To think there’s actually so much wisdom in the bible

[Lardlizard]

I can see why it’s so popular
Almost like an early age self help book in some ways
Also hymns

Then you need to educate yourself @Pepperwort I have never heard of infidels and anyone can read it!

Growing up agnostic, I read the bible when it was in a drawer in my student accommodation.

For me, it was a collection of texts that contained the first attempts at health, laws, social norms and etiquette.
All put in story form with attempted explanations.

One of the first things I remember reading was that meat becomes unholy after three days.
No shit. Without fridges or knowledge of bacteria etc "unholy" is the best explanation of why you shouldn't be eating it anymore and God will punish you for disobeying. Well, food poisoning will but they didn't know that.

God becomes the invisible police force, so you don't think it's ok to misbehave/mistreat others (It's obviously very selective in who you need to be respectful to) as long as you don't get caught etc.

As a species we live by stories and narratives. We have songs that tell stories, books and TV/movies. Trying to remember a random list of 10 items is much easier for our brains when put it into a story.

Throw a bit of gore in to really hammer the message home.

I do think it's an amazing book for trying to make sense of the world with the knowledge from two thousand years ago.

@therhubarbbrothers
thing I struggle with most is that my parents don't exist in any form now, cremation and scattered at sea as requested so there is just nothing of them any more.

But our atoms can never be extinguished surely they will make a part of something else?

Given that it’s a fucking fictional fairy tale there’s likely to be as much wisdom in the “badly written” Harry Potter books as in the bible 🙂

The Bible to me sounds very much like a bunch of people getting blackout drunk, waking up to several traffic cones, sombreros, and a goat with zero recollection of the last 12 hours, trying to piece it all together.

@Camomila

I have read quite a bit of the bible (Catholic school!) but often think 'was that the bible or Shakespeare?' about various sayings

DS1 is starting Catholic school in September and I'm gutted he's probably going to miss out on lots of hymns this year due to the Coronavirus. Tuesday afternoon hymn practise was my favourite bit of primary! I was well behaved so often got trusted with a tambourine

Hahahahahahahaha

I need to educate myself?

I’ve just had cause to post on another thread about what the hell has happened to this country since just 2008. It seems we’re not allowed to say anything of truth in our own country without being rapped over the knuckles or called names. Or being told to re-educate (which is what your phrase really means @startinganew123) oneself by a bunch of authoritarian twits.

#Je suis Charlie, does anyone remember that? And the treatment of women by Islam is very well known. It’s been made very visually obvious of late.

So no, I do not like Christianity, but I do not think Islam is a good alternative and I will read it for it’s historical value only, the same as with the Bible. My belief is that it’s time for humanity to put these stupid toys and ideological games behind us, after 1500 years of damage from them, and grow the fuck up. We have real problems to sort.

Yeah, murder, rape, infanticide, very moral
Even the new testament is sick, who sends there son to be crucified for supposed sins of others. If god is so bloody loving loving why not just forgive? You know, without the grusome crucifixion

This is one small example of many! How did an illiterate man make up this up as many people think he did

Load of BS just like all other religions. He had a young wife right? Why don't you talk about that?

It's not unreasonable to take wisdom from anywhere, it is a bit unreasonable to assume others will see any wisdom over the texts flaws, the history of the texts with its highly selective editing to fit a particular narrative, or to view the wisdom you see as the reason the texts have had such an impact on the world and ignore that the social powers used it as one of many tools to keep and expand their power base. There was wisdom in far older books, and possible wisdom in the 'heretical' books the early church and later poor keeping of texts destroyed (what we have of the Gospel of Judas sounds incredibly, I wish we had more). In fact, the early church recommended far more reading of certain books that were deemed to have been written too late or non-universal enough like The Shepherd of Hermas or are only in certain versions of the Bible but false in the 'standard' used by most, like the Book of Jubilees. As a pp said, if you want to discuss the wisdom, you need to include which version and even better which commentaries as the Torah/'OT' specially refers to 'what you've been taught' which is the previous oral tradition.

I agree that the 'OT=horrid, NT=nice' is selective reading, though I think part of it is how it's taught to line up with the law and continuation of using the texts to teach particular world views. Past Bad and full of horribly idiots fits, new and future will be great if we're all nice (ignore the speech about not coming to bring peace but the sword and Paul's regular judgemental rants and...). I think a lot of resources aimed at trying to fit the law are more aimed at using the texts - of all faiths - to create an ideal of what good people are rather than understanding religions, at least before GCSEs.

