Why Christianity?

Arts & Sciences Religion & Spirituality
141

Yup, that’s a big can of worms. Having read both cover to cover, I’m pretty confident that either:

  1. The God depicted in the OT is not the same God described by Jesus. Or if he is, he’d had a bit of a rethink of his policies in the interim.
  2. The actors in the OT weren’t that interested in God’s opinions and tended to fill it out with their own. A classic example (as I’ve suggested elsewhere) is the corruption by Jewish lawyers of the original Ten Commandments. The Jewish Law as constructed subsequently is, in fact, completely at odds with the Decalogue. There are also several instances where the Jews go off doing their own thing and are apparently punished for it, or at least get God mightily annoyed to the point where he says, basically, why do I even bother with you lot?

As for people who think the Bible advocates violence, the NT is surely up there with Buddhism and Jainism for obsessive non-violence. I don’t see how anyone can construe Christian philosophy as violent. Yes, the crusades, inquisition. Neither of those shameful episodes can be linked to Christian doctrine; it was a simple case of assholes using religion to cover their assholery, a fine tradition which the likes of ISIS uphold today.

Where violence is advocated in the OT, it’s quite clearly specific humans doing the advocating (again, the Jewish law is a good case in point, where the lawyers apparently thought that appending ‘God says…’ to their brainfarts makes everything OK).[/quote]
There’s a theory that gnostic Christians believed that Jesus became the new God after he ascended into heaven, though most people follow the second point you brought up I think. This kind of thing happens as early as the book of Genesis, where God says that anyone who kills Cane for revenge will be punished seven times over, then Lamech says “If God’s vengeance is seven times, Lamech’s vengeance is seventy-seven times” but Lamech’s vengeance never comes up again after this. The OT records these moments of arrogance but doesn’t specifically condemn them all which is basically how people can accuse Christianity of the many things they do.

142

I think Yahweh was an interstellar joyrider who just parked up here on the outer rim of the galaxy and started screwing about with humans like I used to spray ants with matches and deodorant when I was a kid. See the Enki/Enlil stories. If you listed his crimes and tried him under a modern judicial system he’d be put in jail for hundreds of years with no parole.

143

Yup, that’s a big can of worms. Having read both cover to cover, I’m pretty confident that either:

  1. The God depicted in the OT is not the same God described by Jesus. Or if he is, he’d had a bit of a rethink of his policies in the interim.
  2. The actors in the OT weren’t that interested in God’s opinions and tended to fill it out with their own. A classic example (as I’ve suggested elsewhere) is the corruption by Jewish lawyers of the original Ten Commandments. The Jewish Law as constructed subsequently is, in fact, completely at odds with the Decalogue. There are also several instances where the Jews go off doing their own thing and are apparently punished for it, or at least get God mightily annoyed to the point where he says, basically, why do I even bother with you lot?

As for people who think the Bible advocates violence, the NT is surely up there with Buddhism and Jainism for obsessive non-violence. I don’t see how anyone can construe Christian philosophy as violent. Yes, the crusades, inquisition. Neither of those shameful episodes can be linked to Christian doctrine; it was a simple case of assholes using religion to cover their assholery, a fine tradition which the likes of ISIS uphold today.

Where violence is advocated in the OT, it’s quite clearly specific humans doing the advocating (again, the Jewish law is a good case in point, where the lawyers apparently thought that appending ‘God says…’ to their brainfarts makes everything OK).[/quote]

Or you could just agree that God does not exist and both old and New Testament are works of fiction

144

By the way, the Buddhists are getting very non-nonviolent in Myanmar/Burma/Whatever these days. Trying to exterminate the Muslims. What would Siddhartha have said?

It’s a virtue to be slow to wrath, so long as you’re not TOO slow. Turn the other cheek until you run out of cheeks, then sell your cloak and buy a sword. Jesus said something along those lines. Somewhere between delighting in violence and being lion chow lies a… middle way.

145

[quote=“urodacus”][quote=“finley”]Yup, that’s a big can of worms. Having read both cover to cover, I’m pretty confident that either:

  1. The God depicted in the OT is not the same God described by Jesus. Or if he is, he’d had a bit of a rethink of his policies in the interim.
  2. The actors in the OT weren’t that interested in God’s opinions and tended to fill it out with their own. A classic example (as I’ve suggested elsewhere) is the corruption by Jewish lawyers of the original Ten Commandments. The Jewish Law as constructed subsequently is, in fact, completely at odds with the Decalogue. There are also several instances where the Jews go off doing their own thing and are apparently punished for it, or at least get God mightily annoyed to the point where he says, basically, why do I even bother with you lot?

