Cakes for the Queen of Heaven

Birkat HaChamah

2009-04-08T18:07:00.001-04:00

Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who does the work of creation.

1st Kings 17-20

2008-05-16T02:14:00.000-04:00

1st Kings 17-20

So now we’ve reached the Jezebel and Ahab versus Elijah story. And I bet you’re guessing what my opinions on this will be, but you’re probably going to be wrong.

Jezebel is probably the second of two of the “Bad Girls of the Bible” who actually deserves the “evil” label. I would dearly love to sympathize with her, because she was supposed to be a devotee of my goddess but that’s partly why I feel that what she did was just so much *worse*.

Jezebel is a “foreign” queen, of Phoenician extraction, a devotee of Asherah and Baal (who were not Phoenician gods but either the writer is confused or the cultures had started blurring together anyway). She begins persecuting the prophet Elijah when he objects to her religion.

Proselytizing monotheists are expected. So expected, that we get used to them and just assume all monotheists are like that and make them work to prove they’re not (for example, the popular tendency to think the Biblical Hebrews approached interfaith dialogue the same way medieval European Christians did). There is a definite tendency these days to convince ourselves that polytheists and pagans never have done or will do, that sort of thing. Which is not exactly true. Especially not in the days when paganism was the global norm and monotheistic Judaism was the aberration. Jezebel is not an oppressed outsider here. The problem was that she was in a position to force her beliefs on the nation and she did so, causing things to get very…unpleasant and bloody.

Jezebel and Women in Power

Because “Jezebel” has been used for centuries to denote any woman who strays from her culture’s rules about appropriate behavior for women, it overshadows the fact that the actual character of Queen Jezebel might have actually done the things she’s accused of doing.

The ultimate in sexual equality is admitting that women can fall prey to all the same power trips and bloodthirsty desire for dominance, death and destruction that men do. Anyone who actually thinks the only thing we need to fix the world is put women in charge has never been heavily involved in any school or organization comprised mostly of women. I think that maybe they never went to junior high or had a sister, either.

The point of feminism is not that women are better than men, it’s that they are equal. And being equal means an equal chance to be cruel or evil. Because we’re not pristine angels or alien beings. I don’t know about anyone else (actually, I do, because I’ve been in fandom eight years) but I have some pretty appallingly sick stuff I carry around in my head. The stuff I post for public consumption is just the stuff I consider appropriate to share.

Yeah.

It’s been so long since Goddess worship had any power that people often forget that there is not only such a thing as a Dark Goddess but a goddess who is both dark and light at various times. I am under no illusions that this particular goddess is always peaceful, gentle, and non violent. In this story, God and Goddess are having a little lover’s squabble, hurling the supernatural china at each other and tossing each other’s stuff out on the lawn. Everything that is said here is said in the heat of the moment and will be regretted later.

Jezebel, however, takes it all too far and finds out that…well, you’ll see.

The Goddess is not Cosmic Barbie. The Dove is the symbol of The Great Middle Eastern Mother Goddess but so is the Lioness. And sometimes, we are the unsuspecting zebras.

1st Kings chapters 12-17

2008-05-06T22:43:00.001-04:00

It has been four hundred and eighty years since the Israelites left Egypt (although a footnote says it’s been four hundred and forty years, so I’m confused).

1st Kings chapters 12-17

Solomon has died, and been replaced by his son Rehoboam. The people ask him to “lighten their load.” (kind of spurred on by this man Jeroboam) The elders advise Rehoboam to do so, but he decides to listen to his contemporaries instead, who are all “you should totally be stricter” and “you people better do what this guy says, he’s even worse than his father”.

The king tries to crack down on them but they stone his official in charge of forced labor. He is forced to flee the country with a force from Judah and Benjamin (it always seems to be Judah and Benjamin allied against everyone else) but God’s prophet tells everyone to stop fighting and come back. But Jeroboam already thinks of himself as the new king. He builds two idols , on in Bethel and one in Dan and convinces the people to worship them, so Rehoboam will not be able to control them anymore.

Ch 13: 2
“A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you (the altars) he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who now make offerings here and human bones will burned on you.”

Because the way to deal with this is more human sacrifice.

Ch14: 23-24
they had also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones, and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land, the people engaged in all of the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before Israel

Judah and Israel have split again, and this infighting continues through two more kings, ostensibly over whether the Hebrews should be allowed to worship pagan gods or not. But it’s really because they didn’t want to be one country, because uniting under one king and having to change the way you do things is kinda scary. You can compare it to the US Civil War, which wasn’t really about slaves but about whether we were or were not gonna take this “let’s be a united country” thing seriously and do it and one half of the country was jealous over the other half having more power.

1st Kings Chapters 1-10

2008-05-04T15:39:00.002-04:00

I have skipped over the rest of the David story for now, because it’s been David, David, David all the time for the last several months and I can’t allow myself to get stuck in that story or I’ll never get out.

1st Kings

The basic point of this book is to A) describe the reign of Solomon, David’s son who is now king after fighting over the throne with his brother. The biggest difference between Solomon and David is that Solomon is never, ever, ever, allowed to be wrong except in one specific area. The entire book has the feel of political propaganda intended to portray a Golden Age. The second point of the book is given over to long, detailed descriptions of Solomon’s palace, and the Temple, which he is building as a permanent base for YHVH worship. He installs the Ark of the Covenant , which David rescued and brought back to Jerusalem.

This whole section is really very dull, but it’s important because it describes the Temple in detail, and it involves the character of Hiram, who will become important to Masonic mythology thousands of years later (everything in this part is important if you’re interested in the Masons).

Chapter 10 contains the story of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. It’s about a half a page long and fuzzy on the details, and yet people are still ‘shipping them (as if he wasn’t married to someone else at the time), to the point where there are actually books all about their romance.

What’s that about putting romance in Bible stories where it’s never mentioned in the actual Bible, again? Hmm? Oh, this time it’s okay, for some reason, because it’s het and it doesn’t involve Jesus?

Solomon has “many foreign wives” and not only doesn’t force them to convert but provides means for their continual worship of their own gods. He even becomes interested himself. Solomon worships “Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, Chemosh the destestable god of Moab, and Molech, the detestable god of the Ammonites.”

Very little information seems to exist on Chemosh. However, there is a popular theory that Solomon’s “Song of Solomon” aka “Song of Songs” or “Canticle of Canticles” is at least partially based on traditional songs of Asherah worship. Having read some of the Ishtar hymns, I can see where people could get that impression. Various authos have used the Queen of Sheba and Solomon's very weird relationship with Abishag as a human stand ins for a dialogue between YHVH and Asherah. Margaret Starbird takes it a step further and winds the thread through the Jesus/Mary Magdalene story.

1st Kings 11: 2 They were from nations about which the LORD had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods”.

This is one of those famous verses that people use out of context to claim that interracial marriage is wrong. Other people say marrying someone not of your faith is wrong, it doesn’t matter what color their skin is. Seems to me though, that the moral here is “Don’t marry multiple women of other faiths when you’re the king”. Which is a very reasonable thing to ask of a king, but has a bad effect on ordinary people inclined to take it too literally. Although booing interracial/interfaith marriages is something people are inclined to do on their own, with or without Biblical help. Sadly. Most Christians I grew up around had nothing at all against interracial marriage, they believed it meant you should never marry an "unsaved" person. Which gives you a wide range of choices when it comes to skin color but a very narrow range when it comes to religious beliefs- you could marry a Chinese person or an Arab or a Native American but only if they were an evangelical Protestant.

1st Corinthians pt4

2007-09-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

14

9 So with yourselves; if in a tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is being said? For you will be speaking into the air.

All that random "speaking in tongues" done in charismatic churches? Totally useless if it's not a real language that the people around you can understand. That was never the purpose of the whole speaking in tongues thing, to look mystical in front of other people by babbling made up words.

14
34 women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. F70

Oh, SHUT UP. In a verse I skipped typing up, he goes on and on about how God is the head of Christ and Christ is the head of man which makes man the head of his wife. Now, does anyone see the flaw in this? If man is to obey Christ, how did Christ treat women? He let them talk, and gave them positions of leadership. Plus, this all totally contradicts the fact that Paul seems to have many female friends who are preachers and missionaries. It shows up at the end of the chapter as this weird kind of afterthought, and the footnotes say that it is sometimes inserted after the last paragraph instead of just before. So it's a totally out of place verse, inconsistent with earlier teachings, and it keeps moving around. A later insertion, perhaps? Or is Paul just losing it? Some people have tried to explain it by saying Paul was referring to a specific problem in a specific church, where the women wouldn't shut up. But the way the verse is worded, it just doesn't look like he's addressing one specific situation. It looks like a blanket statement about all churches.

It sounds extremely familiar, and so I went and looked it up, and a famous early Christian bishop said a suspiciously similar thing-prior to the official creation of the NT. It would not surprise me at all to discover that Paul was judiciously edited. I just cannot figure this guy out.

You couldn't have paid me to be a woman in first century Israel, but then, you couldn't have paid me to be a man back then either. But I'm a little annoyed with how people always try to claim that Christianity's flaws all come from Judaism. First, because Roman paganism was not exactly uplifting for women all the time, and some of those Greek philosophers were quite misogynistic too. I think that what really happened with the sexism is the same thing that happened with the racism, the anti Semitism, the violence and the materialism. People started to follow Jesus, then a few generations later they realized his messages were going to require giving up things they enjoyed, just not workable in the world they wanted to create.

1st Corinthians pt3

2007-09-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

11:
4 Any man who prays or prophesies with something on his head disgraces his head, 5 but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head—it is one and the same thing as having her head shaved. 6 For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil. 7 For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection F53 of God; but woman is the reflection F54 of man. 8 Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. 9 Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. 10 For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of F55 authority on her head, F56 because of the angels. 11 Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. 12 For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God. 13 Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? 14 Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. 16 But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.

Seems almost like he's saying at the end that the Christians had no custom of head coverings, so it's cool whatever you want to do. But that doesn't make up for the previous statements.

Look, I don’t have a problem with covering my head for church or prayer. I've never been asked to, but if I did I wouldn't care all that much. If I had to cover my head all the time I'd be pretty annoyed. But men not having to do it? That's not fair. And in Judaism, as I understand it, men do have to cover their heads- a man is supposed to wear a yarmulke when he goes to temple or engages in some other formal religious activity. And in the Bible, men wore prayer shawls to cover their heads when praying. I think some men still do that? But here's Paul, trying for some reason to weasel out of men having to cover their heads, while insisting that women still have to. It's very weird. Judaism was kind of sexist, but it was an organic sexism that grew out of a certain culture. But Christianity took that, made the policies even more unfair and redesigned the entire world to run that way. And it really brought out the worst in some people, because they couldn't deal with this thing that wasn't part of their mindset before.

His logic is pretty stupid. "Man came from God but woman came from man?" The image I get is of Adam building himself a love bot in his garage ala Warren on "Buffy". Adam didn't build Eve himself, nor did he order her to his own detailed specifications from God's Love Bot Catalogue. Only one version of the story even has the rib taking event, in the other version, and in the Sumerian/Babylonian/etc version man and woman are made at the same time. It's awfully, disturbingly arrogant of man to convince himself that he's responsible for the invention of women and that life revolves entirely around him. If life revolves entirely around men, which man does it revolve the most around?
13
1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, F65 but do not have love, I gain nothing.

There are so many people out there who have read every Gospel and pseudo gospel and apocryphal gospel and every important holy book they can get their hands on. They meditate daily, and have never lied, stolen, cursed the name of God or committed adultery, they give to charity and have never struck someone on purpose and yet they're extremely unpleasant to be around. That's how I felt during the like, two days, I was on the ChristianWicca email list- "If these people are so bloody brilliant, why are they all so awful?" Frankly, I think it's part of what killed the Gnostic sects and damages a lot of other faiths. People don’t want to go where they don't feel wanted, even if the group that doesn't want them seems to be right about a lot of stuff. But they will put up with incredible amounts of pain and abuse from groups or individuals when they feel that the group or person "loves" them and wants them.

Following all the rules won't do much good unless your heart is in it. I think that's the central message of the entire New Testament. Sometimes that means, for the sake of your heart, you have to bend those rules. Sometimes, for the sake of your heart, it's better to keep them. There's been a lot of throwing babies out with the bath water done by everyone. The "theology of hate" that always tries to resurface- who knows, maybe they're right about some of what they believe, but it doesn't make them better people, due to the tactics they use to get their point across.

Intent, as I learned in magic, is more important than any other ingredient in a spell.

Now Paul, having explained how important Love is, goes on to illuminate the definition of Love.

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

I can't even think of a comment. I just like that whole bit.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, F66 but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

As they say on Sesame Street, you gotta put down the ducky if you wanna play the saxophone. You can't cling to the past (your inoccent childhood) and develop your future (mature grownup talents) at the same time. I don't think this means that everything from childhood has to be destroyed but for example, my doll collection is seriously holding me back from moving on with my life. I feel compelled to keep buying them even though I can't afford it, I'm running out of space (technically, I ran out of space several years ago) and whenever I try to move out I'm held back by the conundrum of what to do with my dolls.

1st Corinthians pt 2

2007-09-25T12:41:00.000-04:00

7:1

1 Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: "It is well for a man not to touch a woman." 2 But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4 For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5 Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. 6 This I say by way of concession, not of command. 7 I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind. 8 To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. 9 But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

And…. This translated in people's heads into, "people should be coerced into marriage as young as possible. Women have no rights whatsoever about when their husbands have sex with them, but the man can do whatever he wants. But sex is actually icky and no one should do it unless they can't help themselves. " I refer you to the link above, again.

8:7
7 It is not everyone, however, who has this knowledge. Since some have become so accustomed to idols until now, they still think of the food they eat as food offered to an idol; and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8 "Food will not bring us close to God." F41 We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9 But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 For if others see you, who possess knowledge, eating in the temple of an idol, might they not, since their conscience is weak, be encouraged to the point of eating food sacrificed to idols?

Idols aren't real anyway, there's only one real God. So if you want to eat food sacrificed to idols, go ahead because they're not real anyway. But don't let anyone who thinks otherwise catch you doing it, because then they'll think it's okay to eat food sacrificed to idols.

So, if, like, I want to eat a chicken sacrificed to Moloch, that's fine because Moloch isn't real (even though he told us earlier that the old gods were demons. Demons!) but I shouldn't do it in front of someone who believes the food is sacrificed to real gods, since they're weak willed and will fall into sin because of me? But if I can do that, because the god isn't real, then why will they get in trouble for eating food sacrificed to something that's not real?

I guess it can all be summed up best as "Do whatever works for you, just don't do it in front of people who will be upset by it". A lot less convoluted than trying to puzzle out the actual sentences, although it still seems off to me.
9:
This is my defense to those who would examine me. 4 Do we not have the right to our food and drink? 5 Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a believing wife, F46 as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? 6 Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? 7 Who at any time pays the expenses for doing military service? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not get any of its milk? 8 Do I say this on human authority? Does not the law also say the same? 9 For it is written in the law of Moses, "You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it for oxen that God is concerned? 10 Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever plows should plow in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop. 11 If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits? 12 If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we still more?

Paul is complaining that he doesn't get paid enough. I can certainly sympathize. I've known many pastors who were totally dependant on the church to feed, cloth and house them, and ended up really struggling because of it. They usually have to take on humiliating second, secular jobs if they can't get extra work as a police chaplain, guest speaker, professor or writer. Many kids who graduate from seminary are faced with the realization that they have almost no job prospects, and when they get a position, it's likely that they'll be living hand to mouth.

I used to envy my PK friends who got to live in parsonages, because those houses always seemed so nice compared to the one I lived in. And they are nice. But they were usually lucky enough to be pastoring at wealthy churches, and they always had at least two incomes in spite of getting a big, free house. I've known a lot of pastors and not all of them were so fortunate.

Some churches don't bother to pay their ministers at all, yet expect someone to be at their service twenty four hours a day. The pastor's wife has double his workload and has to do it all for free. I remember reading a comment recently that couples coming out of seminary together are often shocked to discover that there are no churches who can afford to (or are willing to raise the money to) support two full time pastors at once.

1st Corinthians pt 1

2007-09-18T07:43:00.000-04:00

1st Corninthians

Another letter from Paul, this time to the church in Corinth. Whatever else you can say about Paul, he's a great ranter. It's like reading a first century livejournal.

10 Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, F4 by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. F5 12 What I mean is that each of you says, "I belong to Paul," or "I belong to Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas," or "I belong to Christ." 13 Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
14 I thank God F6 that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)

Chloe. Another girl!

He can't remember who he baptized? Well, I suppose maybe he wouldn't.

Anyway, he seems to be trying to hold the church together by reminding them that they should be following Christ.

Ch 2:6-10
6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. 7 But we speak God's wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him"— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

Here he is hinting that there's more than what is generally taught in church. I have found this to be true, in both the Gnostic sense and the practical sense. There are things that get taught in seminaries that are not imparted to the average churchgoer, and there are things known by scholars that are not told to people in seminaries. Why? I don't know, but I know it's true. And there are truths that only mystics and prophets can know, because normal minds can't handle it without a certain amount of preparation. That's why so many mystics and prophets seem a little unbalanced. Sometime the wrong people get ahold of these "secrets" and cause a ton of trouble for those who are uneducated in the finer points. It happens quite often in the pagan/occult world, and if you think the world isn't affected by it you'd be sadly mistaken.

Take Crowley for example. His published catalogue of writings is available at any major bookstore, you don't even have to show ID to buy them. Naturally, this results in millions of flaming idiots getting ideas. Now, sometimes the world gets lucky and the person who buys it is a David Bowie or a Jimmy Paige, who just ends up writing rather esoteric song lyrics that are beautiful in their own way. And having witch wars with each other that they will be really embarrassed about twenty five years later. But sometimes the person who buys the books is a future L.Ron Hubbard.

Dion Fortune said that it's fine for these books to be published, because they don't actually reveal anything significant. But she died before the time when you could buy the Sepher Yetzirah on Ebay. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the idea of popular availability of important occult books- because if it weren't for that I wouldn't know anything at all, I'm just saying. That I had a point somewhere in this. If someone could retrieve it for me I would be ever so grateful.

You don't have to *get* something to make a total pig's ear out of it.

3:16
16 Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?

Someone please explain to me how this is different from the neo pagan idea that everyone has a bit of God in them, or the Hindu idea that everyone has a bit of "Divine Spark". Because from my pov, there is very little difference, people just like to deliberately misunderstand it so they can claim those gods have nothing to do with their own god.

Paul doesn't say that this only happens after you agree to worship Jesus.
6:9

9 Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, 10 thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

I already linked to all the refutations of the whole "gayness is wrong because the Bible says so" thing. But you know, a lot of people think Paul had some serious issues with his own sexuality?

He seems to abhor the idea of sex with a woman. He doesn't seem to actually hate women, because he seems to have a number of platonic female friends. But he goes on to say that it's better for a man to get married than to torture himself with his urges. He doesn't seem to want to admit that there's any in between option, and frequently rants about gay men, which says to many people- "huge, giant, closet case!"

6:12

12 "All things are lawful for me," but not all things are beneficial. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be dominated by anything.

For example, go ahead, smoke. But a smart, spiritually mature person knows that smoking's a painful, expensive habit and will avoid it. Things like drinking, smoking, drugs, sex, porn, driving really fast, eating too much, those are all things that sometimes you just have to do, or at least, sometimes it can be fun to do them. But it's so easy to get caught up in those things. IMO, looking at porn is fine (although porn for porn's sake has begun to bring out regretful emotions in me after I look at it, in a way that fan fiction and explicit but legitimate media doesn't). But it's not fine to look at porn when there are more important things you should be doing, like your writing assignments, your housecleaning or your exercising or your religious observances. Here there's an interesting point brought up about fundamentalist Christians and sex, and the myth of "pornography addiction".

Hebrews pt 3

2007-09-15T20:25:00.000-04:00

Hebrews says that Jesus was a high priest of the Order of Melchizedek. Um…okay.

It looks interesting but I don't have time to research it.

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see"

The word "faith" keeps getting mixed up with the word "religion". They're not always the same thing. If losing your religious culture means you can't believe in God anymore, you don't have faith.

If you really had faith in God, your faith wouldn't be shaken by science, so you wouldn't have to bully scientists into keeping quiet about evolution. If you really had faith that God has power over life and death, you wouldn't feel the need to force anti abortion laws through the legislature, because you’d know that if God didn't want a baby aborted, he'd take steps on his own without help from you. A belief that you've got to fight God's battles for him just shows that you don't actually believe God is capable of doing it himself- you have no faith. You might have religion but what you call faith is just bloody minded selfishness.

Sometime I'll tell everyone the story of why I have faith in God.

This memorable quote from the "Serenity" movie says so much with so little.
Shepherd Book says to Mal
I don't care what you believe in, just believe in it

Book is telling Mal that it doesn't matter whether he's a Christian or not, Mal's lack of a belief in anything at all is what's made him dead inside. Mal doesn't believe in things he can't see, he lacks hope. And since he lacks hope, he lacks trust, which makes it difficult to love, and if he can't love, he can't have the conviction to save the world.

Hebrews also tells us to obey our leaders and do not be distracted by strange teachings. I guess we can conclude from that, that this was a problem and the author is hoping to correct it through a letter. Is it too cynical to wonder if the "strange teachings" are strange because the author disapproves of them, and no other reason? The apostles are beginning to break into factions, the author of Hebrews is thought to be a student of Paul's Hellenized Reformed Saduccees and Intellectual But Clueless Gentiles faction, as opposed to Peter's Working Class Rural Misogynists faction, and Thomas' Starry Eyed Mystics faction and James' We're Still Jewish Darnit faction.

There's a problem here, and it's with the reading schedule. The Old Testament books are going in order, but the New Testament books are not. Now, I know that probably lots of people who follow these entries are well versed in how the NT is supposed to go, but there are also many people who are following along who are not. And putting these books out of order must be at least a little confusing for them.

I'm now obligated to note that Timothy is out of jail. Who is Timothy and why should anyone care? Well, some day we'll get to that.

Hebrews pt2

2007-09-14T22:32:00.000-04:00

5:7
He, in the days of his flesh, having offered up prayers and petitions with strong crying and tears to him who was able to save him from death, and having been heard for his godly fear,

Very dramatic interpretation of what Jesus went through before death.

5:12
For when by reason of the time you ought to be teachers, you again need to have someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God. You have come to need milk, and not solid food.

What most people get taught about religion is very much like Terry Pratchett's concept of "lies to children." In Pratchett's case, he was talking about methods of teaching children science and history. Teachers tell the young students very simplified things, and as they grow older the concepts gradually become more abstract and complicated. In theory anyway, although in many schools it doesn't work out that way at all.

For example, in most English speaking primary schools, when learning to spell children are taught that "I comes before E, except after C. " It's presented as an iron clad rule. But when kids get older, they generally learn that this is not even close to being true. I often doesn't come before C, especially in words not originally from the English language. I've got a Gaelic name, and people are constantly misspelling it because they're confused about the I/E rule.

In school, if we keep attending up through university levels, we learn that almost all those "lies to children" are so simplified as to be almost wrong. Religion does the same thing, except many people never make it past the Sunday School level of understanding. That is not to say that religion is wrong, but that sometimes the ideas we're taught are so simplified as to be borderline wrong. And now we've got millions of healthy, decently educated adults going around spouting these things they learned-whether it was from Sunday School or just absorbed from pop culture. There are church leaders who never matured past the "milk" stage of Christian reasoning. And often the smartest people are not in influential positions, because advancing in the ranks of churchdom requires charisma and people skills more than it does knowledge of God. The true religious intellectual is usually not allowed anywhere near church congregations.

And this is actually why Roman Christianity and its descendants worked so well, compared to the other branches that were smothered or didn't get to be as enormously popular. They deliberately set out to make a theology, mythology and doctrine that people could pick up quickly and easily. Something a five year old child could learn in a year, a religion that could be explained in an eight page tract. A few simple rules. It's so easy to pick up that there's this thing called, I think "The Wordless Book" which is about five pages, just five individual colored pieces of construction paper. And each page represents an aspect of Christian doctrine.

It works in the sense of attracting and keeping people, but it fails in the area of making good Christians. New converts are immediately encouraged to go out and make more converts, leaving them unprepared to deal with the deeper questions that might come up.

Gnostics (and others) like to blame the Roman church for everything, but it couldn't have happened if there was no doorway left open- it couldn't have happened that way unless the Gnostics let it happen on some level. And I see the same attitudes in many of today's intellectual Christians and Gnostics. There is little tolerance for those who are not well educated, or for those who can't keep up. They are often quick to start arguments, sometimes incapable of compromise and lack the ability to work together as a group. They don't do charitable work. There are no Gnostic sacraments (no legitimate ones that we know of anyway, the "Gnostic Mass" is not Christian) and no Gnostic family venues like Sunday Schools. Perhaps things were slightly different in the early Christian period, but something besides fear drove people toward the Orthodox and Roman churches, weakening the Gnostics.

The Gnostic says "sink or swim", while the establishment church says "here are some floaties for your arms, and look, we have a shallow end." Unfortunately, floaties and a shallow end is what the majority of people really want from organized religion.

Hebrews pt 1

2007-09-14T22:28:00.000-04:00

Hebrews

Hebrews sounds like it should be an Old Testament book, but it's actually not. It is, however, an attempt to tie together the OT and the new. Hebrews is grouped in with Paul's letters, but it's been speculated since Origen (who lived in the second century C.E ) that this book wasn't actually written by Paul. It expresses some Pauline ideas, but it's not his writing style at all and it doesn't open with "Hey guys, it's me, Paul" like the other ones do. Somebody said this might have been written by a woman. There's nothing in the text to explicitly contradict the idea anyway.

I found chapter 2, verses 12-15 interesting.

13 And again, "I will put my trust in him." And again, "Here am I and the children whom God has given me."
14 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15

Have I totally dragged this out of context? Maybe. Leaving aside the reference to children, because I think that is probably metaphorical, it's that combined with he himself likewise shared the same things that I see as being important. The same things. He was born, he hit puberty, he got hungry, thirsty, sleepy and sick. He got angry, he got sad, he got drunk. He cried. He probably felt embarrassed sometimes. He does everything the rest of humanity does, except never once feeling lust or falling in love- experiencing everything except marriage and sex? There's just something off about that, that the hero of the story is a thirty year old virgin who lives with his mother. If he really experienced everything we do, then he experienced sex and marriage too, it's only logical. Maybe even fatherhood.