And, for all the complaints about Christianity not being taken seriously compared to others, my DD had an RE assignement to read through a list of reasons for being atheist and judge whether or not these were good enough reasons to be atheist (it also said that atheists believe everything happens for a reason, which seems weird to attribute). This was an upload from a widely used RE source. The entire focus of the sheet was that atheists shouldn't say they know there is no god because we can never really know for certain. Never saw this for any other faith and I really doubt it would happen. My DD found some wisdom in arguing with that assignment, but we soon after starting using more Religion for Breakfast as an altenative source of weekly assignment wisdom.

Ok well if you don't read properly and find out for yourself I'm not going to talk to someone calling me a twat. No one knows how old his wife was. It is suggested by many that she was young but no age has ever been known. She definitely wouldn't have been a child and was known to have been engaged prior to mohammad. At this time it was the norm to marry young. She was probably her late teens looking at history which is what you want to focus on. But sure just listen to all the things people say rather than trying to find out what people actually believe, what scriptures actually say. Carry on. I'm not engaging with someone calling me a twat. All I was saying was to find out properly before being so sure. There's nothing wrong with reading about other religions properly whether you agree with them or not. Many cultures get tangled with religion and that's where the inaccuracies occur. But I'm just a twat who studied religious studies so what do I know. Enjoy the rest of your day @p

I don't read racist literature.

Apparently Jesus said the only way to his Father (God/heaven) was through him, which means if you don't believe in Jesus you don't get in.

It seems that God only wanted Caucasian/Middle Eastern people in heaven for nearly 2000 years. Christianity was an elite club you had to have the right skin colour to get into. African? No they can't come in. Asians? No, not them either. Native Americans? Another big fat no. South Americans? No, we will just let them carry on sacrificing children for another 1500 years. The Aboriginal nations? Dont even ask.

So the Bible tells that for the 2000 the only people worth saving were either white or middle Eastern. God literally gave the finger to all the other nations on earth and we wonder why racism is an issue.

Are you kidding. Ethiopian Jews and Christians in the bible.

Read Acts

@woodhill

Isn’t Ethiopia one of the oldest Christian traditions? They have one of the oldest churches there, I thought.

Very old Christian country.

And the missions in South America are widely criticised for bringing Christianity (and disease?) to the area. Although the Jesuits, I suspect knew that colonial poets were about to try and divide up the resources and destroy the indigenous communities and people in the process as they considered them ‘lesser’. By converting, the colonial powers could no longer do that as they had to acknowledge the people in their own right by God’s law.

I know people are going to criticise that argument and say the Church was part of the colonial presence there but if you know anything at all about Jesuits, you might start to think it is a little bit more complex than that.

Colonial poets? Bit of Cervantes in the Amazon??!!!! I meant colonial powers.

@startinganew123

Are you replying to me? I did not once call you a twat.

Many Islamic scholars and muslims will tell you that Aisha was 6 when he married her and 9 when he engaged in a sexual relationship with her.

Who is right? Who is wrong?

I think she was replying to me @ramakinsmarties because I objected to the use of that wonderful phrase "educate oneself"; which appeared when I said I thought infidels and women were not welcomed by Islam; which I said in response to someone trying to push the Quran as an alternative to those unsatisfied by Christianity. If you can follow all that.

I didn't call you a twat either @startinganew123. I called anyone using that rather ridiculous phrase an authoritarian twit encouraging reeducation into ideologies without rational arguments. You could have stuck with the attempts to justify Islamic attitudes to women and infidels alone. Responding to those alone, I am not really very interested in excuses based on the way the prophet treated his womenfolk a thousand years ago. I'm interested in the way Islamic men treat their womenfolk now, and their record on the whole is not very good.

I went to CofE schools but was shocked.to find age 12 or so that there were still people who believed in the stories of Christianity, as.opposed.to.going through the motions at school because it's tradition.
Later I wondered why the readings we got in school and on Sundays were the same ones over and over, and 3/4 of the Bible was missed out. Ended up travelling a lot for work pre-internet and reading the Gideon bible when I ran out of books.

Turns out the reason much of it is quietly forgotten in the modern church is because it's pure bonkers. I'd felt sorry for Habbakuk never getting quoted, but seriously, he was on something...

Only got about 1/3 of the way through the free Qu'ran - they could do with small portable editions - but it's pretty similar to the Christian Bible in terms of being a mix of history, edicts, and prophecy, just skips the resurrection and adds Muhammad instead. Given the differences between Qu'ranic Arabic and modern Arabic, I understand there's as much room for misunderstanding as with biblical translations, but often less acceptance that is the case.

The way the status of women went up and down across different cultures prior to the time of Rome is a huge area all by itself incidentally. Saying that at the time women were not well treated anywhere isn't a very good justification for it when you realise just how variable it was even across this one region. There are more options than just "terrible" and "poor".

