quote:Originally posted by Teshi: but because it simply required an unbelievable amount of mental gymnastics to make it hang together with the interpretations that were commonly applied.
If it requires mental gymnastics to make a text hang together with a particular interpretation, perhaps it isn't the text that's the problem.
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The Bible certainly does make sense, but in the context it was written in and written for. And that context changes depending on the book. Trying to force it into a certain interpretation isn't going to work. Neither is assuming that, say, Jeremiah was written in the same culture and context as James. (or that either are written with *our* culture/values in mind)
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quote:If it requires mental gymnastics to make a text hang together with a particular interpretation, perhaps it isn't the text that's the problem.
Let's go with... any interpretation that would make me want to use the Bible as a tool to guide my life or anyone's life in prehistory or in 2013.
quote:The Bible certainly does make sense, but in the context it was written in and written for. And that context changes depending on the book. Trying to force it into a certain interpretation isn't going to work.
Yeah, this is kind of what I'm getting at. As soon as you start saying, "well, it's not meant to" and "but the context!" that's the beginning of mental gymnastics.
It doesn't matter to me that it doesn't hang together, or wasn't meant to hang together, or be relevant to me any more than I would expect a set of 16th century navigational instruction manuals to hang together or be relevant to me. But people don't use compilations of sixteenth century navigational instruction manuals to decide how they and other people should live.
Also, you can't start with, "the Bible certainly does make sense". That's not the beginning of an argument, that's the conclusion. If you decide it makes sense, you're predisposed to find sense with it, like writing an essay that doesn't quite hang together but you're gonna make it, dammit, because you've only got limited time. (I know what that is like very well).
I was much more okay with the Bible before I read it. Now I think there's actually more sense in a set of sixteenth century navigational manuals.
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Navigation manuals require much more preciseness than a set of ethical instructions. People are people regardless of the century. They love, they hate, they serve each other, they abuse each other.
Depending on what is happening in your life you can often find a partial or total analogue in the Bible. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes I think are fantastic codes of conduct. Yet there are some proverbs that say, "Do A lest this bad thing happen" and "Don't do A lest this bad thing happen."
It's not a contradiction. Depending on your situation A may or may not be a good thing. The trick is to learn all the good behaviors, ideas, examples in the Bible, and figure out which is appropriate for which situation.
Now I happen to believe the God of the Bible exists. So now I must also use it as a means of understanding him. Same principle, sometimes he's described as wrathful and merciful. I believe he is both, so I try to see past the biases and understand the underlying truths. I honestly believe God guides me in the effort.
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Teshi: Where exactly am I telling you that you should use the Bible to decide how to live?
As far as context goes: I think most people who read the Bible earnestly are intelligent enough to understand that things like "don't beat your slaves on the Sabbath" or "practice crop rotation" or "how to properly construct a tent for your wife and daughters to menstruate in" might not really be directly applicable, whereas the *principles* behind those laws like "take care of those whom you are responsible for, respect the land, take care of your family" are still valid, and things like "love thy neighbor as thyself" or "blessed are the poor" or "turn the other cheek" are general enough that they are applicable as long as we have things like neighbors or poor people or cheeks. Whether or not you think those concepts "should" be applied or are good ideas in general is a different matter.
It's really people who pick and choose verses like "if a man lie with another man as with a woman, it is an abomination" or "happy is he who dashes his children upon the rocks" without looking at the context (a set of very specifc, mostly hygenic laws governing a close knit group of desert nomads or a hyperbolic poem) that annoy me. You can't pick and choose context and expect any sane result.
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quote:It's really people who pick and choose verses like "if a man lie with another man as with a woman, it is an abomination" or "happy is he who dashes his children upon the rocks" without looking at the context....whereas the *principles* behind those laws ... are still valid
And therein lies the problem. What is the principle behind "happy is he who dashes your little ones upon the rocks" that remains consistent with the principle behind "turn the other cheek?"
