Tag Archives: Bible

Religion

Which one shall we go with?

The husband’s been reading Obama’s Audacity of Hope and shared the following part about religious supremacy with me.

Having the same question myself, I thought I’d to share it with you all.

… let’s even assume that we only had Christians within our borders. Whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?

Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests that slavery is all right and eating shellfish is an abomination?

How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defense Department would survive it’s application?

This passage can be found on pg. 218. He downplays the whole slavery thing, but at least he makes the point.

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Religion

Scholars to study Historical Jesus

Well over a decade ago when I was still very interested in the truthfulness of Christianity a group of scholars got together and decided to find out if the words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Christian text where in fact accurate.

They concluded that Jesus was little more than a two thousand year old street preacher who said/did less than half of what has been attributed to him.

Now there’s another group getting together and their goal is somewhat different in that they plan to determine if there actually was a street preacher named Jesus.

An initiative of the Center for Inquiry, an Amherst-based secular think tank, and its Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), the project is an extension of the no-less controversial Jesus Seminar, which has been convening twice annually for 23 years.

There’s one key difference: Whereas the Seminar has operated on the premise that Jesus was an actual person – it was what he said and did that is up for grabs – the scholars in this latest effort regard Jesus’s existence as a “testable hypothesis.”

…

Like judges in a courtroom, project members will sift through mountains of material to ascertain what evidence is admissible, stripping away theological and mythical accretions.

“We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us,” writes project chair R. Joseph Hoffman, an historian of religion at State University of New York, on the initiative’s website.

The scholars say they do not believe their task is to produce a “plausible” portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives the Gospel writers had in telling his story, and their intended audience.

Personally, I’m of the mind that there was no literal Jesus as to my knowledge there really isn’t any historical record of the man himself, just the various Christian sects.  Even if there was such a man, I think he’s lost to time and can never be reconstructed without the invention of time travel.

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Religious Right

Did you see this one coming?

Newsweek recently ran an article about the religious case for marriage equality.  The professional Christian set is, shall we say, not happy?

Leading social conservatives blasted Newsweek for its current cover story, “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” which they said misinterprets both biblical scripture and their own political movement.

“It doesn’t surprise me. Newsweek has been so far in the tank on the homosexual issue, for so long, they need scuba gear and breathing apparatus,” said Richard Land, who heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of anyone who takes biblical teachings seriously.”

Tony Perkins, president of the socially conservative Family Research Council, agreed, calling Newsweek’s cover story “yet another attack on orthodox Christianity.”

What Newsweek ought to have done is print an article about the religious case for executing “anyone who takes biblical teachings seriously” yet continues to eat shellfish.

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News, Religious Right

What the state asks for, the state gets

bible_cage Six chaplains in Virginia have resigned, dozens more have signed a protest letter and there’s talk of having a rally outside the governor’s pad on November 1, just a few days before the election.  All allege that they’re the victims of religious persecution.

In this case it’s persecution because the state enacted a policy forbidding sectarian prayers at publicly sponsored events and is thus “expunging our Judeo-Christian heritage from the public square” because “in the name of tolerance, public faith is frowned upon”.

Of course, that’s a lie.  Not being able to force your religious views on others especially at a public event is not persecution.  It’s a realistic expectation of neutrality and plain old good manners.

It’s also a lie that that prayer cannot be stripped of its sectarian nature, but that’s another subject.  Today’s subject is the state getting exactly what it asked for which is grief from the religious set.

The real answer is not to strip prayer of “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah” and the like, but to stop inserting prayers of any sort into public events.

No one can complain about not being able to say “In Jesus name we pray, amen” if no one is up in front of the attendees praying to begin with. Yes, the religious set will cry about it, but so what? It seems to me that every time we give them an inch, they insist that anything less than a mile is “persecution”.

For example, they’ve gotten their inch here in Texas by managing to get the Bible into the schools as an elective course.  Now certain supporters are attempting to get an extremely biased curriculum that got one school here in Texas sued and is peddled by right wing Protestant Christians such as Chuck Norris as the course material.

An inch is never enough for the religious right and the sooner we learn this the better off we’ll be.

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Religion, Science

The problem with moderate Christians

The problem with moderate Christians is that they are unwilling to bluntly state that the conservatives are wrong and will hem and haw to avoid bluntly stating that the Bible itself is wrong. If there’s one subject that they clearly show this tendency on, it is evolution.

A simple reading of the bible makes it quite obvious that it states Yaweh created the planet and everything that it is on it. It goes on to state that our species was created “as-is” and that we were given dominion over the earth:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Genesis 1:26)

As the biblical authors were pretty obsessed with their lineage to such a degree that the bible contains insanely long lists of who “begat” who, one can conclude that all this took place approximately six thousand years ago.

