[extropy-chat] Way, way, way over the edge...

[Darin Sunley]

On 4/18/06, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The site I referenced does quote chapter and verse and discusses what
> the writers were actually talking about 2,000 years ago and how
> different modern schools of religion interpret those verses.
>
> <http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibl.htm>
>
> It basically comes down to the fact that Xians take those verses to
> mean whatever they want them to mean.  Very useful technique.

Christians will frequently disagree on how much emphasis to place on
varoius verses. While there is a tendency in certain denominations to
torture certain verses into meaning the opposite of what they actually
say, this is the same kind of postmodern sillyness that we see in
secular society, e.g. the Supreme Court deciding that "right to
private property" is consistent with "we can get more property taxes
from another owner, so we can seize anything we want with emminent
domain." Postmodern sentence-torturing is ridiculous no matter what
the context is, and the Bible actually speaks out against it
specifically. "Woe to them who call good evil and evil good."

There is really very few places in a the Bible that can't be
understood with a Grade 8 literacy level. The King James Version is a
little more archaic, but that says more about modern education than it
does about the language. The Old Testament is more susceptible to
misinterpretation than the New Testament, because it was written in a
very concrete worldview very different from our modern Greco-Roman
culture. The New Testament was written in a Greco-Roman cultural
worldview fundamentally similar to ours, so it's not as hard, assuming
some basic ideas common to their culture are held in mind.


>
> Of course, Xians should not be using the Old Testament at all, as Paul
> wrote that If we insist on placing ourselves under the old law, we are
> obligated to keep every commandment of the law (Gal. 5:3).
> i.e. you have to obey all the cleansing laws, sacrifices, death and
> other severe penalties for crimes, slavery, treatment of women as
> property, polygamy, etc. etc.

This is a common misconception that relates to the aforementioned
concepts that were common to their culture but are not so much in
ours. Paul's central theme in Galatians, what he is talking about, is
the means by which people get right with God. It was a common idea
among the Jewish religious leadership of the time that people earned
their resurrection and place in Heaven by keeping all of the Old
Testament laws. The central message of Christianity is that Salvation
is a free gift from Jesus Christ, and that there is no way any human
beng could earn it on their own, even if they lived like Mother
Theresa for a million years. Jesus said in the Gospels that [slight
paraphrase] "You can only go to Heaven if you are more righteous than
the Pharisees [the most law-keeping Jews of the day]". The idea is
that if we had to depend on our own works to get to Heaven, no one
would make it. What Paul is saying is that if you are depending on
keeping the Law to save you, you need to keep all of them, and keep
them more perfectly than no human being ever has.

Now here's the subtle concept, and this is a piece of theology that
confuses even a lot of Christians. One of the books of the New
Testament (James, for those of you keeping track :)) discusses at
length the idea that good works are necesary to salvation. A lot of
people see this as being a complete contradiction between James and
Galatians. One says salvation is a free gift by grace, and the other
says that faith without works is dead. How it plays out in real life
is that, when a Christian has had an authentic conversion experience
[bear in mind this may be as few as 10% of professing believers] ,
they begin to desire to do good works that they had never desired to
do before. So a saved Christian will be doing good works, and starting
to obey God's laws, but they do so because they are already saved.
They do not become saved by doing the good works, they do the good
works because they are already saved.



> The Old Testament is obviously very silly in modern society.

Much of it is aimed fairly precisely at a very different culture than
ours, and all of it is expressed in language that, because of the
different worldview, if it were to be rendered literally, would be
almost unintelligible to us*, but the New Testament summarizes it's
role thusly:

"The Law [Old Testament] was our schoolmaster, to bring us to Christ."

The Old Testament lays out God's laws, and shows us how terribly short
of moral perfection we all are. It shows us that we need someone to
pay the fine for our sins, because we have broken most of the
Commandments on an ongoing basis and can't pay that fine ourselves.

The New Testament, on the other hand, shows us how much God loves us
and how He arranged for our find to be paid.


*for more info on the vast differences between the worldviews of
eastern and western ancient cultures, see www.ancient-hebrew.org. It's
really quite fascinating whether you believe in the religions or not.


Darin Sunley
dsunley at gmail.com


>
>
> BillK
>
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