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That quote is from a poem of mourning. I don't think it's being given as advice. (I assume smashing one's children on rocks would *not* make most people feel happy)
But more broadly speaking, I don't think the Bible as a whole presents a consistent set of values. Nor do I believe it possible to exactly hold to all of those values at once, as some are mutually exclusive. The values seem to change with the progression of time, and also author by author. Paul and James have somewhat different beliefs about the importance and prescidence of faith and good works for example. Paul and Luke have very different ideas about the value, intelligence, and trustworthiness of women. As I said before, just because something is applicable to you doesn't mean you *should* apply it. I personally believe viewing the Bible to be moral authority is a disasterous mistake. I think doing so and not understanding it is even worse.
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OTOH, if you view it as a tool, guide, or inspiration, (subject to your own reasoning and understanding of morality, or the prompting of the Holy Spirit if you believe in that stuff) then yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there.
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quote:As far as context goes: I think most people who read the Bible earnestly are intelligent enough to understand that things like "don't beat your slaves on the Sabbath" or "practice crop rotation" or "how to properly construct a tent for your wife and daughters to menstruate in" might not really be directly applicable, whereas the *principles* behind those laws like "take care of those whom you are responsible for, respect the land, take care of your family" are still valid, and things like "love thy neighbor as thyself" or "blessed are the poor" or "turn the other cheek" are general enough that they are applicable as long as we have things like neighbors or poor people or cheeks. Whether or not you think those concepts "should" be applied or are good ideas in general is a different matter.
For me, the problem here isn't that I don't think there can be kernels of genuine, honorable wisdom peppered throughout, because I think there are. For me the problem is twofold: one, it purports to be advice and even commands from the author of the universe on how to live and be good people and two, the very same source didn't hesitate to be very, very 'firm' on transgressions in other areas but it was for some reason more important to say 'here is what you can and cannot do on the Sabbath/acknowledge the Savior properly' rather than 'hey, guys, don't keep or tolerate the keeping of slaves, ever, under any circumstances!' Things like that.
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It's not so much mourning as damnation, I'd think: "Hey, Babylon! God hates you and will destroy you for being bad!"
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The last two verses, yeah. It's revenge fantasy, and a pretty brutal one at that. I guess the point I was making is that this should be viewed as a snapshot of the grief and rage of the Jews after they were enslaved in Babylon ("By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept..."), not as literal advice or as a commandment. Which is a possible interpretation if you just take that one verse divorced of context. (Though I've only seen it quoted as advice sarcastically by people trying to make the same point I am)
There are plenty of places (especially in Joshua, Samuel, and Kings) where God does explicitly command slaughtering lots of women and children, though.
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: As soon as you start saying, "well, it's not meant to" and "but the context!" that's the beginning of mental gymnastics.
Suggesting that context should be taken into account when interpreting 2000+ year old literature is mental gymnastics? It sounds like a requirement for responsible scholarship to me.
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A good deal of the Bible is either partially or wholly unintelligible without understanding the surrounding culture. The Book of Jeremiah, for example, makes quite a few allusions to Babylonian religion and mythology. (10:12 is the example I can think of off the top of my head - Marduk was said to have "stretched out the sky" from some other God's carcass) There are numerous cases, especially in the prophets, where what might appear to a modern reader as a creative or rather bizarre literary device (if it's indeed intelligible at all) is actually an allusion or reference to the religion, mythology, and culture of Israel and the surrounding nations.
It does seem somewhat preposterous to claim the Bible makes no sense, and then dismiss people who tell you how to go about making sense of it. But perhaps there is a misunderstanding here?
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quote:Suggesting that context should be taken into account when interpreting 2000+ year old literature is mental gymnastics? It sounds like a requirement for responsible scholarship to me.
Certainly responsible scholarship for the reading and interpretation of human-written and human inspired accounts, yes? Responsible scholarship, too, to attempt to place the meaning of the texts in a spot appropriate to those they were written to, directly, I'll certainly agree.
But these books and particularly almost all who claim to speak for them don't quite put things that way. I hear you say responsible scholarship and for what little it's worth I listen and respect that point of view, but there are more than a few-quite a lot, actually-who don't propose the idea of treating the Bible that way. The Bible itself, at least until recently, didn't say it should be interpreted in such a way!