As for people who think the Bible advocates violence, the NT is surely up there with Buddhism and Jainism for obsessive non-violence. I don’t see how anyone can construe Christian philosophy as violent. Yes, the crusades, inquisition. Neither of those shameful episodes can be linked to Christian doctrine; it was a simple case of assholes using religion to cover their assholery, a fine tradition which the likes of ISIS uphold today.

Where violence is advocated in the OT, it’s quite clearly specific humans doing the advocating (again, the Jewish law is a good case in point, where the lawyers apparently thought that appending ‘God says…’ to their brainfarts makes everything OK).[/quote]

Or you could just agree that God does not exist and both old and New Testament are works of fiction[/quote]

The probabilities seem more in favor of it. If that doesn’t work for one, I’d rather more respect the possibility that there IS a God and both books are works of fiction. If you’re wedded to the bible as God’s word, but are just cherry-picking the good parts out of the book and saying that that’s what God must have intended, what are you basing these judgments on? The morality that God gave you via our Judeo-Christian societies? This seems like another circular argument.

146

Yup, that was an interesting bit. The sword was (in context) defence against some expected blowback after Jesus’s death, but the implication is that one need not be a martyr. Loving your enemies only gets you so far.

147

Yup, that’s a big can of worms. Having read both cover to cover, I’m pretty confident that either:

  1. The God depicted in the OT is not the same God described by Jesus. Or if he is, he’d had a bit of a rethink of his policies in the interim.
  2. The actors in the OT weren’t that interested in God’s opinions and tended to fill it out with their own. A classic example (as I’ve suggested elsewhere) is the corruption by Jewish lawyers of the original Ten Commandments. The Jewish Law as constructed subsequently is, in fact, completely at odds with the Decalogue. There are also several instances where the Jews go off doing their own thing and are apparently punished for it, or at least get God mightily annoyed to the point where he says, basically, why do I even bother with you lot?

[/quote]

From a historical perspective, they were written by entirely different groups of people, blood-thirsty tribesmen with unshakable roots in pre-history on one hand, and the dawn of the modern age on the other.

I can see some rough parallels with Greeks, their worldview shaken, taking Hebrew monotheism in hand and running with it, and Westerners involved in Buddhism today.

I wonder if the Jews would have survived intact through two millennia without Christ?

148

The OT contains a variety of texts, separated by as much as 800 years (the earliest portions of Exodus vs. Daniel), and spliced together by editors with God knows what agendas. Images of God are strikingly different even within the same text, e.g. the J and E passages of Genesis. Yes, God can be bloodthirsty, but then consider 2nd Isaiah.

Where to begin with this? “Jewish lawyers” sounds like a Christian slur, based on the notion that Judaism is more legalistic than Christianity. (Those who believe this should visit a Reform synagogue followed by an Independent Fundamental Baptist church, then peruse a few volumes of canon law.) Judaism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestants agree that post-biblical tradition is important and useful. In Judaism, there are 613 commandments, not just 10. Yes, there was an ancient tradition of 10, but the versions we have now seem to be the corruptions–the original Decalogue would have included such things as “The firstborn is mine,” possibly including human sacrifice.

149

I agree. It’s essentially impossible to take it as a religious text because it’s clearly been fiddled about with so much. The NT has much greater internal consistency. For Christians the OT is of historical interest only - Jesus trod a fine political line between acknowledging that the spirit of the Jewish law was valid while basically saying: you don’t need that anymore.

What else would you call people who write laws? It’s just a slur, not a Christian one. :slight_smile: Lawyers have been a royal pain in everyone’s ass since the beginning of time, and I’m not going to exclude long-dead Jewish ones from that observation solely on the basis of their being Jewish. As for legalistic: Judaism has little else except the Law. Christianity, quite explicitly, has none. I’m not really interested in how various denominations have reconstructed Christianity (or Judaism) to suit their particular political views. The theme of the NT is quite clear.

Exactly my point: hundreds of others were added on by lawyers who needed to justify their own existence. In reality the original 10 (which are stated to be of divine origin) were quite adequate, especially if you made the (minimal) effort to extract a Big Picture from them; the overarching theme or spirit-of-the-law implied by them.

