Dragaera

The Religion Debate

Fri Nov 29 12:35:24 PST 2002

Lydia Nickerson wrote:

 > The books don't exist by themselves, they were written by human
 > beings, often for somewhat venal reasons.  Was it Jeremiah that was
 > written to justify the new line of kings and the changes in the
 > religious structure?  Joshua and Judges were written to prove that
 > the Israelites were entitled to the land they'd stolen from the
 > Canaanites.

Further, they were written at different times with different underlying 
agendas.  Some of the OT stuff has God doing really horrid things--it's 
really hard to stomach.  Part of that, though was that it was written as 
a sort of extreme monotheistic reaction against the polytheistic world: 
  There is only one God, God is all-powerful, everything that happens is 
because of God, so if something ghastly happened, God did it.

Then again, God wants us to worship him only.  By letting some of our 
enemies live, we permitted some of our group to become tainted by other 
beliefs.  Therefore we should (or, writing in retrospect, should have) 
ruthlessly slaughtered *all* of our enemies.  Very much the tail wagging 
the dog, but that's the agenda behind those commands.

Biblical scholarship can say a lot, if one choses to listen, about where 
in history the various books of the bible came from, how they changed 
over time until the canon was established, and the 'why' of their points 
of view.  In the Gospels, a fair amount of what Jesus "said"  was put in 
after the fact by people who either thought the parables needed more 
explanation, or wanted to advance a particular agenda, or whathaveyou.

Probably the most authentic books we have are some of the letters of 
Paul.  They were preserved until the community decided that Jesus wasn't 
coming back any time now, and that therefore we needed a written record 
of what had happened and what he believed.  Some of them are widely 
accepted as authentic writings of Paul.  The four gospels have been 
redacted from various sources; and, of course, a lot of gospels were not 
included in the canon.

God does not change, but our attempts to understand him do.  The bible 
reflects those changes in our understanding and our (often inadequate) 
attempts to express that understanding.  (unless you're a 
fundamentalist.  IMNSHO, a person who deliberately rejects everything we 
have learned with the use of our God-given reason and senses insults her 
creator, but that's a whole other discussion.)

Mia