Far more often heard is talk of rejecting the wisdom of man or various ways of saying the same thing, of interpreting not the Bible but the present physical world and our places in it to be compatible with the Bible.
I read the Bible-which reminds me, I need to go back and answer the OP's questions before I forget-doing things such as openly condoning human slavery, for quite a lot of its length. Even the New Testament lacks a blunt, forceful rejection of the practice and comes close to indirect endorsement more than once. The Bible tells us God will kill children for the sake of the sins of their parents, whether it's because they transgressed against the wrong tribe or because they didn't have the fortune to be raised by the right believers. Over and over again, this happens. God will come down like a ton of bricks within the text on some offenses, offenses any human who was morally sane today would reject as meriting a death penalty.
Something like slavery, though, or massacring the population of an entire region and taking their women (for what possible purpose, who can say, right?), and God's wrath is conspicuously absent. Sometimes even when such things are done to his favored tribe!
By all means, apply responsible scholarship to the text, but unless we're going to rewrite the darned thing that will, as Teshi says, require a *lot* of mental gymnastics to view as a good and moral source of wisdom. Tolerance or even commandments for things such as slavery, genocide, misogyny, and theocracy aren't just washed away by however many parables that can be read with modern eyes and teach us worthwhile things.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Certainly responsible scholarship for the reading and interpretation of human-written and human inspired accounts, yes?
Responsible scholarship for any text.
quote:But these books and particularly almost all who claim to speak for them don't quite put things that way. I hear you say responsible scholarship and for what little it's worth I listen and respect that point of view, but there are more than a few-quite a lot, actually-who don't propose the idea of treating the Bible that way.
There are also quite a lot of people, apparently, who think the Czech Republic and Chechnya are the same place. That doesn't make them right.
quote: The Bible itself, at least until recently, didn't say it should be interpreted in such a way!
I don't have any idea what that statement is supposed to mean!
quote: By all means, apply responsible scholarship to the text, but unless we're going to rewrite the darned thing that will, as Teshi says, require a *lot* of mental gymnastics to view as a good and moral source of wisdom.
Then maybe it's not a book of moral instructions.
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But supposedly, we are told, the Bible is in a class of text by itself, yes?
quote:There are also quite a lot of people, apparently, who think the Czech Republic and Chechnya are the same place. That doesn't make them right.
This isn't geography, and the Czech Republic doesn't speak for itself and say, "Hey! These are my coordinates!" I'm not sure you can claim the Bible makes no claims for itself.
quote:I don't have any idea what that statement is supposed to mean!
What I mean is that until fairly recently, the idea that the Bible should be read in a way similar to ordinary human texts wasn't just unusual but could even be quite dangerous.
quote:Then maybe it's not a book of moral instructions.
Well you certainly don't need to sell me on that. Shall we say instead 'a book whose teachings are considered moral'?
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Rakeesh, absolutely no one would know you're a Mormon, from reading most of your posts, especially the ones in this thread.
I admit it, I don't get you. I may just be dense on this, but I really don't get you. What are you playing at? 12 years of devil's advocate has GOT to be getting boring.
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Rakeesh: Here's something to think about... because I don't know if you're looking at this the right way, and I certainly know that "these people" you refer to aren't necessarily participating in this conversation. (BlackBlade may be a possible exception, but I think he may agree with some of what I say too)
What if the Bible isn't the Inspired Word of God? Easy to say, right. Now imagine you're talking to a bunch of people who *agree* with you. Because we do.
Let that sink in for a moment. Forget everything you've been told *about* the Bible. Think about what the Bible actually *is* with the "infallible" or "inspired" labels removed.
It's a series of books, sermons, letters, poems, and biographies written by persons who shared the same culture over 1500 (or 900) years and, without knowing it, shaped the religion they followed. Think about the reasons they actually wrote those books.
