Loner72 writes:
Arrgh, fable!!
Please--language.
Perhaps the events and mindset you mention in the OT can be considered as such...but do you remember anything about the NT?? The parable of the Good Samaritan comes to mind...it's not just about being nice to people, it's about overcoming ages-old racial and cultural hatred with love in conscious action. Gentiles, lepers, tax-collectors, and prostitutes were considered agents of contamination by the Jewish culture of the time, and women in general were considered simply not on the same level as men, yet Christ and His disciples associated with these people constantly as a manifest sign of the Creator's love for all. That's one heck of a great guide, IMO...
@Loner72, I wouldn't disagree with you for a minute on this; and there's enormous spiritual insight in many of Jesus' actions and remarks. But although most Christians read or hear what Jesus preaches in the NT, what they practice is the behavior of the inhabitants of the OT--and I think this is deliberate. It's simply much easier to settle for imitating a cultural example, following a set of enshrined rules from a nomadic civilization thousands of years ago, than following a series of phenomenally (and noumenally) insightful, spiritual precepts which would require you to reevaluate literally everything in your life, and leave most of it behind.
(Parenthetically, one of the most interesting and oddball treatments of Jesus was in a film by Robert Downey, Jr, called Greaser's Palace. There were two things about it that arrested my attention (and many that repulsed me, but that's neither here nor there). The first was the way Downey has his hero, Jessy (Jesus), played by Alan Arbus of MASH fame, go around constantly bemused, as clearly the only sane person in a psychotic society. The second is a moment when Jessy is performing on a saloon stage. --Did I mention that the film is set in the American Wild West? Jessy does a tap dance while singing his message about love and brotherhood. When that gets stoney silence from the audience, he resorts to manifesting the stigmata on his hands, in great agony. *That* brings forth enormous applause for everyone present. The rather obvious but sardonic moral a la Downey: Christianity has missed Jesus' message, over and over. What the religion has focused upon was his death. Not completely accurate, but accurate enough to score heavy points.)
Your mention of Jesus and his disciples associating with the commonly accepted "dregs" of contemporary culture only highlights the disparity of what they practiced from what Christianity practices today. Places of worship endowed with large funds, in lieu of programs to break drug habits or house street people, or cure AIDs, or get children out of prostitution rings. Religious organizations that spend billions of dollars for political candidates sharing a few of the ancient cultural rules we've touched upon. Endless missionaries sent to play local politics and convert locals from "heathen worship," with a secondary emphasis on aiding and education. With the greatest of respect to you, I must question whether the religions founded after Jesus don't go in precisely the opposite direction of his expressed intent.
Re Judges 19...righto...as I said, certainly the OT contains social beliefs which we find unjust and repulsive [a similar situation w/Lot in Gn 19:1-8 ]...But just a technical question: I understood that the woman died on the threshold?...Look up a parallel tale in Genesis 34. The attitude you mention is still present but there is also a sense of outrage. Could be, I admit, from a sense that women were considered possessions and to rape a woman was to steal from the man (there are plenty of laws throughout the Torah that make this clear)...
That's the way I see it, yes--the woman in both instances is seen as goods either destroyed or damaged, and this is only reinforced by the casual way the gent in Judges throws her to the rapists without a thought in his place. That was what I meant when I referred, above, to the treatment of women as chattel in the OT. To be sure, there are several examples that stand in stark relief to this way of treating human beings (and in the examples provided, women) as goods; but the background culture, which is pervasive throughout the bible, contradicts these examples through an implicit undertext that supports this degrading evaluation. It has a kind of casual, "This is the way society was meant to be, of course" sort of attitude which I find terrifying.
For what it's worth, and from what little you've written, I think you have a pretty damn good focus on what's pure and best in your faith. (As if I can sit at the top of a tree and praise and condemn with any insight. Heh.) And I hope you realize I'm *not* criticizing your insights. But for every person like yourself who sees through the cultural malaise to the essence of the NT, there are tens of thousands--millions?--who look, instead, at the various rules and commandments, and even take those piecemeal in an effort to conform these rules to their prejudices and habits of life.
I'm not offering a rant against religion. I have very strong, deeply religious views, and yes, they do involve dogma and ritual, much as religions always do. But there's a minimum of dogma, and perhaps that's all to the good. Because as I see it, the holy texts of religions are all too easily warped by the devoted into a justification for whatever they wish, and the larger the text, and the more cultural the context of its writings, the more easily it is distorted. With what results we've all too easily seen.
[ 05-11-2001: Message edited by: fable ]