Hebrews tells us that Jesus was more important than Moses, and insists for several paragraphs that this is true. They use as reasoning the whole "the Jews turned their backs on God so God chose someone else" argument. Which I can't imagine went down well with the Hebrews who are receiving this letter. And I think it points to evidence that the author of this book is not a Hebrew themselves. They use a lot of Jewish imagery, and Jewish references but they only seem to understand Judaism in a kind of sheltered, academic way. Which is true of a lot of Christian writers including probably yours truly but…

I was thinking about the argument that "the Jews turned away from God" and it just doesn't work. Not just because the Jews would have, and still do, disagree. But because the person writing Hebrews has lost sight of the fundamental flaw in their theory. The people in the Old Testament are always accusing each other of having turned away from God. It happens so often it becomes routine- "yeah, yeah, turned away from God, where's my toast, woman?" Yet God keeps taking them back, so why would it now be suddenly different? The prophets keep telling these people that they've strayed in order to remind them not to stray, sometimes it doesn't mean they actually had.

It's very much a part of Christian insecurity that the author of Hebrews doesn't understand the relationship between the Jews and God. The natural child knows that family will never really leave you or throw you out.. if your dad locks you out of the house for coming home late and drunk, just wait a few days until he calms down and everything will be okay. But the adopted child is coming from an abusive home, or a place of abandonment and feels desperate to prove that they deserve a place in the family. It's not enough just to be there, they have to have constant reassurance that they're the special and favorite child. It becomes a competition.

His work has been finished since the creation of the world.

This is one of those religion moments where you just have to sit there and go "whooaaa" for like half an hour.

I've speculated once or twice to myself, that God is operating on literally a different erm.. time frequency…than this world. God knows how everything will turn out, because God has already been and gone. There's a reason why the symbol for eternity is a snake eating its own tail, perhaps time moves in a cycle, and God with it.

The stars we see in the sky today are actually millions (and billions) of years old, the light we see is old light. But we're surging forward toward something we can't see, eventually we must end up at the end of somewhere, and when that happens we'll have no choice but to start again.

It's the reason for deja vu- that strange feeling you get sometimes randomly, that you've done something before. I've gotten that a lot- standing in line at the store, arriving in cities I've never been to and being sure I've walked those streets before. We're getting echoes of the future, which is really the past.

There are other circles out there as well, and sometimes those circles pass through our circles, so not only do we get echoes of what we've personally done, we get echoes of what we've done in other realities.

God is waiting for us at the end of time, which means God is actually waiting for us in the past and that's why we can't see him now.

Romans 13-15

2007-09-12T20:35:00.000-04:00

"Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgement on spiritual matters".

Don't argue because one person celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday, and someone else takes no days off.

"As one who is fully in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love."

If someone wants to eat differently from you, leave them alone about it, and don't make things harder for them.

Now , Paul has a reputation as somewhat of a misogynistic, anti Semitic homophobe. And maybe he does get worse later but so far I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing a man with certain culturally imbedded attitudes, who is visibly struggling with a lot of stuff. In this chapter, he's quite supportive of women, mentioning a few who he's worked with, and telling people to listen to them.

He mentions Priscilla, Phoebe, Junia, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, the mother of Rufus, the sister of Nereus, and also says "Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you." So there are eight women preachers mentioned here, plus Mary. Could be referring to Jesus mother, but I doubt it, she'd be really old at this point, if not dead. What other Mary could he be talking about? These people all seem to be important enough that they're only identified by a first name- Mary was a pretty popular name at the time so the mention of a Mary without any other qualifiers must be significant. Well, who's to say it's not that Mary anyway.

He also appears to have connections with various city officials in different places.
He has dictated this letter to someone called "Tertius".

It's important to bear in mind when reading the next books, that Paul a) spent most of his life before conversion as a conservative Jewish priest, and b) he didn't know that his words would end up being taken as Gospel two thousand years later. Since there was no Christian Bible yet, he didn't know these letters would be put in some book and circulated around the world. And c) Not everything that is supposed to be by Paul is actually by Paul. There's this guy Deutero!Paul.

His possible authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews had been questioned as early as Origen. Since at least 1750, a number of other letters commonly attributed to Paul have also been suspected by some of having been written by his followers in the 1st century.

Romans pt2

2007-09-11T20:43:00.000-04:00

Paul quotes the Torah and the Prophets a lot. He's clearly very well versed in them, and actually most of this book seems to be about his quest to reconcile Judaism with Jesus, even though he says he's writing to Gentiles. He also likes his exclamation points!

"We have been released from the law so that we serve in the way of the spirit and not the written code."

The difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is like the difference between etiquette and being nice. Etiquette is elegant, it makes things run more smoothly, it adds class to an event. But even someone who never learned that can still figure out how to be nice.

The letter of the law says that you can't eat an animal doesn't have a split hoof and that doesn't chew its cud. But the spirit of the law means you shouldn't sell dead, diseased horsemeat to someone and tell them it's beef. No, it's not literally spelled out for us but how hard is it to figure out that it's wrong?

I mean, if God really did give us Christians simpler rules, how mad is he going to be that we can't even follow those?

"I told you I was exempting you from the food, farming, money, cleaning and sex laws, because I thought it'd be easier on you. Now I find out that you can't even be trusted with sharp objects. Look what you did! LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID to my nice clean planet! You're going to stay right here and you're going to mop this up and then you're going to go apologize to the rest of the universe!"

Paul says the Law didn't save him but it did give him a roadmap to figure out what's a sin and what isn't.

But then he agonizes, "what I want to do, I do not do, and what I hate I do." Who hasn't been there.

Did God reject Israel?

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit— 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, F52 my kindred according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; 5 to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, F53 who is over all, God blessed forever. F54 Amen.

Paul wants to save his own people, and considers that by being Jewish they are already in a great place, how much better would it be to add Christ to that? He's very torn and upset that he can't convince the other Jews to join him in his new sect. He keeps coming back to it, so I think this is something that really bothers him, as it always bothers the new convert to a new set of beliefs. I've found myself doing the same thing, being so excited about a new religious idea or even just a new fandom, that I really do want to be able to fully share it with others. It's kind of classic, really…

16 If the part of the dough offered as first fruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; and if the root is holy, then the branches also are holy. 17 But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the rich root F67 of the olive tree, 18 do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember that it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. 19 You will say, "Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in." 20 That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand only through faith. So do not become proud, but stand in awe. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, perhaps he will not spare you.

Then he turns around and tells the Gentiles not to be arrogant toward the Jews, because without them, there'd be no Jesus and no salvation. Very, very excellent point, Paul.

It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, 7 and not all of Abraham's children are his true descendants; but "It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you." 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants.

All followers of God are Israelites, regardless of genetic makeup. Except when we're asked to do something we don't want to do…of course. But it definitely applies when we want their land, or their cooperation in killing other people or for them to vote for a certain candidate. Especially when you're trying to hold Armageddon in someone's back yard.

"The elder shall serve the younger." 13 As it is written, "I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau."

But in the Jacob/Esau story, Jacob is the chosen one, the father of Israel, not Esau. But here, Paul is treating Esau as if the older brother were the metaphor for Israel. Wait, what? Which one is Esau and which one is Jacob in this scenario? Is Jacob Christianity? What kind of picture does this paint about Christianity? Jacob was awful, and cheated Esau out of his birthright twice, cheated his father in law, and stole his father in law's gods and ran away. Then he gets in a fist fight with God. And in the end, he's the one who has to go to Esau and beg to be forgiven.

Wait, maybe the metaphor is apt turned around this way too. I have more thoughts on this that I'm saving for my posts on the Crucifixion.

25 As indeed he says in Hosea, "Those who were not my people I will call "my people,' and her who was not beloved I will call "beloved.' " 26 "And in the very place where it was said to them, "You are not my people,' there they shall be called children of the living God." 27 And Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, "Though the number of the children of Israel were like the sand of the sea, only a remnant of them will be saved; 28 for the Lord will execute his sentence on the earth quickly and decisively."

Justification for those people who believe the amount of human souls that will be "saved" is predestined and limited.

There are some hymns that were inspired by the book of Romans.
As it is written: "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Good News of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!"
(warning, page a little scary)

I ask then, did God reject his people? May it never be! For I also am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.

Interesting. I never knew Paul got so specific about his genealogy. Someone with enough academic skill and resources and determination could probably trace his family. I don't know what the point would be in that, other than an interesting game to play though.

These are what I mentioned before seem to make up some of the emotional guidelines the NT illuminates.

12:9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor that which is evil. Cling to that which is good. 12:10 In love of the brothers be tenderly affectionate one to another; in honor preferring one another; 12:11 not lagging in diligence; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; 12:12 rejoicing in hope; enduring in troubles; continuing steadfastly in prayer; 12:13 contributing to the needs of the saints; given to hospitality. 12:14 Bless those who persecute you; bless, and don't curse. 12:15 Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. 12:16 Be of the same mind one toward another. Don't set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble. Don't be wise in your own conceits. 12:17 Repay no one evil for evil. Respect what is honorable in the sight of all men. 12:18 If it is possible, as much as it is up to you, be at peace with all men. 12:19 Don't seek revenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to God's wrath. For it is written, "Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord."

Therefore "If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in doing so, you will heap coals of fire on his head."

Be nice to horrible people. It really freaks them out. It's probably where some of us in the progressive Christianity movement have been falling down. We kind of treat conservatives like offensive alien beings, like contact with them will pollute us. It's totally understandable, they've proven in the past that when given an inch, they will take not a mile but the whole road. But if we start to act "unchristian" toward them just because they are awful people bent on bringing about Armageddon, doesn't that make us just as bad? That's how they fell into the trap they've fallen into- by being so utterly convinced that they're right and everyone else is wrong, and they're not obligated to be nice to those they consider to be sinners.

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. Romans 13:8
Love doesn't harm a neighbor. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law. Romans 13:10.

Sound familiar, neo-pagan, crafty and occultist readers? A really famous magician said something that sounds almost the same, but isn't quite the same. It's such a famous phrase that people go around quoting it without even realizing where it comes from or in what context it was said. The man who said it probably was quite familiar with the Apostle Paul, and what he does here is certainly a work of genius. Take a quote, change it a little, make it mean something else, and inspire generations to base their entire philosophies of life around it.

"Love is the law, love under will. ".

Naturally, neither version of this phrase has made people any better. One version is mentally translated as "I can do whatever I want" and the other version translates mentally as "I can do whatever I want, provided I'm doing it for what I consider to be a good reason." That doesn't mean this is what the authors meant, as you can see, I've provided some links explaining another point of view.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib2.htm
http://perdurabo10.tripod.com/id386.html

Romans 1-6

2007-09-11T04:38:00.000-04:00

Romans

"Romans" is sometimes also called "Paul's Letter to the Romans". It opens with a brief recap of who Paul is, and a little editorial note reaffirming certain "articles of faith". These particular articles were not set down as official church doctrine until a couple of centuries after the time we believe this book was actually written. If the beliefs were really Paul's, not all his contemporaries shared them, in fact, they fought with him quite a bit. The letter is in first person pov. The chief problem with all Paul's letters is that we only have his side of the correspondence. We don't know who responded or what they said or what the original reason for the letter was. It's like trying to gain spiritual insight from one half of a telephone conversation.

Paul starts the letter by greeting the Roman church and saying how much he wishes he were with them.

We get the first of many often quoted verses. Paul is one of the favorite apostles to quote-especially to rip out of context, to paraphrase, to turn around and to mangle. Even Aleistor Crowley did it, creating a rather famous catchphrase out of an inverted Paul quotation. I will get to that one when it comes up. The first misused verse is "the righteous shall live by faith".

This is used to teach people that if you are a good person, you'll have faith in God, and all you need is faith-knowledge and works are not as important as simply believing really, really hard. Yes, this has some truth in it, but it shouldn't be used to teach people that since spiritual leaders are inspired by God, anything the leader says must be true and to question them is to question God. Which is often done in churches. Furthermore, later on he says that "God will reward each person according to their works."

The second verse quoted often is " 24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion" Used today as a weapon in the anti gay movement, people frequently ignore the rest of the verse and concentrate only on "indecent acts with other men." But Religious Tolerance. Org attempts to translate the passage into something that makes a lot more sense.

And Paul says "for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself."

"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus."

"For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."

Paul talks about Judaism not being just a privilege but a job, and that there is "every advantage" to being a Jew!

But what of those who aren't Jewish? God is the god of the Gentiles too! Can a Gentile who doesn't know about the laws still get onto God's "nice list"? Paul thinks yes, and says that there are people who follow the laws who are still on the naughty list in God's eyes because they are not kind, they have no compassion and they lack faith.

Many people have "broken the rules" for reasons that they think are justifiable, there are some very observant Jews who have killed or lied to "protect other Jews". This strange ethical quandary is covered well in Steven Spielberg's "Munich". This is a moral position, the person doing it thinks that they're being selfless, however much others may disagree (two wrongs don't really make a right, after all. Or do they? Discuss?).

However, the world is also full of people like Jack Abramoff. Abramoff claims to be an Orthodox Jew, but clearly this is no man of God. He wrote emails to friends gleefully talking about the money he was going to steal from the Indian casinos (with multiple exclamation points!!!) There's no religious motive here, just greed. Whenever he mouths the words of a prayer, or attends a Yom Kippur service or lights a Shabbat candle he is doing it as a total hypocrite. I don't really think God gets mad at people for slipping up in normal human ways. And I'm really not sure Salvation By Being Born Again for the Lord Jesus Christ is right for everyone. But there's a difference between not being saved and being a total, unmitigated bastard, especially when you ought to know better. Being "chosen" is not just a privilege; it's an obligation, and if you don't believe in what you're doing, it's totally worthless. Which is pretty much what I think Jesus is trying to say, and Paul is also saying here when he speaks to both Jews and the new spinoff religion of Christianity.

Paul explains that Abraham didn't have the laws, yet God still rewarded him for having faith.

Judaism began as a tribal religion. In a tribal religion, the needs of the tribe have to come before individuals. When you’re traveling with thousands of people and animals and camping, you don’t want people going off and doing their own thing. If someone’s got filthy personal habits they could make everyone else sick. Maybe you have to have a harsh code, because life is harsh and if someone screws up, if the priest has shaky hands, if there’s a squabble over cattle, a lot more people could get killed. You also have to keep creating more members of the tribe-more babies means a bigger tribe which means safety in numbers and power in war.

Because they began as an offshoot of Judaism, and still retain some of the same Bible books, there’s understandably some confusion over which rules Christians are required to follow. There seem to be two major schools of thought, although most people fall somewhere in between. School #1 says it’s all relevant, school #2 says none of it is.

There’s a very clear problem with both schools of thought. First, that the people of the first school claim it’s all relevant but generally ignore things like the dietary, fabric and agricultural laws as well as the ethical ones. The only things they really seem to care about are the ones that talking about sex or killing people.

I’ve been asked more than once why they do this, and I never really had an answer. But I thought of one last night.

Christianity is not a tribal religion. It was invented in settled towns and cities centuries after Moses. The very first Christians might have been from Galilee, but the ones who did the most creating of the faith were Hellenized Jews, Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Africans, and Celts/Britons…not a tribal faith. The needs of the tribe do not have to supercede the needs of an individual, there’s tons of room for a variety of approaches. However, conservative Christians often still think of it all in terms of a tribal structure. People should not be allowed to make their own choices about morality, because the ripples from their actions will damage the tribe, so it’s up to a leader to make strict rules and enforce them. Sexual violations are believed to have more effect on the community than what people eat, so those type of laws have to be enforced strictly.

But doesn’t this conflict with the message of Jesus, who protested hierarchies and excessive legalism? Most often, the verses pointed to by conservative literalists are ones that allegedly crop up again in the NT, taken out of context and not tempered with the message of love and forgiveness. They are then overlaid with selected Laws of Moses that fit the same agenda, using terrible translations. In their eagerness to do this, of course, they end up breaking at least fifty percent of the Laws and missing the entire point of the NT. So they're not doing either one right, resulting in some kind of mutant freak of a religion.

The NT is supposed to be more about emotional guidelines rather than practical community rules set in stone. If the rules don't work anymore, make new ones. Does that make it entirely incompatible with the older laws?

It's a little tangled. Of all the dietary laws in the OT, there's only one incident in the NT that purports to make them irrelevant. The cleanliness laws are not actually overturned, although Jesus says that it's okay to be a little dirty sometimes. But emphatically throughout the NT, people preach against death penalties, corporate and religious greed, tyranny, slavery and judging other people by their sexual histories.

Many Christians have, perhaps mistakenly, interpreted the lessons of the NT to mean that it doesn’t matter what you eat or what fabric your clothes are made out of or how you plant a field as long as you are a moral person and have accepted Jesus. It’s a nice sentiment but “Moral” has been redefined by the neocons as church attending, correct in your sexuality , acting out the proper gender roles and not being tainted by another faith. Also, submitting to the authority of the priests. So they go after gay people, pregnant teenagers who want abortions, unmarried people having sex, people who won’t go to church and those who call them on their actions.

Meanwhile, people are dying from Triple E and Mad Cow disease because clean food is considered “irrelevant”. Is this moral?

I think that might be violating the spirit of the law more than having consensual gay sex with someone you care about (Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love….) Despite food laws not being covered much in the NT, we are told to be moral people and feeding people poison is not very Christian, IMO. It’s not “love” is it? Neither is charging interest on debts owed to you by people already stretched to the breaking point.

Don't get me wrong. There are many laws I'm glad are unenforced (or have quietly been done away with). But I think that those things weren't really in the spirit of God's laws anyway-suited for a short time to a certain culture but not feasible anywhere else.

It's a stewardship thing, It brings you closer to God, it defines the difference between holy headspace and regular headspace- as I said before it's a very popular concept in mystical circles too. It's not about abiding by the rules of a contract you never signed, or about appeasing some terrifying tribal god. It's about being the best person you can be. Which means no, things don't have to be carried to obsessive extremes (like needing three sets of dishes)- but I can see how it fits in with a spiritual life. When mandated by the government it tends to mutate into something else.

Mark pt 2

2007-09-06T23:36:00.000-04:00

Mark 9-13

The chief problem with online Bibles is that they don't put the words of Jesus in red, so you can't compare to see if he "really said" something. So I'm just using the online ones to cut and paste the quotes. (sigh)

Jesus takes Peter, James and John up into the mountains. They have a vision (I guess) of seeing Jesus standing with Moses and Elijah.

11And they asked him, "Why do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?"

12Jesus replied, "To be sure, Elijah does come first, and restores all things. Why then is it written that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected? 13But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him."

I think… he's saying he's not Elijah and John was not Elijah, but Elijah was Elijah. I think.

He wants to go to Jerusalem for Passover, as is traditional. Outside the city he asks two disciples to go into the city and take a colt that will be waiting for them. The disciples rightly worry that people will get angry with them for stealing. Jesus says "tell them it's for Jesus."

Now, I can't see this working in real life. He may have been Big Stuff in back in Galilee but this is the big, cosmopolitan city and the owner of the colt is more likely to say "Ohh, Jesus wants it. Oh, well then, by all means, take it. After all, we can't deny Jesus. Is Jesus planning on paying for this? " But actually they'd probably just yell "Guards! Someone stole my colt!"

But this doesn't have to be realistic. It's actually what's called a "ritual myth". A ritual myth is a story that may or may not have happened, but the purpose is not to pass along facts. A ritual myth becomes liturgy, the rhythm and the emotion is more important than characterization or realism. It's meant for the already initiated, who don't need any background to it. Passover is also a ritual myth, so this becomes a ritual myth about people coming together to observe a ritual myth.

They go to visit the Temple, and when they enter the courtyard, they're greeted by the sight of people selling animals and changing money. Jesus goes berserk and smashes the booths.

he said, "Is it not written:
" 'My house will be called
a house of prayer for all nations'[c]? But you have made it 'a den of robbers.'[d]"

I guess the people had turned the Temple into a shop- a God shop were you could buy salvation (and nifty trinkets). Today's churches are beginning to slip back into it- several "mega" churches have rented out space to Starbucks, and churches with steeples sometimes rent their towers to cell phone companies. I don't see anything wrong with a shrine or cathedral having a gift shop, as long as it's located away from the front doors and sanctuary, and the church hasn't sold itself out to some greedy corporation. St. Paul's in London, for example, has a giftshop located discreetly in the basement, accessed by a side door, where discreet people buy discreet gifts discreetly. Many churches have charity shops. But people shouldn't have to walk through a mall to get to God. And they shouldn't have to buy absolution or a ticket to Heaven. Once a church enters into partnership with people whose sole goal is to make money, the church is making an unwise choice. The pagan temples were doing the same thing as the Jewish Temple, and it led to corruption as well. Jesus seems to preach against the corrupting power of money more than anything else. Incidentally, he says "it is written", he is quoting someone else here, not himself.

It's at this point that the high priests get involved. Because now Jesus has interfered with making money, and that is unforgivable. The Pharisees were probably very devout local guys, who wouldn't really have done anything to Jesus because he was popular and his relatives would probably not stand for it. But the high priests just saw some guy threatening their tenuous relationship with Rome. The high priests, unlike the regular people, did not want any kind of "Messiah" showing up, they'd been allowed to run things for far too long and God, or an ordained messenger from God, would just ruin it all. This is not a fault of Judaism alone, this would happen in any organized religion- imagine if the Vatican (or the Falwell/Dobson/Robertson crowd) heard that Jesus was back and was coming to Have Words with them.

Jesus is spurred into talking about the End Times.

As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!"

2"Do you see all these great buildings?" replied Jesus. "Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down."

This does actually happen. Not a few days from his own death or anything but it does happen. It's famous for happening. But since the writer is writing this after it's happened (the destruction of the Temple), did Jesus really predict this or is someone from the future looking into the past with their own bias?

you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.

1) There will be a lot of things that seem like the end of the world, but they won't be.
2) It's the end of an age, which will be terrifying, but the beginning of something better.

14"When you see 'the abomination that causes desolation'[a]standing where it[b] does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

One of the things that sparked the riots and the Siege of Jerusalem, the standoff between the Zealots and the Romans, was a Roman leader's plans to build a pagan temple over the Temple of Solomon. Many Jews fled into the mountains. And it was through fleeing into the mountains where it was difficult to get to them, that they saved what was left of their religion.

Or maybe he means this? That's an abomination in my book.

15Let no one on the roof of his house go down or enter the house to take anything out. 16Let no one in the field go back to get his cloak. 17How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! 18Pray that this will not take place in winter,

It almost freaks me out to read the words about being on your roof, because it reminds me of Katrina. But then I remember that these words are being written in a culture where people often have/had rooftop gardens, so someone being on their roof would not be terribly unusual. It would not be a sign that say, they were up there to avoid drowning.

21At that time if anyone says to you, Look, here is the Christ , or, Look, there he is! do not believe it. 22For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles to deceive the elect—if that were possible. 23So be on your guard; I have told you everything ahead of time.

24"But in those days, following that distress,
" 'the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
25the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.'[d]

But this hasn't really happened, so what is he talking about here?

I tell you the truth, this generation[e] will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

If all of this is really referring to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the surrounding events involving the Romans, then he is right. Mary Magdalene, and St. John (the beloved) survive for quite a long time, they outlive Peter, who lives at least until 65 C.E. It sounds like he's addressing his own generation, but then he predicts some things that don't come true as well and seems to be implying that there's an even worse apocalypse coming later.

32"No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

How can God know something Jesus doesn't know?

In Margaret Starbird's "Magdalene's Lost Legacy", I found an interesting theory about the End Times and the Anti Christ. She worries that perhaps the GodMan Christians have been worshipping for thousands of years is not the real Jesus, that we've turned him into someone he was not and never wanted to be. We made him a warrior and a dictatorial king when he tried to flee from both roles in the Bible. His messages have been turned on their heads- he wanted women to be equal with men, instead Christianity took away what few rights ancient women had left. He wanted to expand the central tenets of his own religion to be accessible to Gentiles, and instead the Gentiles went power mad, blamed the Jews for killing him and embarked on centuries of anti Semitic campaigning, culminating in six million Jews dying in German concentration camps. He told us being physically clean wasn't the same as being spiritually clean and…surprise, here comes the Plague. He told us to be peaceful, but instead we beat the living daylights out of any person or country that won't bow down and worship him (or at least give us their oil). He told us to take care of the poor and instead we leave thousands of poor people to drown in filthy water or starve inside shelters waiting for help that won't come. His effort to break down the temple/high priest systems turned into the world's most extensive and powerful system of high priests and temples. Our Jesus is a white guy, with no sense of humor who walks around spouting platitudes (when he's not melting people with his eyeballs). We're often encouraged to pray to him, not to God- if we just ask Jesus for it, he'll give it to us! And we wave the instrument of his torture around-this violent image with the unbalanced sides (the "male" bar is longer than the "female" bar) that Constantine had a dream about. This is a false Jesus, a frightening, mirror world version- is Jesus foretelling the rise of an Anti Christ who will be…himself?

I'm not covering the Crucifixion here, because it's going to come up again three or four times so I'll just combine all those passages when I'm done with the Gospels. But I'd like to point out these links and discussions on "Who really died? "

This is an interesting theory.

Mark pt 1

2007-09-05T22:59:00.000-04:00

"John the Baptist, not the sort of guy you'd invite to a GOP fundraiser. " Peter Levenda in Sinister Forces

Mark feels rushed and incomplete, as if the author was working mostly from hearsay, without any background. He doesn't bother to explain anything that's going on. In fact, he assumes that the reader already knows the entire story because he skips important info and throws spoilers around like there's no tomorrow.

First we meet John the Baptist. Who is the archetypal hippie, living out in the desert, with long hair and speeches about the end of the world. He also rails against the corrupt government. I have heard that he was an Essene but I don't know how much proof there is. He baptizes people, which is why he's called "the Baptist". Jesus comes to see him after a sermon and asks to be baptized. John is concerned, not thinking himself worthy. But Jesus insists and wades into the river. When John is done, a dove flies overhead and a voice is heard saying "This is my Son, in whom I am well pleased." There's that dove again…

This might seem totally unambigous but on the discussion group, some people have said that it can also mean "Son" in the sense that we are all the children of God. Jesus has begun teaching in the synagogues and people there seem to enjoy his preaching, no one has threatened to lynch him at all.

Jesus goes out to the desert to be alone. This has been interpreted by a couple of people on the discussion list as a vision quest, and I agree. He sees visions of angels and demons and communes with animals.

