On Monday, April 5, 2004, at 09:21 AM, B. wrote:
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> theres no doubt that much of biblical religion is
> offensive, patriarchal, violent, and sexist. but, like
> many things, if you are paying attention, it resists
> the kinds of summary judgments yall are leveling.
> monotheism is not always so monolithic.
>
> And thats another thing: its awfully inconsistent. You
> can cherry pick the good stuff and leave out the bad,
> but it seems a bit disingenuous. Ive always found The
> Skeptics Annotated Bible to be informative:
> http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
>
and you can pick the bad and leave out the good. i've always found the bible itself and much of the scholarship on and around it to be informative about, um, the bible.
the bible is "inconsistent" primarily if you see it as handed down from on high. but if you see it as a cultural product with a historical process of development, it's less a question of inconsistency than of social-historical context. who'd have thunk context would be important in reading the bible? one of the things that's so twisted about the new testament's assault on the pharisees and scribes is that they were the ones who thought the torah needed to be reinterpreted because the times had changed. to call them progressive may be a bit much, but they weren't reactionaries.
my point was not a defense of biblical religion per se, but simply that it is more complicated than the assaults on it here (unfairly, imo) make it out to be. i am not christian or religious, but in the end, people can be patriarchal and religious or patriarchal and irreligious. there is also a biblical tradition of social justice and resistance to oppression and it is possible to have a coherent, biblically based liberation worldview. there are people who do it. MLK is perhaps only the most prominent.
j