pope fiction

He's got a point. How do you argue with that? Content is too significant of an element to just not take into account.

PF

pope fiction

That's your interpretation, spin. I don't see it that way. Lucas stole the settings for Star Wars from older Japanese films like Seven Samurai. I see different symbolism than you do, because I have seen the films that inspired Star Wars. Star Wars doesn't push its beliefs on the viewer any more than Seven makes you want to kill someone for committing a deadly sin.

PF

Hugo Holbling

I don't want to get involved in this, but maybe asking if an unbiased reading is actually possible could take the thread somewhere?

the_cave

Mods, is it just me, or is this thread barrelling towards Elsewhere at a catastrophic rate?

For some reason I feel compelled to pull some order out of the discussion, so let me simply say that I think there is some confusion here about what standards one ought to use in judging a text such as the Bible.

I understand there are many here who can get no personal satisfaction whatsoever of any kind out of reading the Bible. I have no contest with that for the purposes of this discussion.

I also would understand if some were also claiming that objectively speaking, the Bible is poor literature, history, poetry, etc. Again, these are grounds on which there can be reasonable disagreement.

But surely, since Judaism and Christianity have had such a tremendous, extraordinary, and breathtaking scope of influence upon world history, it would be folly to reject one of its central texts as a worthless document? I mean, how on earth are we to understand culture, society, history, religion, psychology, and human behavior itself, if we don't find ways to analyze the cultural objects that humans produce?

The Bible is surely one of the central documents in the history of the world. Therefore, whatever its value as literature, personal devotion, or accurate history and/or anthropology or archaeology, it surely holds significant value as both cause and effect of a great deal of human activity that is centrally important to the course of human history. As such, it can be studied and analyzed in valuable ways. Hence, it might well be of no value (or at least held to be such) in many ways, but surely remains valuable in some very important ways.

Shouldn't that be all there is to say on the subject?

spin

Well, whacky-doo!

I'm impressed that you could do that while suffering from alexia?

What a great achievement. What insight! I'd never have guessed that people wrote literature about things.

Your trivialising of Hopkins is so reflective of the bible-bashing we see here.


spin

spin

Pope Fiction,

The bible, being a difficult complex work, requires knowledge and effort on the part of the reader to get at its contents. Your trivialising of it as "not just a book full of fairy tales and metaphors, it's a book that suggests a way of life" is sufficient evidence for one to assume you haven't done sufficient homework.


spin

spin

The question is worthwhile asking, considering we are attempting to read a book written in a cultural context different from our own, challenging us to read it without succombing to the interpretive frameworks we take as natural within our cultural context(s).

Obviously knowing more about the cultural context of the bible will help to some degree to shed some of the bias, but it is insufficient in overcoming those interpretive frameworks. One finds some scholars attempting to make analyses while trying to expose their own frameworks to criticise, discussing the effects of the framework on the interpretation allowing the return to the source and attempting further interpretation conscious of the implications of their earlier approaches and trying to see how relevant they were.

It is a dialogue between analyst and ancient work in an effort to shed the bias.


spin

Godless Wonder

You are making the (well, one) mistake of assuming that more than a small fraction of Christians actually read the Bible. They don't.

Further, just because something has great influence doesn't mean it isn't crap. Ronald Reagan, while serving as president of the U.S., is said to have consulted astrological horoscopes. Let's suppose this is true, (even if it isn't) and let's suppose that some major world impacting events resulted from such consultations (even if they didn't.) Would that mean that we should we take astrology seriously? That fact that an enormous number of people take a certain sort of crap seriously does not in any way transform it's crapulence into something non crapulent.

MachineGod

Wow...what a thread..."the bible is crap"

Iv'e seen science fiction books that didn't get a review that bad.

Sorry but I didn't bother to read every post to this thread. I'm sure that it has conjured much conflict in it's wake.

I have read the bible, cover to cover, at least 5 or 6 times. I could agrue about detail, I could pick out passages to aid my point of view as I see fit, but for this topic...why do you need to?

Ever heard the phrase, "Can't see the forest through the trees"?

Some of the book is real documented history, some of it is just advising you how to be a better person, some of it tells you what foods are healthy to eat and what isn't, some of it is dramatized or stretched on the truth, and some of it has errors.

If you want to take what the bible says, then also consider what it does not say. Nowhere does it claim God to say he would prevent someone from changing it, or mis-translating it, or anything. It only says that he/she would have to answer to him about it if they did. Of course that don't help you though does it.

I say, you don't need a book to tell you what is right and what is wrong or how to be a good person. Understand your heart and listen to it. God will speak to you from there.

Everything you learn in life is what HE has taught you. For no other reason than allowing you to be here.

Wisdom is God and God is everywhere.
The path to wisdom is knowledge. Take up your armor of knowledge. Make no judgement and judgment will be reavealed to you.

the_cave

Maybe so, maybe not. But you can't deny that it's had an influence upon the majority of Western lives whether directly or indirectly...

You're right, it doesn't mean we should take it seriously--that is, we shouldn't take astrology seriously as it presents itself. But if astrology truly had an influence upon world events, then yes, we should definitely take it seriously as a phenomenon. We should study how it influences people, its history, how it changes over time, or how it remains the same...it may be full of meaningless information, but studying it objectively would provide a great deal of insight into the working of the minds who use it.

Let's look at it from a more blunt point of view--scientists, detectives, and others use even human waste to learn valuable lessons about things. So even things that are distasteful to us are important sources of information, and hence, are "valuable" from a certain point of view. It's the point of view that matters.

It's the difference bewteen valuing something from the inside--where we might differ--and valuing them from the outside--where we can come to consensus. So I understand that you might hold the Bible in complete contempt--but you have to admit that studying it objectively can provide valuable information.