When Jesus is choosing the twelve of his inner circle, he just walks up to total strangers, asks them to be his friend, and they get up and follow him. I think we're meant to infer that he has such a powerful and amazing kind of charisma that all he has to do is introduce himself and people are falling all over him.

This is why novelisations and similar type versions of the stories are so much more satisfying to read, because those authors bother to explain how these people know each other and why they'd take off with this new teacher.

Hey, Levi bar Alphaeus! Random Lamb shoutout!

The demon possessed man (My name is Legion) story has always made me laugh. It's just so funny. They're going down to the lake and this random guy runs out, all dirty and disheveled, naked and screaming like a maniac. As usual, Jesus is totally unflappable and just talks to the guy like they're having a civilized tea party.

Legion: WWASOANFONGGAAAAH! (flings arms around and spits)
Jesus: I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that.

Jesus diverts the demons into a herd of pigs and they all move on. He goes to the home of a Pharisee to have dinner, and the Pharisees are upset at the way some of Jesus's followers don't wash their hands.

"Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean, " Jesus replies.

He may be referring to spiritual uncleanliness, which can be easily confused with physical uncleanliness- saying "my men may be dirty but they're still good people." Once again though, this has been used as justification for us to chow down on triple bacon cheeseburgers and potatoes fried in animal fat, with a side of lobster salad.

" Are you so dull?" he asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean?"

The words of Jesus are in red. So when he says that, he means it. However, in my NIV there's a comment inserted in parentheses at the end which says "In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean". This isn't printed in red, but in black like the rest of the type, so it is actually just the author/editor's opinion that Jesus meant all animals were now clean. While I can agree that we're not necessarily going to suffer eternal retribution for eating the wrong food, that doesn't make every animal "clean" and safe to eat. Not all plants are for eating either. Like I said in a previous entry, it's more important than ever before to watch what we eat-it may be necessary for Christians to return to the kosher food laws if we want to remain healthy (if not that, become vegetarians or vegans or try halal). It's not some kind of ritualistic thing that is symbolic of being clean, I'm talking if you keep eating that, you are going to continue to slowly poison yourself. Meanwhile, the profits from the sale of these food items will be turned around and used against you- to fund shoddy "science" that will prove the foods are healthy, to buy congressmen to push harmful agendas and to fill the bank account of some guy who thinks he can buy his way into Heaven by funding scary groups. How can you say all foods are safe to eat when they're not?

The Bible doesn't say we're going to Hell if we dont' brush our teeth. But if you don't, they will turn yellow and fuzzy, then your gums will start to hurt and bleed and turn white. Then your teeth will fall out. God will say to you "why do you have no teeth?" You'll say "But you didn't say anything about brushing them." And God will say "But I told you to take care of your body, didn't I?"

It's always taught in "traditional" Christianity that the Pharisees were the bad guys- corrupt and too comfortable. But I think people confuse the Pharisees with the high priests. The Pharisees were conservative lay teachers, and I'm sure Jesus was happy to debate with them. When a guy is going around your town calling himself a prophet, it's your responsibility as community leaders to investigate him. I don't think there was anything personal in the constant questioning. Here was a new person with new and interesting ideas, naturally (especially since one of the fundamental building blocks of Judaism appears to be the argument) they might enjoy debating him and he would enjoy debating and defending his thoughts. These aren't screaming, "now it's personal" fights or hot spotlight interrogations or "let's catch him in a lie so we can throw him in jail" things, they were probably academic arguments such as you might find in any seminary or rabbi school. Besides, the Pharisees were not actually the Scary Fundamentalists, the Sadducees were much worse (I think? I'm getting confused).

I don't believe they started plotting to kill him when he healed someone on the Sabbath. That just seems so ridiculous.

His family thinks he's crazy. Maybe because he keeps rambling on about seeds.

Jesus says "If you are not against us, you are for us."

Usually modern Christians say "If you are not for us, you are against us" and try to claim they're quoting Jesus. But the two sentences do not actually mean the same thing. Jesus is saying "if you have no quarrel with me, I have no quarrel with you." The conservatives who often misquote the passage are saying "if you remain neutral, you are actively trying to hurt us."

Jesus says "Everything is possible for him who believes."

Jesus says " If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last and the servant of all."

Jesus says "Whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me."

Jesus says "What good is it for a man to gain the world but lose his soul?"

Jesus says "Why do you call me good? No man is good but God alone."

Jesus says "Anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward."

Jesus says "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's."

Jesus says " The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."

Jesus says "I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. 29But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

No one's been able to figure out, as far as I know, what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. If they know they won't say. How can people avoid doing something if they don't know what it is they need to avoid?

Jesus says "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Well that just throws Prosperity Theology right out the window (it's a popular idea, that rich people get that way because God has blessed them. Poor people are poor because they've sinned). And no, guys, there is no "Eye of the Needle" gate in Jerusalem...

Jesus says "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. 12And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

Unfortunately this is yet another passage that's been used to oppress certain people, mainly women. I think it was meant to make people be so careful about who they were marrying that they wouldn't need to get divorced, but it turned into something else. Instead, people just kept right on making loveless arranged marriages, which they then tried to get out of or find some way around. Women were forced to marry abusive men, and were then unable to get away from them. A man would marry a woman, decide he didn't like her, shut her up in a separate house and start cheating on her. But it was (and still is) a double standard, because women who cheat are shunned far more severely than men who cheat. It seems like the Jews really tried to make happy, consensual marriages but that didn't work well all the time, almost nowhere, because women had little rights so men rewrote the rules of marriage to suit themselves.

And when asked what the most important commandments are, this is his reply

9"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.[e] 30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'[f] 31The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'[g]There is no commandment greater than these."

Not "Don't be gay." Not "You shall not question the religious establishment." Not "You shall not insult America". Then he tells two parables that I really don't understand…

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12so that,
" 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
and ever hearing but never understanding;
otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'[a]"

13Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?

4The disciples had forgotten to bring bread, except for one loaf they had with them in the boat. 15"Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod."

16They discussed this with one another and said, "It is because we have no bread."

17Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don't you remember? 19When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?"
"Twelve," they replied.

20"And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?"
They answered, "Seven."

21He said to them, "Do you still not understand?"

NO, no we DON"T.

Matthew pt 5

2007-09-04T22:03:00.000-04:00

16:26
26 For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his life? Or what will a man give in exchange for his life?

And of course, the only way to gain the world is to lose your soul. There have been people who came close to having enormous sway over the world who were not compromised, but they tend to get murdered. It's never the Dick Cheneys, the Donald Trumps, the Rupert Murdochs or the Bill Gates of the world who have to die young.

28 Most certainly I tell you, there are some standing here who will in no way taste of death, until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom."

Interesting. How's that work? Because, in the late first century, everyone really did think the world was ending, and it sort of did, because the world they knew ceased to exist. The Age of the Ram was supplanted by the Age of the Fish. Or is this one of those metaphor passages?

21:4
4 All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet, saying,
5 "Tell the daughter of Zion, behold, your King comes to you, humble, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

YES! YES! *ahem*. Do I even have to say it? Okay, nobody cares what I'm giggling about anyway.

23:1-37
13 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows' houses, and as a pretense you make long prayers. Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.
14 "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for you don't enter in yourselves, neither do you allow those who are entering in to enter.
15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much of a son of Gehenna as yourselves.
16 "Woe to you, you blind guides, who say,'Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obligated.'
17 You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold?
18 'Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obligated?'
24 You blind guides, who strain out a gnat, and swallow a camel!
37 "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!

Seems as though many people don't even know what the difference between a Pharisee and a Sadducee is.

While little or none of their own writings have been preserved until today, they seem to have indeed been a priestly group, associated with the leadership of the Temple in Jerusalem. Some say that they were not truly descendants of the High Priest Zadok, but rather the followers of another Zadok who rebelled against his Rabbinical Teacher.

Most of what we know about the Sadducees comes from Josephus, who wrote that they were a quarrelsome group whose followers were wealthy and powerful, and that he considered them boorish in social interactions.

Modern Christians often use the word "Pharisee" to describe someone legalistic , yet hypocritical, it's an insult to be called a "Pharisee". But the Pharisees were the ones who survived to create Rabbinical Judaism and were known to actually be less harsh than the Sadducees, so the word turns into a rather inaccurate and slightly anti Semitic reference. The Sadducees were the Temple leadership, the Pharisees the common local priests, the Sadducees were the ones who had Jesus arrested. The Pharisees didn't have that kind of power, and judging from the quote below, maybe they wouldn't have felt like trying.

In general, whereas the Sadducees were conservative and aristocratic, the Pharisees were eclectic, popular, and more democratic. The Pharisaic position is exemplified by the assertion that "A learned mamzer takes precedence over an ignorant High Priest." (A mamzer is an outcast child born of a forbidden relationship, such as adultery or incest; the word is often, but incorrectly, translated as "illegitimate" or "bastard.")

They're painted as bad because they argued with Jesus, but what else would you expect them to do? Some guy shows up calling himself a prophet and you're not going to go check him out? But lots of people are taught in Sunday School that the fact that they questioned him makes them suspicious, which is basically grooming children to not ask difficult questions. It may be subconscious now, but it could have originally been done on purpose-"Jews are unworthy because they are argumentative, don't argue or you won't be worthy either".

However, just because they might be using the wrong word doesn't change the basic point of the passage.

15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel around by sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much of a son of Gehenna as yourselves.

I didn't know Jewish priests went on mission trips. Did they? Doesnt' seem like something they'd do, considering everything else we've learned about them so far says they were most emphatically not interested in anyone non Jewish and not a resident of their own land. So I think... the person who wrote Matthew had complaints about a different set of priests. Well, it doesn't matter because if this were a movie, this would be the point when Jesus breaks the fourth wall and addresses the real audience.

Have you ever followed what happens when the Right Wing of the Western churches gets into a third world country? If there were already Christian groups, they set the people against the older groups, especially if the previous group in residence there was a Catholic organization.

Women start losing their rights-although at first it looks like things will be better for them they just end up exchanging one kind of misogyny for another. The concept of the "witch in league with the Devil" is introduced, and the definition of witchcraft changes to include shamanism and folk magic. In parts of Africa dominated by the religious right, children (often little girls) accused of witchcraft are ripped from their homes, handed over to a witch hunter to be tortured for months. In Nigeria, you can be arrested for homosexuality (while technically it's not supposed to happen, the religious leaders hold incredible sway). Certain Protestant religious leaders worked with certain Catholic religious leaders to crush liberation theology in South America.

That's it for Matthew. At least, the parts I want to write about right now.

I don't know when I'll do more, I'm really wiped out with some female problems, and I have to use what energy I have to write some of my fiction.

Matthew pt4

2007-09-03T01:11:00.000-04:00

Mathew 16:18

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

Recently in my other journal I made an entry with a link to an article about Pope Benedict, where he asks where God was during the Holocaust. This is somewhat ironic, of course, because the new pope was a member of the Hitler Youth as a young person. He may not have had a choice (although it seems somewhat of a cop out to me to say "but if I didn't do it, they'd hurt people I cared about". Well, people you cared about got hurt anyway, didn't they.) But it's even more strange-not that he was in the Hitler Youth, and not that he was elected pope in spite of this, when the previous pontiff had made such great strides in the area of Jewish-Christian relations- it's strange that he would ask such a question.

"Where was God?"

You'd think the head of the largest Christian organizations in the world would have some kind of answer to that. Perhaps the answer is not one he wants to consider. You see, if the Church had been doing its job, maybe things wouldn't have gotten so out of control. Religion exists to be the voice of compassion and morality, at least all religion post Jesus has- Religion has often been the last or the first line of defense for the weak and helpless. When it fails in this duty, whether because it's focused on its own survival or because it has simply turned on the people it was supposed to help-maybe just because people are feeling apathetic, disaster strikes.

Of course it's not just the Church's fault. When we look at the causes of the Holocaust, we see a failure of every popular system people have of policing themselves. Democracy backfired (Hitler was voted in), Science turned on us (Eugenics, experiments on people), Diplomacy was taken advantage of (We can trust he won't invade Poland) -even the idea that we're all Civilized and Enlightened turned out to be largely false. But the Church, the Church is-was- supposed to be different. Isn't it?

Jesus famously told Peter "you are the rock, and on this rock I will build my kingdom. " The Catholic Church loves this verse. You might recognize it yourself, it's carved on the wall of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. The verse has been used for over a thousand years to cement the Church's right to rule on earth. Yes, the meaning of it is disputed often (maybe it wasn't Peter, maybe it wasn't a literal rock, etc, etc), but the Catholics have held firmly to their belief that Jesus gave Peter the keys to Heaven. "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven." The verse is so popular it's actually been made into a pop song.

"And all the powers of Hell itself shall nevermore prevail against it." If there was ever a twentieth century illustration of "the powers of Hell" it was the Nazis. There are billions of Catholics in the world, they have billions of dollars in art, architecture, money and other assets throughout the world, they have radio stations, television stations, film companies, world class universities…and the Vatican is a literal fortress (it is its own nation with fortifications capable of withstanding everything except heavy missiles) with its own private army. Now, imagine what they could do when backed up by other major Christian denominations. If the majority of Christians in the world all turned their energies, physical, political or psychic, on a goal there is little that could stand in their way. We can see that in the way fundamentalists of all denominations have banded together to take over America's government.

So why did six million Jews have to die? Because the Catholic Church, and many other major Christian denominations, did not try hard enough to save them. In some cases they actively encouraged the Nazis (even smuggling war criminals out of Germany) until it became obvious what the Nazis were doing- meaning- about the time they were actually shoving Jews in actual ovens. And still, most church authorities did little about it.

With privilege comes responsibility, as exemplified in Paul's explanation of the Jewish laws. This chunk of verse is often used to claim that Christians are the new chosen people, because the Jews failed at living up to their responsibilities. But the very people who use these verses as a defense have also failed to live up to what's expected of them-they've failed even more because when they failed, it affected people besides just their own community. The Church failed at the task God set for them, the task of loving your neighbor, protecting the helpless, treating others as you would like to be treated, they did not live up to the example of Jesus (who, incidentally, happened to also you know, be a Jew).

Benedict asks "why didn't God stop this?" God was there…that little voice in your heart that tells you "don’t do that, it's wrong", that voice is from God. And the Church as a global body was supposed to be God's hands on earth, or so they constantly tell us. You can't have it both ways, spending a thousand years insisting that God has given you the keys to the universe and then claiming you were helpless when evil showed its face on earth. You weren't helpless, you were trying to save your own skin. Or maybe you were just too unconsciously influenced by medieval urban legends about Jews.

Standing up to evil would have required some people to die, more than likely. And many other people might have lost employment or political favor. That's what you sign on for when you sign on to be a part of this Christianity thing. You agree to strive to follow the example of Jesus and the first Apostles. Aside from the obvious example of Jesus, the first Christians were beheaded, shot, stoned, burned at the stake, devoured by lions, tortured, crucified (upside down and right side up) , among other things. Another interesting line in the song I linked to above says "If you would give your life away, for nothing in return". The Christian leadership during WW2 was not, on the whole, willing to do such a thing. A pope or archbishop who truly walked with God would have said "you want to take those people to a concentration camp, then you're going to have to take me too."

"One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around us, machine gun trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains -- and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel. . . . The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. . . . "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. . . . Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. . . . For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is -- He is hanging here on this gallows . . ."

Elie Wiesel

Matthew pt3

2007-09-01T22:47:00.000-04:00

12:30
He who is not with me is against me, and he who doesn't gather with me, scatters.
Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men.

He said the opposite in Mark (whoever is not against me is for me). However, since Mark is the older book, I suppose the verse in Mark is more relevant. What is blasphemy against the Spirit? I think people have debated that for centuries. Since so many theologians and traditions believe that the Spirit is the female aspect of the Divine, is blasphemy against the Spirit really blasphemy against the Feminine Divine?

12:42
The queen of the south will rise up in the judgment with this generation, and will condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, someone greater than Solomon is here.

Interesting. Who is this "Queen of the South"? She "came from the ends of the earth" to see Solomon. This puts me in mind of the "Queen of Sheba" story, except that it seems a little weird for Jesus to be referencing some long dead queen of a foreign land from a extra canonical folk tale. Unless you want to run with the popular theory that the "Queen of Sheba" was really an avatar of a certain Middle Eastern goddess. Some long dead queen of another country wouldn't have the power to "rise up in judgement" of them.

13:54
54 Coming into his own country, he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, "Where did this man get this wisdom, and these mighty works?
55 Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother called Mary, and his brothers, James, Joses, Simon, and Judas?
56 Aren't all of his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all of these things?"

Jesus
James
Judas
Joseph
Simon

So, Mary has five children named in the Bible. This doesn't count any daughters-although there are no women named specifically as Jesus's sisters *in this book*, the verse that mentions "his sisters". Plural. I wonder if their names began with J too. But it seems like instead of remaining a perpetual virgin, Mary was a regular baby making machine, and only one of those children is ever labeled as being divinely conceived.

Why are things like this so important? Well, it changes our picture of Jesus. One the one hand, you can have a Capricorn, who is a thirty two year old virgin (you think it'd be embarrassing to be in your thirties and a virgin now, imagine how awkward it'd be back when people married at fourteen), an only child still living with his mother. His mother, of course, never actually had sex with her husband. On the other hand, you have a Pisces, possibly married, the oldest of five or at minimum, seven children. And his parents had a normal physical relationship.

14:1-12
At that time, Herod the tetrarch heard the report concerning Jesus,
2 and said to his servants, "This is John the Baptizer. He is risen from the dead. That is why these powers work in him."

Interesting that I decided to write about this passage today (okay, technically yesterday), which is actually St. John's Day according to the medieval calendar. John "the Baptist" was born to Elizabeth and Zachariah, Mary's relatives. John was the cousin of Jesus, and they seem to have been quite close.

John lived in the desert and worked as a prophet and preacher. He was incredibly popular, many people even thought he was Elijah reborn. John's trademark was baptism, although he didn't invent the concept. John, you might remember, was the one who baptized Jesus, initiating his formal entrance into the field of ministry. John made a special point of railing against the corrupt practices of the Jewish king, Herod.

Herod claims to have actually liked John, but when his wife and stepdaughter demanded John's head on a platter, Herod had John killed. When his stepdaughter performed a dance that pleased the king, the king promised to give her anything she wanted, and her mother convinced her to ask for the prophet's head on a plate. Contrary to popular belief, the stepdaughter is not named in the Gospels, nor is the dance she performs, although fanon has come to call her "Salome" and the dance "The Dance of the Seven Veils".

"The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft" theorizes that the dance symbolized Ishtar's descent through the seven gates of the Underworld, and that since Ishtar removes an article of clothing at each gate, the dancer would end up naked. And that, of course, would make the scene much more scandalous and creepy not only in first century Israel but even today.

14:22-34

24 But the boat was now in the middle of the sea, distressed by the waves, for the wind was contrary.
25 In the fourth watch of the night, Jesus came to them, walking on the sea.
26 When the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, "It's a ghost!" and they cried out for fear.
27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying "Cheer up! It is I! Don't be afraid."
28 Peter answered him and said, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the waters."
29 He said, "Come!" Peter stepped down from the boat, and walked on the waters to come to Jesus.
30 But when he saw that the wind was strong, he was afraid, and beginning to sink, he cried out, saying, "Lord, save me!"
31 Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand, took hold of him, and said to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?"

Okay, this is funny. I'm sorry, but it is. Any time Peter embarrasses himself is funny. There is obviously a deeper meaning here, but I think that it's pretty obvious.

15:21-28

22 Behold, a Canaanite woman came out from those borders, and cried, saying, "Have mercy on me, Lord, you son of David! My daughter is severely demonized!"
23 But he answered her not a word. His disciples came and begged him, saying, "Send her away; for she cries after us."
24 But he answered, "I wasn't sent to anyone but the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
25 But she came and worshiped him, saying, "Lord, help me."
26 But he answered, "It is not appropriate to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."
27 But she said, "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters' table."
28 Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Be it done to you even as you desire." And her daughter was healed from that hour.

This is a twist. Jesus thinks he's here only to save the Jews. It shows him in a less than perfect light, making very human choices based on very human prejudices. Only a human would think that way, but it also shows him as capable of changing his views.

Matthew Pt2

2007-08-30T23:18:00.000-04:00

17 "Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill.
18 For most certainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law, until all things are accomplished.
19 Whoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments, and teach others to do so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven; but whoever shall do and teach them shall be called great in the Kingdom of Heaven.
20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, there is no way you will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

If I understand this correctly, what he's actually saying is that in order to be really holy you have to do both. One of the biggest conflicts between the Big Three faiths and all their various sub sects is the debate over which is more important- works, rules or faith. But the fact is, they're all tangled up together and interdependent on each other. Christians say they don't need all those minute and picky rules that Judaism and Islam have, yet they just end up creating their own set of rules and trying to push them on people. So far, nobody seems to have done what they should be doing, whether Jew or Christian or Muslim.

21 "You have heard that it was said to the ancient ones,'You shall not murder;' and'Whoever shall murder shall be in danger of the judgment.'
22 But I tell you, that everyone who is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment; and whoever shall say to his brother,' Raca!' shall be in danger of the council; and whoever shall say,'You fool!' shall be in danger of the fire of Gehenna.

The most important thing of all is how people treat each other. We all have a tendency to spend our time coming up with convoluted ways of justifying which rules we do and do not follow. We expend so much effort doing this that we often don't have time to include things like love and compassion.

An American missionary wanted to go into New York City and preach to the homeless. He decided that he was going to rely totally on God to take care of him. So he didn't bring much money, didn't even rent a hotel room. His only contact in the city was the Jews for Jesus headquarters. When he finally arrived at the building-lost, starving, exhausted and broke, they invited him in. They have him some coffee,let him use their bathroom and sent him on his way.

There were no offers to let him stay at one of their homes. There was no effort to find him a place, or a job, they didn't even feed him. No one offered to drive him to the YMCA! They let a kid from the Midwest wander around NYC in the 1970s, *alone* with *no money* and *nowhere to stay*. This was a group of people trying desperately to convince everyone that Judaism and Christianity can be compatible, and yet they failed at one of the cardinal requirements of both faiths!

When I was searching for a new church last year I went to one I really liked. It was big enough for me without being too scarily huge. The people seemed nice, and it was close to home. The doctrines didn't conflict with anything I believe (it was UCC) as far as I knew. So I went to their information table and signed up to be contacted.

I was never contacted. They were all so busy with their lifegroups, and plays and rock band and building projects and two dvd enhanced worship services on Sunday mornings and coordinated parking and murals on the Sunday School classroom walls and sterling silver coffee pots and charity toy drives that they forgot to- you know- call someone who wanted to be reached out to.

6:9
9 "Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. F47 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us to the time of trial, F48 but rescue us from the evil one. F49 14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

That's from the New Revised Standard Version. It's supposed to be much better, but the rhythm and the poetry is off. Much as I hate to say this, the King James version sounds so much prettier.

Our Father which art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen.

The "power and glory" line is not included by many people. But basically this is one of the most famous prayers in Christianity and it's even acquired a deeply magical significance. It was used as a protection ritual in many Christianity based magical systems, as well as a test for witch hunters to discover witches. If a person couldn't say the whole thing, they were a witch, or if they could say it backwards, they were a witch.

I don't think Jesus meant for it to become a formal liturgy, but post Jesus Christians didn't have much in the way of a liturgy, especially not for common folk who might not be able to read, so it worked well as a universal prayer. More people can recite this than can say the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments or the Nicean Creed.
6:21-24
22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

Huh? I admit it, I don't understand this one. I'll work on figuring it out.

24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Mammon is commonly thought to mean "money". Usually a demon or Dark deity associated with greed. For lots of people, money becomes their master, their religion.
7:7
7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

The words and location of this verse gave me an idea, but I won't elaborate on it here in case it disappears on me.
8:5-10

5 And Jesus having entered into Capernaum, there came to him a centurion calling upon him,
6 and saying, 'Sir, my young man hath been laid in the house a paralytic, fearfully afflicted,'
7 and Jesus saith to him, 'I, having come, will heal him.'

A lot of people think the soldier is referring to his lover. It was a notorious practice among wealthy Roman men, owning male slaves reserved just for sex, or simply taking up with a young man. It's something Paul seems to get really upset about, which makes people wonder. Anyway, Jesus doesn't react with disgust (although he doesn't go and visit the boy either).

8:14
And Jesus having come into the house of Peter, saw his mother-in-law laid, and fevered,

So, we meet Peter's mother in law. Peter is apparently married, and indeed in another Gospel Peter mentions he's got a son, Mark. But where is Peter's wife? Who is she? Is she perhaps dead? Or did she travel with them? I know women weren't thought of as important enough to mention, yet that only means that when one is mentioned, she's really, really important.

8:18-28
and lo, a great tempest arose in the sea, so that the boat was being covered by the waves, but he was sleeping,
25 and his disciples having come to him, awoke him, saying, 'Sir, save us; we are perishing.'
26 And he saith to them, 'Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?' Then having risen, he rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm;
27 and the men wondered, saying, 'What kind -- is this, that even the wind and the sea do obey him?'

I think this is funny. Jesus is shown both being very human (he's cranky about being woken up from his nap) and possessing divine powers. It's much harder to control the weather than it is to heal people. Healing is a rare gift, but hundreds of people throughout history have possessed it. Controlling the weather? Even more rare. But if you pray hard enough, perhaps it could be accomplished. There's a lot a person with considerable magical power who also has deep faith in God can manage to do. You laugh, because I sound like some wacko Pentecostal, but it's true.

10:28

28 And be not afraid of those killing the body, and are not able to kill the soul, but fear rather Him who is able both soul and body to destroy in gehenna.

That's from Young's Literal Translation. The King James uses the word "hell", which of course, these people did not believe human souls could be sentenced to. Gehenna would make such a pretty name for a girl. If you wanted her to you know, hate you for the rest of her life.

11:15
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

This verse reminds me of a perfect example of "having ears to hear". A piece of art changes when you understand the backstory and the little codes artists include in their work. I rented the movie "Greencard" last year. It wasn't my first time seeing the movie, but this time I understood it better. Throughout the entire movie, there are constant baffling references to Africa. Since the story takes place in Manhatten, and ninety nine percent of the main characters are white Americans, what on earth does this story about an American botanist and her fake French husband have to do with Africa? Why is the closing song a rousing rendition of "Eyes on the Prize", the anthem of the black civil rights movement?

It's a movie about cultural harmony, two people who fall in love even though they shouldn't be together. And the story takes place in the late 1980s, at the height of…. the movement to end Apartied in South Africa. The whole movie is a not so subtle protest in favor of the rights of black Africans.

