Moments of Permanence - Questions of Language and Morality: The Abortion Issue

From: sami Date: June 6th, 2009 05:44 pm (UTC) (Link)

Indeed!

As for the Old Testament - gah, you're not supposed to take it all literally. It's history, but it's also, consciously, myth - if they intended it to be taken as literal truth, there wouldn't be allusions to different creation mythologies partly inherited from Mesopotamian mythology.

Then again, people tend to think a lot of things about Judeo-Christianity that aren't supported by the Bible.

For example, the much-cited "Problem of Evil" is actually open to fairly easy solution once you note that, though doctrine has held it for a very long time, the Bible does not, in fact, say that God is omnipotent; there are other justifications, but dude, seriously. It doesn't.

It does not say that God is the only god in existence. There are references to "household gods" and the like. The Bible only says that we shouldn't have other gods before Him - Christianity doesn't mean that the spirituality and passion of pagan inheritance must be lost.

You even get down to the way people present Jesus as this sombre, gloomy dude, when the characterisation of him in the Gospels is joyful, someone who made everyone around him happy.

And then you get the people who read the Bible and somehow come away from it thinking that Jesus preached hate and the abandonment of the poor and weak, which... not so much.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

From: lauredhel Date: June 6th, 2009 06:03 pm (UTC) (Link)

I may have more on this tomorrow, on how current day obgyns are talking about abortion provision in the USA . More tomorrow, if you nudge me.

(Reply) (Parent)

From: mmoa_writes Date: June 6th, 2009 08:10 pm (UTC) (Link)

Preach it!

Again on the problem of evil, I find it annoying that people always forget the bit where God says he gives good and evil. The whole point of saying 'God is love' is a way of expressing the benevolence - I suppose a religious way of saying the sheer amazingness/unlikeliness - that allows us to exist (hence 'agape'), not to be some wishy-washy, 'everything will be as you want it to be'.

Then we start complaining when people pick holes with our erroneous ideas (often ones we don't really believe in anyway) when tbh, we kind of started the whole thing to begin with!

And then you get the people who read the Bible and somehow come away from it thinking that Jesus preached hate and the abandonment of the poor and weak, which... not so much. Dude, wat? I hear a lot of that from people who haven't read the Bible (so kind of understandable considering most of it's press comes from Christianists) but wat? I mean, I sometimes disagree with what he says but you can't get mistaken about that much. That's the whole gospel! It doesn't matter if you don't/can't believe 101 impossible things before breakfast, but it does matter that you feed the hungry, heal the sick...

That's what I hate most about fundamentalists. They ruin it for everyone else (seriously. When I was studying the Classics I remember hearing an anti-theistic friend of mine complaining that there was so much good stuff - from a literary and historical angle - in the Bible and it pissed her off she'd never realised because of a bunch of goons. Hear, hear, I said!).

(Reply) (Parent)