I find this highly unlikely, not least because there is no recorded incidence of such things - except for the one obvious exception which was never, um, completed, and some sacrifices to idols which (apparently) God was really, really annoyed about. The distinguishing feature of the Decalogue is their completeness and consistency. Corruptions tend to make things worse, not better.

150

What do you want, a signed letter from God? They’re all human artifacts with complex compositional histories and influenced by their social setting. The NT is shorter, and its constituent texts range over less than a century (Paul vs. Revelation), but hello? The Penteteuch has J,E, P, R, etc. The synoptics have Q.

Which Christians are these? Liturgical churches typically have readings from the OT, Gospels, and Acts or an epistle (plus psalms etc. incorporated into the service). Psalmody is an ancient monastic practice. Isaiah is traditionally called the “Fifth Gospel.” I can keep going, but the take-home is that for most Christians, the OT anticipates or prefigures Christ.

And then you see lawyers as bad. Look, Torah in Judaism refers to (a) a particular body of scripture, the so-called Five Books of Moses, (b) the wider body of commentary based on it, (c) the mystical activity of G-d (d) that which binds the Jewish people together, etc. What if I were to say that all Christians cared about was words, because of the Logos? That would be perverse, no? What you wrote was on that level. And if you mean that the spirituality of the average Jew is defined by hair-splitting, nit-picking, legalistic minutae, I suspect that this is not informed by much exposure to real-life Judaism, though such people can be found. Consider, for example, what the various strains of Judaism have to say about women rabbis, or gay marriage (no trivial matter that). This will reveal certain fundamental differences about how they feel tradition ought to be approached.

Incidentally, the 613 commandments are all drawn from the biblical text. For example, the first one is “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Oh really? What Christians are we talking about here, anyway? Catholics and Orthodox have big thick volumes of canon law, and I daresay the Baptists will have a few suggestions as to how you ought to live your life. Are you defining “Christianity” with the pristine teachings of Jesus (whatever those were)? But the sayings attributed to him are hardly univocal on this point.

151

Well … yes (the technical term, I believe, is ‘red letter Christians’).

I can’t understand how it’s less than obvious that anything added by humans isn’t the word of God/Jesus. Some people may take it as such; Catholics, for instance, as you mention, are quite big on man-made rules and human personalities (saints, popes, etc). Well, if that’s their bag, fair enough. My gripe here is that anything clearly and explicitly of human origin, whether that’s in the Torah, the Hadith, or the Catechism, is surely as suspect as any other human pronouncement.

IMO the dictation of the Ten Commandments to Moses is the only place in the OT where God actually gave out some laws and said, write this down, people, it’s important. Jesus’s words may or may not have been recorded faithfully. We can’t tell. We can only assume on the basis of multiple congruent texts that they’re as good as can be expected after 2000 years. If Jesus was who he said he was, then his words matter; other people’s commentary, less so.

152

You think that the OT God really spoke to people from the sky way back when, and then people wrote down what he said?! Consider the possibility that it’s humans all the way down. God and Moses exist only as characters in a story / myth. Jesus seems to have been a historical figure, but our information about him comes mainly from religious fanatics who solemnly affirmed various impossible things, and seem to have been relying on oral folklore.

Wikipedia says that “Red Letter Christian” is an evangelical movement associated with Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. Is this what you mean? A number of Protestant groups think they are going back to the pure traditions of the Bible and primitive Christianity, when in fact they have inherited a mass of beliefs and practices which they hardly notice. I wonder if you are doing this as well.

153

Well, that is a pretty fundamental characteristic of a deist religion. You don’t have to believe in God as a guy with a beard sitting on a cloud. “God said” is simply shorthand for something external to human nature. If you believe no such thing exists, fair enough, but Christianity assumes the existence of God and that Jesus was (in whatever sense you wish to imagine) his personification. If you want a debate about Christianity WITHOUT that assumption, it all gets a bit pointless.

[quote]Wikipedia says that “Red Letter Christian” is an evangelical movement associated with Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. Is this what you mean?
[/quote]
You seem to be assuming that religion=church. I suppose if you’re starting from the view that all religions are human constructions, that’s a natural conclusion. However it is perfectly possible to have the religion without the Church. There doesn’t need to be a human driving some ‘movement’. I have no idea who those guys are.