"Napoleon Dynamite" is a satire of "Donnie Darko", but you might not figure this out if you've never seen "Donnie Darko". And if you didn't get "Donnie Darko" you won't get "Napoleon Dynamite".

Matthew 1-2

2007-08-29T00:11:00.000-04:00

Matthew

Matthew is the first Gospel of the New Testament, which is odd because it's certainly not the oldest, Mark is. I read an explanation of why this book comes first instead, but I don't remember it now.

The first thing we encounter is a list of Jesus's genealogy. This is the second reason why all of those boring lists in the Old Testament are so important (the other reason, obviously, being so the Jews can track their ancestry). Jesus is said to be of the line of David, which would be essential if he was the Davidic Messiah (there are apparently two Messiahs who are supposed to come one after the other). This also gives him royal blood, making him a real world threat to the country's corrupt king and Roman overlords.

Oh yes, they have a corrupt king and some Roman overlords now. A lot of time has passed since Malachi, which we often forget because it looks like just two pages. But generations have gone by.

1:18
Joseph is pledged to be married to Mary, but in 1:19 he is going to divorce her. So are they married already or not? I don't understand. I've read some theories, but many of them come from people who are not necessarily reliable sources.

The story jumps right to the visit by Magi. There are no shepherds or angels in this one. First, I'll just link to my previous Magi post. And the wiki article on Magi.

In Matthew, the first people to recognize and honor Jesus for what he was, were forgeign wizards. Later on, as you by now should naturally expect, foreign wizards and witches become the thing people definitely did not want around. Having brown or black skin increased your chances of being accused of, and executed for, witchcraft.

Herod tells the Magi to find the baby, then alert him so "he may go and worship too." Of course he wants to kill Jesus, and the Magi figure this out so they don't bother to go back to the palace. The king orders all male children under two to be taken and killed.

The Jesus story is almost like an inverted version of the Moses story. Moses grows up a prince, only to discover he's really a commoner. He flees from Egypt. Jesus is a prince raised by commoners who must flee into Egypt to survive. Both stories contain a corrupt king who orders all the male children under a certain age killed, so none of them will grow up to depose him.

Since it's been such a long time, I'll repeat my disclaimer:

1) This isn't Bible Spam. I'm saying that because I don't want people thinking this is supposed to be funny, and then having low opinions of my sense of humor. Not that I won't try to be funny sometimes, but nobody ever gets me anyway.

2) I'm no professional theologian. Sometimes I'm totally wrong. But not being a professional theologian (or even a Bible college graduate-or a graduate period) does not automatically make me wrong either.

3) I have no editor, so these bounce wildly from simple recording of my thoughts on reading a passage, to actual formal essays.

By the way, I've been using this site as a reference (thanks Cat!). It has the Bible, both halves, in Greek, Byzantine, and Hebrew in addition to English.

4: 9-10
Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.

9 He said to him, "I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me."

10 Then Jesus said to him, " Get behind me, Satan! For it is written,'You shall worship the Lord your God, and you shall serve him only.'

But later, some of his followers changed their minds. They were offered the world, and they exchanged the truth of Jesus for a governmental sponsorship. And things just haven't been the same since. It's not Roman Catholicism's fault entirely, because Protestantism seems to have fallen for the same line.

4:19

24 The report about him went out into all Syria. They brought to him all who were sick, afflicted with various diseases and torments, possessed with demons, epileptics, and paralytics; and he healed them.

25 Great multitudes from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and from beyond the Jordan followed him.

Jesus is ministering among Jews normally not well respected. Samaritans and such. It, imo, paints a very different picture of him from the usual clean, white guy sitting in a pristine, white temple or a nicely maintained hill with other clean white guys. In one contemporary Jesus movie, when the Devil is trying to tempt Jesus, he/she shows Jesus a vision of a modern Palestinian refugee camp, because he/she knows that it'll get to him.

5:2-11
These are the Beatitudes, which are very important in Christianity, although you don't hear them much these days. I've taken the liberty of translating the words into "Amero-Fundie" for you. I think more people can name the ten commandments than can recite these. I know I can't recite them. I keep forgetting they even exist.

3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
(Blessed are the financially successful, for social class is determined by your faith in God)

4 Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
(Blessed are those who protest the funerals of gay soldiers, for filthy sinners don't deserve respect)

5 Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.
(Blessed are the violent, for the infidel needs to be smacked down)

6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
(Blessed are those who gorge themselves on fatty, salty poison)

7 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
(Blessed is the governor who ridicules the pleas of a woman on death row)

8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
(Blessed are the technical virgins, for they are not filthy dirty whores like the rest of you)

9 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
(Blessed is the nation with the most bombs)

10 Blessed are those who have been persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
(Blessed are us, for we are a minority even though we're running the government of the most powerful nation on earth)

11 "Blessed are you when people reproach you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, for my sake. (Blessed are those who are told they can't beat their children or force strangers to pray with them)

13 "You are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its flavor, with what will it be salted? It is then good for nothing, but to be cast out and trodden under the feet of men.

Does anyone else remember "Salty"? No? I just want to know if that was something unique to 1980s Nazarenes or if it was a religion wide thing. Salty was a children's cartoon character who was personified as a giant blue shaker of salt. Sort of like Gumby but Christian and musical. The local Christian bookstore used to have a huge Salty display. There was a special button you could push on the display and Salty would sing for you.

How Flanderseque. Anyway, it was based on this verse, which makes it even more obscure and weird.

15 Neither do you light a lamp, and put it under a measuring basket, but on a stand; and it shines to all who are in the house.
16 Even so, let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

Conservative Evangelicals are very big on not hiding their lights. And so many people find it offensive, so liberals and moderates have tried to run in the opposite direction. There have been lots of great people I've met and I didn't know they were Christian until it accidentally came out. And that might be great, if you're the sort who doesn't want to be bothered with knowing other people's beliefs, but it becomes a problem when the only people anyone ever hears from are the wacko conservatives. It's fine to quietly practice your faith and spend your time working on being a good person rather than trying to make other people follow your rules. Except those other people? They don't keep quiet, and so they've come to define, at least in the eyes of the public, what it means to be a member of this religion.

You're afraid people will laugh? They're going to find something to make fun of anyway and they'll make less fun of you if they know you're not what they expected.
You're conflicted? Join the club.
You think no one else is like you? You'd be surprised.

In a time of peace, maybe it'd be fine to keep your beliefs to yourself. But we're not in a time of peace- we are at war. This is happening now and it is serious. And it's happening because the right people failed to stand up at the right time. Yes, I realize this is exactly what those other people are saying, but what can you do?

What if another Christian badly needs you to be well, a Christian for them?

Kings

2007-08-22T23:05:00.001-04:00

Kings

One of the many reasons for the obsessive cleanliness laws about who couldn't touch what or who couldn't sit where, when, was because…

People didn't wear underwear. No, Jesus didn't wear underwear either (which means I need to correct a comment I made several entries ago except I won't because it's too time consuming but I'm stating here that I realize I made a mistake). Now, I've had it explained to me that what Jonathan actually took off was just his armor and some outer type garments, but if you are going to go around saying he stripped, then he would have been naked. Having him take off all his clothes except his non existent underwear is as strange as having them shake hands instead of kiss (which is what a couple of Bible translations have, despite the fact that shaking hands was not common in that time and place anyway. Plus it just comes off as such a blatant attempt at censorship because any idiot can pick up a good Bible and see that the translation is wrong).

I know that Sunday School teachers really want to make sure children can identify with the stories, which is why they often make David a child or young teen, and Jonathan the same age. There's a lot of value in that, teaching children about standing up to bullies, and little boys how to be a good friend. But out of neccesity, the whole story then has to be de sexualized, when sex is a major underlying theme in the original story. Not only that, but it means the story tellers have made the same mistake that a lot of overeager religious people do, which is to make a believable story, totally exaggerated to make a point, which is later taken literally and thus made much easier for skeptics to smugly debunk.

Would you be convinced that an eight year old boy killed a twenty foot giant with a rock the size of your fist?
Would you be convinced that a fairly strong, fairly athletic eighteen or twenty year old man knocked unconcsious a seven foot tall person with a rock the size of your head, and then chopped off his head with a sword while he was still down for the count?

Jonathan is also older than David. Not creepy old, but still older. So to portray David as someone barely hitting puberty , yet have their relationship be a romance, turns his older friend into a pedophile and nobody wants to see that. The fact that Jonathan is not a teenager kind of pulls the rug out from under the "okay, so they were sleeping together but it was just about typical teenage experimentation" argument. I'm also slightly annoyed by the "well, it's just their oriental temperment". Yeah... oriental temperment. That's it. Sure.

I'm wondering why it is that people are quite willing to admit that David did a lot of things he shouldn't have done, yet very conservative Christians and Jews can't stand the thought that he might have slept with a man. If you're the type of person who thinks there's something wrong with homosexaulity, and you can't entertain the idea that David might have been attracted to a man, how do you justify considering that to be worse than anything else he does?

There's also the interesting question of David and Saul- anything going on there?

I bought "David the King" by Gladys Schmidt, after finding it recced on a lj that hosts one of the few D/J fics I was able to find. The book starts out really neat, and seems to be building up both good steam as far as plot,and a lot of great sexual tension that you're hoping will explode. Except… it doesn't. Suddenly, inexplicably, Schmidt puts a rift between David and Jonathan- although they remain friends it is awkward and the progression towards something romantic is halted. The author uses social taboos as a reason why it takes David and Jonathan about six chapters to work up the nerve to hold hands before she inexplicably rips them apart. The teen angst is great, don’t misunderstand me, the description of David's dilemma- loving Jonathan but lusting after the sexually aggressive Michal. But I don't buy it that David would have allowed social taboos to keep him from Jonathan. When do we ever see the Biblical David paying attention to social taboos? Some of the things he does, such as dancing down the street half naked, would be considered pretty out there even today.

David then spends the rest of the book searching for the same love in other people and never finding it. Too much time is spent on his marriage to Michal, which is really only a rather dull footnote in the Bible, whereas half the Bible story is taken up with David's relationship with Jonathan. The air is let out of their relationship so much that in the beautiful, climactic scene (some say it contains more than one type of climax) where they are forced to part, the reader feels nothing. The author just parrots the Bible, with no added subtext or emotion and seemingly can't wait to get past it. Jonathan's death, instead of being this explosive moment of epiphany for David, (he died for me, he loved me, he was the best thing I've ever had and I never told him!) is treated like a rather unimportant side note. It's almost like she chickened out, afraid the book would meet with a negative reaction or even not be published otherwise.

The biggest problem in general with adaptations of Bible stories is the author who Doesn't Know When to Stop. Every story seems to contain a natural "cut off" point, but all too often authors just sail past it in their urge to tell the whole epic story. But the stories usually work better doled out in small, manageable portions that focus on the things most likely to interest the audience. People want to see Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, people don't want to watch him standing around making laws. So the best place to stop the story is just after the escape- something "The Prince of Egypt" understood but "The Ten Commandments" didn't. If people would like to know what happens next, they're free to pick up an actual Bible.

http://epistle.us/hbarticles/davelament2.html
http://jot.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/30/2/171

There is no real Butch/Femme dichotomy here. I realize it's hard for a lot of people to comprehend, and it was probably totally puzzling for people in the ancient Middle East to conceive of a sexual relationship where no one plays the woman, but I don't think David and Jonathan were like that. I mean, there's definitely a delicate negotiation of power going on- Jonathan is David's prince and military commander. In a sense, David wouldn't even really be allowed to say no to Jonathan. David can't say "I love you" first, he's not even allowed to leave town without asking permission. But the entire relationship revolves around David, not Jonathan.

David is the one who will eventually be king, and Jonathan figures that out, and since his love for David is self less and self sacrificing, he does step aside, which might be taken by some readers to mean that he's chosen "the female role" but that just says a lot of disturbing stuff about how said readers view women. Jonathan behaves as the ideal Biblical husband, surrendering to God's will meant he had to give up all of his earthly power, so he did that. He is able to understand that this doesn't make him weak, or "the woman". It seems like hundreds of thousands of men who belong to the Abrahamic faiths have been unable to follow this example at all.

Saul seems to condone the friendship, until he starts to see that David has the potential to be king, which might mean he would be dominating Jonathan, therefore, in Saul's eyes, making Jonathan the girl. Before, Saul might have rationalized it as "my son sleeps with men, but at least he's on top in every way." Of course, like the author of the first essay says, we can't begin to know how they expressed their feelings when alone.

You know, the slash fic talk might have been innappropriate here. Duly deleted for now.

http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Belle-And-Sebastian/Jonathan-David.html

2nd Samuel

2007-08-21T23:12:00.000-04:00

2nd Samuel
Weird how it's still called "Samuel" even though Sam is dead.

Of course, there are some things that don't make my comparison between Y/J and this Bible story work out so well, namely that David is a lot more manipulative- he is not really that bubbly, he watches people and does what he thinks they want him to do, so they will be charmed by the "simple country boy." Although he seems to be capable of strong, demonstrative emotion he also seems to keep his own counsel. He's definitely a showman, but in the sense that he's always on, if Hollywood had been invented at the time, David would have naturally known how to work camera angles and where to stand so the light hits him the best.

David is a really fascinating guy. He's totally ambitious and ruthless- yet extremely generous and big hearted to his own friends. He does take in Jonathan's crippled son, and he is loving toward Bathsheba and genuinely devastated at the death of their first baby. However, he really doesn't let the fact that she is already married get in the way of his plans either, he simply has her husband "meet with an accident" on the battlefield. Did he really rape her? I don't know, we're not given any sort of indication whether she was willing or not. If he had assaulted her, the text would say so, because when David's son rapes his half sister, the text definitely makes that perfectly clear. It's probably more likely that David and Bathsheba had a sort of Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky thing going on. He's taking advantage, but society tells her that she should consider it a privilidge to be taken advantage of by a world leader, so she decides not to mind.

I really like this whole story arc, for the depth of feeling and three dimensional characters involved. Unlike in say, the Exodus story, the author doesn't try to insist that bad things are happening to characters because "God has hardened the heart" of the person doing the horrible thing. David's actions are also condemned in the text, especially by his spiritual advisor, who presents David with a simple parable to explain to him the effects of his selfish behavior.

Gay Renaissance sculptors sure liked making naked statues of David. And the tradition seems to have continued, although not just among gay artists. Nude statues of Bible characters, aside from Adam and Eve, are not all that common. Mary Magdalene and Jesus seem to be the only other Bible characters pictured nude with any frequency, and Jesus is usually only pictured that way in his death scene, so there's no mistaking that this isn't meant to be a pleasant image (and the important bits are usually tastefully covered with a towel). Michaelangelo probably had to use a Bible character as a model for his famous sculpture, he couldn't just call it Random Hot Nude Boy at the time, but he could have used any character as a model. He chooses, David, who is probably the most sexually charged male character in the entire Bible, a man who simply cannot seem to keep his pants on. Then there's that tower, which basically resembles giant male genitalia. I think… that the prudishness of Jesus's time was not a consistent thing in Biblical culture.

It's interesting that David is never branded a whore, unlike women in the Bible who had a reputation for actually enjoying sex. It's also interesting that today's Christian leaders let King David get away with a lot of things they did not let Bill Clinton get away with.

Did you know there's this whole fascinating theory about King David and David Bowie?

http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/1/hisown.html (David/Jonathan erotica. Skip if male/male sex offends you)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/0/momentsafter.html (David/Jonathan erotica. )
http://japanpeterpan.livejournal.com/136122.html (erotica, not very fluffy)
http://community.livejournal.com/rarelitslash/134587.html (erotica)
http://cotillion.slashcity.org/efic/viewstory.php?sid=380 (erotica, perfect, stunning example of how to write sex and make it spiritual)
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/614405/1 (cute, if somewhat dry, D/J romance. Basically PG rated right now)
http://books.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=544182357&chapter=2 (more fic, PG)
http://books.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=544182357&chapter=3 (more fic, also PG)
http://japanpeterpan.livejournal.com/206785.html (excerpt from a professionally published novel. PG but with a slashy tone)
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/7/27/231327/961 (Buffy, David, and the Religious Left. Good article, although the author seems to have forgotten about the tv series, which took the themes of the movie and ran with them)
http://epistle.us/homobible.html (Homosexuality in the Bible, with a HUGE section on D/J- I mean, really, really thorough)
http://yaoi.y-gallery.net/view/57994/ (cute D/J artwork, no nudity)
http://www.newtekpro.com/ArtGallery/2002/02/King_David.jpg
(this piece shows David reading a letter and looking shocked. He also looks extremely Bowielike)
David with Goliath's head
Gorgeous, gorgeous painting on the cover of a book. I don't know the artist, so I couldn't google the painting by itself.

1st Samuel 15-31

2007-08-20T15:30:00.000-04:00

1st Samuel 15-31

God and Samuel are getting upset with Saul, who is not performing as expected. Because they had a war and Saul didn't kill everyone and everything belonging to their captured enemies. And Samuel tells him that he shouldn't have sacrificed the captured animals, because God wants spiritual sacrifices, not literal ones. Samuel harrangues Saul until he tearfully repents and slaughters the captured king that he had previously been treating extremely courteously.

Samuel said, "Has Yahweh as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of Yahweh? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.

But wait, it's not what it sounds like…

23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as idolatry and teraphim. Because you have rejected the word of Yahweh, he has also rejected you from being king."

That particular passage is so easily abused, especially when it comes to schooling, and parent/child relationships. In general, it's the cornerstone of the beliefs of the religious right. Or at least, the way they interpret it.

Now we segue into the story about David, the shepherd boy. The Israelites are fighting the Philistines (still, again, blah blah blah) and the enemy has a "giant" named Goliath. As I understand it, he's about seven feet tall, which is actually quite possible, he's not some fairytale giant, he's like Shaq sized.

This story is really well done. It is clear, concise, believable, and full of well drawn characters. It is also one of the first times a villain in a Bible story is drawn with as much color and personality as the heroes. Whoever is transcribing this story really wants to make it entertaining.

David knocks Goliath out with a rock from his slingshot, and becomes an instant war hero.

After that, we get an incredibly hot and romantic male slash love triangle.

I am not sure I buy the Ruth/Naomi as lesbians theory. I don't buy it because the whole point of the story is how Ruth and Boaz got together, and because women do interact differently with each other- there are many girls who are capable of acting the role of confidante, yenta, or mother figure to practically anyone. Naomi specifically wants to help Ruth, not only because Ruth needs help but because Boaz is clearly lonely. Naomi takes it upon herself to Fix Things. Yes, they're extremely affectionate with each other, but let's be honest, and I don't mean this in any sort of sexist way, but women are often more physically affectionate and emotionally open with each other than men are with other men. For example, I know very few women who are bothered by sharing a bed with another girl- at Writercon, I platonically shared a bed with a woman I'd never met before, and neither of us minded. But I had a conversation once with some straight guys who insisted that they would not share a bed- if there were three guys and two beds in the hotel room, someone was spending the night on the floor.

If Naomi and Ruth were lovers, why did Naomi spend so much time and energy fixing Ruth up with a man? And Ruth goes along with it completely. These stories were probably written by men, who would assume that this is how two close female friends would relate to each other, but a man probably also wrote the David/Jonathan story, which has characters acting in very unstereotypically male ways.

David and Jonathan are guys. Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible for men to act that way with each other, and I do understand that there are many places in the world where men are much more physically affectionate with each other than they are in North America, and that in antiquity, men were generally more touchy feely, this is a bit beyond all of that. Especially since the culture of the Bronze Age Israelites seems to have been one where machismo was extremely important, and these two men are soldiers. Hugging, weeping, kissing, vowing eternal love, would probably not be signs of just an extremely close male friendship. The whole relationship is just beyond the kind of Gilgamesh/Enkidu type really close male friends. I don’t deny that men can be that close without being sexually attracted to each other, but they're usually childhoodfriends or relatives and Jonathan seems to love David from the first time they met.

Look at Yossi and Jagger-lots of interesting parallels there anyway, (for example, this cartoon-look at their facial expressions. David is being goofy, while Jonathan stands to the side with a patient smile on his face)and the bit about how Jagger wanted to be a rock star. Different era, of course, but the rest of their unit didn't even realize they were sleeping together. And when they have a serious talk about their relationship, or rather, when Jagger attempts to initiate one, they're not even looking at, or touching each other. But in the David/Jonathan story, the characters are quite the drama queens, making it extremely difficult to ignore how they seem to feel about each other-if we were meant to take their relationship any other way I'm sure the writer would have toned things down. Saul certainly seems to have a big problem with it, although I'm sure his repeated attempts to stab David are only about the fact that David is more popular with the people- except that he happens to also call Jonathan a pervert and screams at him for being involved with David. David's the wrong gender, the wrong social class, and he's perceived as a threat to Saul's power in the kingdom.

Basically, if David and Jonathan were a man and a woman, people would just assume they were sleeping together. And the same people who insist they couldn't have been a couple- they were just "really close friends" are also people who would instantly assume that any two men outside the Bible who act that way with each other are gay.

I'd like to see this story filmed, as a serious examination of a gay romance in the Bible.

http://rainbowallianceopenfaith.homestead.com/GayLove3.html
http://www.bridges-across.org/ba/faith/jt_add4.htm
http://members.aol.com/matrixwerx/glbthistory/jonathan.htm
http://www.allfaith.com/Religions/Christianity/jon.html
http://www.mgb-home.de/D-Jonathan1.jpg

Judges through 1st Samuel

2007-08-19T21:19:00.000-04:00

Judges- 1st Samuel
I was supposed to write up my notes on Judges. I started, but got distracted with the other projects, and when I returned to Judges, I discovered it was just- my brain kept trying to shut down, screaming " I don't want to do this. I don't wanna do this. I donwannadothis!" So I didn't do it.

I have a couple of comments, I suppose. On Gideon: People like to tell and retell the great story of how he won that particular battle, however, they never continue the story, probably because Gideon gets drunk with power and turns into a jerk.

"Ruth"

A nice, romantic story that people say has lesbian undertones but I just don't see it (and I'm usually thrilled to see stuff like that). It also introduces us to the genealogy of David , which will become important for a couple of reasons.

1st Samuel 1-14

A woman is being teased by her husband's other wife, because she's barren. So she goes to the Temple and prays for a son, promising that if she gives birth, the child will be dedicated to God and she will never cut his hair. When she has the child, she names him Samuel.

At the time, the priest's sons are extremely corrupt, but Samuel, who serves in the Temple as a child, is not. Samuel has an experience where he hears God at night, in the Temple.

Because Israel is corrupt, there's a battle and they lose really, really badly to the Philistines, in fact, they lose the Ark. The Philistines take the Ark to their own camp and set it up next to their god Dagon (the Philistines seem to have a lot of different gods at different periods in time). But every morning when they enter the tent, the Dagon statue is on his face before the Ark. The Philistines begin getting tumors (the way you would when exposed to radiation…) and so they move the Ark to another city. But there's another outbreak of tumors.

The desperate Philistines practice a bit of image magic, making golden representations of their tumors to send back to Israel with the Ark as a sort of plea to God.

After several years, the people of Israel begin to beg Samuel (the Judge) and God for a king. But God and Samuel say that the Israelites don't really understand what they're asking for. They go ahead and appoint Saul after a whole complicated story I only skimmed.

Here's something interesting. As I understand what happens next, Saul manages to lose Yahweh's favor by inexplicably attacking the Philistines and starting a whole nother war. So things are really , really awful and so guess what the people's great idea is for solving everything?

"Let's kill Jonathan, the prince. "

I read something once, that talked about this strange compulsion every society has, that is basically a resurfacing of very ancient ideas. In ancient cults, if people felt true disaster had arrived (the gods are displeased) their instinct was "it's not good enough to sacrifice an animal, if we give them one of us, a human, they will forgive us." And it can't be just anyone, it has to be someone important, like children, or a beautiful virgin, or a popular leader. I think this might be the deep down reason for a certain type of high profile political assassination. Logically, shooting JFK in the head caused more problems than it solved, and the people who planned and executed the murder must have known that. But the primitive, unconscious mind doesn't care .

Joshua

2007-08-19T15:58:00.000-04:00

Joshua 1-7
Joshua is now the leader, very much the military man, which Moses was not. A prostitute called Rahab shelters Joshua's men when they go to case the city. The story doesn't seem to specify exactly what kind of prostitute she is, but she's got a house so she must be doing well (maybe a temple priestess?).. Incidentally, some people say she is an ancestor of Jesus. I cannot find where I read that now, which is quite frustrating. According to this book, she "lives among the Israelites to this day". She agrees to leave a length of red yarn hanging from her window so the soldiers will know which house to not touch, and she brings the people whose lives she wants to spare into the house with her.

Red string, like the number seven, is a recurring motif in the Bible. It's carried through to today in the Kabbalah (well, more precisely Jewish folk magic which is not technically the same thing). The mysterious prostitute is also a recurring theme but I'll touch on that when it comes up again later.

Joshua meets a man with a sword, and asks him "so, what side are you on?" And the man says "Neither, I am the commander of the Lord's Armies." According to most mythology, that'd make him the archangel Michael. Sort of, from this point of view, the celestial equivalent of Joshua.

He tells Joshua to march around the city once a day for six days, and on the seventh day to march around the city seven times. Then everyone should stop and shout all at once. If nothing else, this is extremely effective psychological warfare. When the city falls, Rahab's life is indeed spared. Joshua also tells the army to take the sacred items from the temple and put them in God's treasury.

Joshua God of War versus Prince of Peace

The only people who supposedly are spared besides Rahab's people are a tribe that comes to Joshua and offers to serve the Israelites forever if they're not killed.

The Reubenites and the Gaddites build an altar on their own side of the river, which upsets the other Israelites. The others gather an army against them at a place called Shiloh. It's an interesting coincidence that Shiloh in the US was the location of an important American Civil War battle. Anyway, the people building the altar manage to pacify the others by explaining that they only wanted a place near home to worship God.

But the war against all other people keeps raging. There are only a few places God insists that they cannot have, Egypt and Seir are two. It's interesting how protective God's been of Egypt, in spite of having to rescue his people from it. He won't let the Israelites war against Egypt, he tells them to be nice to the Egyptians… but the Caananites all have to go.

