as a simple matter, or one which could be arrived at simply? Your gloss on this matter strikes me as wildy naive. It is a story after all about people, not cardboard characters. People as real as Abraham Lincoln or Romeo or Juliet, for none of whom does the acceptance of What Is come simply.
The literature of that religion is rife with detailed accounts of just how torturous, how lacking in solace is the process by which some people, perhaps most people come to accept the truth of this story in a way that is nmore than naive. Does the dark night of the soul ring a bell? Have you ever read the Mystics and their accounts of the Bible or do you rely for your opinions upon some subset of television preachers or a comparable set of sources? Even televangelists share accounts of trials and tribulations.
Simple acceptance? Hardly.
Anyone may eschew this or any other religion or all religion who chooses to. His soul is in peril, of course, but then so are mine and yours and Benny Hinn's and the frickin' Pope's.
And if you can't cope with that presentation you can throw it away. The truth beneath it can be found and stated without any reference to "souls" or "peril". There are all kinds of ways to say "I love you" or to leave your lover or to achieve any other meaning.
But anyone kids himself if he imagines that he demonstrates a superior degree of guts or vision by hiding his head in the sand-- or pointing and laughing--when presented with the subject matter of spirituality. He kids himself if he imagines that his faith in reason, say, in logic and empiricism, or in Science or in the cold hard lessons of the street is anything else than the acceptance of a story handed down through generations, if with a briefer pedigree. Not that the lessons of the streets don't have the longest pedigree of all.
Is anyone bothered that the Bible's story doesn't make sense? Okay. But look, making sense is one of the subjects of the story. If I wanted to write a book to help you understand playing "Monopoly" you could hardly ask me to write it "according to the rules of Monopoly" irrespective of the fact that for one shining silly moment that might seem, to a child perhaps, like a fair standard to hold my "Monopoly" book to.
There are more modes of understanding than simply making sense. That one is really pretty rudimentary, but if it happens to be as faras you've gotten of course you're tempted to think it is The Shit.
If any of the Abrahamic stories are about what they purport to be about it would be just silly to disengage your encounter with them simply on the basis of nonsensicality. The same would go, it seems to me, in case of an insufficiency of any other particular mode of understanding.
Understanding, and Modes, they are also part of the subject matter of The Story and as your logic teacher taught you, viciously circularly is the plight of those who try to understand a thing in a manner like that.
Shit man, I mean if you require that things make sense the first thing you have to give up is women, the second thing is people generally, the third thing is life. When you've abandoned all those that would be a good time to start critiquing religion as nonsense.
Yeah it is nonsense. That's a given. And you can strive to impose some sensible order on it with varying degrees of success but you'll eventually fail that that's okay because intellectual masturbation anyway to try to impose that order. And that goes as well whether you are C.S. Lewis writing his lame-ass Apologetics or Joe saying "This thing doesn't exist."
They are both attempts to impose a framework from the top, so to speak and neither ever gets near the bottom of things.
Will you critique music for not being tall enough? You won't get to the bottom of things that way. Art for not being fully describable as an algebraic equation? Of course not. That would be silly.
Besides the huge architectural edifices of the church buildings themselves there obviously exists a huge and many-roomed edifice of doctrine and hierarchy and politics and more crap. There is no end to the valid complaints that can be laid at all their doors. Lot's of the worst things ever done were done in the name of this edifice.
It is also true though that there exists a huge edifice of history, literature and community which functions precisely--but of course by no means solely--to assist with the task, which is anything but simple, of finding and inhabiting the truth of that story. And yes this edifice is all too often used in ways antithetical to this purpose, just as happens in politics or business. What the fuck. There you go, right?
And the truth of the story has exactly nothing to do with whether James was the brother of Jesus, or with whether God can create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it, though you are welcome to build a career around either dispute, or fry up some similar but novel silliness in case you can't get a real job (and I do hope everyone can see who that is and isn't a poke at; not the OP, certainly.)
People who bail out on that story and others like it before attaining a mature view, or otherwise at the first sign of trouble, and then criticize it roundly and in a cavalier manner are to me like people who pass or flunk arithmatic in grade school and then quit. Thise ones who spend spare moments for the rest of their lives pontificating based on their experience about the pointless, even imaginary nature of, say, Calculus, Topology, and Mereology
If you aren't interested, that's cool. If you've found another way, that's cool too. A grown-up reading of the Bible, like a grown-up reading of the central texts of various other traditions will validate that it is cool. But childish and/or sophistical critiques of a thing one has never grasped are pretty uninteresting.
My comments have not been leveled at the original poster as a person. They are in response to the quoted section of the original post and some of his further remarks as well as other things I have seen in my very partial reading of this thread.
I credit the original poster for trying to open a discussion here, whatever his biases may or may not be. May The Force and Ganesha be on everyone's side.
|
RE: The Bible and Common Sense - 
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