[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

[C. G. Estabrook]

First of all, the bible (by which apparently both the Hebrew bible and 
the New Testament collection are meant) is not a single literary work 
but a vast library of materials, written in quite different styles and 
to quite different purposes over half a millennium, and based on earlier 
traditions. This material can hardly be read 'naively' (as apparently 
Parenti does) but with the same critical acuity that we bring to the 
other 2,500-year-old books that we read.  (How many...oh, never mind.)

Our hermeneutic took a strange turn with the rise of capitalism. The 
interaction was surely complex. An aspect of the process is set out in a 
brilliant recent book by James Simpson, Burning to Read: English 
Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Harvard UP 2007) - “a 
landmark in the study of fundamentalism. In James Simpson's radical 
reassessment, the Protestant Reformation appears not as a parent of the 
Enlightenment, but rather as a progenitor of the extreme and intolerant 
literalism that has seized every major world religion today” (Amitav Ghosh).

Secondly, the library is a precipitate of a movement, not the other way 
around.  I think e.g. it would astonish members of the Christan 
communities in the Roman empire at the end of the first century of the 
Common Era that a collection of some two dozen of their internal 
memoranda, exhortations, memoirs, and even bits of historical 
speculation (in a fashionable but highly artificial style) would more 
than a millennium later be seen as constitutive of their movement. --CGE

(PS - Today is the 30th anniversary of the murder of Abp. Oscar Romero 
of San Salvador, shot while saying mass by a CIA assassin trained at the 
US Army's School of the Americas; paid for by our tax money, the SOA 
trains Latin American officers and boast of defeating “liberation 
theology” as represented by people such as Romero.)

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> Doug ___________________________________ 
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