mongrel

I'm probably showing my ignorance once more, but I dunno if I don't ask.

Why does the Bible only seem to concentrate on one relativly small part of the world? It seems as if the America's, Australia, East Asia, Polynesia, were all ignored by God. Does this mean the peoples in these regions weren't worthy? Or, perhaps, the people who wrote the Bible had no idea of the existence of said places? If the Bible is the word of God, then surely these places would have at least a passing mention.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Amos

Good question. Don't you have your aboriginal myths and cargo cults? They are equally inspired and so your question really is why God favoured one mythology over the other. It now becomes wrong to assume that God would be telling Moses to go home and mind his own bussiness because that would have turned his hair red instead of white. In other words we would not have been.

Amos

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Amos ]</p>

mongrel

Thanks for responding Amos, but I didn't understand one word of that.

ps-What's a cargo cult?

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: mongreldog ]</p>

Orpheous99

During WWII, in South-East Asia, when a plane would crash onto an island, where there were primative peoples still, they would see it as being a god and worship it as such. These were usually cargo planes. I suppose someone on here could give a more detail description.

Amos

The Cargo cults interpreted the prophetic messages from their cult leaders wrong and never went nowhere because of it. Their cult leaders were inspired by God and equally inspired as Moses was. The Children of Israel were wrong too and still are today. Their problem was unbelief, as it still is today, rebel, repent (when a plane crashed to give them supplies), rebel, got born again and repented, rebelled through sin, got saved again with another spurt of charism (plane crash for the cargo cults and evangelist/new war for protestants), and so on and so on.

Why does one mythology prosper over another? One reason for this is the complexity of the Law such as in our case was given to Moses to serve as the heart and lifeblood of our mythology. It is based on this keen insight that Moses knew that they would prosper (keen insight is "burning bush" and realization is "transformation of Moses" as depicted with his hair turning white). Should this revelation to Moses have been about the Cargo cults on the other side of the globe it would have turned his hair red from anger is just a hyperbole used to point at the insanity of the idea. In other words, your revelation must affect you or it would not be a revelation to you. It is when this revelation is second hand to you (as it was to the chidren of Israel from Moses and today is second hand to protestants from the bible) that things go wrong.

Amos

mongrel

Amos, I appreciate you going to trouble of replying, but have you got a translater handy I still don't get it.

Orpheous, thanks. I'd never heard of that before. I guess it shows how easily a religion can start when the people don't understand something.

Amos

You mean how easily it is for a religion to go wrong when they don't understand something. There is much more interesting examples around and if I could remember the details better I would tell you some. It is just that I like to forget these things (sullster will love me for writing that).

mongrel

Amos, I guess that's another way of putting it, but I think I phrased it right. My opinion is that all religions have gone wrong because they don't understand something.

My original question is still unanswered, though. Why does the "Word of God" only concentrate on one relatively small part of the world?

Amos

Because each mythmaker creates God in his own image.

Tom in KC

Mongreldog,

I’ll attempt an answer from a Christian perspective. The Bible says, and most historians agree (as far a s I know), that the Middle East is the “cradle of civilization”. After the early part of Genesis, the Bible says that people did spread out beyond the Middle East. But God chose Abraham (who still was in the Middle East) as a righteous man, a man of faith, through whom he would make a covenant. This covenant was that he and his barren wife Sarah would have children and the successive generations would form a great nation that would commune with God and eventually bring the world’s savior. Jews, of course, would argue that the Messiah has still not arrived.

The land that God gave this nation was what is now roughly Israel. This is the reason that the Bible focuses on the Middle East from Abraham through Jesus. Incidentally, the Mormons believe that Jesus appeared to Native Americans and left teachings with them (cited in the Book of Mormon).

After Jesus, Paul traveled extensively throughout areas that, at the time were, the most highly populated (in and outside of the Middle East) to evangelize the Gentiles.

Tom

[ January 09, 2002: Message edited by: Tom in KC ]</p>