A lot of PPs seem to be criticising the Bible from either a position of ignorance or a position of fundamentalism, and taking it as a supposedly coherent factual historical report of events, that they then think they are being clever for finding discrepancies in.
It is actually a collection of texts from many different writers, and contains a mix of poetry, allegory, folk tales, advice, history, parables, you name it.
Most of the OT was retold by oral tradition for centuries before being committed to writing, and all of it was subject to potential contamination by men editing it for their own purposes.
St Paul’s letters have two writers with differing styles. It is known that Paul encouraged women setting up and leading churches all over Asia Minor - he did not write the misogynist bits telling women to shut up in church etc, which must have been added later when men wanted to take control of the new religion and remove women from positions of authority.
In the Old Testament, you need to know the context to make sense of it. For example, Lot was a Moabite. The Israelites despised them, and were not above writing tales of incest between Lot and his daughters as a bit of propaganda to discredit them!
The four gospels telling of Jesus’ life and ministry agree surprisingly well, with minor differences, given that they were written some years after his death. And St Paul interviewed St Peter in Rome, so had an eye witness account to base his testimony on in his letters. So I think we can be more sure of the factual basis of the New Testament.
The Bible is a fascinating read, but you cannot fully understand it without knowing the cultural and historical context, and the purpose of the writers. They often used stories to illustrate moral points, just as Christ did with his parables.
I’ve been a Christian convert for the last 28 years, and I’m still learning new things from the Bible. I’m fortunate to have a minister who is absolutely brill at theology- she brings every reading to life with modern relevance and a lot of vital background detail.
In summary, the Bible gives us varied accounts of how Man’s understanding of God has developed over the millennia, culminating in the life changing event of the incarnation and resurrection, where God took human form and willingly suffered death at our hands, to demonstrate his infinite love and forgiveness for the worst we can do, and to show that death is not the end.
That is awe inspiring and deeply humbling, and the only appropriate response is adoration and gratitude, and a wish to live as God wants us to, in fellowship and love with Him and all other people.

@Babdoc - and if we dont agree with you do we get burnt at the stake, or just in hell later?

@Babdoc would your minister put her stuff online?

@Babdoc

I agree with your points about the Bible in context. I am very surprised at people using theories, approaches and logic from literary and historical disciplines to disarm religious arguments. It is like the philosophical vs science debate - they are two different disciplines that approach material differently.

I was taught that we have all of these different disciplines, science, arts , etc in order to understand the world through each way of looking at it - scientific, philosophical, etc. It is quite Renaissance man in its way but I think once you look at all of these different ways of understanding the world you get a sense of what doesn’t change and what is a constant and religious practice is based on that. There is another thread on here about the book the Secret and a psychotherapist said there are two things that concern people control over events and uncertainty. Rituals and practice provide some relief for this in their practice. The Bible to me is just an attempt to put everything they thought relevant into one book.

Yes - some of the bible does include advice which is applicable to our current lives.

biwi - starting a thread to discuss the bible is not ridiculous at all and I actually think you should apologise for that comment. I highly doubt you would feel free to steam in and say that if someone had started a thread about the Quaran or the Tanakh - at least I hope not

I don't think it's reasonable to tell people what the appropriate response to any text is, Babdoc I've studied alongside various teachers - Evangelicals, Catholic, Chasidic, Orthodox, academics of all stripes, all more clever than I desire to be. There are many ways of looking at it, like any other text. Some get awe, connection, wisdom, comfort, identity, guidance, certainty and others see a tool for understanding the past, for control of self or others, or possibilities to wrestle with like in Ecclesiastes (this is more true in some Jewish traditions).

I view the various versions of the Bible as a source for analysing social history. The Bible has always been heavily doctored to meet social and political agendas continuously. If one looks at versions published and various translations from before the mid-1900s, one will get a very different view on many verses than if you read the same texts from more recent publications and translations. The whole very modern argument over how to translate ἀρσενοκοίτης is a perfect example, a study of translations shows a major shift in how that one Ancient Greek word was being treated starting around the 1980s and now an obscure word translated in similar ways in various languages for centuries is a major contested issue across religious leaders and academics.

For me, there is awe in how a single word can change so much, how much more the other alterations and choices may have changed society from, the other selections, the disconnection of the "Old Testament" from the Jewish oral traditions (leaving all the verses that say 'as you have been taught' looking a little odd), the destruction of 'heretical' texts and dismissal of other texts are written too late or not universal enough to be canon, and how different things might be if the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had become the main standard for Christianity. Awe in how powers have changed the world by controlling books and their ideas. As fun as Ecclesiastes is, the wisdom I see in the Bible is not in the literal texts, but what people have done with it. Quotes are be inspiring, but those can be found everywhere these days, and the application is the proof of wisdom from foolish platitudes.