I've always felt sympathy for the people in these stories. I have never simply dismissed it all as irrelevant and bloodthirsty mythology of a cruel God. I have spent the last five books asking questions, having in-depth discussions on culture and translations, putting things in historical context. But I find that around the middle of Joshua, my patience runs out. There is kill, and there is overkill, and this is just too much. The blood and violence just keeps coming to the point where I actually felt sickened and I couldn't keep reading. So you'll have to forgive me but I won't be finishing Joshua.

It's at this point in the Bible that the issue of God's warlike side becomes a serious problem. There's no longer a visible excuse for the violence, it's just people going to town on their neighbors because they want to. They had a chance to stop and take some land no one else appeared to be using, but the people who suggested it were bullied into continuing on. People who don't want to fight are shouted down and called traitors. They're so into fighting that they actually almost start a war with themselves when they run out of other people to kill. This does not make the Israelites worse than any other group (the people they war with in the OT were not fluffy indigenous bunnies), or their god worse than other gods, nor does it change the concept of God as being good.
God is a war god. That's what Yahweh Saboath means, "Lord of Armies".

I guess one question is, what people is God the war god of? If he is the "king of the universe", then whatever he chooses to do in regards to moving the human chess pieces around is a result of how huge this universal God is as a concept. If he made everything, then he chooses when to destroy it as well. And if God is just a tribal god who got big, then he's simply putting the needs of his own people ahead of the needs of others, which is understandable for a tribal god. Especially since the definition of "his own people" has expanded so much in the last millenium. Wikipedia says there are 14 million Jews in the world currently. I think Christians and Muslims put together add up to about 2.8 billion of the world's population. There's also some groups that worship the same god but don’t, for whatever reason, fit into the above three categories. Now what happens if, say, Christians and Muslims decide to have a war, and the Jews get stuck in between? Or some other similar problem?

It could basically rip the world apart.

Many hyper conservative Christians have been encouraging parents for decades to have as many children as possible and to raise them to be little soldiers for God. They do tend to think of themselves as an army that must continuously recruit or it will die. Even if some people have to be drafted. The children are raised with the mindset that they are learning battle skills, and that the rest of the world is out there waiting to get them.

When I was little in Sunday School, we'd sing this song called I’m in the Lord's Army. The basic idea was, you might never get to be in the military and blow things up and shoot people but you can be a warrior for God. Our summer camp did a whole "Lord's Army" theme one year.

My whole childhood was filled with martial images like that. Songs about onward Christian soldiers, and blood and stories of people dying horrible deaths.
….And we weren't one of the scariest denominations. There were a lot of intellectual training games, such as "sword drills (verse finding competitions) and "quizzing". Membership drives, reading competitions- church was an endless competition. A sort of spiritual military school and I was from a West Point family. My sister, I think, has come close to being undefeated in sword drilling since she was about ten. No one was overtly pro war, but no one really talked about the concept of being anti violence either. We were taught that it's wrong to hit people (in spite of the fact that several of the parents believed in corporal punishment), but no one made the connection between that, and war.

And so how do we square this with the nonviolent message of Jesus? It's very difficult if you want to think of them as being the same guy, instead of Jesus simply representing the highest human potential. I think that's one of the reasons why Christianity has that weird personality disorder. There are nonviolent and pacifist Christian denominations- the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Amish…who are finding themselves increasingly at odds with the loudest voices in Christianity. And it's not new, it's always been a big problem, the usurping of the church back in the Roman era was done by a military commander. And ever since then, it's divided Christians into two groups, people who revel in the battle, and people who don't.

Can someone who isn't into war, isn't into conquering the world for God, still be a warrior? Clearly there's a sort of a war coming, the first advance troops were sent out against the rest of the world three decades ago. And when you discover, as I have, that you're not on the side you were brought up to be on, and there's a chance you will have to fight these troops, how do you do it? What do you do? Should the fact that your god is a warrior god be dismissed? It's all well and good to say "I won't stoop to their level, I won't give them the satisfaction of responding", but they're simply not getting the message, they're just going to keep pushing until you push back.

Right now, for privileged Westerners, it's only words and politics, and that seems bad enough. But less fortunate people all over the world are dealing with real consequences from our "words and politics".

Deuteronmy 21-26

2007-08-18T18:56:00.000-04:00

Chapters 21-26
21:10-14
10 "When you go forth to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hands, and you take them captive, 11 and see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you have desire for her and would take her for yourself as wife, 12 then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and pare her nails. 13 And she shall put off her captive's garb, and shall remain in your house and bewail her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her, and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. 14 Then, if you have no delight in her, you shall let her go where she will; but you shall not sell her for money, you shall not treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

So you can take a woman pow captive and force her to have sex with you, but only if you let her mourn her family first. Then if you ~~rape~~sleep with her and don't like her after all, then you have to let her go and you can't sell her to someone else. Okkaaay… Well, I guess that qualified as civilized and enlightened back then.

21:18
18 "If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they chastise him, will not give heed to them, 19 then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, 20 and they shall say to the elders of his city, 'This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.' 21 Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones; so you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

The whole town gets to kill disobedient children. What's the length things are allowed to get to before this happens?

22:5
5 "A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD your God.

This shouldn't, despite what some conservative religious people think, mean that women are not allowed to wear pants. Women wearing pants made for women are not cross dressing, just like men in kilts and robes are not cross dressing. I have a feeling there's a lot more to this verse, I just don't have time to look into it at this exact moment.

22:20-24

20 But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, 21 then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you. 22 "If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel. 23 "If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, 24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you

If she's not a virgin, she has to die. Yes, I'm aware that this could mean simply that she gets in trouble for lying about it, but there's still a disgusting double standard here and I don't see any way the passage can be justified. I respect the concept that people should save themselves for marriage (even though in practice, it doesn't work too well) but that means a woman should have a right to expect *her* partner hasn't been with anyone else either.

If a man rapes a woman in a city, and she doesn't scream for help, they both have to die. This is rather naïve, in assuming that just because she'd scream, someone would rush to her aid. It's obviously written by a man, and most likely a very sheltered man too. They don't seem to grasp how rape sometimes really works- that rape can happen and no one bothers to stop and protect the woman, or that sometimes there are fuzzy gray lines where sex starts out consensual and ends up something else, that people can be repeatedly raped for years and not even realize that's what has happened to them (such as husbands forcing themselves on their wives) or that the man can simply put his hand over her mouth so she can't scream. I don't think they had roofies back then, but I bet they had some kind of similar herb and failing that, a rock or a cudgel works pretty well.

Yes, in an ideal world, if a woman was being attacked and screamed, there would be plenty of people who would do the decent thing and help her. But we don't live in that world, that's why colleges have to hand out mace and teach female students self defense moves.

23:1-7

1 "He whose testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off shall not enter the assembly of the LORD. 2 "No bastard shall enter the assembly of the LORD; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the LORD.

3 "No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the LORD; even to the tenth generation none belonging to them shall enter the assembly of the LORD for ever; 4 because they did not meet you with bread and with water on the way, when you came forth out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Be'or from Pethor of Mesopota'mia, to curse you.

What if it's not his fault? What if he's castrated without his consent? And some poor kid can't enter the temple because his parents screwed up? It really seems like an awful lot of people are ending up excluded here.

And as a Christian, this does bother me. The thing about my religion is that, even though the proselytizing is annoying, and the pushyness is annoying, Christianity makes a point of actively reaching out to everyone. Yes, people are encouraged to change behavior that is seen as undesirable in order to be considered part of a specific congregation, but no one is ever, ever, ever, officially blocked from worshipping. The worst that can happen is excommunication and that only happens due to something that you, yourself have actually done, and only in the like three or four denominations (out of hundreds) that actually practice excommunication. You can't be kicked out of church because of your race or because of something your parents did.

And no one is ever barred from entering a church building on the basis of not being able to provide adequate paperwork.

One of the big things that has stopped me from joining some other religion is that most of them have never extended any effort to reach out to me. People come to Christianity because they feel wanted.

7 "You shall not abhor an E'domite, for he is your brother; you shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were a sojourner in his land. 8 The children of the third generation that are born to them may enter the assembly of the LORD.

23:17
15 "You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you; 16 he shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place which he shall choose within one of your towns, where it pleases him best; you shall not oppress him. 17 "There shall be no cult prostitute of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a cult prostitute of the sons of Israel.

A nifty concept of proto social justice, followed immediately by another prohibition against cult prostitutes, who the authors really seem to hate.

25:11
11 "When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, 12 then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall have no pity.

So if two men are fighting, and the wife tries to defend her husband and touches the other man on his privates, it's the wife who gets in trouble? WTF? That makes no sense!

Deut 27-30

Moses talks about what'll happen if the Israelites reject God. Or maybe just general prophecies, I wasn't clear on that.

28:49
49 The Lord will bring a nation from far away, from the end of the earth, to swoop down on you like an eagle, a nation whose language you do not understand, 50 a grim-faced nation showing no respect to the old or favor to the young. 51 It shall consume the fruit of your livestock and the fruit of your ground until you are destroyed, leaving you neither grain, wine, and oil, nor the increase of your cattle and the issue of your flock, until it has made you perish. 52 It shall besiege you in all your towns until your high and fortified walls, in which you trusted, come down throughout your land; it shall besiege you in all your towns throughout the land that the Lord your God has given you.

Is this perhaps about Rome? Oh man, I hope it's only about Rome.

Well, Moses has half the people stand on one mountain and pronounce a curse, and half the people stand on another mountain and pronounce a blessing. Then they all gather together and Moses preaches to them one last time before he goes off to die.

RIP Moses, you weren't so bad.

Deuteronomy 7-20

2007-08-17T23:02:00.000-04:00

7:1-12

For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.
7:5 But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. and
7:16 And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.
7:17 If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them?
7:18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt;
7:19 The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the LORD thy God brought thee out: so shall the LORD thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.
7:20 Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.
7:21 Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the LORD thy God is among you, a mighty God and terrible.
7:22 And the LORD thy God will put out those nations before thee by little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts of the field increase upon thee.
7:23 But the LORD thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.
7:24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.
7:25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therein: for it is an abomination to the LORD thy God.

Wow. This book is getting a bit scary. Way to ram home the point, high priest guy pretending this is written by Moses. Sounds a lot like the Puritans.

In 9:5 we're told that God is not doing this because Israel is special and good, but because the other people are just that awful, God just has to kill them. Thing is, we can't ever know for sure know, since so much of the culture of these conquered people was destroyed.

Deut 10-25

Regarding the rules about women and their periods-and I know this is off topic but now is when I thought of it..

Today, we think of isolation during your period as some kind of horrible punishment. But back then, maybe it came as a relief to women. Women had fewer rights, they didn't always even have the right to decide when they'd have sex. Remember that it's only been about thirty years since wealthy, industrialized nations with democratic leadership agreed that a man forcing sex on his wife still legally counts as rape. But what if there were specific times when GOD and the legal authorities mandated that a woman could not be touched? Someone who had to live every day with concerns over being accosted, groped or forced to have sex when she didn't feel like it and couldn't even get much access to birth control might welcome such a law. She can go and be as hormonal and cranky as
She wants to be without having to put on a falsely hospitable mask, and then she gets to pamper herself with a nice long bath. And you know, men don't know what's going on down there, you could stall him for at least a couple of days extra.

Okay, back to the reading. It's been a week or two since I actually read these chapters, and although I took notes they might not be as complete as I thought. Click the links to view some Brick Testament illustrations!

Deuteronomy 10-15
Chapters 10-15
We are told in this chapter once again, to never eat blood.
13:8-11
And if anyone says "let us go and worship other gods (gods we have not known)…
And if the town falls to worshipping another god, the entire town must be killed. It doesn't say how, but everyone's gotta die.
I'll really trying here, but I just have nothing to say to that.

Deuteronomy 16-20
Chapters 16-20
The king must not have too much gold or take too many wives. First off, didn't they only have a judge at this point? What's with the king talk? Or is Mr. Document Forger forgetting that he's supposed to stay in character? Maybe this is "advice for a future king". It's good advice though and if more kings paid heed to it, maybe other things would work out better too.

Deuteronomy 5-9

2007-08-17T01:02:00.000-04:00

Deut 4-9
This is a well written passage in 4:11.

You came and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire to the very heavens with black clouds and deep darkness.

So it's a volcano type thing, I suppose. Now, this doesn't mean that we can just say "Oh, it was a natural phenom, that's all". Because Moses goes into the volcano and comes out alive. But definitely, whatever was in that mountain is what got put in the ark- and that thing killed people. I skimmed the Gardiner book "Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark" and he's got some interesting theories.

Somewhere around verse 14, the people are warned in a lengthy diatribe, not to make grave images and not to worship "the created and not the creator".

This is not about having pictures on the wall, or about paying tribute to different aspects of God. Of course whatever image of God we as humans try to create will be just a reflection of our own psyches. So we've definitely got to be careful there. But idolatry can be pretty insidious. Some Christian churches actually put loyalty to the inerrency of the Bible ahead of Jesus and even God. When I was little, my parent's denomination went through a brief period where they stressed pledging allegiance to a "Christian flag". Money can be an idol. It certainly is here in the US. Many of the worst atrocities of modern times have either been directly the result of greed, or somehow motivated by greed, often masked as religion or whatever the favorite style of government is (buy a new washing machine, do it for democracy's sake!)

Neo pagans are often accused of "worshipping the created and not the creator". Ironically, the people who do the most accusing are the sort of Christians who actively worship Jesus as God. Neo pagans (although I dislike using such a blanket term) worship the spark of God that is in all of nature, not the rock or tree itself. They're aware, as most pagans from at least the time the Greeks began writing down some serious literature have been aware, that Gods do not really reside in statues. Generally, when they forget that, that's when things go downhill for them, just like they would for Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a huge problem with the idea of Jesus as God, but look at it this way. God has been God since the dawn of the universe, and will be God for eternity. Jesus lived 33 years. From the perspective of an immortal, 33 years is nothing. Even Jesus insists "I'm not more important than God!"

Deuteronomy 1-4

2007-08-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

Deut 1-4

The boundary of the land God promises to his people seems to be expanding, while the criteria of who is considered a true Israelite seems to be shrinking. That's the way it seems to me when I'm reading it, anyway.

God and Moses create the concept of a "judge", a person who will function as the legal and martial head of the nation.

My notes say "who is talking here, oh..Moses". LOL. This is written in first person, by Moses. I've gone and looked this up, and it seems that Talmudic scholars suspected that this book wasn’t really written by Moses, because it describes his death and says " there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses". They think Joshua wrote it. From Wikipedia- These writers had no problem identifying a period for the text to have been written within. At the end of the 2 Kings, there is an enigmatic story of the religious reform conducted during the reign of King Josiah, also recounted more briefly in the 2 Chronicles 34:3. After eradicating the rival cultic centres to Jerusalem, Josiah purged the Temple in Jerusalem of pagan influences (621 BC). During the process of cleansing, Hilkiah, the High Priest, found a lost scroll of the Torah, whose laws were happily in complete accord with the reforms then being instituted."

But for now, frankly I don't care that much who really wrote it, whoever they are, I suspect I wouldn't like them.

He recounts what happened in Numbers. Right away, I'm noticing that this version of events is not the same as the one I just finished reading. This time, the Lord says he won't give them the land of Esau, although in the last book he promised it to them. He will not give them the Moabite land, it's reserved for the descendants of Lot (although in the last book they were told go to war with the Moabites and slaughter them all). He will not give them the land of the Ammonites either.

God will not allow Moses to enter the promised land, but the text doesn't explain why other than that Moses hadn't done well enough at keeping the people from whining. I have been told two different reason, neither of which appears in this book- a) that Moses cheated on his wife and so made God angry, and b) that he had allowed the spies to lie about what they found. Um… huh? I don't see any evidence of a) in the text, and I honestly can't remember when or how I was given the impression that it was anything close to the reason.

Numbers: The rest

2007-08-14T00:28:00.000-04:00

The Israelites often say that they're "on the way to the land of milk and honey" or that God has promised them a "land of milk and honey".

Margaret Starbird says "In Sumerian poetry, milk and honey are symbolic of the erotic secretions of male and female partners… So the epithet "milk and honey" conveys the joyful spirit of conjugal harmony, fruitfulness, and well being in the language of symbol. This is the land where the people live "happily ever after…. A land of milk and honey is a country filled with nature's bounty. It is a land where children are nurtured, widows consoled, foreigners made welcome, and arts and letters, music and dance are encouraged."

The Edomites will not let the Israelites pass through, even when they offer to pay. The people of Arad attack them.

Okay, God gets mad at the people again, for reasons I didn't quite catch. He sends "fiery serpents" among them that make the people sick. So the people beg Moses to do something about it. Moses appeals to God, who tells him to

Yahweh said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard: and it shall happen, that everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live
(21: 8)

Two things- one, what happened to the rules about not appealing to graven images? Does it not count this time? Also, this is kind of, well, magic…imo. And two, this snake curled around a pole is the international symbol for "doctor" or "hospital".

They find a well and sing about it.

There's a story about Balaam and his donkey, which is just so trippy.

Balaam said to the donkey, "Because you have mocked me, I wish there were a sword in my hand, for now I would have killed you."
The donkey said to Balaam, "Am I not your donkey, on which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Was I ever in the habit of doing so to you?" He said, "No."

Apparently, Balaam is this guy who is being coerced into betraying Israel. Then God has his donkey talk to him and this proves to Balaam that God is really real. So when Balaam is taken up to the high place to curse Israel, he says How shall I curse whom God has not cursed? How shall I defy whom Yahweh has not defied?

23:24
Behold, the people rises up as a lioness, As a lion he lifts himself up. He shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drinks the blood of the slain."
24:9
He couched, he lay down as a lion, as a lioness; who shall rouse him up? Everyone who blesses you is blessed. Everyone who curses you is cursed."

The KJV says "as a lion and as a great lion" which doesn't work for me. I like the other translations, that use both lion and lioness, because it seems more true to the nature of God. I once read an article on HuffingtonPost where the author was complaining about the image of the Abrahamic god.

He compares gods to the animal kingdom and says "Is God like some kind of lion, who sends a lioness out to do his bloodthirsty work for him?" I guess this guy's never read his bible. Imagery of God as a lion abounds throughout the bible. God's "dirty work" is frequently done by his "presence" which is sometimes interpreted as being female. And you know… Ishtar's symbolic animal is the lioness, as is Sekmet's. Of course, C.S Lewis also chose to make his Godish character a great big lion, and in "The Lion King" the lion is well, king of the animals. In Africa, and the Middle/Near East, there are plenty of other huge, dangerous animals around. But only the lion has the grace and elegance combined with power that make the animal seem royal.

According to wikipedia, "the lion is referred to 130 times in the Bible"

24:17
I see him, but not now. I see him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob. A scepter will rise out of Israel, and shall strike through the corners of Moab, and break down all the sons of Sheth.

Many Christians take this to be a prophecy about Jesus. However it can also be a prophecy about Bar Kokhba's revoltThe article even theorizes that this might have been what originally encouraged the schism between Jews and Christians- an argument over which man was the real Messiah.

(there's a few verses in chapter 24 that I'm just skipping right over because I find them a little worrying, but I don't have the time to get into them right now.)

It seems like the whole issue with the other nations might have been one big misunderstanding. The Hebrews/Israelites are basically homeless, but they need to be protected. So they form a national army that just happens to include every able bodied male over age 20. They're crossing the desert, looking for a place to settle. But all these other countries see is a gigantic, mobile army of fierce desert people who are rumored to have a powerful war god, and their tribal chiefs are renowned sorcerers who humiliated Egypt (which, as I said before, was the most powerful nation in the area). All these nations are living on the verge of war constantly, and now here's this new group that has appeared almost out of nowhere and are marching across the land. Thousands and thousands of them.

I left my parent's church because the pastor preached a sermon using some of the verses in this chapter (although mostly from the far harsher Deuteronomy) and used it as a diatribe against "sinners" and non Christians... yeah... I think that Westerners especially see these stories as not being real, so when you use rhetoric like that you're not really talking about people who really exist. I mean, after all, Canaanites don't exist anymore, they magically walked off the face of the earth one day in BCE to be replaced by people who apparently came down off some kind of spaceship?

These incidences are about a specific group of people in a specific time and place. They're not universal orders for the entire world for all time. The Israelites at first attempt to pass through peacefully, but the neighbors (according to this story) aren't having it. It seems like war is almost unavoidable in these cases. That's not true of the people who tend to point to these verses as justification for war today.

The people are starting to see their neighbors as "The Other". Dangerous, alien, and a threat. They'll fight over anything and God keeps egging them on.

Sure, "defend the land". But even among "the chosen", there are many groups and many colors of skin, many languages, many cultures. The right to live in that "promised place" is not the sole right of one tiny sub section of the population. That'd be like saying that only African Americans from Atlanta, GA deserve to have civil rights. The Edomites are seen as The Other in the story, yet they're actually the descendents of Esau, Jacob's twin. The descendants of Ishmael are also seen as The Other, yet they're of the blood of Abraham too.

Numbers 23-34

While in Moab, the Israelite men begin to indulge in immoralities with the Moabite women. They worship "Baal of Peor" (it seems that there are different Baals?)

And… God tells Moses to kill them. A man marries a Midianite woman and is killed for it. Wasn't Moses married to a Midianite? I'm getting a really mixed message about racism, and this vigilante justice is setting an unpleasant precedent.

"If a man dies and leaves no sons, turn the inheritance over to his daughter."

After that random interlude, they go to war with the Midianites. God tells them that they must kill everyone except the virgin girls, who they can take for themselves.

The Ruebenites and the Gadites don't feel like crossing the Jordan to go to war, so they decide to remain behind. But first Moses scolds them and convinces them to fight in the war, and it's decided that they’ll fight, then they can go back to their settlements.

33:52-56,
peak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;
33:52 Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:
33:53 And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. 33:54 And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.
33:55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.

That's horrible.

But then God says he doesn't want any bloodshed in the land!

"'So you shall not pollute the land in which you are: for blood, it pollutes the land; and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him who shed it.

So, against war but pro war, against death penalty but all for the death penalty. Don't have wars or murders on God's land or we'll have to kill you.

Numbers 1-25

2007-08-12T02:51:00.001-04:00

Numbers 1-5
There's a tally of the population of each tribe, totaling to 603, 550. It's another incident of numbers and measurements being so specific for something that might seem almost unimportant that I wonder if the numbers don't mean something extra besides what they appear to mean at face value. I also can't help thinking that the main purpose of all this is to find out "do we have enough for an army?" Certainly Moses would be considering this as they head toward hostile territory- they are a nation now, and a nation has to defend itself. They specifically want to know how many men are of age and can bear arms.

All the tribes have to stay in their own tribal groups, parked around their tribal standards. These people on the move must have been something to watch. Like a huge, mobile city.

The Levites are set apart, they're not supposed to do anything except take care of the temple.

The Sons of Levi are:

Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. The clans of Gershon are Libni and Shimei. The clans of Kohath are Amram, Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. The clans of Merari are Mahli and Mushi. There are very specific instructions for what each Levite is responsible for. The Kohathites are in charge of the holiest things.

With all these people constantly on the move, such regimented social roles make sense. It makes things easier and faster if everyone has a specific job which they never deviate from. There are 22, 000 Levites total.

However, the rules are becoming much harsher. Now, anyone who tries to get involved with helping set up or take down the tabernacle, or who attempts to touch anything in the tent, and who is not a Levite will die. This translation says they'll be put to death, but I think it really means that they'll die from touching the energy source in the tent. People who are unclean are to be "put out of the camp".

Chapter 5 verse 12-31

"Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them:'If any man's wife goes astray, and is unfaithful to him, and a man lies with her carnally, ……

The priest shall bring her near, and set her before Yahweh; and the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the waterThe priest shall set the woman before Yahweh, and let the hair of the woman's head go loose, and put the meal offering of memorial in her hands, which is the meal offering of jealousy. The priest shall have in his hand the water of bitterness that brings a curse. The priest shall cause her to swear, and shall tell the woman, "If no man has lain with you, and if you haven't gone aside to uncleanness, being under your husband, be free from this water of bitterness that brings a curse. But if you have gone astray, being under your husband, and if you are defiled, and some man has lain with you besides your husband:"

then the priest shall cause the woman to swear with the oath of cursing, and the priest shall tell the woman, "Yahweh make you a curse and an oath among your people, when Yahweh allows your thigh to fall away, and your body to swell; and this water that brings a curse will go into your bowels, and make your body swell, and your thigh fall away." The woman shall say, "Amen, Amen."

"'The priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out into the water of bitterness. He shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that causes the curse; and the water that causes the curse shall enter into her and become bitter. The priest shall take the meal offering of jealousy out of the woman's hand, and shall wave the meal offering before Yahweh, and bring it to the altar. The priest shall take a handful of the meal offering, as its memorial, and burn it on the altar, and afterward shall make the woman drink the water.

When he has made her drink the water, then it shall happen, if she is defiled, and has committed a trespass against her husband, that the water that causes the curse will enter into her and become bitter, and her body will swell, and her thigh will fall away: and the woman will be a curse among her people.

If the woman isn't defiled, but is clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.

Here's an interesting discussion on this topic.
http://community.livejournal.com/christianleft/156901.html which reveals that this passage is not really at all what it seems. Although I'm still slightly bothered by the fact that there's no similar test for an unfaithful man, I understand why there wouldn't be. It was just the way of the world back then, and is the way of the world still-men get away with cheating many times when women don't. I'm also wondering if the whole little ritual isn't just something devised by Moses/the priests/God to humor paranoid men.

Numbers 13-20
Who signs up for a Bible study and then gets annoyed because there aren't enough pagans? It's a Bible study. What would you expect the majority of people to be? In fact there are plenty of pagans, they just don't feel like going around shouting "look at meeee, I'm a pagan!"

Also, people need to learn what the definition of a "terrorist" is. A terrorist doesn't wear a uniform, a terrorist doesn't need a paycheck to be a terrorist, nobody says "I wanna be a terrorist when I grow up". A riot is not terrorism. Furthermore, no matter what he does, God cannot be a terrorist. He's God, and therefore a) operates according to a different set of moral guidelines and b) if he made it, it's his prerogative to destroy it. We may not like it, we may not think it's fair, and some may decide not to worship a god who would do that, but to call God a terrorist is a horrible misuse of the word. It's also kind of racist, considering we're talking about war in the Middle East. God is just such a big concept that his actions can't be boiled down to "OMG Terrorist!"

in 13:2 Moses is told to send spies into Canaan. I'm not going to retype all the names here (of course the names are listed) but I will say it amuses me that one of the men is called "Oshea" in the KJV. It's also written as "Hoshea" in some of the translations, and Moses calls him "Joshua". The spies come to Hebron. They cut off a branch of grapes, and take some figs and pommegranates back to the Hebrew camp. At the camp, they say that the new country is full of giant fruit just like this! But also that the people there are also huge, and mean- they're the "children of Anak" aka the Nephilim. They're saying this mainly because they're afraid to fight the new people.

