Linna Heartlistener wrote:Fist and Faith wrote:I'm gonna quote what I just wrote to somebody else, regarding my thought that Christianity is a fantasy. Although I don't usually have reason to state it that way, it's what I believe. I only stated it that way to try to make rus understand that it's silly for him to tell me I should be interested in it and research it myself. There's no motivation to do so.
This... I kind of identify with. I sometimes ask myself, "Well, why don't you feel pressed to investigate various other major world religions?" And I'm sure I'd be confronted with some truths that we westerners are often blind to. But I expect to be changed by the content I take in, so I DO tend to research most deeply the bodies of data that already agree with what I believe... and what I want to seek more deeply.
Though there was -one- person here who made you question whether Christianity -might- have truth and beauty and goodness great enough to be worth seeking, in spite of its apparent improbability...
FF wrote:...to say nothing of being immersed in it my entire life just because of the culture I live in.
American culture? A lot of commentators actually describe the modern-day USA as a "post-Christian culture," for various reasons. Of course, most of them are probably Christian commentators, so you could put it up to a case of them saying, "Hey, don't blame me for this mess!"
FF wrote:Is there anything of value for me to learn about the Abraham/Isaac story, despite the cruelty? There's no reason to think it's not possible. Cruelty is throughout many of the books and movies from which I've learned things. Not to mention history.
True... with the Bible, I think you have to ask, "What is the text trying to show?"
Is it:
A. Giving the story of what someone did, warts and all, saying, "This is just what happened."
B. Telling a story of something that the Bible is saying "This was NOT supposed to be" (like the horrifying story of Jepthath the judge ACTUALLY having his daughter sacrificed because he believed God would require him to)
C. Commending the person for what they did.
And yeah, as you probably know, Abraham ends up in that last category.
Since, in another place, the Bible says:
Moses, in Deuteronomy 12 wrote:You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the LORD hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods.
...there must be more going on than meets the eye. 'Cause that's a pretty resounding statement against human sacrifice. (and there is at least one stronger one.)
Generations upon generations of Jewish people would have had that book pretty well emblazoned upon their minds, along with the narrative of Abraham's life.
So better be -SOME- resolution of this apparent case of celestial schizophrenia!
I believe that a big chunk of the resolution to the problem is found here:
the mysterious author of Hebrews - Hebrews 11 wrote:By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
What do you think?
FF wrote:But the Bible bores me to tears!
So I don't much bother. If anyone wants me to learn something from it, or make me think it's more than a boring book of mythology, I'll read what you have to say.
Ohhh... hadn't thought of that one! Also hadn't thought of ppl going just from the King James. (good point, LF! Do you know about biblegateway.com ?)
On what resonates with me from this:
I've said a thousand times that two of the greatest influences on culture today are public schooling and the media - and they can both be shown to be decidedly un-Christian - focused on a denial of Christian faith as something true. So yes, the products of today's culture are largely non-Christian - despite the sometimes heroic efforts of parents to impart that faith to their children, they are now spitting against the wind, 100-150 years ago they were still spitting with it - consider the success of people like Anthony Comstock (the Wikipedia article on him, last I looked, was simply a raving condemnation of him by fanatics who hate not him personally, but what he stood for in general) in beating down pornography in his day, and putting off the breakdowns of marriage, the family and children in favor of the worship of the individual we have today.
Point is, whether you hate Christian morality or not (as something proposed for the society in which you live), that he was successful in his own time, and would get absolutely nowhere today - because the public no longer supports Christian morality. Only increasingly isolated pockets stand against the hugest abominations, having lost on the smaller ones that make the bigger ones possible. Now everyone speaks of "being together" with someone as a euphemism for sexual relations, and no one bats an eye - something impossible a hundred years ago. (The term "companionate marriage" was a vogue term that ultimately didn't fly.)