You have the Pentateuch written by Moses (or more likely, assembled by various clerics during the reign of King Josiah) designed to pretty much create a religion whole cloth - establishing the origin of the Chosen People from creation to the calling of Abraham to their slavery in Egypt and their exodus, establishing the rules to be followed (if you're interested in creating a *religion*, not a new socioeconomic structure and government, you're not going to mess with established rules like slavery or property) and rituals to be performed. Giving the people a common story, a common mythology, a common liturgy.
You have the Books of History, from Joshua to Nehemiah and Ezra, chronicling the history of the people from their bloody conquest of Canaan to the creation of the Monarchy, to the splitting of Israel and Judah, the conquest by Assyria and Babylon, and finally the rebuilding of the nation.
You have the books of wisdom, the poems and proverbs and philosophy of Ancient Israel.
And the Prophets. Men who preached righteousness and holy living and social justice. Who stood up to all the evil kings (many doing a lot of the raping and murdering and enslaving you talked about) and condemned them openly. Most of whom were tortured and killed for doing so. The Prophets, when they aren't taking too many psychedelic drugs like I suspect Ezekiel did, contain some of the most profound, compelling, powerful literature of the ancient world. And they have to say a lot about society, poverty, justice, fairness, and compassion that resonates just as strongly with modern society as ancient times.
And then you have the Gospels. Autobiographies written (or compiled) by members of the early church about Jesus, conveying his life, his words, and his message in the best way they knew how. And the epistles, letters sent by early church leaders on how to live and act as a community, how to treat one another, how to live in a Godly manner.
I suppose if you look at it as one book, one work, the Inspired Word of God, then of course it's going to seem incredibly inconsistent. Full of slavery and war and genocide and incest. If you look at as the narrative of a people, from their greatest rulers like David and Solomon to a poor immigrant woman like Ruth, all the great and terrible things they did, the literature and ideas they held sacred, the prophets that acted as a check on their transgressions... then it's something incredibly beautiful. And you can learn a lot from it.
FWIW, "the Bible" doesn't make any claims for itself. No one who wrote books of the Bible (except maybe the authors of the Pentateuch) knew their books would become books of the Bible. They were added after the fact, by consensus. The most that happens is some books (like Revelation) make claims for themselves, and some books make claims for earlier books. The "claims" you're talking about are those being made by religious people talking about the Bible.
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But supposedly, we are told, the Bible is in a class of text by itself, yes?
Told by who? And why do you care what they think?
The rest of your post pretty much makes my point -- mental gymnastics are required if you start with a preconceived notion of what the Bible is "supposed" to be, and try to force everything to fit that.
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As far as I can tell, this is what you are telling me.
The Bible is absolutely contradictory or incoherent. Much of it (although how much of it is presumably up to us) is inapplicable to human life today. The interpretations made of it by scholars may be wrong. The details and claims of it were made up by humans.
So... basically you agree with me, except you think that these stories describe actual or useful metaphorical events that are somehow better (or perhaps that gets mitigated down, too?) than actual and useful metaphorical events from other cultures that recorded their holy stories.
quote: then it's something incredibly beautiful. And you can learn a lot from it.
Yes. Like any set of holy or culturally useful stories that have been recorded and can teach us about the nature of belief in a historical society and something about human nature could, if you were really into them, be considered 'beautiful'. So why do you, in particular, chose to value these holy stories and not another set or-- and I guess this works with some kind of religions--all stories?
quote:The rest of your post pretty much makes my point -- mental gymnastics are required if you start with a preconceived notion of what the Bible is "supposed" to be, and try to force everything to fit that.
So the Bible isn't incoherent if you don't expect it to be coherent? I think we basically agree, except you think that aside from culture and humans making it important, it has some value or perhaps reference to reality that I do not think it has.
Unless you don't think this, in which case you believe that there is a God and I think it exceedingly unlikely and other than all bets are off as to what we should believe or use as source material, if we use anything at all.
posted
In light of these, I'd like to state that since I think Religious Studies is only useful because it's useful to know the references to things, I'd have liked to teach a 'founding myth' class in which all stories are source material and we're not required to believe that the stories describe anything useful if we conclude that they do not.
