As usual Billy, an impressive tome. A couple of snippets of thought from me as I have skimmed the work.
Thanks for the new word, “heterodox”. That is a word I haven’t used, and it is a good one. Do you have a citation for this, “Land animals took to the water and things that swim migrated to dry land....." Chris From: BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 2, 2017 12:38 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [RC] Power of Popular Culture Lost Gospel Part # 5 Appendix The Power of Popular Culture Part #6 Appendix The Lost Gospel Religion in the 21st Century Of course, there is the question: What was Christ really like? I think I know some of the answer. Trouble is, some is all anyone can know. And that is the task, making a go of things, being a Christian in a real sense, not knowing all that we would like to know. And admitting day in and day out that we all make mistakes and the only way forward is to be honest about them and not repeat past errors of judgement. We do the best we can. What makes someone a Christian simply is really trying to do your best and rejecting counterfeit faith of any kind. The example for a Christian is to seek to emulate is Jesus. It is also thinking for yourself, making new discoveries of faith, and being open to the truths found in other faiths and, somehow, making them your own. Thoughtfully... Being conscientious.... Without going too far. There is a world "out there" that has inestimable value for your life if you learn how to make good judgements about what has lasting value and what does not. Faith is about far more than belief. It serves you far better if faith is regarded as a matter of making the best judgments. Faith, by this understanding, is all about your core values and about how you decide that specific values, not some other values, should guide your life, year after year, forever. What really led you to making that decision? If you can answer this question truthfully then you know yourself, or at least are starting to know yourself. Faith as it is commonly understood, is all about strong belief. People operate from the basis of having a "center" that consists of a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong, what is important and unimportant, and about what contributes to health and what subtracts from health. However, this is conceived in terms of a narrative -a biography, a dramatic sequence, theater -in so many words, a story. The story at the center of faith may be magical or matter-of-fact; it can be a mix of the two and usually is. This is certainly the case for Christianity. So we need to ask: Is Christian faith possible without "signs and wonders"? Does Christian faith depend on miracles? After all, are miracles real? Suppose, however, like Don West, we leave the question unanswered because, for all anyone knows, miracles are examples of science we simply are unaware of: Future science, or maybe science that exists in a fourth dimension that sometimes intersects with our 3-dimensional world for reasons we do not understand yet which people try to explain with creative myths and conjecture. Suppose agnosticism about such issues was regarded as a virtue? Religion based on false certainty does not serve our best interests, does it? I don't think so, no matter how reassuring our favorite myths may happen to be. But the solution to this problem is not Atheism because that is yet one more example of false certainty. How do Atheists know that we live in a billiard-ball world where nothing has any meaning and everything reduces to interactions between atoms in space with numbers on them like an 8 ball? Bertrand Russell had the right idea when asked about his religion by a government official: "Agnostic, " he said. To which the official replied, "there are so many different religions. I suppose your's has as good a chance of getting you to heaven as any of the others." What can we be sure of? That some religions provide our lives with beauty, with values that make life fulfilling, with values that show respect for other people and want the best for other people since, after all, who doesn't want a society in which most people feel good about themselves and are thankful for friends and neighbors and business people and everyone else who makes our own lives better? In fact, in stark contrast to libertarian every-man-for-himself thinking, religion is all about community, making life better for all people in a town or village or entire country. The view that religion should be a purely private matter is completely false. Yes, there is a private dimension, but meaningful faith necessarily is about the good we can do for others -it is about sharing. As the Apostle Paul once said: " 'I am free to do anything', you say. Yes, but not everything is for my good. No doubt I am free to do anything, but I for one will not let anything make free with me." The issue is not choice by itself, it is right vs. wrong and making the best choice. Religious faith gives people guidance for making good choices rather than bad choices. That is, in the free-for-all world bequeathed us by the 1960s, by avaricious capitalism, and by contemporary libertarianism, what we are told is "good" is whatever feels good at the moment. But the purpose of religion, one purpose, is to demand to know what the best thing to do happens to be whether it feels good or not. . A soldier in battle who sacrifices his life for his buddies does not feel good while being shot by bloodthirsty enemies, but it is the right thing to do. A woman who sacrifices her time and energy to make sure that a child survives an illness does not feel good when paying a hospital bill or buying costly medicines, and treatment for a child who has a temperature of 101 may not be pleasant in any way, but it is the right thing to do. More prosaically, deferred gratification may not feel good; you do not have the