Possibly. Nobody ever really escapes the influence of their cultural traditions and upbringing. But I don’t think I’m the only Christian on the planet who thinks it’s better to read what’s written in the bible and come to one’s own conclusions than to listen to some guy in a magic hat explain what he thinks it all means.

154

[quote=“finley”]
But I don’t think I’m the only Christian on the planet who thinks it’s better to read what’s written in the bible and come to one’s own conclusions than to listen to some guy in a magic hat explain what he thinks it all means.[/quote]

The question of which is the better bet depends on one’s intellectual abilities. The Bible is well above the average person’s reading level; hence the priests to interpret it. But it turns out the priests can’t be trusted, hence the Reformation. The fact remains you’re not doing a dullard any favors by telling him to read the Bible for himelf and come to his own conclusions. You need to dumb it down to his level, or maybe give him a Veggie Tales DVD.

I’ve looked at the Living Bible. A well-intentioned but misguided effort. There’s too much that’s beyond the average intellect no matter how you word it. There’s a Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible. That might be more useful.

And it came to pass that there’s the Book of Mormon.

Then there’s the Boomer Bible. If you don’t get it, the joke’s on you.

155

Even when understood more or less correctly, the Bible is chock full of crazy stuff. That means anybody intending to be guided by it will need to superimpose some sort of interpretive framework capable of bracketing the really unworkable parts, like the verse about killing witches. Christian and Jewish tradition does this in a fairly systematic way, and can be viewed as “off the shelf” workarounds. Whether the remaining portions are all that useful or sublime is an open question–it is quite possible to dispense with the book as well as the guy with the funny hat.

156

The OT is full of crazy stuff. Would give anyone nightmares. Frankly I’d suggest impressionable people shouldn’t read it. That’s why I was musing on whether the OT God and the NT God are the same person, or whether most of the OT is just a logbook of leaders playing the “God says” card to keep everyone compliant.

As I said earlier, I reject the entirety of Jewish law on the basis that it’s quite obviously written by lawyers. You can spot them a mile away. Or several centuries away.

If you’re a Jew you can’t ‘work around’ the Jewish Law. You can only accept it … or not. There are plenty of old-school Rabbis who bemoan the fact that nobody pays attention to things like not mixing your fabrics. Unless you can think of anything specific, Christianity doesn’t need any workarounds because it’s logically consistent (if somewhat hard to get your head around, as Rowland said).

Well, obviously, but then you become an Atheist or an Agnostic instead of a Christian :slight_smile: I was just saying that going to Church does not in itself make you a Christian, although I know plenty of people (including some thoroughly un-Christian ones) who think that it does.

It’s a fair point. The problem is that there are a lot of dullards on the planet, and some priests have latched onto the fact that you can tell them absolutely bloody anything in the certain knowledge they’re never going to check it in the Bible. Hence the astounding political power of the Catholic church. Christianity per se is not difficult to understand - I could probably summarize it in a paragraph - but if you’re illiterate or a bit dopey, I can see the appeal of listening to the guy in the red shoes instead of reading a thick book. And that’s where it all turns to shit.

157

Jesus affirms the Law in Matt. 5: 17-19 / Lk 16:17. The belief that only the NT is inspired, not the OT, is associated with the 2nd c. gnostic Marcion–who, like you, sees the OT deity as a lesser being unworthy of worship.

Again, your statements about Judaism seem uninformed by contact with real-world Jewish groups and their diverse approaches. I’m sure they could work their way around virtually anything they put their mind to!

There is a spectrum of Jewish observance, and Jewish opinion about what it means to be observant. Plenty of new-school rabbis emphasize social-justice concerns.

I meant that church tradition is a way of bracketing those parts of the Bible which are thought to be unhelpful (as you have been doing). Logical consistency is a bit much to claim on behalf of statements to the effect that virgins have conceived and the dead resurrected, not to speak of all the minor disagreements within the NT, but I agree that a more or less coherent worldview can be made out of it. Anyway, there is no such thing as “Christianity” (singular), there are only various Christianities.

158

Well … yes (the technical term, I believe, is ‘red letter Christians’).
[/quote]

So you believe in total pacifism then?

