To think this is an inappropriate passage of the Bible for a school Christmas service?

[RevolutionofOurTime]

DD10 has been asked to do a reading at the school’s Xmas carol service.

The passage is Genesis 3: 8-15:

“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, "Where are you?" So he said, "I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself."

And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?" Then the man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate."

And the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." So the Lord God said to the serpent: "Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." “

I’m not impressed. Surely they could have chosen other (NT) passages where the focus is not on original sin (and don’t blame a woman for it 🧐)?

I’m an atheist, but was raised a Catholic and I have no objection to DD taking part in the service. I have been to countless midnight masses (Xmas services where I’m from) and I’m sure the Genesis was never the focus.

IABU to think this is not appropriate for a Christmas service?

Truro was the last diocese to be created
There were more than a dozen after Truro, most recognising major population growth eg Southwark,Birmingham, Guildford.
The diocese of Leeds was only created in 2014.

But the 9 Lessons was certainly Truro's gift to the CofE, and was popularised by Eric Milner-White Dean of King's, along with the BBC who broadcast it from 1928. Since it's still going strong and is copied in many parts of the world the first lesson can't be too much of a problem.

“ I don’t believe Christianity sounds in any way like something someone made up. I think it sounds more complex than that, ”
Humans are capable of making up very complex things. Have you come across Literature?

You know, parthenogenesis isn't even the most far-fetched bit of it, @BertrandRussell.

At one point in history, people speculated that Jesus was gestated in a glass-like vessel, and that God had used a sort of pipette-like device, a rod, as part of his divine plan to get Mary married to an impotent man (Joseph) and make sure the couple still had a child.

Imagine. No one except medieval Catholics could theorise IVF. Except, well, the people who theorised (and developed in reality) IVF.

I mean Christmas is technically a Christian holiday so is quite normal... it's in the name

BertrandRussell

I have. I am an English teacher.

But the OT/NT/Apocrypha aren’t ‘literature’. They are in no way works of fiction. Their purposes (depending on your perspective) might be considered to be didactic, explanatory, illustrative, but they weren’t written for entertainment, nor ‘written’ by a single author at all. On a secular level the body of works that underpin Christian theology might be seen as collection of writings that illuminate several cultures, many historical happenings, many beliefs. But on no level would I consider them to be ‘made up’.

Does 'literature' have to be 'fiction,' would you say?

Or indeed written by a single author?

I mean, surely many of the texts we read as literature are not easily categorised as pure fiction. What about Paradise Lost? Milton didn't think he was 'making up' Christian history, and I would imagine he would have been horrified at the claim. However, most people do consider the poem to be 'literature'.

SarahAndQuack

I suppose not. That definition aside (it’s peripheral to my point), I would reframe what I have said here to address the idea that these writings were ‘made up’ or can usefully be considered to have been. That idea makes no sense to me.

That's fair! Sorry for the tangent.

I still don t understand why the Bible could not have been “made up”.....

It's not impossible, but it's not likely. If it were made up, we'd have to theorise an enormous, sustained conspiracy involving large numbers of writers, scribes, readers etc. over thousands of years.

I am not very sure that most writers, that far back, would have understood the same distinctions we do, but I think they thought they were writing 'real' history and laws and so on.

I mean, to take an example, you'd have to posit a writer or writers who made up some laws (as in Leviticus). Then you'd have to presume that writer/writers and/or his/her descendants managed to convince peoples around them that they were actually following these made up laws. You'd have to posit either that people were take in by the fraud, or that they sustained it for thousands of years. Because we know, from corroborating sources, that people really did observe those laws.

It is the standard reading - and what a load of prize bollocks it truly is. I go for the singing - it is lovely. I ignore the rest.

I still don t understand why the Bible could not have been “made up”.....

Well, because we know it wasn’t. We know the provenance of many of the texts.

Although, to be fair, seeing as I am also positing that it’s not impossible that a god came to Earth to save us from sin, I can’t say “impossible”, Bertrand. It’s not “impossible”. But it doesn’t look made up. It looks collated.

I don’t obviously think that somebody sat down and wrote the Bible cold. It it a compilation of legend, myth, oral history “filling in the gaps” and so on. But so is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Up to a point, Bertrand. Except that AMND is a unified work from a single time and place, with (we think) one writer. You can’t reasonably compare it to the Bible.

YY, it's the unification of it that is the issue. Too many layers passed on.

I think you would have a difficult job seeing MND as 'oral history,' unless you mean the fairytale bits, and even those look to be Shakespeare pretending to do oral history, rather than doing it for real. It's not like someone repeating lineages of kings, which get reflected in several sources outside the Bible.

(I have to say, this discussion always makes me wonder how on earth the Song of Songs got into the Bible. But that's perhaps by the bye.)

Wow I wouldnt want my children reading this. I would be confounded how to make any credible explanation of such tosh

It's a fairly standard reading to use. Does your DD go to a Catholic school? If so then YABU to expect them to ignore original sin.

I think it’s for the same reason Nic Cage has (had?) a career: it’s who you know.

Reading this thread is interesting. It is entirely from the adults points of view. Are we not talking about the effect on children? They got lost here

Things like the lineage of Kings is common to loads of oral traditions.

I think I might be misunderstanding. Are people saying that the Bible isn’t made up because it has no single identifiable author, it wasn’t written all at the same time and has some verifiable facts in it?

Well, I was talking about the effect on children, Confused. I said that if the OP thinks this is damaging it is incumbent on her to remove her DD.