advantages of driving a new car or eating in a fine restaurant, -so that you can balance the family budget- but responsible management of your money is the right thing to do. And so it goes throughout life. We can do far better for ourselves if we jettison libertarian values, thank you very much. However, anyone who thinks this has to mean a dour life, void of all joy, would be crazy. Evangelicals leaned that lesson decades ago; so did Catholics and almost everyone else in the Christian fold. Not to mention Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth. As the Apostle Paul also said, we need to be our best in everything we do. Christian faith is -or should be- about excellence. About quality and the quality of one's life. This is the opposite of live-for-yourself-before-all-else libertarianism. It is about the priceless value of families and communities and friendships and getting your priorities right. It is about learning, especially learning the right things. Religion, in so many words, is a form of education. * A man shall leave his father and mother to enter into relationships with the opposite sex, eventually to marry some special woman. * There is no higher goal in life than wisdom; do whatever it takes to become intelligent, to cultivate your judgement, to learn all you can. * Admit it when you are wrong, don't lie, and don't live a lie. * Know your limitations, be honest about what you can and cannot do, don't make excuses, and don't let your accomplishments go to your head. * Don't associate with fools, with criminals, with braggarts, or with anyone who will drag you down to a low level. Demand integrity of yourself. If you don't have integrity you are nothing. Its all in the Bible -and so much more. These may or may not be "commandments" but they may as well be, for without making these principles your own what are you? A guaranteed failure. For one, I am sick and tired of critiques of the Bible that are made by people who have no idea what is in the book. As if all that there can be are mythical stories and self-righteous preachments. This does not say that the Bible is perfect, simply that it is inspired, obviously, one would think. It represents the best that ancient people were capable of saying, and, for that reason, deserves to be read objectively for the wisdom in its pages. Regardless, there are multiple flaws and examples of outright misrepresentation to bring to your attention. For a detailed discussion see Richard Elliott Friedman's 1987 volume, Who Wrote the Bible? and Robin Lane Fox's 1991 opus, The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible. These scholarly books should disabuse anyone with an education of the notion that the Bible is an unblemished creation free of all errors or misstatements. Au contraire, it is highly problematic and features much that cannot be taken at face value. Regardless, it is the best of ancient literature and it has been recognized as such for at least 1900 years. It is a masterpiece of literature and a library of classical era wisdom -and poetry and philosophy (certainly the case for Ecclesiastes) and narrative history which, while not always accurate, is accurate far more times than otherwise, and is superior to anything else of the genre from the period, including the Greek historians. But the Bible is clear that it should not be held to a standard of perfection. "For all have sinned and fall sort of the glory of God," as Romans 3: 23 puts it. "All" means exactly that, including the authors of the Biblical texts. Nothing human do can be perfect and we need to live with that fact. But this hardly says that there isn't great value in the text -including what seems to be the first recorded statement of a theory of evolution, found in Wisdom of Solomon, in the concluding chapter. "For as the notes of a lute can make various tunes with different names though each retains its own pitch, so the elements combined among themselves in different ways, as can accurately be inferred from the observation of what happened. Land animals took to the water and things that swim migrated to dry land....." This is all there is, not much, but for the time it was written it is amazing. And it should put to rest any possibility of interpreting the Genesis creation stories literally -which, in any case, the leading Fathers of the Church regarded as allegorical anyway. But 'Wisdom' is in the Apocrypha and doesn't count? Such is the view of a good number of Evangelicals, speaking of those people who insist that the 1611 King James Bible is the only acceptable translation. Except that the translators of the KJV insisted that the Bible should always include the Apocrypha, which it did until the 19th century, to be deleted for reasons that are not especially convincing. The Genesis stories are charming, regardless, and certainly are memorable. They also are derivative of Sumerian originals that preceded any early date for the writing of the Pentateuch that can be imagined by at least 1000 to 1500 years. There isn't the least doubt about which stories came first..... Those in which a Goddess created the first humans from clay, in which a Goddess named Inanna planted a sacred Huluppa tree in her garden in a very real place called Edin; in its roots lived a serpent and in its boughs lived a demoness named Lillitu, viz, the Llilth of Jewish tradition, and in its highest branches lived the Zu bird that could take people into the heavens. Another Goddess, incidentally, if one reading of the Deir 'Alla Inscription can be taken at authentic (there is dispute among scholars because of the condition of the original text), brought destruction upon Sodom for its heinous sinfulness. This text, unknown until its discovery in 1967, also talks about Balaam son of Beor, better known from the story in Numbers 22-24. The Goddess is identified by either of two names, the Semitic Ishtar or the