So Fist, Linna's questioning that you really have been immersed in Christianity your entire life is spot on. You've been immersed in a culture in the process of a gradual rejection of the legacy of Protestant Christianity - with some people around you no doubt truly believing - but not the culture as a whole. Even I, raised more radically as a fundamental Baptist, could not escape the influence of the media nor my friend's exposure to schooling, and I myself was in public up to the 8th grade, and thankfully my mother pulled me and placed me and my siblings in a small fundamental Baptist school, for which I am still grateful. It is true that a lot of language and some cultural relics still surrounds us. But as blue laws disappear, 'gay sex' (excuse the euphemism) becomes normalized, never mind that sex has escaped its truly Christian boundary of being only for a married couple by the common traditional definition of one man and one woman in a bound vow for life, not a contract to be broken when the going gets rough, you can't say that you are or even were immersed in a Christian culture. I probably have more of a basis for saying it than you do, having been religiously brought to Sunday morning, Sunday evening services, and when older, Wednesday night Bible study and finally (when I was personally committed as opposed to simply being 'told by mommy') Thursday night door-to-door "soulwinning". But I still don't think that the culture as a whole could possibly have been called Christian. I was in a micro-culture that did work to isolate itself from that larger influence.
Linna's points on Isaac are good 'scratch-the-surface' stuff - a person who only reads the text and is unaware of a large context, and its place in Christianity (ie, how Christ FULFILLS Judaism, and doesn't merely "borrow" from it) has not even really scratched that surface. I freely admit that there are many things I have myself only scratched the surface of, the book of Job, the Psalms and the minor prophets of the OT being good examples. But from what I HAVE dug into, I find that it is all quite deep - far too deep to possibly be confused with mythology.
I only had time to read a page yesterday while with my daughter at the playground - she liked playing more with other people's bikes and toys outside the fence than the multitude of toys and rides within, so I had to keep busy with her, but from GKC's "The New Jerusalem" (one of his later and more mature works):
GK Chesterton wrote:Stevenson has somewhere
one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man;
that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits
for a train. The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one;
the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another.
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire.
The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.
www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/New_Jerusalem.txt
It's a pity to cut any text of Chesterton's out of it's context, for very often objections that made be raised have their response in the context, which is why it is good to read a whole book of his, and not merely an excised quote.
However, on the question of Bibles, I do have a counterpoint. People love to bust on the King James' version (KJV) - I myself was driven from the Baptists in part by their insistence on accepting only the KJV, and as a linguist I definitely support periodic re-translation (every couple of hundred years, anyway). However...
An inability to read and understand the language of the KJV is a fault of ours, not the text's. The person pretending to be educated ought not be the least bit hampered by the 'thou' forms, "whither" vs "where" (a distinction still made in modern Russian - direction vs location), and with regular study, finds that he not only understands the meaning of the language of the general text, but is enabled to understand other texts in that language/from that time period as well. The Sola Scriptura Protestant, however wrong he might be in insisting that only one translation can be accurate and holy (a rather Islamic thought), and even in his own ability to determine theological meaning or correctly understand all cultural complexities, is quite right in saying that we can learn what that language of that period meant, and garner a general sense of what a text is saying from period language.
So go easy on the KJV - it's based on Masoretic texts - from people who weren't exactly friends of Christianity, btw, excludes texts accepted by the early Church, and has translation and other problems - but it was also a masterpiece of its time, and provided a high-level standard of language that the Good News Bible, NIV and so on simply do not.
"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one." Bill Hingest ("That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis)
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." G.K. Chesterton
That one sounds spoken very much from the heart.
I keep telling y'all to read him, he's NOT just 'a religious fanatic' or even merely an apologist - you would be greatly pleased by the discoveries you would make in literary criticism, history, philosophy, poetry, and GENUINE independent and critical thinking not taught by the public school of Pavlov's dogs. I can't even distill the words to encapsulate his genius - you can't put genius into a nutshell. Try to do it for Da Vinci or Shakespeare - you'll wind up telling people that they have to go and read and study them - that message forum soundbites cannot adequately sum them up.
"Catholics do NOT have a trademark on her" - nice!