Re: I Am Homophobic

>>>>> "michael" == Michael Zara <[email protected]> writes:

  michael> Well, I don't know offhand just what to cite in support of
  michael> the assertions that "the Bible" supports slavery, child
  michael> abuse, etc., but (with the exception of the mixed fiber
  michael> bit), I recall that it does, at least implicitly.  For
  michael> example, slaves are acknowledged and proper treatment
  michael> called for, but nowhere does "the Old Testament" expressly
  michael> command the abolition of slavery -- a glaring oversight, I
  michael> would think.  Not sure about child abuse other than the
  michael> general violence of the writings, and the "spare the rod"
  michael> stuff. The genocide stuff is more explicit, with God
  michael> commanding his people to commit it and take the land.  "The
  michael> Old Testament" is a crazy, dark, and terrible world.

Hmm, despite the pleas for peace via citations by verse, which is
silly, I'll just repeat what I said earlier: the Christian Bible
contains lots of stuff that even first century people found very
problematic, and one of the things Christian theology has been doing
for about 2,000 years is trying to come up with a way of reading the
Bible that minimizes the icky and promotes the good.

And that as far as I know runs across every version and variant of
Christianity ever. And it pretty much *has to*.

  michael> On a more important point, while it is tempting to say that
  michael> Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are determined by their
  michael> respective religious texts, not by any "experts," it is
  michael> critical to recognize two points that seem to undermine
  michael> that assertion.

  michael> First, all of the texts (in fact all texts) require
  michael> interpretation, and even if one decides to rely on no
  michael> "expert," one then sets up oneself as the "expert" and the
  michael> "authority."  Ultimately, as Alan Watts pointed out, there
  michael> is NO transcendental authority, because all must be
  michael> interpreted and *accepted* as "authoritative" by each
  michael> individual.  Each believer makes or unmakes his/her god and
  michael> truth.

Hmm, I hope I didn't mislead with my talk of "experts". What I meant
was that if one's question was "what did Jesus really say", the *only*
way to answer that with anything approaching integrity or honesty is
be *very smart* in lots of pretty difficult scholarly disciplines. It
is, after all, an historical question and answers to historical
methods of inquiry.

I did not mean expert in the sense of *religious authority*, that is,
institutioanlly authorized interpreter of the text. That's a separate
problem and issue altogether.

  michael> This seems the essence and the essentiality of the "not
  michael> befitting" test that Kendall referred to earlier in this
  michael> thread.  

Yeah, there's always been a tension between the things people were
happy to attribute to God (creation, acting to reconcile godself to
the world, and so on) and things people were unhappy because *when
attributed to human persons* they were monstrously evil. The earliest
intutions about this matter -- as represented for me by Origen --
where that according to our moral lights God ought to be morally good,
not a monster. (Of course there is an alternative rendering, which I
always found unsatisfying since it left me mute and wordless: "God
sees more than we do so God's moral lights are different than ours, so
what God does that seems evil to us may well not be to God" -- a line
I've always found deeply unsettling and, to be honest, grotesque.)

This tension is nowhere better explored than in Kierkegaard's Fear and
Trembling.

(There is also a specifically historical, textualist way of
approaching the Christian appropriation of Jewish scriptures: the
Pentateuch and prophetic literature simply reflect the political
concerns of the people who produced them, and one of the bones of
priestly contention was on who's side YHWH would be, in support of
which wars of conquest could YHWH be marshalled, and so on. This seems
to me, if one needs or wants to remain an "active Christian", a
perfectly decent mode of survival. For a very literary, very
idiosyncratic rendering, see Harold Bloom's *The Book of J*.)

           By even the most generous application of this
  michael> test, the god of the "Old Testament" is at best a
  michael> schizophrenic, if well meaning, bastard -- and the god, if
  michael> any, of the current world is the same (see in this context
  michael> Jack Miles' GOD: A Biography, he's also got a new one
  michael> CHRIST.... hey, he's a Jesuit, he can get away with it ;-)

The God character in the New Testament does a bit better, except for
some really terrible shit in Revelations.

As many have pointed out since about the first century or so, God's
main mode of relating to the world has been...silence, leading
eventually to Nietzsche deciding the old fellow had gone and died on
us. What's perhaps more disturbing than the silence is the possibility
-- which Harold Bloom cleverly explores (though like every other Bloom
text, except perhaps for *Anxiety of Influence*, not as cleverly as
*Bloom* thinks) in his *Omens of Millennium*, which I recall thinking
was either a very important rendering of distinctly Euro-American
religious movements or a big pile of shit... -- that God is busy
talking to lunatics, freaks, and weirdos: Koreshes, Joseph Smiths, and
the like.

If you are atheist or agnostic, these are not especially live (in the
existential sense) questions, but living in such a religious (in some
sense) society, they can't be totally dead questions, I think, not if
you care about what your fellow citizens are doing to and saying about
one another.

  michael> Second, the supposedly authoritative texts of the religions
  michael> are *themselves* assertions by self-anointed experts, not
  michael> wholly unlike OBL or Pat Robertson.  

Well, yes and no. No in the sense that all the canonical texts became
canonical not so much by the assertions of *individuals* but of, well,
committees (of what were experts (in both senses) of the day). Nor
were any of the canonical texts written by a single author in any
sense we would today recognize as "authorship". All the texts are
community texts at the very least, often tradition texts (i.e., the
effects of religious communities extended across more than a person's
lifespan).

Yes in the sense that they *are* religio-theological, that is,
ideological works, through and through. (In fact, one of the people
who taught me Greek when I was an undergraduate spent lots and lots of
time sorting through first century Hellenistic and other literary
genres trying to figure out *which* the canonical gospels are most
like; the conclusion of which is probably still not fully settled, but
as I recall the gospels are a pretty syncretic mishmash. One thing
surely are *not* is "history" in any sense we would recognize.)

Of course, if you accept *that* claim, you've already moved out of the
fundamentalist world, so many possibilities are opened up.

           Moreover, as Kendall
  michael> pointed out earlier, the selection of which sub-parts and
  michael> doctrines were part of the religion (at least for the
  michael> Jud-Christ "Bible") was yet another layer of "expert"
  michael> fiddling.

Indeed. The theological doctrines of scriptural inspiration (which in
their contemporary form are *very* recent), absurd on their face, are
even more absurd when you realize that fundies really need to stretch
them to cover the entire raucous, highly political period of canon
formation, which was hundreds of years long.

(Note: it's helpful in this context to say Judeo-Christian "Bible" as
they are separate religions, the canon formation processes were
historically and sociologically much different, and, more crucially,
"canon" itself has a very different status in the two traditions. In
*general*, in my view, "Judeo-Christian" is complete bullshit and
should be avoided.)

  michael> Where is one left but to come to his/her own decisions or
  michael> adopt the most attractive amongst the experts' mumblings?

Yeah, which makes this precisely like every other complicated
issue. :>

Kendall