Lógos Sokratikós

Bush and his kindred wouldn't have stated it better. Was that comment really necessary Toto? Really?

Toto

I am puzzled about why you object to that statement. I don't think that it describes Bush's religion.

Lógos Sokratikós

From message to me:


It's a putdown.

Lógos Sokratikós

Well, I didn't mean it in that sense. But, since you mentioned it, well... It discribes his politics! And since he gets advice from the Bible we can insert an equivalence sign, and well, it discribes his religion, sure enough.

Toto

To elaborate some, I think that scholars of the history of religion see the ancient Israelites as worshipping a god who was the most powerful among gods, who protected them in warfare, but who was not necessarily benevolent. As history unfolded, Jews adapted and refined their idea of "God" in response to historical events, and by the time of the Roman empire, thought of their god as the only god, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. They then had to go back and reinterpret their sacred scriptures as metaphoric.

Christians picked up the idea from Hellenistic Judaism of an omni-everything god who was Supreme Goodness, but they didn't bother reading the Bible until fairly recently.

So we now have modern literate people who read the Bible and say, "What! That God doesn't sound very nice to me!" This is understandable, and a problem for Biblical literalists and Christians who want to believe everything - that the Bible is true and that its god lives up to the Hellenistic idea of all goodness and wisdom.

I think it may be useful to have people periodically point this out to believers who have never thought about the issue. But it does involve reading the Bible with little or no regard for its history.

Toto

Bush AFAIK does not get his politics directly from the Bible.

I still don't know what you object to in my original statement.

Vorkosigan

The Bible is a text containing characters on pages. Everything in it is open to, and subject to, interpretation. Do you think that Bush's crowd is getting their ideas from the Bible, or from the interpretations of the Bible that they absorb from others?

He who controls the reading, controls the text.

LP675

Not enough options, so I had to protest vote with the only option given that I personally think could fairly be applied to God (although you might struggle getting there from just this passage).

A “vengeful� with no 'spiteful' would have been fine.

Sven

So do you think
(1) "vengeful" is compatible with (omni)benvolent
or
(2) that he is not (omni)benevolent?

Or (3) ...?

John A. Broussard

Somewhere in the depths of ethnology I remember a rather different view of the Israelite god. The basic premiss, fairly well founded, was that the further you go back into primitive lore, the more you find people worshipping animals, plants and even inanimate objects. Since objects of worship tend to hold terrifying power, there is a tendency for these objects to become taboo. Some primitive peoples will not eat the eagle, or snake, or vegetable root which is their "totem."

Extrapolating backwards (which is obviously dangerous) it may be that the original Israelite nomadic tribes worshipped the pig. It became a totem, rivaled only by the golden calf, and eventually triumphed and morphed into Jehovah, but the taboo lingered.

Just a notion.