Rachel:

Really, I love how you guys complain that fundies are so deluded in their literalistic interpretation of scripture and then turn around and call using exegesis to understand scripture a “convenient excuse.” Give me a break.

You put “convenient excuse” in quotation marks, but I don’t know who you are quoting, as no-one used the phrase until you did. However, this was probably aimed mainly at me.

I am not objecting to trying to understand scripture and interpret it in a sensible non-literalistic fashion. I have however noticed, both in my own correspondence with apologists and in observing internet discussions, that when apologists start talking about “exegesis” and “hermeneutics”, they are using code-words for something that has little to do with scholarship. Rather, what they do is first make up their minds what they consider to be moral and what sinful, and then invent whatever rules they need to get to their own opinions from the biblical text. Then they claim that their morality is based on the bible, when it is nothing of the sort.

I think Leopardus got it right when he said “A lot of exegetic approaches give the appearance of weaseling one’s way out of ‘inconvenient passages’.”

– becoming who you are

Joseph Campbell (following Jung) would say that everyone lives according to some myth(s), but it is important that the myths never live you. When the myth lives you, you can’t become who you are because you haven’t even tried. You’ve taken someone else’s answer, someone else’s schema to be your own. But of course, that’s naive at best.

Campbell spent his life trying to create a “science” of mythology. Really, a typology — but one must start somewhere. Myths are what Campbell called “the masks of god.” The error of errors becomes, then, taking the mask and missing the divine. Or, as Meister Eckhart pleaded, “I ask that God rid me of God.” 

And, it may well be that behind each mask is nothing. That is my opinion.

As far as my opinions about xianity itself:

– inherited “sin” is the thread to pull

How could I ever accept any myth which postulates a doctrine like inherited sin? Especially, one that condemns the female as the prime agent of sin. Thus woman is more culpable than man. She deserves greater punishment. And God sees to it that she is subjected first to her father, then her husband, when widowed young her brother, when widowed old her son. That’s why for so many years it was law in some U.S. states, until just recently, that a husband could not be held to have raped his own wife. Her duty is to submit.

There is no “sin” — there is error, there is failure, even moral failure. There are evil people, who do vile and unlawful acts. But, there is no sin.

So the doctrine of atonement is pointless. Salvation is unnecessary. The universe is innocent.

The four so-called great monotheisms — Zoroastrianism, post-exilic Judaism, Xianity, and Islam are so much smoke, mirrors, greasepaint, cardboard used to sell irrational beliefs and puritanical sleaze. The Western versions of religious truth are untrue. They do us not good, but great harm. They are unhealthy.

What a price we pay for the dream work of our ancestors! A three thousand year old nightmare from which so many in the U.S. never awaken.

bipolar2
c. 2007

May I point out, however, that conversion to Christianity wasn’t about making people feel good about themselves or an easier alternative to Judaism

I’m uncertain as to where I made either claim?

Part of the appeal to this, though, can be the idea that any suffering you face occurs for a reason, and will be rewarded in the afterlife. It gives a purpose to all the horrible things that happen, and comfort that even if there’s no satisfaction in this life, there will be satisfaction in the end.

It’s true that Christianity set out to gain converts and gave an equal standing in the kingdom of God to women and slaves. May I point out, however, that conversion to Christianity wasn’t about making people feel good about themselves or an easier alternative to Judaism. ‘Member Nero? Christians faced persecution and unspeakable suffering early in the church’s existence (and many Christians around the world still do).