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CommieGIR posted:Its a very poor history book. Its more of a collection of folk tales inspired by someone actual events. Sometimes no actual events even. There's no evidence in the archaeological or historical record for Jews ever having been in Egypt, for example. Exodus is largely the author writing an origin story for his people, rather than documentation of actual events. In fact, modern Egyptologists think the pyramids were not even built by slaves, but by farmers working between growing seasons. You have to take with a grain of salt a series of stories that boil down to "God says we're the best people, and he told us to kill all these other people and live in their lands because it's ours now." It reads like ancient propaganda for the campaigns to initially take the historical Israel from its original occupants. I want to discourage people from thinking of the collection of texts in the Bible as having any use whatsoever as a historical record. Instead, they should look at it as a record of the evolution of a society and its code of ethics and morals over the time it purports to document. Even if the stories aren't true, they truly reflect the morés and beliefs of the societies that wrote them. We should encourage people to see the Bible as a map. To study it end-to-end and see which ideas stuck around, and on which topics the biblical socieites evolved, and try to understand the trajectory of moral development shown therein. If you view it that way, you can see that as time moved on, the cultures that contributed to the bible started to see the benefit in welcoming outsiders, being kind to others, attempting to lift up your "lessers" and so on. We see the society move from the idea of a contract with God that says "you the best, as long as you follow these 10 simple rules" to a society where your duty is to be considerate of your fellow person in general, rather than just as far as God tells you to. If you take this approach, then you plot the bible on a course where at its trajectory in modern times things like acceptance of gays and the desire to lift up minorities are natural outgrowths of the lessons the bible has to teach. Treating it as a historical document is a grave error that leads to fundamentalism. Treating it as a series of documents charting a moral history is much better. disclosure: I used to be extremely fundamentalist. I grew up as a pastor's kid and was trained to be grossed out by gays, look down on schoolmates who had turned to drugs or alcohol, be disgusted by premarital sex, etc. The more I actually studied the bible, and the more I saw how miserable and mean the "Christians" around me were, the more I started to question that viewpoint. I got into many heated debates with my dad and his various pastor buddies. I started to keep track of the bible verses they read in church to support their sermons. I started to realize that these guys only ever selected a very narrow range of scripture. 90% of the book is left untouched in most churches, and things are never placed in context. They'll read two or three verses (that is, sentences) from the middle of a long story, say "the Word of God" and snap the book shut. The followers of these churches aren't even reading the bible, much less studying it. The style of pastoral leadership they get actively discourages understanding the bible on a level greater than sunday school vignettes. Eventually they all stopped debating me, and I was branded a "lost cause". I went off to college and eventually developed into an atheist. Ironically, I actually look to Jesus as a role model for how to behave as a person now and am way more invested in it than when I was busy worshiping a mutated image of him. -----topic switch----- Also, in terms of evangelical fundamentalism, I want to bring your attention to one of the most problematic groups ever: AWANA. The wiki page makes it seem benign, but the materials we studied there were anything but. Every day after school hundreds of us would be gathered into a gymnasium at the local Christian college. We had handbooks like what the Cub Scouts have, except ours were filled with bible facts to memorize. We'd have to memorize certain scripture versions (John 3:16 and then a whole lot of Old Testament genealogies and laws). We had to memorize the names of the books of the bible in order (but not read them). We had to recite "christian principles" (which included things like "If bad things happen to you, look for the sin in yourself that caused it.") You earned patches for completing these tasks. If you couldn't do it, you had to continue to work on it every day until you got it. You could not work on anything else until you'd earned a given patch. They carrotted you along through this by dangling the opportunity to do "service projects" every 10ish patches. These service projects were almost always actually just fundraisers for the church, whether that be volunteering at the concession stand for a local sporting event or "visiting" sick and bedridden church members (where we were told this was to keep them company and share fellowship in Christ, but we also weren't allowed to leave them alone until they promised to renew their tithes). This poo poo was some high-order indoctrination and a big part of why I continued to believe in fundamentalism as deep into my teenage years as I did. It wasn't until I finally realized that I'd never actually read the bible in all my years of Christianity that I started to question. It wasn't quite ACE schools, but it was definitely messed up.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:07
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Do It Once Right posted:How in the hell did some pentacostals decide that speaking in tongues and rolling around on the floor was a good and cool thing to do? Hahaha, my grandma does this. She invented a hole new language on the spot to "Cast the demons out of me" when I told her I was an atheist. I've never seen it outside of apostolic megachurches, so I think it's a uniquely American phenomenon. The rest of the world has the whole "doing services in Latin" thing to add their exotic flavor to ceremonies.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:30
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Talmonis posted:There's tradition, and there's outright batshittery. Truly, that your grandmother invented her own language on the spot to "cast the demons out" of you upon learning you were an athiest, is pants on head crazy. That sort of person likely has an untreated illness that her religious sect encourages. Nah. She's not mentally ill. If you've ever been to one of these churches, pauses for prayer are literally a room with 5000 people in it all babbling nonsense sounds for 5 minutes and genuinely believing they are praying. My theory is that making sounds is an emotional release anyway (think about how good it feels to just shut yourself in a room and scream when you're really stressed out), and these ministers are masters of building you up emotionally so you have A LOT to release when it's time to pray. Eventually you just get conditioned to "pray" like that whenever you're emotionally overwhelmed. If one person babble-talks, it might be a disorder. When 5000 people babble-talk, they're being psychologically manipulated.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:57
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Guavanaut posted:So what was the deal with the occult in 80s saturday morning cartoons anyway? It's no different than all the swords and musclemen and women with impossible proportions that populated cartoons then and now. Certain things just tap into the human psyche as being "cool poo poo", and those sorts of things tend to be recognizable as cool by children, whereas complex narratives or relationships between characters aren't as recognizable to children. Therefore, you go hog wild with magic crystals and musclepersons and transforming cars and whatever else because "magic and not of this world" makes kids excited.
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Jul 17, 2015 15:02
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Wade Wilson posted:The thing to keep in mind here is that the Bible itself is the god that Christians in America worship. The actual deity described within it is irrelevant and most of the denominations straight up claim this. You seem to be confused about the translation of the word Logos. It's often translated as "The Word", but it's not meant in the manner you're stating.
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Jul 22, 2015 06:21
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