Canaanite Shagar. Date of the original is put at roughly 800 BC, itself based on a still earlier text. Ishtar, of course, in the Flood Story found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, another narrative that predates the Hebrew Bible, is the deity who brought forth the deluge that destroyed most life on Earth. For an in-depth exploration of the topic of the divine feminine in ancient Israel, a time when Hebrew religion had not yet become Judaism, see William Dever's 2005 scholarly book based on decades of archaeological research, Did God have a Wife? Dever picked up where Raphael Patai left off and presents copious evidence that, indeed, original Hebrew religion, in common with the dominant religion of much of the ancient Mid East, was henotheistic, not monotheistic at all. That is, at its core was belief in a divine couple, sometimes simply husband and wife, sometimes husband, wife, and a divine son or divine daughter. Not incidentally, the myth that the original religion of humankind was "pure monotheism" which later was corrupted by polytheistic beliefs and practices, is pure baloney. The evidence, of which there now is an abundance in the form of cuneiform texts, religious art and statuary, and the design of temples, etc., is overwhelming to the effect that our ancient ancestors were at least akin to henotheists althyough many were outright animists as such -similar to the traditional religions of American Indians. Which is to say that the view of religious origins found in the Bible -and borrowed in the Koran- is indefensible. That is not how it happened. For detailed discussion of how it really did, while there are a good number of similar studies, a book that should be highly recommended is Nicholas Wade's 2009 volume, The Faith Instinct, which takes the story back to about 50,000 BC. How would you know any of this if you refused to look at ancient texts that have obvious connections to the stories in the Bible? Which brings us to still another non-Hebrew religious hero besides Balaam, namely Melchizedek. Still another, by the way, as described in Isaiah 44 and 45, was Cyrus, the Shahanshah (king of kings) of the Persian empire, a Zoroastrian. He is called "the Lord's anointed;" that terminology translates into the word "messiah." Still another Persian Zoroastrian monarch figures in the Book of Esther, the name of the composition being a local (Diyala) version of Ishtar. Esther's uncle, who is prominent in the text, is Mordecai, which is the Hebrew version of the High God of the Babylonians, Marduk. But let us consider Melchizedek. Who? The ruler at Jerusalem when Abraham entered the land; Melchizedk, whatever else may be said, clearly was blessed by El-Shaddai and just as clearly was not a Hebrew. And, taking the story further, as the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament tells us, Jesus is a "priest forever" and is so "in the succession of Melchizedek." Feel free to look it up, the relevant verses are found in chapter 5. Is there supposed to be some sort of good reason for ignoring the Book of Hebrews? Was Jesus Jewish? Of course he was. But that was not all he was. If you actually read the Bible to recover its original meaning this is made crystal clear. You do want to recover its original meaning, don't you? I certainly do and would not have it any other way. And there needs to be a Church that teaches these truths as truths, not as "incidentals" that are treated as if they should be explained away. These truths all make sense -and they make sense together. One reason this is true is that much in the Bible, major parts of the book, can be thought of as a "Bible within the Bible." Specifically this refers to: * About half of the Book of Genesis * :Parts of the Book of Judges * Ruth, in which Naomi is modeled after the story of the Goddess Inanna. * Esther * The Book of Job * Chapters 8 and 9 in Proverbs * Ecclesiastes * Song of Songs, which is derived from Sumerian royal love poetry * Lamentations, which is based on texts such as the Lament for the Destruction of Ur. Note the reference to Ur, the home of Abraham. * Jonah Plus scattered passages elsewhere such as Numbers 22-24 and Deuteronomy 32: 8-9. The prime example of the continuation of this tradition in the New Testament is the Book of Hebrews -and various passages in Revelation. Acts 19 can also be understood as related to this tradition, the pericope about the Goddess Diana, especially verse 37 in reference to Paul and Barnabas: "These men whom you have brought here as culprits have committed no sacrilege and uttered no blasphemy against our Goddess." All of this represents the continuation of original Hebrew religion -before the era of Ezra and Nehemiah. That tradition lived on as an undercurrent and as themes of some of the most inspired writing in either testament of the Holy Book. The Bible really does become a new book when you learn how to read it for the purpose of learning its original intent. None of which is about "re-imagining" Christian faith, viz., making stuff up to suit a Leftist social agenda. It is the exact opposite, it is an approach that can be called "Radical Fundamentalism," letting nothing whatsoever get in the way of finding, as best as it can be done, the original meaning of the Bible and, where possible, learning from the original texts, in translation anyway, whether the cuneiform tablets that give us the first versions of the stories in Genesis, or the painted plaster wall at Deir Alla in what is now Jordan, or anything else that may provide us with historical truths, including the Dead Sea scrolls or selected papyrus texts from Nag Hammadi. This approach is certain to cause the strongest possible opposition from both the Right and the Left -and that alone should tell you that it is true. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> . 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