Modern scientists, on the other hand, have generally concluded that the universe came into existence approximately 14 billion years ago and that our planet came into existence a mere 4 billion years ago with life making it’s first appearance somewhere around 1 billion years later.

Furthermore, our species did not appear until 200,000 years ago. We are not a distinct species, but a kind of ape. We are not a result of an alien “making” us nor did some ancestor suddenly spring to life when the same alien breathed upon dirt, we are a product of evolution as are the other species.

One does not have to be a genius to figure out that these two stories are not “complimentary”, but contradictory. The Bible states it went down in a very particular way and gives no evidence that it was not serious about it. In fact, the biblical creation story has been understood to be a factual account since it was written down approximately two thousand years ago.

It has never been understood to be a “timeless truth” and the majority of Americans thoroughly reject such claims with (as of 2006) 55% believing that Yaweh created our species “as-is“. Support for this “as-is” theory has actually increased in the last decade or so from roughly 40 to 45 percent of the population.

So not only are the moderates fudging about what the Bible actually states and what is actually believed by Christians, they are also apparently lying about what what they actually believe because if they did actually accept the conclusions of science and are the alleged majority they claim to be – the percentage of Americans who actually accepted the conclusions of modern science would be higher than it is.

This makes them a problem rather they like it or not for as long they continue to insist that Bible is “complimentary” to reality, the nutballs will continue believing that it is still acceptable to believe the Bible story is a factual account. They will continue to think that “creationism” or “intelligent design” should be taught in our public schools as “science” and more generations will grow up in an education system terrified of contradicting the now absurd and unfounded belief that a “magic man did it” .

The fact of the matter is that moderates have to give up their fairytale once and for all by admitting that the biblical creation story is merely an account that a certain group of humans once believed was a truthful account but is now contradicted by the findings of modern science. It’s the only way we’re going to get out of this mess we’re in here in America.

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News, Religion

It’s not about the Bible per se…

but two sisters are refusing to return to school after an incident at their school. The incident in question concerns a classmate who decided to rip pages out of a Bible.

As many Parker High School students get ready for Christmas break, junior Elle Jacobson is at home and will not be returning like her friends.

“I have never felt threatened like that in a classroom before,” said Jacobson.

The 17-year-old is talking about an incident in her English class two weeks ago during a class presentation.”

This boy got up and his visual aid was a Bible and a book. And he got up and started his speech by saying ‘Now, this piece of crap’ and pointed to the Bible.”Jacobson said that she quickly felt threatened.”He took the Bible and he said, ‘I’m going to do this because I can. I’m going to do something that your stupid, little minds aren’t going to be able to comprehend and he took the Bible and started ripping out pages.”

What caught my eye is that the Bible was only one of the books the unnamed student held up.  The second is alleged to have been a collection of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  If you’re familiar with Emerson’s work then you know that a reoccurring theme is that conformity is a vice.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Emerson:

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, …the upbuilding of a man” (99).

Conformity in America as it relates to the Bible is that the collection of works is something good, worthy of being preserved – despite what one may actually think of the collection.  It’s the foolish face of praise, the forced smile.  If this unnamed  book was in fact the student’s second book, it puts his remark about doing something the other student’s could not comprehend into striking context and proved his point.

“Little minds” cannot fathom that someone would look upon a revered symbol and precede to destroy it.   Such minds retreat back to the castle, where all is safe and sound.

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Atheism

Teacher fired for not taking Bible seriously?

Need a reason why the Bible and all other religious texts should be kept at home/church and out of schools? Here’s one for you. A professor has apparently been fired for using the Bible academically in his western civilization class after being threatened with a lawsuit for telling a student outside of class that he did not take the story of Adam and Eve literally.

“I put the Hebrew religion on the same plane as any other religion. Their god wasn’t given any more credibility than any other god,” Bitterman said. “I told them it was an extremely meaningful story, but you had to see it in a poetic, metaphoric or symbolic sense, that if you took it literally, that you were going to miss a whole lot of meaning there.”

Bitterman said he called the story of Adam and Eve a “fairy tale” in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney. He declined to identify any of the students in the class.

Need I remind you that these are not 10 year old kids, but young adults?

The fact of the matter is that the Bible cannot be taught as an academic text. It’s not. It’s a religious text and until it’s gods are dead, it’s going to remain that way. There’s no way around it. The majority of the American population is quite emotionally attached to that book and the special place it assigns them in the grand scheme of things.

They will not take kindly to being told differently under any circumstances.

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