Mmm, just think what you could include!
(I guess it would be basically literature-and-myth-in-history)
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Teshi, were you require to teach the Bible from a particular faith perspective? I don't know how "religious studies" works in the UK. I know that Amira taught (teaches?) it, and she's Muslim, so I assume it's not required to be taught from a strict COE perpective. I suppose to an extent it depends on the school?
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quote:The Prophets, when they aren't taking too many psychedelic drugs like I suspect Ezekiel did, contain some of the most profound, compelling, powerful literature of the ancient world.
What parts are you talking about and what are you comparing this to? There are some pretty heavy hitters in that that I honestly don't think any part of the Old Testament could be said to even be in the same class as.
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: As far as I can tell, this is what you are telling me.
The Bible is absolutely contradictory or incoherent. Much of it (although how much of it is presumably up to us) is inapplicable to human life today. The interpretations made of it by scholars may be wrong. The details and claims of it were made up by humans.
So... basically you agree with me, except you think that these stories describe actual or useful metaphorical events that are somehow better (or perhaps that gets mitigated down, too?) than actual and useful metaphorical events from other cultures that recorded their holy stories.
. . . Yes?
Not sure if I am the "you" in your post or not, but if I am, then no, that is not what I am telling you.
The Bible as we have it is (among other things) a collection of literature of multiple genres written over a period of somewhere between 600 and 1500 years. Imagine for a minute that you put together a collection of 66 (or 39 or 73) of your favorite things written in the last 500 years. Include fiction and non-fiction, poetry, lyrics, movie scripts, blog posts, etc. Arrange them in an order that makes sense to you. Does your collection have coherence? Yes. Does its coherence look the same as that of the Encyclopedia Britannica? No.
On your point "The interpretations made of it by scholars may be wrong," well, yeah. That's kind of a given in any scholarship, is it not? That doesn't mean people are pulling interpretations out of their left ear (although some probably are). It does mean that everything we think we know must be held lightly, and discarded, or at least reinterpreted, if better evidence presents itself.
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That sounds like what I was saying, only in slightly gentler language. I naively thought the Bible was more coherent and meaningful before I read it. Upon reading it, I was surprised to find it to be incoherent and contradictory.
You seem to agree but to a slightly gentler extent, which is to be expected from our different viewpoints.
Can I ask, in order to uncover further how we differ, whether there is a fixed point to which all or most the Biblical accounts/stories/lists/blog posts must--inspite of whatever their reason for being included, internal or external contradictions--adhere?
Would you expect that a collection of Greek myth would have the same, less or more coherence than a Bible (or, if you wish, another collection of stories emanating from the same tradition but perhaps not traditionally Biblical)?
Is there something different about the coherence of the Bible from the coherence of any given set of texts emanating from a single culture, or, indeed, the whole of humanity's literary output?
Is there something different about the usefulness of the Bible as opposed to another set of literary histories?
*
I realise you're a busy person, dkw. Feel free not to answer some or all of these questions and obviously these aren't only open to dkw.
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Teshi: That's understandable. But it's not like the Bible has any single author or even an editor - it's pretty much just an anthology of texts that relate to one another. In other words, the Bible was never meant to be and isn't supposed to be coherent. There are some religions that probably give that impression, but even die hard "it's the literal word of God" fundies will give you the same description of it.
I guess since I grew up with it, I was never under the impression that it was a single coherent work. I understood the nature of it pretty much from the get go, so it's hard for me to relate to exactly what mistaken belief you're arguing against.
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Dogbreath: If it helps to explain, I went to a Christian school in the UK, which isn't really about the Bible and more about Biblically-derivative stories, like the Christmas story and Noah's Ark. You almost never look at the source material and Jesus is always great, and God is rarely self-centred and vengeful. I knew that there were books written or compiled by various whom, most of whom probably weren't who they purported to be. It was more that I thought there would be more cohesion between books and also within them, and also that I thought more of the stories were... relevent. I thought it was a collection of great works of literature. I don't any more. I'm not saying I was right to believe that, only that's the story of my interaction with the Bible.
