>
> On Mar 24, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> The Bible is not supposed to be literally true, except in the fantasies of
>> fundamentalists, who are an abberation in Christianity and exist in numbers
>> only in the United States. Therefore, critiquing their paradigm is dumb (and
>> also won't convince them).
>>
>
> I'm not sure what "supposed to be" means in this context, but that aside,
> the Bible is full of nonsense. It's got some merit as a literary work, and
> is obviously rather important in history, but let's not blind ourselves to
> the nonsense quotient. The OT in particular is full of toxic waste.
And, according to John Shelby Spong and a raft of other religious scholars, the gospels were written by Jews - who knew little or nothing in terms of the details of Jesus' actual biography - for Jews about the god experience followers found in Jesus' humanity. The first three gospels then draw almost completely on OT prophesies and express the life in Jesus in terms of prophetic fulfillment rather than historical accuracy. Only the last gospel was written after the schism, and it contains the least accurate history. So... if theres gobs of toxic waste in the OT and a very large proportion of the NT is meant to indicate the realization of OT prophecies then their a good likelihood that reading Jesus' life in prophetic terms translates a good bit of toxicity - along side the complete historical inaccuracy - into the NT. Some day I'll get to the end of Spong's book and find out what he means by god perceived and sought through Jesus' and our lived humanity but, hell, to me that sounds an awful lot like the immanence of species-being, though I don't expec tthat this is where he'll end up. (let the floodgates open....)