13:29

Amalek dwells in the land of the South: and the Hittite, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, dwell in the hill country; and the Canaanite dwells by the sea, and along by the side of the Jordan.

Caleb says they should take the land anyway, but the other men disagree. Now, this is supposed to make Caleb a hero, but is he really?

"Let's not go to war with the foreign people who are actually semi related to us and who we'll be feuding with forever if we do this.. it sounds like a bad idea."

"LOSER! WIMP! "

"Let's go kill the foreign people who are actually semi related to us, and who we'll be feuding with forever if we do this…"

"YEAH! Caleb, you are the MAN!"

God comes down and yells at everyone again. Then God says that because the people in the other countries have not been good, he'll strike them down and make Israel a great nation. And Moses says "that'll show the Egyptians."

So wait. Is God the god of everyone, and that's why he can punish these other people too, or is God just the god of the Israelites? If God is the god of everyone, why is he uprooting everyone else to make room for a special group of people? If God is everyone's god, isn't there the slightest possible chance that these other worship practices might be legitimate too? (barring the ones that involve human sacrifice and such).

But then the people begin to worry that God doesn't really mean it, maybe God brought them out here to kill them where there'd be no witnesses. God gets annoyed and tells everyone that the people who doubted him will never see the promised land. And he's going to make their children wander for another forty years. Then he orders them to go around the Amorites, instead of through them. The ones who "grumbled against Yahweh" all die of a plague.

Then a few of the people decide that they're going to attack the new country right away, even though God said to wait. They rush off without Moses or Aaron or the ark. Of course they lose in the most humiliating way.

I think this battle is actually described in "The Egyptian", except from the enemy's pov. The main character is an Egyptian doctor who happens to be doing business with some Hittite troops, when a ragtag bunch of wild eyed people called "Khabiri" (Egyptian word for "Hebrews" apparently) come out of nowhere and attack them. To the Hittites, who only encounter the ones who disobeyed God, these people seem kind of desperate and pathetic, ignorant hillbillies who are just looking for food. Killing them all is hardly a workout. Of course, the Hittites don't know that there's thousands of people waiting on the other side of the hills and the only reason why they haven't been attacked again is because a god told the people not to engage.

15:32
A man is put to death for gathering wood on the Sabbath. Geez.

In 15:38, there's some puzzling fashion advice from God.

Some priests attempt a coup, and God announces that he will kill them. He tells Moses and Aaron to step back, and the ground opens up beneath the rebellious priests. The desert literally swallows up a couple of families (16:33). Act of God, flowery language, or sinkholes? Yet another 250 people are destroyed by fire. And then fourteen thousand seven hundred people die in a plague.

20:8, the people are whining about not having water.

God tells Moses and Aaron

"Take the rod, and assemble the congregation, you, and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock before their eyes, that it give forth its water; and you shall bring forth to them water out of the rock; so you shall give the congregation and their livestock drink."

I guess I realize that this is probably just a natural method of divining for water. But I'm so depressed that all the things I used to think were magic turn out not to be.

I've read most of these passages several days ago and have typed them up after that, so I'm not like, reading six chapters a night or anything, lol.

Numbers 1-5

2007-08-12T02:51:00.000-04:00

Leviticus

2007-08-11T00:58:00.000-04:00

I seem to be missing a chapter. Maybe it fell behind the couch.

There are long instructions for what to do if you find mildew in your house (yet another set of instructions that are not considered very relevant now).

Men's emissions and discharges are also considered unclean. The difference is, men aren't forced to have them every month. Maybe this is just me looking at it all through modern Christian feminist westernized glasses and it's not really as sexist as it all looks. But then again, there's still the part about girl babies being more impure than boy babies. Later on in Leviticus, there's a list of monetary values for people wishing to dedicate themselves to the temple. Men in every age category are worth more than women. I love how men throughout history have devalued women. I'd like to see them try to have babies without women around. They probably also wouldn't eat their vegetables or shower enough.

The "Scapegoat Ritual" is in here. Remember I talked about that before?

People are no longer allowed to make sacrifices away from the Temple. This has got to be a clever plan to keep the people's religious ceremonies under control of the priests. And that would probably be how the division between a legal religious ritual and "illegal magic" starts. Anything that happens without the authority of the priests must be against God, and since women aren't allowed to be priests, any ritual a woman, or an uneducated, lower class person does away from the eyes of the priests is clearly evil. According to this logic anyway. Well, it's what whoever wrote this probably wants to happen.

"You must no longer offer sacrifices to goat idols" The footnote to NIV says "demons". I'll have to look that up later.

Things and people you cannot have sex with

Animals
Close relatives
Your mother
Your father's wife
Your sister
Your son's daughter or daughter's daughter
Daughter of father's wife
Your father's sister
Your father's brother
Your father's brother's wife
Your daughter in law
Your brother's wife
A woman and her daughter
Wife's sister while your wife is alive
A woman having her period
Neighbor's wife

It does not say that sex is forbidden between fathers and daughters, which is kind of creepy. Although I suppose that can be covered by "close relatives". God says here that he gives these rules to people so they "won't fall into the sins of their neighbors"… and father/daughter sex was not really a part of the culture of neighboring nations either as far as I know. It produces an almost universal eeeeeugh reaction. Father/son sex is not mentioned either except in the "no gay sex" clause and that's a very debatable clause. ETA: aside from the "close relatives" clause which should cover everything, it also says you can't sleep with both a woman and her daughter, so that also covers father/daughter liasons.

Don't sacrifice your children to Moloch. However, Moloch is not listed here so he is not likely a Canaanite god. He might have been Phoenician, and the Phoenician version of the Canaanite religion was much crueler and harsher than the some other forms of Canaanite faith.

Wikipedia on Moloch. Pay especial attention to the section on "Bohemian Grove" and look at the picture to the right. *shudder*

ALso the name of the demon in the Buffy episode "I Robot, You Jane", who enjoyed seducing young teenagers through the internet and then killing them.

Don't lie with a man as with a woman. ( a long article that deserves a thorough read)

Leave gleanings on the edges of your fields for the poor.

Don't steal.
Don't lie.
Don't deceive.
Don't swear falsely by God.
Don't defraud people.
Don't hold back wages.
Don't make fun of handicapped people.
Judge fairly.
Don't spread slander
Don't endanger a neighbor
Don't hate in your heart
Don't seek revenge

…you know almost all of these are ignored on a daily basis by the right wing theocrats in America? In fact, they've been providing horrible moral examples while trying to push their agenda. Well, I don't know if they make fun of handicapped people or not but I wouldn't put it past them.

Don't plant a field with two kinds of seeds. I admit I don't understand this one. At all. And I don't know how I'd manage my proposed vegetable garden if I were to take this law seriously. I have about fifteen different types of seed and only two rather small plots of land. I guess if I cleared out a space in the woods I could have three plots. One for herbs, one for flowers, one for veggies?

Do not wear clothing made from two different kinds of materials. … /blinks/

You can't eat fruit from a plant planted in a new land for three years. Makes sense, a lot of fruit trees don't even bear fruit for three to five years. I'm sure there's some other reason too, but I'm not going to try and guess.

Do not promote divination or sorcery. Once again, what's your definition of sorcery? Shaking a chicken at someone to "cure them"? Oh wait…

Don't cut the hair on the sides of your heads or trim the edges of your beard. There's like only one group of people in the world who actually follow this one.

No tattoos. I'm suddenly hating Nazis even more than before.

Don't force your daughter into prostitution.

Don't turn to mediums or seek out spiritists. Right, because only the priests have the right to talk to the supernatural...

Be honest with your measurements.

Show respect for old people.

Death to:

Adulterers.
Children who curse their parents.
Men who lie with other men as with a woman
Bestiality

Brother/sister incest does not require death.
Mediums are stoned. You know, most mediums say that their skills are something they didn't ask for and didn't necessarily even want?

Priests can't marry divorced women or prostitutes.

No descendant of Aaron who has a defect may come in the Temple (it looks almost like the verse is saying no one at all who has a defect… ) This just upsets me. So physically disabled people can't come in the Temple?

Don't lend money with interest.

Don't have slaves from your own nation. This verse has had a terrible impact on the world. It encourages people to think of those from other nations as "not my people, therefore not important". It was used as justification in the early settling of America for people to get slaves from Africa.

Don't set up a sacred stone or a carved stone to worship. Now wait a minute, didn't Jacob do that back in Genesis? I'm sure they mean worshipping the actual stone, because that was and still is a common misconception between Judeo-Christians and people of other faiths. The god is not the effigy, the god is not in the statue. God might be trying to concentrate his power all in one place, but this is a bad move, IMO because what if later, say, the Temple is destroyed, where will he go to gather power?

But I think all of this is really an admonishment from the actual writers, who have a terror of "foreign gods" due to a recent bad experience with another nation. This is also probably why they have God saying that he will punish Israel for not following all the rules he lays out. The writers list several traumatic events that sound similar to what they've just been through at the hands of Babylon.

Exodus: The rest

2007-08-09T02:01:00.000-04:00

Or therabouts. Moses is given the ten basic commandments by God. It's been pointed out that these are similar to the Code of Hammurabi (which, as a prince of Egypt, Moses would be familiar with because Egypt did quite a lot of trading with Babylon). They are also similar to the Sumerian "tablets of destiny" which were given to Marduk as a symbol of his rulership over the other gods. Whichever god had possession of the tablets held the destiny of the world, and was guaranteed success and power for their people.

1) You shall have no other gods before me. I find the use of the word before to be very significant.
2) You shall not make for yourself an idol. The difference between this, and a "graven image" is also significant. It doesn't say that you can't have pictures of living things.
3) You shall not misuse the name of the Lord . There's a tradition in Judaism of not saying or spelling out the name of God. The name is so secret that even the thing most people think is his name, is just four shorter words stuck together, and those four words represent an even longer series of words and syllables. God's full name takes up about a page and is still never printed completely. The only tradition Christians seem to have is that you shouldn't say "oh my God" too much if you're not actually intending to call on God. Christians tend to frown more on the use of "foul language"- four letter words. Which really aren't taking the Lord's name in vain at all, they're just rude, and rudeness is relative depending on social class and current company (an Anglo Saxon word is considered more impolite than a word that means the same crude thing in French or Latin).
4) Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. You'd think that'd be self explanatory but it's not. Some people think this means you must not do anything on the Sabbath, and other people make it the most stressful day of the week trying to "keep it holy". Which day is the Sabbath? For some, it is Saturday, because their calendar says Saturday is the last day of the week. For others, it is Sunday because the people who built their religion decided they wanted the week to end on Sunday. Are people who celebrate it on Sunday going to be in trouble with God? Or will they only be in trouble if they fail to properly honor the day they've chosen as the Sabbath? Should you not do anything at all, or does it just mean that you should relax and do what makes you happy?
5) Honor your parents.
6) You shall not murder. The word used in the NIV is "murder". There is, I suppose, a difference between murder and killing but I think this is one of those laws we're supposed to mind the spirit of, and not try to get off on technicalities. Except… people are just so bloody hypocritical. A large percentage of "pro lifers" are also pro death penalty, pro war, meat and egg eaters who yearn for fur coats and spray chemical pesticides in their gardens. They scream about saving babies from abortions (which include condom use and birth control pills according to these people) but refuse to spare a moment for the babies after they're born. You can't take someone off life support, unless they can't pay the hospital bill. Then it's ok, apparently. I think that if God really had the power over life and death, and he wanted a baby to not be aborted or a plug not to be pulled, he'd arrange for it not to happen. My grandfather was going to die, they pulled the plug on his life support machine and he started breathing on his own. We did what we thought was best, and God had other plans.
7) You shall not commit adultery.
8) You shall not steal. I've heard stealing defined as anything from robbing a bank to to going to lunch and not punching out.
9) You shall not give false testimony. In court, or ever?
10) You shall not covet. Defined to me as wanting something so badly it's all you ever think about. I suppose I've been "covetous" about wanting my own apartment.

Anyone who attacks his parents (verse further down the page says "curse") shall be put to death. . This is a little different from merely not "honoring" them. I'm still not sure death is the proper solution though.

It says a man must provide all his wives with the same proper amount of food, clothing and marital rights. If he doesn't, his wife can leave him. Sounds nice in theory ,doesn't it. But women had no power back then, so even if the law said she could leave him, do you think she'd actually be able to manage it? She'd be shamed for abandoning her marriage, the court might find in favor of the man just because, you know, "bros before hos". She's been trained from birth to obey the resident alpha male, someone's gotten to her psychologically before she's old enough to even think about marriage. And never underestimate the impact of simply being smaller and weaker. Look at what happens in the modern USA, where women are incredibly liberated and all she has to do to leave her husband is say "I don't want to be married to you anymore". And many abused women have difficulty leaving, or just simply never do.

Do not allow a sorceress to live (NIV word is sorceress). Why is it only women who are condemned here? And what is the definition they have in mind of a "sorceress"? I know the King James deliberately uses the word "witch", because James was paranoid about witches and wanted it to have that specific connotation.

Mistreating a foreigner is against the rules. People seem to ignore that one easily.

Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people.. Hey, biblical literalists- do not curse the ruler of your people. Exodus, chapter 22, verse 28.

Servants and non Jews are not to be forced to work on the Sabbath either. Another one people ignore easily-people don't give their maids the Sabbath off. In the US in the 1800s, rich Protestants would force their Irish Catholic maids and cooks to work on Sundays.

Do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk.

This was considered cruel. I'm not sure it applies anymore, in the sense that we can't eat meat with dairy. Goat isn't so popular anymore. Dairy comes from dairy cows, and meat comes from meat cows, often grown on different farms in different parts of the country. Or you can eat goat cheese on beef, or dairy cow cheese on goat. Or am I totally missing something here?

The idea of God keeping a book that he writes down people's behavior in, is very, very Egyptian.

Cut down their Asherah poles? They have Asherah poles already?

Archaeologists have uncovered inscriptions on ancient altars, inscribed "To Yahweh and His Asherah".

God goes on for about three pages on what he wants the tent to look like, and what he wants his ark to look like. Then, the author describes in vivid, painstakingly anal detail the process of building them.
I could never summarize it as hilariously as Insidian, so I'll just let her remarks say it.

Leviticus pt 1
Exodus is older than Levitcus, yet Exodus says nothing about homosexuality. There are a lot of things in Leviticus that aren't in Exodus. Most modern, mainstream Christians tend to focus more on the rather simple, easy to follow rules of Exodus- Leviticus was never even taught to the children in the Sunday School I went to, and I wouldn't exactly call that church liberal. Leviticus and Deuteronomy (coming up) are practically dirty words among theologically left wing Christians.

It's not nearly as bad as it seems like it's going to be. But where the Christian Reconstructionists go wrong is in trying to legislate this series of laws for the entire world, whether other people want them or not. They also don't understand (or more likely, don't care) that some of these rules are no longer enforced even by Jewish people. I mean, when was the last time you heard about an official Public Stoning? There is no high priest caste system anymore and there are no more animal sacrifices. Furthermore, despite their so called "literal" stance, most Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists ignore all parts of the OT that they feel are inconvenient, such as dietary laws and admonishments to take care of the poor.

First, there's a few detailed instructions on how and when to make a burnt offering.

Bird offerings must be doves or young pigeons. Doves are sacrificed a lot. You know, nearly all the major goddesses of the ancient East are associated with doves?

The priest must sprinkle blood on altar. Eventually, this must have started to smell bad, even if the place were regularly washed.

NO YEAST. Looks like yeast is forbidden constantly in the Bible. Does anyone have a reasonable explanation why God hates yeast so much?

Priests burn a "memorial portion" and keep the rest for themselves. Kind of interesting that the people are providing their priests with free food, and that so many "sins" require animal sacrifices.

"All the fat is the Lord's"

All the fat from the animal has to go to God. Regular meat can't have any fat on it either, and the blood has to be drained out. You must not eat any fat or blood. Makes sense- fat is bad for you, and bloody food isn't always safe to eat. I'm not sure it needs a mandate from God but I'm a modern person who has grown up in a world obsessed with cutting the fat off meat.

The fire must not go out. Never. Ever. Ever. I wonder why. But it's something I've seen mentioned in descriptions of ancient Egyptian temples.

Two of Aaron's sons are "struck down by God" for offering the wrong incense at the wrong time. This seems overly harsh to me, but I bet it was really something like they performed the ritual without taking proper fire safety precautions.

God says the priests must not drink while working. A reasonable request although it causes conflict with the modern Christian "communion" in many denominations and the words can also be twisted to claim that no one can drink wine, ever.

You can eat- any animal that has a split hoof and chews its cud. Which excludes camels, rabbits, badgers and pigs. This is the first anti pig mention. Hmm. About pigs….

Pigs can make people sick. There's this disease called Trichinosis. Also, the modern meat packing industry is really kind of disgusting and unethical, the pork industry is particularly famous for it. Someone once wondered if the pig thing didn't have to do with DNA- supposedly pigs DNA is close to human's. The Egyptian god Set, who was the bad guy of the Egyptian pantheon and whose identity is often confused with/syncreticized with Satan had pinkish skin, hoofed feet and pointy ears.

The reason why so many people are always bringing up the no pig rule is because many Gentile (and non Muslim) societies revolve, or used to revolve, around pig farming. There's pork in everything, especially now that someone's invented Bacon Bits. To ask that someone not eat pork is quite shocking and baffling to them. Try being a part of a Gentile culture, and not allow yourself to touch pork. It's not easy-

"You sure you don't want ham?"

"I'm sure."

"She's a vegetarian."

"I'm not a vegetarian, I just don't eat pork!"

"She's Jewish."

"I'm not Jewish, I just don't want any ham! I don't eat pig! Pig I do not eat! No pig. Not ham, not pork, not sausages, not bacon. No. Frigging. PORK!"

"There's no need to lose your temper."

For some reason, chowing down on a ham while observing the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has often struck me as particularly rude.

It's permissible to eat sea creatures that have fins and scales. This could be again, another evolutionary thing- life comes from the ocean/sea…

Birds you cannot eat include : vultures, eagles, ravens, kites, owls, gulls, storks, heron or bats. Three of those birds (gulls, ravens and owls) are sacred to certain Goddesses, which is interesting. Then again, vultures and gulls also eat trash and scavenge. Bats are birds?

You can't eat bugs, except for locusts, katydids and grasshoppers. Now, I think most of us would laugh at the idea that people had to be told not to eat bugs, but there are places in the world where it is done.

You can't eat animals that walk on paws- nothing from the dog or cat or bear family, I guess. And I assume that excludes primates too? I don't know, they're not mentioned here. I know that Phoenician pirates once discovered a tribe of "hairy women" in Africa which were apparently gorillas.

You can't eat weasels, rats, lizards or snakes. You know, I have no urge to eat most of these animals anyway? The stumbling block for most people seems to be the pork, and the seafood, and mixing meat with dairy.

You have to wash anything that comes in contact with an unclean animal. So far nothing seems all that scary, mostly it's things people do already or would find it easy to do.

But then it starts to get weird.

If a woman gives birth, she must wait seven days while she's ceremonially unclean. If she gives birth to a boy she will be impure for thirty three days. For a girl, it's two weeks and sixty six days. Then she has to give a "sin offering".

I mean, wtf? I mean, I understand about germs and disease but she hasn't done anything wrong by having a baby. And giving birth to a girl makes her twice as impure? How is that rationalized?

There follows a series of specific instructions on what to do if you get a rash, or a boil. You have to go see the priest, who will look at it and decide if it's unclean or not. Apparently, the priest, in addition to being a judge, religious leader, sex police and public health inspector is now also a doctor. Leviticus doesn't command that the priest actually cure you, just that he tell you if it's bad enough to be "unclean". If it is, you are isolated for seven days. If it gets worse, you have to leave the camp for a certain amount of time. At the end of that time, the priest will come to you with certain items.

Instructions for curing a person
Two birds.
Scarlet yarn
Hyssop
Cedar wood.

Kill one bird over fresh water. Dip the live bird, together with the yarn, wood and hyssop in the blood of the dead bird. Sprinkle it over person seven times. Release the live bird.

Tell me again what's wrong with witch doctors and voodoo?

Someone asked a question that it had never occurred to me ask… what makes anyone think the angels who visited Sodom and were almost raped, appeared to the Sodomites as men? There's a tradition that teaches angels appear at least slightly androgynous.

In the last chapter of Genesis, when Joseph frames his brothers for stealing the silver chalice, he puts the cup in Benjamin's bag. Is this where medieval scholars got the idea that Mary Magdalene was of the line of Benjamin? Because there's not a lot of evidence for her being of that family, since we don't really know her family tree, but it was a popular myth at one point. It's one of the ways she acquired her famous red hair- those descended from the tribe of Benjamin were frequently believed to have red hair.

An interesting theory was brought up about Isaac and Abraham. It's a really controversial story, a father sacrificing his son. But it becomes clear just how frustrating it is for people who don't know the Jewish oral traditions that go along with the Bible, and people who don't have PhDs in Divinity, because they read it and get the impression that God is a horrible deity. But it was brought up on list that Isaac was probably an adult at the time, fully consenting. Christians are usually left with the impression that this is a child, maybe seven, maybe twelve. I mean, that's what I'd always been led to believe. But God is not condoning child sacrifice!. Someone suggested that it might actually be a voluntary initiation into Abraham's religion- tribal leader performing a coming of age ceremony that will prepare his son to take his place as tribal leader. A psychological initiation, the kind every student of Mysteries has to go through.

You know, no matter how much I try to analyze it, that part where God attacks Moses makes no sense. It's just bizarre and random- why didn't God just tell Moses he had to be circumcised?

Another thing we have to consider is not just "did such and such a thing really happen?" but what are we meant to believe happened, and why does the writer want us to think that? The writers of Exodus and Leviticus are writing from several generations later, when worship of YHVH has changed quite a bit. They've also recently had a bad experience with a polytheistic nation and so are eager to keep their people from embracing what they see as an evil culture. This is the point when the idea of other gods is going to become officially no longer tolerated.

They did such a good job of erasing memory of the time when other gods were given equal respect that I've heard of Asherah referred to as an "obscure Goddess". She was anything but obscure in her own time. There are gigantic temples to her in Lebanon. Her "poles" are the ancestor of the medieval "May Pole". Granted, she's not as popular as Isis or Ishtar, whose worship continued until Islam became the dominant religion in the region. But obscure? No, not if she actually makes it into the Bible, not if the worship of her was such a threat that an actual commandment had to be issued to stop the people from praying to her. They even tried to marry her to God.

If they'd been allowed to, (or agreed that she was already the female half of God) there probably would have been less war. Which is one of the big problems I've begun to have with this entire book. People are so adamant about the monotheism that they'd rather kill all their neighbors than admit that someone else could have an equally valid god. It seems like God is on a bit of a power trip. Or is it the authors who are on the power trip? Or maybe just trying to make their people feel better about themselves by painting neighbors as evil and inferior. They probably didn't realize what a negative affect those words would have thousands of years later. They keep getting conquered, and people seem to want to hurt them, so the authors are trying to find a way to explain to the Jews why everyone wants to hurt them.

So far the reasons have included:

1) Pagans are just evil, because their gods are evil.
2) People are jealous because God has chosen you.
3) God is punishing you for not being loyal enough/clean enough/devout enough.

But I'm digressing. It's important to understand what the reader was intended to think, not just what really happened. Authors put words in Jesus' mouth all the time when the NT was being written. Both orthodox and gnostic sources contain episodes of the life of Jesus that could be entirely fictionalized. But each story exists for a purpose, to argue or illustrate a point. An author who desperately wants to justify say, eating unclean food, might include a story in which Jesus says it's alright to eat unclean food.

I was really worried about reading the next chapter. It's considered THE Dominionist handbook

Exodus 1-39

2007-08-08T00:44:00.000-04:00

Exodus 1-13

Speaking of civil rights movements. . .

The Book of Exodus tells the story of what appears to be the world's first organized push for civil rights for a minority class.

The NJB says Moses is an Egyptian word short for Tutmoses. The footnotes also say that according to the Elohist tradition, this is the period in time when God first reveals his name of Yahweh. So what was he being called before that? The text likes to imply that he had no name, he was just "God" or "The God of our Ancestors" except where it calls him El Shaddai. Many mythologists say El refers to the high god of Canaan, where they'd lived previously and return after Egypt and Shaddai means, depending on the motives of the translator, either mountains, breasts or destruction. Shaddai/Shaddaim is definitely breasts in Hebrew, but I expect any minute now for someone to explain that it's just not that simple. If there really is just one true God, then there must have been a time when he was the only God around, so the earliest cultures must have all had gods who were either related to each other or were the same god called by different names. The Mesopotamian belief was that there was a family of gods, each assigned to rule over a particular area of the world. Moses asks who it is that is speaking to him.

"I am he who is, " says God. Some versions have him saying, "I am that is" or "I am who I am" (apparently God is Popeye.) More than one scholar has claimed this really means, "It's none of your business who I am".

Does Moses know anything about the Hebrew god at all? I liked the way the animated film "Prince of Egypt" handled it- Moses doesn't even know he's Hebrew, let alone anything about the slave's religion. The revelation triggers a major and realistic freakout. There were several scenes I liked in the movie but the burning bush scene was especially interesting. Moses goes into a cave and sees not a traditional "burning bush" but a sort of "holy fire", a pale, glowing substance that symbolizes the presence of God. The voice Moses hears in the cave is not one voice but at least two, a male voice and a female voice speaking in harmony. The male voice is more dominant, but the female voice initiates the conversation and echoes the male voice as it speaks. Later, on the night of Passover, when the Egyptian boys are…eliminated… when the filmy white substance that winds its way through the city finishes its task, it sighs, and that sigh is definitely a woman's sigh. In terms of evidence of the Divine Feminine, this is on par with Mary Magdalene appearing in the Da Vinci painting. It's not hard evidence; it's just evidence that the idea that God has a female side is a far more popular idea than you'd think. This is an interesting window into the personal theology of the people who made this movie.

