Volker.Doormann

Hi Capnkirk,

sorry, no, i never have heard from Joseph Campell and his work. Thanx for your hints about him. I have just seen some web pages about him. I have searched myself for years for the symbolic meaning in the texts of the myths.

Indeed, I agree, that all that prior religious scriptures, that deals with persons, are only symbols of human character, therefore we are familar with them, but those persons never had any historical meaning as a time line.

I agree too, that the conscious insight in the meaning of that symbols can free from that disorder religions have claimed as order , but that each one, who refers that order hisself only on logic or harmony, must reject. I think all other meetings to organized religions are useless and meaningless.

Still there is a order to find more and more. Logic is very helpfull, but there are only a few tools to master harmony, because we mans have so long rejected the power of the womans love (a woman is a man with a womb, a womb_man, a woman). Who is born without a mother?

Thanx again for your hints.

Volker

Clarice O'C

Thanks, Bob. But what do you mean that "Then the divine and mankind [humankind] start mating?"

Best,
Clarice

Clarice O'C

Wow, Volker, I can't read the language but what a beautiful website.
http://doormann.org/

Best,
Clarice

Clarice O'C

Hello All,

Don't miss this. It is exactly the crux of the matter. Adam and Eve were *innocent* before they ate the fruit. YHWH set them up to fall.

But, why?

Best,
Clarice

Hawkingfan

Then the distinction in 1 Tim is unfounded.

Wow, thanks for elaborating. I thought a sin was a sin in god's eyes.

Again, this is not the case in the NT.

Stephen T-B

Isn’t it the case that trying to make sense of the Bible is a complete waste of time?
That’s because it was contributed to by many people over a considerable period of time, each contributor having his own take on the meaning of the stories which have come down to him.
Like Chinese whispers, this leads to incoherence, and the premise that the Bible is god’s word and therefore completely sensible - if only we used our brains - can only be upheld by intellectual contortions of the most grotesque sort, as Amos so generously demonstrates.
Now, if he and his fellow philosophers would turn their attention to the Quoran or the Book of Mormon, how much easier would their lives become! Since each has a single creator, it is bound to have a simplicity which is absent from the Bible’s rag-tag of collected tales.

Volker.Doormann

Thank you Clarice. Sorry that you can't read German. Maybe sometime I can make English language copies of the German pages. But if something seems to be of actual interest, mail me.

Best wishes to you

Volker

capnkirk

Hawkingfan,

To get myself focused back on the specific points and questions you raised, I went all the way back to your original thread-starter.

In the context of the 1 Tim verse: It literally WAS NOT Adam that was deceived. Eve was deceived "by the serpent". Neither Adam nor Eve were deceived by God, though they DID try to deceive god when first questioned about their disobedience.

So you see, the spin in the 1 Tim passage is not in what it says, but in what it conveniently leaves out! Adam ALSO ate of the forbidden fruit. Nowhere does it say that Eve used deceit to convince Adam to also disobey. As I have pointed out in other posts to this thread, the spin was added by Jewish elders trying to dissuade defections to the religion of Ishtar in Canaan, way after Genesis but long before the NT. (Actually they had to seriously embellish as well as rewrite the myth as it existed in Gilgamesh to create the gullible Eve in the first place.)
Here you are confusing "obedience" with "knowing right from wrong". They are NOT the same thing. It takes little imagination to visualize circumstances requiring obedience to an evil master, even knowing that such obedience is "wrong" (thus demonstrating the difference). Living in any one of the world's cruel dictatorships would qualify.

Odd and self-contradictory as it sounds, Xtianity (& Judiasm) hold(s) that the "original sin" was not disobedience, but gaining knowledge of good and evil. God's punishment, however, was for disobedience. There is an inherent dilemma here, because it seems that it is precisely the "knowledge of good and evil" (how to recognize the difference and how to choose between) that god spends the rest of the bible trying to teach man about!?!? Doesn't that spin your head around!

Personally, the A&E myth is useful only as an allegorical fable whose "moral" is that the birth of "sentience" (knowledge of good and evil in the context of awareness of self) seperated us forever from the "harmony of nature" (the garden). In the minds of most humans, it is sentience that seperates us (maybe not so thoroughly, in light of recent research demonstrating development of language in other primates), from the rest of the animal kingdom.

So isn't it equally mystifying that sentience is at the heart of xtians' concept of being "made in his image"? Hooodathunkit?

Stephen T-B

Nicely put, Capnkirk.
The more you dig intoi it, the deeper you find the nonsense goes.

Hawkingfan

capnkirk,

Thanks for clearing that up for me. Only a couple things:
I don't see how. We agree that god punished A&E for disobedience. And they did in fact, disobey because they broke a rule that they were told (directly and indirectly) not to break. Therefore, disobedience=sin=something that is wrong (in god's eyes). But they could not have known that it was disobedience, that it was a sin, or that it was wrong because they did not yet acquire the necessary knowledge to discern it, but were punished for it anyway.

I was a member of the Church of Christ for 20 years and never heard this. I was told over and over again that original sin was disobedience AND trying to "be as wise as god". I was told that 1 Tim explains why women do not lead prayer and why they cannot teach at church. It is also to explain why men are to have "authority" over a woman. Ridiculous.

Amos has told me this before, I think. Maybe he reads Campbell too. I personally don't believe we've separated from the harmony of nature at all. We are not the only animals with self awareness (chimps have been proven to have self awareness) and that there is no such thing as "knowledge" of good and evil but that it is a made-up concept.