I took away from my primary school education that there was much more to the Bible than I think became obvious when I had to teach it, unedited, to children and children were having difficulty understanding why Cain's gift was not accepted, or why this person was killed, or why this war happened because it seemed like all the people had done wrong was be represented by the wrong leader. Children want to know if this is God-sanctioned or not, or just a historical story.
I have no trouble accepting that it's not coherent, but I had big trouble teaching it to 10-13 year olds as somehow helpful.
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It's kind of like science always being depicted as awesome and accurate and monolithically amazing at knowing stuff, but in fact its complicated and uncertain. Only the Bible gets a more extreme reputation. The Bible is often presented to children and outsiders as a story of love and obviously you are aware that it is not, unless you read specifically looking for love and you ignore the fact that ending up on the wrong side of God is pretty easy.
"So Moses/Pharaoh and the deaths of the first born. Did that really happen?"
No, it's a metaphorical story from a different time? What is the metaphor we are intended to take away from it. Aside from it being a propagandistic story intended to assert the specialness of a group of people and by consequence denigrate the 'other', it also emphasises the importance of the first-born son. I doubt you would argue that it is a horrific tale, only carried off today in the idea that the Egyptians were slavers and that is a morally abhorrent crime etc.
Obviously, it was a different time when, in the Christmas story, Herod did a similar thing. Obviously?
I can see its historical use, but I don't see its modern use. Maybe there is no modern use aside from as a story?
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I would like to see a movie version of Moses, but set in the modern world. It really world come off as horrific.
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: [QB]Can I ask, in order to uncover further how we differ, whether there is a fixed point to which all or most the Biblical accounts/stories/lists/blog posts must--inspite of whatever their reason for being included, internal or external contradictions--adhere?
Are you asking about criteria for inclusion at the time the canon was decided on, or about similarities that can be seen in the canon as it stands? The answer to both is yes, but beyond that it would be different depending on which you're asking.
quote:Would you expect that a collection of Greek myth would have the same, less or more coherence than a Bible (or, if you wish, another collection of stories emanating from the same tradition but perhaps not traditionally Biblical)?
I would expect a similar level of coherence in a collection of Greek Myths, but more if the particular collection were told or re-told by a single author.
quote:
Is there something different about the coherence of the Bible from the coherence of any given set of texts emanating from a single culture, or, indeed, the whole of humanity's literary output?
Yes. The texts were deliberately chosen, and others emanating from the same culture were rejected. There is more intent involved in their choice and the in order they are presented in than a random collection from a single culture or time period.
quote:Is there something different about the usefulness of the Bible as opposed to another set of literary histories?
I'm not sure useful is a particularly useful word here. Useful for what?
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quote:Originally posted by Teshi: It's kind of like science always being depicted as awesome and accurate and monolithically amazing at knowing stuff, but in fact its complicated and uncertain.
There's another parallel too . . . both science and the Bible suffer from people speaking of them in awed tones as if they are infallible, but not knowing a whole lot about what they actually say. Biblical illiteracy and scientific illiteracy are both rampant.
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quote:Yes. The texts were deliberately chosen, and others emanating from the same culture were rejected. There is more intent involved in their choice and the in order they are presented in than a random collection from a single culture or time period.
You slightly misunderstand my question. I am aware that these texts were picked from a wider selection.
quote:I'm not sure useful is a particularly useful word here. Useful for what?
The Bible was selected for a purpose. What is that purpose?
If I selected a bunch of texts from a time period, would my Bible is as useful or as 'true'? If not, what is the thing that is different about the Bible from my Bible? Why should people use the Bible, Torah, Qu'ran, Bhagavad Gita as opposed to my selection?
Is there something inherently more useful/'true'/meaningful about these holy texts than any other collection of stories?
quote:There's another parallel too . . . both science and the Bible suffer from people speaking of them in awed tones as if they are infallible, but not knowing a whole lot about what they actually say. Biblical illiteracy and scientific illiteracy are both rampant.
Yes. That is what I said.
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