In the NIV, contrary to what we usually hear, when Moses rescues the Hebrew slave, he makes sure no one is looking before he kills the slavedriver, then he buries the body in secret. This is more consistent with the characteristics of a shy man ("I am slow of speech and tongue") but not with that of a member of the royal family, who would likely not even face a reprimand for dispensing justice between two employees. In the cartoon, Moses' brother (who is now Pharaoh) offers to whitewash the entire incident, because the law doesn't apply to a prince. It's Moses' personal conscience that makes him run away, not fear of legal retribution.

Moses goes to live in the desert, which is where he meets his wife Zipporah. Her father is called Ruel on his first appearance in my NIV, then Jethro for the rest of the book. No it doesn't explain why. The NJB does explain, by saying that tradition varies as to what his name was. But in the text they pick a name and stick with it.

The NIV says God was "concerned" about the situation with the Hebrews. CONCERNED? God was only concerned? That seems inconsistent for a deity prone to flying off the handle over little things.

"I will take you as my own people and I will be your god, " says God. But hadn't he already done that?

God says that he will help Moses speak to Pharaoh, but that he'll harden Pharaoh's heart against Moses. Why would he decide to make things harder on everyone, when he has the power to make Pharaoh compliant to Moses' demands? Because, as he says a couple of pages later just before he drowns Pharaoh, "I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh." God is playing stupid political games with people's lives.

It's hard not to wonder what the secret was behind the Egyptian's massive architecture. It's not surprising that people wonder if it was aliens, or superior, advanced technology, and it's certainly not hard at all to believe that it was done with thousands of slaves driven to exhaustion (in spite of what a PR problem it is for Egypt, it's by far the most realistic answer and it's not like they were the first or last nation to do so). Try for a moment to grasp the scope of Egypt's power. There was a long period when they were basically the USA of the ancient Middle and Near East. Heck, they're still one of the most stable and powerful nations in their region. Surrounding nations were fighting with weapons they bought from Egypt, paying tribute to Egypt to secure their borders, often subject to Egyptian law whether they wanted to be or not. Mika Walteri's "The Egyptian" is an excellent chronicle of the time period the Moses story takes place in.

You know how in Genesis everyone's complaining about the Hittites all the time? In reading "The Egyptian" it's easier to understand why Everyone Hates the Hittites. At least according to that book, they seem a bit like land bound Vikings, but without the charm and sophistication and respect for other people's property. The book also describes a thorough, barbaric and bloody conquest by the Egyptians of a small tribe of people called the "Khabiri". I tried looking on Wikipedia, but there was no entry for "Khabiri". But a Google search revealed this- The tablets show the frequent use of the name Khabiri in speaking of those who were over-running the country. Many of the very finest scholars regard Khabiri as Egyptian for Hebrew and the whole framework fits in well with the early date (1400 BC) for the beginning of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan under Joshua ... The author of "The Egyptian" must have seen the tribal name in some documents, saw that they were from a certain area, and incorporated a scene with them, maybe without realizing that his entire novel revolves around them. Or perhaps he did know, and it's a nod to the AU aspects of his story. And it's Hittite warriors paid by Egyptians who do the most damage to the Khabiri in the novel. But then there's this too.

After God sends down ten plagues on Egypt, he prepares to help the Hebrews escape. This involves detailed instructions for the Passover meal, which they are to eat the night before they leave for good. God really hates yeast for some reason. Yeast improperly used can make people sick but honestly!

According to the NJB, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Passover were not originally the same event. The Feast of Unleavened Bread started in Canaan. Passover was a "pre Israelite festival", the "Destroyer" was a demon who threatened family and cattle, the blood gave protection against him. This puts a whole new perspective on mezuzahs, which I was told are symbolic of the blood on the doorposts. They would never have been needed after Egypt if the whole thing was just about the Angel of Death striking down Egyptians. Instead, they protect people against a primeval, visceral nightmare that was a concern way before the Egypt incident.

There are supposedly two versions of the reasons why the Hebrews left Egypt. In one, they run away, in the other they are kicked out. The flight story is dominated by the Moses figure. The two stories may historically belong to two different periods. That's probably why some people are convinced Moses had something to do with Ahkenaton, the Pharaoh who becomes a monotheist and nearly destroys Egypt in the process. I am not really sure this works, not just because I don't know enough about Egyptian history. Moses and his people left and struck out on their own across the desert, while Ahkenaton merely built another city a few miles down the Nile, experienced humiliating failure, and his family moved back when he died. If those people came back they can't be the Hebrews. But there are also many details that match up- in Walteri's novel, the "waters turning to blood" are caused by violence and war in the streets of Thebes, children are killed, "darkness fills the land" and the crops of Ahkenaton's people develops a disease. The children who eat this grain die in massive numbers and the loyalists of Ammon blame it on Aton, the "one God" of Akhenaton. In response, Ahkenaton becomes even more dictatorial, increasing the number of slaves he sends to the mines and putting people to death who criticize him.

Exodus 14-39

I'm going to leave off trying to figure out what is true and not true in the Moses story, because that's totally not the point of this project at all. It's all about the wisdom and spiritual insight I'm supposed to be getting, and playing Amateur Historian is only distracting me. Also, I'm trying to pretend I don't know what's happening next.

On the discussion list, someone brought up the connection Ishmael and Hagar have with Islam. I'm sorry I didn't mention it here, I didn't really know that story. In fact, I don't know much about actual Islamic theology at all, which is why I never discuss it. I talk about Judaism and paganism because I'm trying to learn to understand it so I can understand Christianity better.

Genesis 23-36

2007-08-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

Genesis 23-36

Why, if God said that people would no longer live past 120, are people still living past 120 in Genesis? But I can only assume this is why they all marry so late.

So many of these stories have to do with sibling rivalry between brothers.

Hagar had almost died in the wilderness, but God rescues her and promises that Ishmael will also become a great nation. Ishmael's people settle in the area from Havilah to Shur "on the border of Egypt" and "lived in hostility toward all their brothers." Isaac is now grown up, and has married Rebekah (who is from Mesopotamia and has a nose ring! A nose ring! ) Isaac makes yet another peace treaty with the Philistines.

Rebekah is barren (why are so many of these women having trouble conceiving? Does anyone know?) but then she becomes pregnant with twins, who seem to be fighting with each other inside her.

"Two nations are in your womb, "God says. "And the two peoples from within you will be separated. One people will be stronger than the other and the older one will serve the younger one."

Esau (Edom) is the older one. He's red and hairy, while Jacob, the younger is smooth and comes out grabbing onto Esau's heel. Esau is the outdoorsy type, and Jacob apparently likes to stay and home and cook. One day Esau comes in starving and begs for some of Jacob's stew. Jacob won't give it to him until Esau hands over his birthright.

I don't think I like this guy. Later, when Isaac is dying, Rebekah and Jacob cover Jacob's arms in wool and bring some food into Isaac, who has failing eyesight. Isaac thinks he is talking to Esau, and hands over his entire estate. When Esau comes in later, and announces that Isaac has been deceived, his father gives him some vague promise about living by the sword.

Esau then tries to kill Jacob, who runs away. While on the run, he dreams of seeing a "stairway to Heaven".

God says "your descendants will be like the dust of the earth."

Which means they'll be everywhere and indispensable, but also that people will treat them like dirt. Jacob calls the place "Bethel" and offers a sacrifice. He finishes his journey in his grandfather's homeland and when he first meets his beautiful cousin Rachel, he kisses her and cries (that must have freaked her out, some dirty foreign guy grabs her and starts sobbing…) When Jacob asks to marry Rachel, Rachel's father tricks him into marrying Rachel's sister Leah too. Leah is not pretty like Rachel.

Poor plain Leah keeps having babies, hoping Jacob will love her because she is fertile where Rachel is barren. But then Rachel starts having kids too. And Jacob likes her kids more, because they're Rachel's and he loves Rachel, whereas he married Leah out of responsibility.

Jacob does a spell to get more money out of his father in law, and then claims God did it for him.

It's a prevailing misconception (IMO) that bible characters are always correct in everything they do. But that really doesn't seem to be the case, they are often just as human as anyone else is. Probably what makes them such enduring characters is that they are imperfect.

Jacob and Rachel are not nice people. Jacob cheated Esau out of his birthright. Now he is unsatisfied with the wages his father in law pays him (after he performed magic to try and manipulate things to his advantage) and so he and Rachel steal her father's household gods and take off in the middle of the night with their children. Her father catches them and has them searched. But he can't search Rachel, because she claims she's having her period and can't get up/let anyone touch her.

Her father then laments that if they'd just told him they were unhappy, he'd have understood. He wishes they'd waited so he could see them off properly.

Jacob returns to Esau and makes up with him. The rest of his family goes ahead, and leaves him to spend the night alone. He "wrestled with the man until daybreak". What man? This has got to be some kind of translation error because it just jumps right into the scene without even explaining the arrival of "the man". I'll have to wait until I can check some other sources… unless someone is reading this who can help me out, but maybe no one is reading this.

Jacob won't let the man go until he blesses him and tells him his name. But the man is God, and God renames Jacob "Israel" which means, "struggles with God."

Regarding OT women and their periods- modern feminists often complain that women back then couldn't be touched and had to go off and live in another tent. And no, it isn't fair to force someone to do it; it's not fair at all. But on the other hand, consider what having your period can be like for many women. In this modern era, we can go into any drugstore, supermarket or Wal-Mart esque store and see an aisle full of sprays, creams, powders, and pads and tampons of every size, shape, color, scent, expandability and absorbency. We have disinfectant sprays and powerful laundry detergents. But imagine what it was like in BCE, when the best a woman had, especially if she was a desert nomad, was a few rags. If she were lucky she'd be able to get some painkilling herbs. Would you even want to be around anyone else? Even today, in the most powerful, comfortable and advanced nation in the world, the best technolgy for dealing with menstruation that I can get my hands on is… a bottle of aspirin and what's essentially super absorbent wads of cotton. No, I don't want to go out, no, I don't want to be touched, no, I don't want to come out of my room and yes, I have discovered the value of voluminous black clothing. And am I looking forward to taking a long shower/bath? You bet.

The final story in Genesis is the story of Joseph (and his Technicolor Dreamcoat!). There are about five stories out of the Bible that everyone at least vaguely knows- the Garden of Eden, Noah, Moses, the Christmas story, and the Joseph story. So I don't think it needs summarization here, because there's not much that's controversial, confusing or worth debating in it. We'll see if anyone else comes up with something later.

The basic theme of Genesis, if I could sum it up, would be sibling rivalry. And along with that, the importance of recognizing that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin and it doesn't really matter who's on whose land. God loved everyone and he tried to give everyone a place to belong and a country to call their own.

BTW, Spellcheck insists that it's "Dreamboat" not "dreamcoat" and that Rebekah is spelled wrong.

(comments)
pepperjackcandy
2006-01-19 09:27 pm UTC
We'll see if anyone else comes up with something later.

How's this?

I think that Akhenaten was the Pharaoh of Joseph's time.

Because if Pharaoh believed that his dreams had been sent by one of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon, why would he listen to someone who specializes in one god of a different pantheon?

But Joseph's great-grandfather did the same thing Akhenaten did -- abandoned a pantheon in favor of one god.

Since both dropped out of their respective polytheisms (?), that'd give them a more common worldview, I guess.

babydraco
2006-01-19 09:50 pm UTC
That'd make some sense. And it corresponds to the famine that Joseph predicts-Akhenaton's administration totally ruined Egypt and a lot of people died. And I'd rather see that than see Moses made out to be a cowardly, incompetant king who was deposed by angry citizens.

Bible Study: Genesis 3-23

2007-08-05T14:05:00.000-04:00

Genesis 3-23

Or approximately thereabouts. I find it easy to read ahead because the chapters are so short, six chapters is like the equivalent of six pages of a normal book, and because I don't have my hands on the NJB at the moment I'm not getting bogged down by footnotes. But I still wish I had the footnotes.

5The Lord saw how great was mans wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. 6And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. 7The Lord said, I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them. 8But Noah found favor with the Lord.

This once again reminds us of Sumerian myth. In Sumerian myth, there was a figure called Ziasudra/Utnapishtim, who was like a proto-Noah. A later story gives the credit to Gilgamesh, who was the most famous action hero of ancient Mesopotamia. God is angry at the humans and decides to destroy them. He plans to save only one family, and to them he gives detailed instruction on how to build a boat that will withstand the flood. He tells Noah to gather up two of every animal.

Adad thunders, Nergal tears down the doorposts of the gates that hold back the waters of the upper ocean, the Anunnaki lift up the torches, setting the land ablaze with their glare. The gods themselves cower like dogs against the wall of Heaven. Ishtar who had incited the gods to destroy mankind lifts up her voice and bewails her action, while the rest of the gods weep with her. The storm rages for six days and nights. On the seventh day it subsides. …The ship grounds on Mt. Nisir. Utnapishim waits seven days and then sends out a dove which returns having found no resting place. …he also sends out a raven. Then he lets out all the animals and offers a sacrifice. The gods smell the sweet savour and gather. Ishtar lifts up her necklace of lapis lazuli and swears by it never to forget what has happened. " -Middle Eastern Mythology, by S.H Hooke.

God tells Noah to gather up seven each of the "clean" animals and two of the "unclean", although most songs and cartoons as well as the simplified versions told to Christian children only mention the two of every kind. I assume the clean and unclean distinction is another unique addition of the Jewish priests at the later time, because Noah and his people didn't live under the clean/unclean restrictions. Or they wouldn't if they had ever existed, which scholars doubt.

Noah's trip takes forty days and forty nights. He also sends out a raven and a dove (ravens and doves, by the way, are often used as goddess symbols. The dove in particular is used as a symbol of YHVH's feminine side).

God says "Never again will I curse the ground." God says this about five times on one page, why is it that so many people, especially biblical literalists, still think God is going to use weather to punish us?

God tells Noah "you must not eat meat that still has its lifeblood in it." Don't eat your meat raw? That's very sensible advice. Thank you, God.

Later, Noah is drunk and lying in his tent naked. His son Ham finds him, and is embarrassed. His other two sons grab a cloak and walk backwards (so they won't see him naked) and drape him with the cloak. But Noah wakes up and curses Ham for looking at him naked. The passage says that Ham's descendants were cursed.

"Cursed be Canaan, the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." It goes on to explain yet another genealogy which tells of Nimrod, descendant of Ham, who founded Babylon, Erech, Akkad, Assyria, Ninevah, all those people who pick on the Israelites. Perhaps the authors wanted to explain why things were so terrible for the Israelites.

The lists of descendents actually match up in places with the Sumerian "king lists"- Enoch appears on both the king lists and the Biblical genealogies, as does Nimrod. It is actually here that the story begins to join up in an obvious way with other mythologies. Nimrod shows up in other myths from other cultures, and real places are being mentioned. This sets the stage for the entrance of the Bible into map-able history. After yet another long genealogy, we're introduced to Abram and his wife Sarai.

Abram (later to be called Abraham) was supposedly a mercenary in his youth. This is fascinating to me, it means that Yahweh was a soldier's god, which continues to be born out later. His armies are powerful and tend to win; it's why he was often called Yahweh Saboath (God of the Armies). The Hebrew people were always fierce warriors. Their skill was highly prized throughout the Oikumune ("civilized world"). What does this mean for us today? Is the fact that the Abrahamic god is a war god justification for making war?

I also find it interesting that the chief Babylonian/Sumerian goddess Ishtar was a war goddess. It goes a lot toward explaining the tempestuous relationship they have in mythology. But also, if the God and Goddess are two halves of one being, they might be similar in their favorite roles. In the novelization of the Abram/Sarai story ("Sarah" by Marek Halter ), Sarai is a priestess of Ishtar. It's interesting to see the reaction to the book-the things people seem to believe about her, despite how little her personality is described in the canon scriptures.

Sarai and Abram travel to Egypt, where Abram is afraid the Pharaoh will take her away and so he tells everyone she is his sister. This backfires, the Pharaoh "takes her to be his wife" (I think that means he slept with her) and is upset that Abram didn't say anything about being married. This passage does not make a ton of sense and doesn't advance what there is of a plot, so I think we have to assume that it's either a confused fragment of something else, or it is one of those coded references to a conflict the source of which is long forgotten but certainly not forgiven.

Abram settles in the area around the Salt Sea (the Dead Sea). There's a pair of cities there called Sodom and Gomorrah. His relative Lot moves into the city.

This is the infamous story that has served for thousands of years to encourage the oppression of homosexuals. Conservatives especially have always claimed the problem was the actual sex acts that were named after the city-leading it to be banned in several societies and it's still banned in some US states.

It seems pretty clear that the issue with Sodom/Gomorrah was their violence and lack of hospitality, not their alleged gayness. They were going to violently sexually assault two messengers of God. This wasn't two people of the same sex who met at a party and really liked each other, set up a house together and wanted to adopt kids. This wasn't even two gay men meeting in a bar and negotiating a consensual sexual encounter. This was attempted violent gang rape of two angels. The people were so evil they didn't recognize the representatives of God among them. The message might not be "gay people are evil" but "don't rape people, especially not angels". God never destroyed other famous centers of gayness- God never destroyed the Isle of Lesbos and nothing has ever happened to Christopher Street or London's SoHo. Government incompetence is what half destroyed New Orleans, and part of the reason appears to have been that the government didn't think poor people, ethnic minorities and gay people deserved to be rescued, not because God hates them.

I still don't understand why Lot tries to give them his daughters.

I watched a documentary on the Dead Sea area, the environmental evidence does show that there could have been a huge earthquake and explosion in the area long thought to be the former Sodom and Gomorrah. Volcanic ash was thrown into the air and rained down on the heads of the people, most people probably didn't make it out alive. It would be easy for someone to be covered with the falling salt and ash if they couldn't run fast enough. Looking back slowed Lot's wife down. In the actual Dead Sea, if an object remains under water for a certain amount of time it will become completely covered in pure white salt. According to the scripture, it really doesn't seem like Lot was given a lot of time to get out. The angels sort of grab their hands and say "Go! Now!" like in the movies when people run from a building that explodes just as they hit the parking lot.

By the way, according to the same documentary, in the area around the Dead Sea, the walls of the underground caves below the beaches are crumbling and so random sinkholes open up and suck people under.

God tells Abram to change his name to Abraham and Sarai to change her name to Sarah. I'm sure there's some significance to the name change but I’m not a linguist so it just seems rather arbitrary to me. They do this a lot in the Bible, telling us that someone changed their name and not quite explaining the reason for the linguistic difference. I've read some speculation about gematria that claims these names become codes when there's a slight letter shift.

God demands that Abraham circumcise himself and the men of the tribe. It's not really explained why they have to do this- I know it's allegedly more hygienic and it increases sexual pleasure but as an ethnic identifier it leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes I think God is making Abraham do all these things just to see how far Abraham will go for him.

Sarah and Abraham are unable to conceive, but God promises that they will have a child. First he tells them to give Abraham a chance with Hagar, Sarah's slave (I guess they were trying to see whose problem it really was?) Hagar becomes pregnant; Sarah is jealous of her and begins to treat her horribly. Hagar runs away. God finds her and demands that she go back (whuh?). She gives birth to a boy and they name him Ishmael.

Abraham and Sarah go to another place, and meet another king. Abraham pulls the sister scam again, and again it fails. Obviously the men will try to sleep with her if she says she's single (so she's either cheated on him twice now or she's been raped twice). I guess they're trying to show us that Sarah really couldn't get pregnant. They're in their 90s, so I'm not sure what's going on here, can she possibly still be that hot at 90?

Abraham makes a treaty with the Philistine men of Beersheba. King Abimlech says "Now swear to me that you will not deal falsely with me or my children or my descendants. Show to me and the country where you are living the same kindness I have shown you." (Gen 21: 22).

And Abraham swears it.

God gives in and says he'll make Sarah miraculously pregnant. A year later, Isaac is born and immediately becomes more special and important than Ishmael. In fact, Hagar is asked to leave and ends up cast out into the desert to starve with her baby. God promises that her child will also be a great father of nations. I'm starting to wonder if God isn't just making this up as he goes along. He wanted Abraham to have a child to begin the ascendance of the nation of Israel, but he wasn't sure it would work so he created a backup baby in Ishmael and then had to fob him off on someone else? "You are my Chosen People. And you're my Backup Chosen People."

Several years pass by, and God comes up with yet another whimsical test for Abraham. He wants Abraham to take Isaac out to sacrifice a lamb. But when they get to the altar, God tells Abraham to kill Isaac instead. Abraham actually tries to go through with it, and Isaac is surprisingly willing to lay down his life. God manages to intervene and explains that it was only a test. We can see that this is clearly some kind of foreshadowing-maybe messianic, maybe not.

Bible Study: Genesis 1-3

2007-08-05T14:03:00.000-04:00

Genesis 1-4
I joined an email discussion group that will be reading the Bible together. I am posting my responses here as well. Before I do so, I want to talk about how I view reading the Bible. How should people read it? What should you expect?

1) It is not a science textbook, and it's mostly not meant to be taken as a literal history throughout. It is part mythology, and chronicle of the growth of a religion but its main purpose is as a spiritual guide. Parts of it contain beautiful and almost universal spiritual truths, and some parts are just entertainment, political propaganda or an attempt at historical archiving. There's also parts that are just plain useless junk. The thing that's so great is no one knows which is which!
2) It is difficult and cryptic, a one-time read-through is not at all enough. Of course it won't make sense if you just read it as a straight narration meant to be taken entirely at face value.
Because it contains stories written by different authors over a period of several thousand years, there will be many contradictions. These don't invalidate the text at all, because it was never meant for all authors to agree with each other- it wasn't planned ahead of time like a modern book and it's not meant to be read like one.
6) I'm not pretending to be some expert, I'm at best an amateur theologian, at worst just someone with a lot of time on my hands and an interest in religion.
7) I'm going to include references to other books, because it helps me, as well as links to Bible Spam and The Brick Testament for fun.
7) We're reading The New Jerusalem Bible which is supposed to be the most accurate (Christian) translation. The group's name is lectiodivinia, at yahoogroups. The NJB is a Catholic bible, highly respected linguist and fantasy author JRR Tolkien was one of the original translators/editors. At times I was not able to use the NJB because I don't own it, so I've also used this one online. Partly because I simply didn't trust half the versions that turned up in my google search. This online one is not well typed out, sadly and someone forgot to do line breaks at one point, so I've occasionally been forced to resort to my NIV (curse you, Rupert Murdock).

This week's readings were
Sunday, Jan. 1: Genesis 1-2 and Mark 1:1-13
Monday, Jan. 2: Genesis 3-4 and Mark 1:14-28
Tuesday, Jan. 3: Genesis 5-6 and Mark 1:29-39
Wednesday, Jan. 4: Genesis 7-8 and Mark 1:40-45
Thursday, Jan. 5: Genesis 9-10 and Mark 2:1-12
Friday, Jan. 6: Genesis 11-12 and Mark 2:13-17
Saturday, Jan. 7: Genesis 13-15 and Mark 2:18-28

Here is Insidian's take on Genesis. And from Brick Testament, the Garden of Eden story.

Genesis.

The earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep and a divine wind swept over the waters.

The "Old Testament" has some of the most beautiful language in world mythology, if it doesn't put this part of the bible in the top ten of the most incredible writing ever. Whether it is accurate or not is irrelevant, it's more important what it teaches us about people, and what we learn about that is extremely relevant.

God creates man last, and gives him special intelligence and special jobs to do. Man is given dominion over all the plants and animals, but man is also charged to take care of those things, these things were not given to us just to use up and break. Light is a creation of God, but darkness is pre-existing, chaos is older than order. Perhaps God didn't create evil after all, then. Or perhaps when he separated light from darkness, he created the concept of good and evil at the same time.

It says that God created the heavens and the earth, but it does not specifically state that God created the entire universe. This leaves plenty of room for speculation on where God itself came from, and is not really addressed in Genesis. Knowing how thorough these authors were, if they had thought of an answer they would have included it.

Perhaps one of the reasons why they don't ask the question is because they have borrowed much of their mythology from the Babylonians. Babylonians were the descendants of Sumerians, ironically the people who gave us Abraham. They can't answer the question because it is not asked by the original inventors of the myth. Likewise, the Noah story doesn't give a reason why God wanted to destroy the world, other than people were "sinning", but the Sumerian version does. The older gods were annoyed at how loud the human parties were, and the humans weren't doing the work the gods had given them to do.

There are two versions of the creation story in Genesis. They were written at different times and the variations tell us a lot about what was going on with the authors. One may have been written during the reign of King David, when Israel was powerful and wealthy, and monotheistic. The other, written during or just after the Babylonian captivity, when Israel was beaten down and thrown in with a strange, foreign culture. But since this was the culture they had originally come from many generations ago, they'd already been traveling around with a similar myth, sprinkled with some bits from Egyptian and Canaanite beliefs. There are actually four different authors or groups of authors thought to have worked on this book.

It's not actually clear in some places whether this "God" is one god or several. Elohim is plural, a word that seems to have been borrowed from Canaan.

"Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves".

"Behold Adam is become as one of us knowing good and evil: now therefore lest perhaps he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever."

In fact, the Hebrew people were not always monotheists- the monotheistic Yahwist worship tended to be something only hicks from the mountains engaged in and Abraham did not come from a monotheistic culture. Yahweh may have originally been part of a pantheon, slowly gaining power until he staged a coup and was crowned king. There is actually a passage in the OT where Yahweh travels to the Council of El (the Canaanite high god) and berates the other gods for their lack of morals and concern for the humans. He becomes king of the other gods; much like Marduk becomes king of the gods in the Sumerian/Babylonian story.

God may be One, but with many emanations or aspects. The earlier creation myth, the Enuma Elish (from Sumeria) describes twenty four beings emanating from the Creator, each being was given rulership over one part of the world. But all these beings seem to be aspects of the original God and Goddess- Enki and Ninhursag are Ishtar and Tammuz. And above the first two God and Goddess mentioned, there is another Creator who seems to encompass them all.

"Man" here is used to refer to both man and woman, according to the footnotes. It's at least implied that Adam and Eve are created at the same time, which is similar to the original Mesopotamian myth in the way it doesn't differentiate between the creation of man and the creation of woman. A more obscure version teaches that Adam began as a hermaphrodite that then split into two people and two genders.

God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky. 21God created the great sea monsters, and all the living creatures of every kind that creep, which the waters brought forth in swarms, and all the winged birds of every kind. And God saw that this was good. 22God blessed them, saying, Be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth. 23And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.

It's interesting that God does create birds and reptiles and "great sea monsters" before he creates cattle and primates, and that man comes last, which is not so terribly different from evolution. I once saw this painting of the evolution of man from ape to Homo Sapiens, all the creatures are standing in a line and at the end of the line is a primitive man reaching up his hand. God is standing at the end of the line, holding the man's hand as if to help him walk.

