to be sad that we are not going to get women bishops?

[grovel]

Bugger

LRD - well, maybe everyone isn't entirely logical when it comes to matters of religion?

And I feel sad for Rowan Williams too, he would loved to have had the acceptance of female bishops as part of his legacy.

Waspie - whether it should be allowed to be an employer or not, it seems wrong that it is part of the State and not fully obey the normal laws of the state.

Indeed.

Sorry, derailing the thread, just curious as it's not something I've come across before.

Btw, I don't know if MN will let me link, or even how to link, but there's a petition going on saying that if the Church won't accept women bishops, it should not get to have seats in the House of Lords. Maybe interesting to some on this thread? If so say and I'll try to link.

Has anyone linked this petition yet?

Rleigions can choose to be sexist within themselves if they think that their god tells them to be, but if so they should not have an officially recognised voice in our government.

X-post iwth LRD

Thanks trills!

Trying to explain this to my dd was hard. She said women are just as good as men in praying and serving God. Also she was taught there is no gender in heaven so is trying to understand why gender matters on earth. I am confused about the queen being the head of the church. Does this not mean she is authority over men?

WRT what to believe from the bible, I stick to the 4 Gospels. All the rest is from man imo. (Man being gender inclusive in this instance).

Nowhere does Jesus say 'Women shall not be priests'. Or 'the Church should be led by people with penises'.

Equally, Jesus says nothing on homosexuality.

What Jesus talks about is loving one another and loving God.

I think the bit of her in authority over men is the anointed monarch bit, not the weak 'n' feeble bit.

('hmm' at the logic, obvs, not at you!!)

Grimma - yes, I totally agree with you.

I suppose my thought was that if the church can decide what it does within the confines of it's religion why does that give it any exemption from the laws of the land?

There should, IMO, be a total division of church and state.

I've signed the petition. No way should bishops have seats in the Lords.

I have to hand it to those who are running with the "oh well that part of the Bible can be ignored, because we don't like the message, Old Testament? Doesn't count". Your level of cognitive dissonance is impressive. It's almost as if you would rather come up with your own enlightened morality based on notions of freedom and equality than stick to the teachings in the Bible. To do that you have to invent your own god because you can't use the whole Bible any more, and there's not much difference between reinterpreting and ignoring as just making stuff up.

Trouble is, where to start? Making up the basic rules to live by is pretty simple, it seems to me, sure some finer points would need debating but most mentally healthy peo

oldman - but that's been the standard method of Biblical interpretation since before the NT was even written.

Why does it surprise you people would rather come up with an enlightened morality than go with literal interpretation? Literal interpretation is a very new idea, and seems a bit bizarre to many of us. The idea that people aren't using 'the whole Bible any more' is absurd: the only people who've tried to use 'the whole Bible' in the literal sense have been doing it for, oh, I dunno, two hundred years tops? Whereas the people who interpret less literally have been doing it for millenia.

Sorry about that fat fingers on a small screen. To continue my tedious diatribe:

......people unbound by indoctrination could come up with something workable.

The trouble comes when you try to lever in an omnipotent and loving god. I really can't see how that fits in with the world. I think old Epicurus had it about right - worth a Google. The mental tricks required to match the notion of a god you would like to exist and the evidence before your eyes require a certain abandonment of logic and reason,which are precisely the characteristics that stop you from believing in the Bible in the first place.

Maybe it's time to acknowledge that morality can come from humanity, establish a set of obvious common beliefs as a civilized society and move on from dark age dogma.

LRD. I'm all for the people defining our own morality/laws. As you say, it's what we have always done.

But if you interpret the Bible and your concept of a god to suit your moral beliefs derived from your own or collective reasoning, are you not just fooling yourself? Is that not clear evidence that Humanity invented gods and not the other way around?

Well, of course, it's perfectly possible I'm fooling myself, but no, I don't see why that's evidence humanity invented gods.

Why wouldn't any sane person interpret the Bible? We interpret every act of communication - that's how our brains are set up, as humans, to decode language and respond to it.

I'm not at all surprised, well it stands to reason though doesn't it.

God made Adam
God made Eve (using a bit of Adam) as an afterthought/plaything for Adam.

Religion is man made for men.

"Religion is man made for men."

I really struggle to understand why anyone would believe otherwise, tbh. To say the bible is only misogynistic because it was written by some poor 'unenlightened' folks in days gone by is just staggeringly illogical.

Why do you think the bible is misogynistic, if not because it was written by 'unenlightened folks', house?

What I'm not getting is that some people appear to think that the true word of God / Jesus was inherently 'right on' and not at all at odds with modern society.

It's just that those pesky humans wrote down some rather politically incorrect stuff about what God / Jesus wants which they shouldn't have. So we ignore all those bits.

Am I getting that right My brain hurts a bit now

I think that's pretty much it - or rather, there are things in this world we don't understand properly. Loads of them. And as knowledge expands, we don't actually stop finding there are other things we don't understand. So it is silly to expect that anything written down is going to explain everything so we can understand it, once and for all.

If you're not comfortable with the theological bit, maybe see it as a way people have of rationalizing the fact that we aren't ever going to know everything or understand everything?

I mean, it's not so much God was dictating to the gospel writers and they were fiddling with their hair while he was talking so they wrote a bit down wrongly, or one of them thought 'nahhh, that sounds daft, I'll put something else in the copy and no-one will notice'. It's that you can't really communicate something in human language, that is going to be the sum of human knowledge forever. Human brains don't work that way.

I think the bible is surprisingly enlightened in some areas of the old testament, take Leviticus for example, the rules regarding skin disease or rashes show an enlightened view of how to prevent spread of contagion etc. also the Jewish rules regarding not mixing dairy and meat show some clear knowledge of the danger of bacterial contamination.
It is however I think unrealistic to expect that after countless translations and transcriptions that Gods perfect word remain as He intended it. After all, however hard we try, we are human and therefore imperfect, each with our own experiences and opinions, which this thread amply demonstrates, if God appeared to each of us with the same message tonight, how many different versions of that message would we see tomorrow? And how different again would those messages be after several thousand years of passing down by word of mouth, then written, then translation into languages which were not even in use when the original message was given, and may not even have the vocabulary to express fully the message? This is why I am unable to accept the old testament as Gods literal word. The imprint of mans imperfect hand rests too heavily on it for me to judge or condemn anyone based on its contents. It is a moral compass, and a guide, but my direction comes from prayer, faith and the new testament.

Yes... whenever you get a 'WWJD' the answer you get is usually 'what would I do if I had the same clout'. Man ( in the genderless sense) makes god in his own image and - despite being a probably real historical person, tries to do the same for Jesus. Here's a thought experiment...suppose you have a christian who's somehow skipped Matthew 8.28-36, Mark 5.1-20 and Luke 8.20-34. Paint a scenario where your walking along in the countryside and meet a naked man who lives in tombs who says he's posessed by demons. WWJD? I'd stake large odds that no-one who hadn't read the story would come remotely close to what is supposed to have happened. It doesn't in any way fit with our 21st century sensibilities.