159

Good question. My honest answer is: I don’t know. Jesus’s advice on dealing with violence works surprisingly well when dealing with rational actors and in self-limiting, individual confrontations. I even tried it once with a non-rational actor who was threatening all sorts of hellfire. It probably helped that I figured he was all talk and no trousers, and I only understood half of what he was saying (this was in France). Anyway, he seemed a bit confused by it all and eventually sat down, and we ended up having something resembling a conversation (he was a complete retard and undoubtedly several sandwiches short of a picnic, but the outcome could have been a lot worse). I’ve been in situations recently where an extremely violent response would be easy, unpunished, and (momentarily) satisfying - but probably not long-term effective, so I chose a softer route. There have been cases where passive resistance has worked on a national scale. Not many; some. Jesus certainly adhered to his own philosophy. How did that work out for him? Well, not so well on a personal level, obviously, but if we’re talking long-term goals, it appears to have been a success.

On the other hand, there’s that scene in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus tells his disciples to buy a sword; some of it is almost tragi-comic, because you’ve got here a bunch of peasants who have probably never wielded a sword in anger in their lives and have no skill with one. Jesus tells them to stop waving it around before someone gets hurt. So we’re left guessing why he told them to buy one. Did he imply: “… and learn how to use it”? Who were they supposed to use it on? Were they supposed to use lethal force? Or was it just for show? We never find out.

There’s also a couple of instances where Jesus gets good and angry and deals out some Old-Testament judgement. He defends people who are being unjustly accused. He insults people who are being sanctimonious assholes. My overall impression, then, is that the advice is not to tolerate evil to the extent that it spreads like cancer; it boils down to the more mundane observation that de-escalation often gets a better end result than immediate recourse to violence. If violence can be avoided, then avoid it.

Could we have conducted WW2 like that? Would it have been the right thing? I doubt it: Hitler had a specific outcome in mind. Still, it’s interesting to speculate what would have happened. Say Britain had simply said to Hitler: you’re a bastard, but we will not fight you. If you come here, you will have to tell your armies to kill unarmed civilians. When you take over, we will ignore every pronouncement you make. What would have happened? German culture at the time was not dissimilar to British culture; there was a certain feeling of kinship that made the whole thing doubly tragic. Would the German armies have been sickened enough by the whole thing to say: we’re not doing this? Would the invasion have been so completely crippled by non-compliance that it became too costly or pointless? Or would they have literally slaughtered every person with non-Nazi ideas until there was not one left standing? I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here.

Could we ‘avoid’ (say) radical Islamic terrorists? I think we could: it would be perfectly possible to isolate those countries that support it, refuse to trade with them, and let them fall to pieces in their own good time. If the whole world stopped buying Saudi oil, the royal family would disappear up their own rectums within a week. The military approach to terrorism has not, so far, worked out that well.

Just to be clear: this approach is not the same as appeasement. The subtle difference is that appeasement basically involves pretending nothing is wrong and hoping the bad guy goes away. The Christian approach involves an explicit judgement: the original act is evil, and called out as such. It’s just that no evil act is returned.

160

So, the New Testament is not as consistent as some have claimed, nor red-letter Christianity so simple?

Of course when Jesus said “buy a sword” at the Last Supper, his disciples produced two swords, and Jesus said “That’s enough”; so obviously he wasn’t meaning for them to try and fight, and indeed when one of the disciples tries it in Gethsemane Jesus rebukes him, saying “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.”

The best explanation is that this was retconned in to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy that Jesus would be lumped in with bandits and criminals.

As for pacifism, it only works in certain situations. If Gandhi had faced the Japanese instead of the British, the result would have been different- or even 19th Century British instead of 20th. Likewise, Martin Luther King was successful with the Civil Rights movement due to television; it was the sight of peaceful protestors being attacked by police dogs that stirred the consciences of the North; otherwise the South would have responded in their time-honoured fashion of shooting, lynching, or imprisoning the leaders, with beatings and burnings for the rest.

And this is the problem of trying to apply Jesus’ teachings to worldly situations. Jesus (as presented in the New testament) was an Apocalyptic preacher who believed he was the Messiah come to bring the overthrow of the old and the ushering in of the New Order; thus he could preach “take no thought for the morrow”; thus Paul could tell his listeners it was better not to marry, with the Second Coming so close.

Alas, it didn’t work out that way, leaving the movement to try and work the teachings of their master into something that could be applied to everyday life; a lot of the message had to be tossed overboard as too impractical.