Terry Pratchett attempts to summarize our modern beliefs about world creation by saying "In the beginning, there was nothing. Which exploded."

More than twelve of the world's creation myths involve the world beginning as a formless, watery waste. Why is this so? There are reasons, but every reason involves people admitting something they don't want to admit. Either there really was a big flood (human beings probably didn't witness it, but found evidence later) or we really did all come from the same ancestor, or there really is a Great Universal Unconscious, or perhaps the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Africans had earlier and more extensive contact with cultures on the other side of the world than traditional historians want to believe. Several myths also seem to include snake goddesses, and the stories often echo that of Marduk and Tiamet. An Aztec myth describes two gods pulling the "serpent goddess" apart to make the sky and the ground. The Aztecs were quite Egyptian in their architecture, worship style and dress, cocaine, maize (corn that grows only in the Americas) and tobacco were found in the stomach of an Egyptian mummy. The Bushmen of the Kalahari (southwest Africa) have a myth, their god had a wife and two sons, the sons taught the humans how to find food and the daughter of the god married a snake. The Algonquin have a myth with the "Sky Goddess" falling from the moon, which is similar to the Persian story of Astarte, another version of Ishtar/Inanna. Astarte could also be Asherah, a Canaanite fertility goddess, the descendants of these people were the Phoenicians and rocks have been found in on the east coast of the US that are engraved with Phoenician writing.

All the Middle and Near East, creation myths also feature a god creating humanity out of clay or mud. In the Sumerian/Babylonian version we are created from clay and the blood of Tiamet's monstrous husband Kingu, slaughtered by Marduk in the great war between the gods (what's that? A war in heaven? Hmm.)

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom He had formed. 9And from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad. 10A river issues from Eden to water the garden, and it then divides and becomes four branches. 11The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where the gold is. (12The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli. (Others: onyx ; meaning of Heb. shoham uncertain.)) 13The name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through the whole land of Cush. 14The name of the third river is Tigris, the one that flows east of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. 1

Oddly specific directions, aren't they? I don't think they knew, when they wrote that, that it would spark a war several thousand years later. There's a book called "Entrance to the Garden of Eden" that I'd love to get and read, it's about a Jewish man who experiences a crisis of faith and goes back to the Holy Land to find himself. He sets out with a Christian and a Muslim to walk the paths of the bible, they end up finding a lot of common ground (no pun intended).

God plants a tree in the garden and tells Adam and Eve not to eat from it; they can have anything else they want but not this fruit. The type of fruit is not specified, it is popularly thought of as an apple but it could also have been a peach or a pomegranate, or perhaps some fruit the world no longer has. Incidentally, those three fruits are associated with sex and especially sex with women, because they resemble parts of the female anatomy. Apples are part of the rose family and the rose is the sacred flower of the Goddess. Eve is tricked by "the serpent" into eating the fruit and giving some to her husband.

This serpent makes no appearance before then, so people have spent centuries trying to figure out who exactly it was and what the purpose of this temptation was. Popular Christian thought makes the serpent the Devil/Satan, but seems to be confused as to why God allowed it to happen and why God couldn't fix it afterward. The serpent says to Eve, " God doesn't want you to eat the fruit, because if you do, you'll be as wise as a god- your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods".

This has had a threefold effect. It created a theology where it was deemed bad to be like gods, leading people to think it would have been better for us if we'd never been tempted. This is the Rebellion is Bad train of thought, which can be traced all the way up to today's dictatorial religious types. There is also the theory that the snake was some kind of hero or servant of God, who was supposed to push us in the right direction, God knew all about it but either couldn't change it or didn't want to. And finally, the theory that the snake was a rebel, who did it all behind God's back because it wanted to free us from the intellectual shackles God had put us in.

Adam and Eve do not actually die. But it's believed that they would have been immortal had they not given in to temptation. Through their sin, Christianity teaches, they damned the entire human race. God catches them, Adam blames his wife for the entire thing (setting a precedent for thousands of years of similar actions) and God throws them out of Eden.

As the footnotes say, it is never written that women's pain in childbirth or menstruation was because of her sin. Rather, the problem was between her and man; man would now seek to dominate her, instead of accepting her as his equal partner. It's never stated or implied that God wanted it this way, or that it's right, just that it happened.

Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain- a farmer and Abel, a shepherd. They both bring offerings to God, and God is not as excited about Cain's offering as he is about Abel's.

The Lord paid heed to Abel and his offering, 5but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. 6And the Lord said to Cain,
Why are you distressed?
And why is your face fallen?
7 ( Meaning of verse uncertain.)Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.

Cain feels as if he hasn't pleased God, and God tells him that it's okay, not to be discouraged because discouragement opens the door to sin (my interpretation, anyway). Cain takes this badly in spite of God's words. This has always come across as confusing, partly because people don't use the actual words of God in this scene, but sort of make up something. The message that comes across is that God didn't like Cain's vegetables, vegetables are not as good as meat and God wants blood sacrifices. Blood! BLOOD! Muhaahahahaa. But it doesn't look like the verse says anything of the sort.

8Cain said to his brother Abel... and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him. 9The Lord said to Cain, Where is your brother Abel? And he said, I do not know. Am I my brothers keeper? 10Then He said, What have you done? Hark, your brothers blood cries out to Me from the ground! 11Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, ( See 3.17.) which opened its mouth to receive your brothers blood from your hand. 12If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.

Cain said to the Lord, My punishment is too great to bear! 14Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth anyone who meets me may kill me! 15The Lord said to him, I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him. And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him. 16Cain left the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

This is one of the more misunderstood passages. People tend to think that it means Cain was only cursed, but God also extends protection to him. People have, at various points in history, tried to claim certain races were descendants of Cain, and used it as an excuse to treat them horribly.

People often criticize this story because they claim it makes no sense. How can Cain and Abel have such intimate conversations with God, when Adam and Eve were cast from God's presence? And why does Cain fear retribution when there are supposedly only two other people in the entire world and they're his parents?

The easiest answer is that this story was tacked on later, and does not mean what it seems to mean at all. It could be a metaphor for the reason why certain races have historically feuded with certain other races- an agricultural society's war with their neighbors. Something to do with Jews and Arabs, perhaps. But also there is an ancient ritual called the "scapegoat" ritual, where priests would drive a goat into the wilderness to atone for the sins of the community. This was celebrated around the same time as Yom Kippur is now (leaving room, of course for variations in the calendar). Sometimes they used a man instead of a goat, and the man would be marked so no one would touch him. This ritual is at least 7,000 years old. There is also a myth of two male gods, one a farmer and one a shepherd, fighting to be Ishtar/Inanna's husband, it appears to get quite violent.

When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, 2the divine beings (Others: the sons of God.) saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. 3The Lord said, My breath shall not abide ( Meaning of Heb. uncertain ) in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years. 4It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.

This part has always struck me as odd, especially since it's one of those passages that gets virtually ignored by everyone except fantasy writers. Another translation says that the women were taught magic by the "sons of God", which is just such perfect justification for the existence of people with the gene for being powerful witches and wizards. It could also be an attempt to divert attention away from the necessary incest that had to have happened in order for the human race to come from just two people.

There follows a long and very specific genealogy, listing exactly how long each person lives. If you're paying attention, this actually becomes quite important, but what strikes me is how painstakingly specific so many things are in this part of the Bible. They don't say "so and so lived to maybe something close to five hundred years" but "he lived for five hundred and sixteen years, three months, and two days".

Harry Potter: Hallows, Not Horcruxes

2007-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

He was born a pauper to a pawn on a Christmas day
When the New York Times said God is dead
And the war's begun

Calling the first book "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in the US editions probably helped to sell the books (because underestimating American intelligence is apparently a marketing tool that works) but it also made the book a lot more controversial. People who wouldn't have noticed the book at all if it were called "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" decided they weren't going to stand for their children reading any books about sorcerers.

Christian fundamentalists accused the books of promoting witchcraft and Devil worship. Because the characters wore pointy black hats and waved wands around, they reacted more strongly to these books than they did to "His Dark Materials" which is far more critical of, and obnoxious toward, Christianity.

"His Dark Materials" would be more infamous if they'd changed the title of "Amber Spyglass" for American readers to "So Where's Your God Now, Suckers!"

Among conservative Christians, Harry Potter books were burned and banned and ranted against, accused of inducing demonic possession at worst, "encouraging interest in the occult" at best.

To people who are not conservative Christians, this sounds ridiculous, almost funny. But it's not nearly so funny if you've ever had to debate the issue with someone, or if you have to see the look on church people's faces when you tell them you're a Harry Potter fan.

As for its alleged bad influence on children, Harry Potter is far from a morally bankrupt series. The moral values encouraged in the stories are actually quite traditional. Be nice to people, killing people except in self defense is bad, don't pick on racial minorities, it’s important to study for school and make use of the library, and a successful adult life includes achieving a happy heterosexual marriage that results in children with the person you fell in love with in high school. Harry Potter is, at times, so traditional it's annoying.

If they'd bothered to read the books, they'd have noticed something. There was no religion mentioned at all for six books. It would appear JKR's magical world was one where religion and magic were not connected, magicalness was genetic, not spiritual.

The fact that Christianity makes no appearances in most of the books except for mentions of Christmas is a bit bizarre considering where this story takes place. It takes place in a traditionally Christian nation, with no real separation of church and state, a place steeped in Christian history. Yes, people in Europe and the UK are less likely to talk about stuff like that than Americans but good grief.

The way JKR’s magic seemed totally divorced from spirituality was actually one of the things conservative Christians who bothered to read it didn’t like about it. The ones who didn’t think it was Of the Devil didn’t approve because the books didn’t mention Jesus. They are the kind of people who really prefer that all entertainment worth experiencing should press home a message about God or Jesus. They worried that because the books didn’t guide children in the direction of Christianity, they’d eventually tempt the children away from Christianity.

They never really understood that just because it wasn’t being mentioned, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Because they don’t understand subtlety, metaphor or any way of talking about spirituality that doesn’t whack people over the head with it. JKR's Christianity is more traditionally English- seen as something cultural and as a social duty, not as something meant to consume your entire being twenty four seven. I get the feeling she wouldn't have much respect for people who obsess about it.

Christianity, you say? Where? But I thought these characters were pagans!

Wherever did you get that idea? It's true that some of the HP mythology is based on pagan things, and probably some Hogwarts students *are* pagans but the structure of the wizarding world is based on Ceremonial Magic/k which less of a religion and more of a method of doing things. It was and still is,heavily based on the Kabbalah and Christian Hermeticism and is the method most often chosen by magical types who belong to Abrahamic faiths. These aren't Wiccans-there is no Rede in Harry's world (clearly, everyone's stomping all over it if it exists there). Assuming that the characters are pagans just because they use magic is playing into the hands of fundamentalists.

The International Statute of Secrecy was passed in 1689, not, unfortunately, the more romantic image of the wizards going into hiding upon the arrival of Christianity in Britain. But check out what was going on in 1689.

Bear in mind that these aren't "Christian books" they are books written by someone who was influenced by Christian mythology. The difference is simple, a "Christian book" is a book by an author who considers the most important part to be getting the message of Jesus through. This is an author who just happens to be working with a set of themes she's most familiar with. She's been very clear about allowing people to see the story through the lense of their own beliefs-I do not believe she intended for everyone to go "Harry Potter=Christian story!". Mostly what I'm saying here is that these books are not and never were, anti Christian.

Despite all the non religious flaws the books had, I’m happy to see someone once again writing fantasy inspired by Christian beliefs that does not make preaching Christianity the entire point. In fact, the Christianity is so vague you could easily insert another religion in its place. It’s just that this means, oh, this is wonderful, the fact that the author is Christian and included Christian beliefs and values means that people who claim it’s of the Devil don’t have a leg to stand on and now we have proof of how wrong they were.

JKR has said "anyone who knows my beliefs knows where the story is going." Although I've been told she's a Presbyterian, without guessing her beliefs, let's see where this story went.

Harry is a blatant messiah figure. The wizarding world certainly treats him like one. He's "The Boy Who Lived", the hoped for savior and chosen one of an oppressed people. As a baby, he survives an attempt on his life, the way Jesus did in the Christmas story. He is raised until age 11 in total obscurity. So far, though, we're basically still doing the typical fantasy hero background.

His last name is "Potter". "The Potter's Field" is a medieval English term for the place where Judas hung himself after betraying Jesus to his death (see the Ellis Peters novel of the same name) and Matthew 27:7 in the Bible. Harry's parents were betrayed by their own best friend, who then faked his own death and framed another friend for his murder.

There is also a famous verse, "I am the potter, and you are the clay" (meaning "I made you what you are and you are a work in progress"). I have heard God and/or Jesus referred to as "the potter".

Harry's parents died on Halloween, which is a very important day for Christianity (in spite of what certain people claim). It's Reformation Day for Protestants, celebrating Luther's official break from Catholicism. It's also All Saints Day/All Souls Night for Catholics and Anglicans, as well as the (European) pagan festival of the dead, when the veil is thinnest. Only evangelicals (especially American ones) see the three holidays as unable to coexist peacefully. Halloween was originally one of the great examples of the ability of Christians and pagans to learn to cooperate with each other, but later became a battleground between Protestants and Catholics.

Harry is a "Seeker", which could have a double meaning (there is even a fan dicussion group called "Harry Potter for Seekers").

The last book is called "Deathly Hallows". "Hallows" are an old word for saint's bones. Harry's owl is named after the patron saint of orphans. There is a scene in book 7 where Harry's friends drink a potion that contains parts of Harry. A sly allusion to the Eucharist/Last Supper? But I won't go so far as to claim Neville's head catching on fire is symbolic of Pentecost. Harry's first broomstick is called a "Nimbus 2000", a nimbus is an old word for the halos which saints have often been portrayed with.

You've probably noticed by now that there's a recurring number theme in Harry Potter.

Wizards are supposed to manifest magical ability by the age of 7,which is also "the age of reason" in Christianity. There are 7 members of a Quidditch team.

In Matthew 7:7 it says
"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door
will be opened to you..

When I was doing my Bible Study posts I actually paused after reading that and my first thought was "OMG Harry Potter!" Only...a completely obsessed fan would do that, I'm sure. But that's what happened.

Harry turns 17 on the 7th day of the week in the 7th book in a book that was released in 2007. On that day, six of his friends drink the previously mentioned potion to alter their appearance so they look like him, making 7 Harry Potters. Students attend Hogwarts for 7 years. There are 7 Horcruxes and 7 secret entrances to Hogwarts.

Seven is just about the holiest number in the Abrahamic tradition. Incidents involving the number 7 appear all throughout the Bible and various Kaballistic works. If you want to get really technical and grasping at strawsy, the book was released on a Saturday in the US, and Saturday is the 7th day of the week by the Jewish calender.

Harry is from Gryffindor House, whose symbol is a lion. The Abrahamic god is usually portrayed as a lion or lion like. Slytherin, the house Voldemort comes from, uses the symbol of a snake. The snake is symbolic of the snake who tempted Eve in Eden (although lots of people believe the serpent was not such a bad guy after all). Nowhere does it say the serpent was actually the Devil, but they have come to be associated with each other.

Dumbledore's conflict first with Grindelwald then with Voldemort is classic God vs Devil.

Is Snape the Paul of this story? He used to persecute people, and then saw the light and ended up being a tremendous force for good even though he was still kind of a jerk and nobody really liked him.

And if so, does that make Draco, Timothy?
I took advantage of this comparison in A Seal Upon Your Heart, my first post DH fan fic.

Or is Draco, Salome? He’s a spoiled teenager, as I say in
Candles in the Rain
, a “sad relic of a sad legacy” whose lust for power and attention is manipulated by the adults in his life, he is manipulated and coerced into causing the death of a beloved political figure (or so it seems to people on the outside). He is the darling prince of the Death Eaters, but has no actual power of his own (and Draco as a boy Lolita is very popular in the slash writing community). And in the end, Draco and his parents are left with nothing.

The four houses can be compared to branches of Judaism in the first century-Slytherin are the Sadducees, Gryffindor are the Pharisees, Ravenclaw are the Essenes, and Hufflepuff are…I guess I’ll get back to you on that one.

Of course, in all of these scenarios the Death Eaters represent Rome, the Slytherins being the group desperate to cooperate with the conquerors, only to end up humiliated and used, with the rest of their community saying "WTF is wrong with you?, You ruined everything. "

Some have pointed out that "King's Cross" may be a reference to Jesus the King on a Cross, but that's kind of a shaky theory for most of the series, because there are two other reasons why she probably chose it as well. First, it is the reputed grave of Queen Boudicca (between platforms Nine and Ten), and JKR likes to incorporate a lot of British history into the books, and second, because it's just so cool looking. If you've been there, or seen the movies where it is featured briefly you know what I mean. Douglas Adams used it as a setting too, it just makes a great Portal to Another World. It's one of the most widely used stations in London, so why wouldn't the characters depart from there?

Harry is tortured by Voldemort in a graveyard (a place of the skull). He's tied to a gravestone and bled while Voldemort subjects him to the Cruciatus as his enemies look on and mock him.

In Order of the Phoenix, Harry and his friends go to the Ministry of Magic and have a battle with Death Eaters. Harry and his friends, while engaging in the fight, end up smashing the entire room of prophecy globes. Sirius falls through a veil in the Department of Mysteries, which is reminiscent of Jesus' prophecy that the Temple would fall and the curtain would split in two, and all previous prophecy would be null (hence the shattering).

This is also the book where the Death Eaters, working with clueless Ministry officials, put Harry on trial on a bunch of bizarre, trumped up charges.

There are allusions to Grail Quests and Arthurian Legends, but that also loops right around and brings up Christianity again.

All of this, all of this can be yours
Just give me what I want...and no one gets hurt!

There's another reason conservative and fundamentalist Christians don't like this series. They think its very presence in the world is an attack on them, and what if it is? Hear me out on this… These are people who are always complaining about something, but it often turns out that their complaints, while they were basically misguided, are not totally out of left field, even if they don't realize it because they're so focused on freaking out over stupid things.

In Christianity right now there is something going on that's very much like the growing problem of the Death Eaters in the earlier books. It's called The Shadow War. Some Christian leaders are still trying to pretend this isn't happening.

Check out this Christians United For Israel Tour vid. Otherwise known as Fake Christians United Against Israel

The Death Eaters taking over Hogwarts is very much like the Southern Baptist takeover of their theological seminaries. There are parallels in other religions but I don't want to say anything because I don't want to offend anyone. Anyway, the rise of the Death Eaters eerily parallels the rise of Dominionism in Christianity. They even use similar rhetoric at times and many Dominionist groups are known to be connected to white supremacist organizations.

In the Harry Potter films the Death Eaters are dressed like KKK members (only in black). The KKK often uses the symbols of Christian nationalism, their new millennium version is even called "Christian Identity" and recruits through prisons.

Magic is Might after all.

Draco and the other Slytherins are classic conservative Christian/Dominionist kids (except conservative Christian kids are more cheerful in general-like the children of Death Eaters on Super Terrific Happy Pills!). I know these kids (yeah, I've said my denomination was not dominionist, but that never stopped anyone).

No, they weren't as bad as they could have been-there were no KKK style racists among them (but this was the extreme Northeast, where even if you are One of Those you do NOT advertise it) but there was a lot of casual anti Semitism/anti Arab stuff. A lot of "we are better than everyone else"-ness. It was especially interesting among the core group of local pastor's kids, because we believed that the rules simply did not apply to us (remind me to tell the story about The Day We Learned to Shoplift). And deep down what a lot of us were was just plain terrified, struggling to be perfect and failing miserably- trying to lead lives that other people thought were weird and old fashioned and pressured into endorsing a lot of really hateful stuff.

Now I'm picturing Death Eater "purity balls" and it sounds like a fan fic.

The way she goes out of her way not to mention Christianity in books 1-6 is telling, since she's making all her points anyway without once bringing it up.

But suddenly, in Book 7, she is no longer pretending Christianity doesn't exist except for Christmas.

The scene where Harry, Ron and Hermione sneak into the bowels of the Ministry of Magic to free the imprisoned Muggleborns is very similar to the medieval legend of the "Harrowing of Hell". In this story, Jesus dies on the cross, and during the three days he is dead, he descends into Hell and frees the Jewish Patriarchs (Moses, Abraham, etc) and various other people who were considered great men but not Christians*. He then bravely fights his way back out so they can take their place in Heaven. There is a similar moment in the "Buffy" episode "Anne", and in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy.

There is a character called Pius Thicknesse who betrays the Order and then gets made Minister of Magic. Pius Thicknesse took over the government. Get it? Get it? It's a shout out to us Americans!

When Harry, Ron and Hermione visit the different wizard villages in Europe, they find that these villages often contain wizards and Muggles living peacefully together-buried in the same graveyards, working together, worshipping together, even the War Memorial in Godric's Hollow is for two wars. Christians and magical people are living together, some of the magical people are Christians. Sirius mentioned that he went to James house every week for "Sunday Dinner" (something only Christians do), and the characters get Christmas and Easter off, not Yule and Ostara.

It reminds me a bit of Salem, where there's an occult shop on every street, and they throw one of the biggest and most raucous Halloween street parties in three states, and have been know for decades as a Pagan Mecca, yet the churches are flourishing too and it's hard to believe that people don't make use of both.

What ravages of spirit
Conjured this temptuous rage
Created you a monster
Broken by the rule of love
And fate has led you through it
You do what you have to do.

In a beautiful scene in which Hermione and Harry visit a churchyard, one of the graves has a specific quote inscribed. "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." The meaning of this saying should be obvious- It's a bit like the psychological test of asking a person what they would rescue from a burning house. What does your mind automatically go to when your life is threatened?

And in a less dramatic sense, whatever you value the most is what will drive every motivation you have. It can also be taken quite literally- the place where you keep your most important stuff is the place you'll try the hardest to protect. There are a great many "treasures" in Deathly Hallows that people are fighting over or trying to protect- Lord Voldemort literally put pieces of his own soul into his treasures and he accidentally put a part of his own soul in his worst enemy.

The phrase was a clue that Harry was the final Horcrux.

But this isn't just some old phrase.

This is a Bible verse. She doesn't attribute it in the book, so only someone who knows- really knows- their Bible will know where the quote comes from. But like I said in my original reaction to the book, when I saw those words I gasped and slammed the book shut.

Matthew 6:21 says "Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also."

Another gravestone, in fact, it’s James and Lily’s grave says The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death which is from Corinthians 15:26.

While I'd had my suspicions for quite some time, I was shocked to see an actual, blatant reference to my faith in a book that people have frequently accused of being hostile to my faith or at least indifferent to it. To see evidence that supported my theory made me happy. It was cool to have an author slipping in a quote that you had to have special knowledge to pick up on, a reminder of being part of a club with its own specific codes.

My urge to punch the air and shout “YES!” is not about wanting to be smug towards people who aren’t Christians. It’s about conservative and fundamentalist Christians who spent the better part of a decade screaming about how these books were sent by the Devil Himself. They were so obsessed with proving how pious they were and trying to shut down anything that sounded like it might be heretical that they failed to recognize a true Christian message when it was right in front of them.

A Livejournal friend pointed out that the six Slytherin characters who manage to redeem themselves are like the six members of Lot's family in Sodom. They stand between the evil people and the heroes, even if it's in a somewhat passive way- Regulus switching the lockets, Narcissa and Draco pretending they don't recognize Harry, since the Death Eaters were relying on Draco to identify him, when Draco chooses to pretend he's never met Harry before, Draco essentially saves his life.
Later, Narcissa tells Voldemort Harry is dead, even when she knows he isn't.

Dumbledore is a sort of stand in for God. Many of the issues people have with him and the questions they have about him are similar to the ones addressed when it comes to God. If DumbleGod can see the future, why doesn't he do something about it? How much does DumbleGod actually know? Is he playing favorites and if so, why?

Is he dead or did he just abandon everyone? Dumbledore allows the characters, the author, and the readers to explore their issues with God without actually referencing God in any way.

He sees all and knows all but won't interfere because you have to figure it out for yourself. God has guided you and protected you and set you apart as special, but he's also manipulated you and seemingly abandoned you at times, and set you up to fail so that you could succeed.

People familiar with Christian theology may recognize DumbleGod's methods, which are finally revealed in Deathly Hallows. DumbleGod has put Harry under his personal protection for seventeen years so Harry will survive to fight Voldemort…and die doing it. One of them (Harry or Voldemort) must kill the other one in order to end this, and because Harry is the final Horcrux, the only true way Harry can defeat Voldemort is to allow Voldemort to kill him. His entire purpose on earth is to grow up to be murdered.

Many Christians don't like this theory when it concerns Jesus, and may be annoyed to see it popping up again in Harry Potter. A lot of people think DumbleGod could have handled things differently from the start. I think people have filled many hours and many books with arguing over this. Such views definitely illustrate ambivalent feelings about God.

So he has two choices. Die, or watch all his friends die. And Harry survives because he went to his death willingly. The point was ultimately not his death, but being willing to die. After his quasi death, Harry and Dumbledore have a trippy conversation in King's Cross station, which is really taking place on another plane as Harry hovers between life and death. I am very surprised he wasn't discovered resurrected by a weeping Ginny.

Greater love hath no man than he who would lay down his life for his friends. . John 15:13.

"I mean to, and that's what did it. Haven't you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can't torture them, you can't touch them"

Another important Christian theme. It's complicated, and people can't agree on it but... The sacrifice of the cross is supposed to mean that the Dark's power over us has been lifted and from that point on, Evil can't really hurt you.

As for those who may be curious about the Dark Mark or one of the primary final themes of the books, I’ll let King Solomon elaborate.

Set me as a seal upon your heart, a seal upon your arm, for love is as strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If one offered love for all the wealth in his house it would be utterly scorned.

Harry ends up with a "seal upon his heart" due to the Horcrux he was wearing around his neck. The Death Eaters have a "seal upon their arms". And love *does* prove as strong as death.

This is also an amusing fact.
The resurrection symbolism of peacocks (apparently, Flannery O'Connor liked to use them for Christ symbolism too).
The Mercy of Albus Dumbledore

Other recommended reading:

"Looking for God in Harry Potter"
"The Gospel According to Harry Potter"
"God, the Devil, and Harry Potter"

**the Harrowing. Look, I didn't make it up, okay?

2007-08-03T11:25:00.000-04:00

Test post.