penelope,
from where I stand, it appears to me - perhaps incorrectly, too - that BB is providing an ultra-hardcore critique, perhaps beyond the bounds of fairness, targeting the nascent Foundations of my own Religious Beliefs. If I don't come to honor his beliefs - not just respect, but honor them - then my beliefs have got to be dirt. And it feels too, at times, that he is determined to make sure that that is just what my incipient beliefs become - in my eyes and in everyone else's eyes.
you're reading me wrong. i do not expect you to "honour" my beliefs, this is not a ceremonial event. actually, i am trying to do you a favour. if your foundations rely upon a totally erroneous understanding of *my* beliefs, then you are building your foundations upon sand and setting yourself up for a nasty bit of structural work later on. it is far better, i would have thought, to understand these foundations before you rush to build your roof terrace. nobody says (myself least of all) that you have to have any kind of relationship with jewish sacred texts, but if you insist on having a relationship with them, then it should be based on understanding, not ignorance and condemnation. i don't define myself in terms of canaanite idolatry or anti-semitism. by all means condemn the Torah if you feel you must to live a good life, but first you should seek to understand it. that is all i am saying. if you expect courtesy, you must give it in return.
BB insisted on viewing my own attempts at courtesy as "patronizing."
penelope, i told you i *presumed you didn't realise* how patronising the remark actually was. should you really be surprised to discover that i had nuanced and deep feelings for my own sacred texts? come on now.
I can see how it might appear to BB that I am attacking his religious beliefs. This is not what is happening here. Not on my part. I am just trying to establish my own. And be a tad provocative, doing so - not shilly-shally around issues.
you want to be provocative, but not to provoke a strong response? how is that supposed to work?
Or blame you, at least, for refusing to politely suggest to him that he might change his tactics.
in my first couple of posts to you, i was trying to steer you away from a course which would undoubtedly lead to my having to jump all over you. contrary to what you may think, i don't get a kick from savaging people making tentative steps on their spiritual journey, although people who insist on coming here and talking nonsense about things they clearly know nothing about, yes, generally, they do get corners rubbed off pretty quick. if what they're talking nonsense about is judaism, then that generally falls to me or dauer.
each fear, if you do something, that BB then will get on your case, too, and you won't be able to shake him free?
penelope m'dear, i'm a moderator and that imposes a certain discipline. i do not rampage around the site picking fights when frankly i have better things to do with my time, like the job i get paid for, which has nothing to do with this. all site users have a code of conduct to follow and the other moderators and brian, the site owner, will have no hesitation in kicking my arse if they feel i'm out of line.
look, i think you're under a number of misapprehensions as regards both the purpose of this site and my own attitude, which i will try and clarify.
1. this is a *dialogue* site. ideas here are for discussion. this is also a site for grown-ups; ideas are put forward for defending, robustly - one of the things i like most about tao is though he and i are in violent disagreement on a number of issues, he will fight his corner with as far as i can tell no hard feelings, although i wish he'd be less personal.
2. the moderators have (and are still having) intermittent discussions about creative writing. while this is not a creative writing site, there are a number of regular posters who post chunks of their own writing (and repost them on a number of other sites) - i assume they read the comments, but they don't get involved. coberst is the first person who springs to mind here. there are another set of people who pop up and post things which are intended to push other sites, particularly their own and, worst of all, there are the latter-day-prophets and messiahs, who are generally nuttier than squirrel poo. now while all of this might be useful for starting discussions, it does generally get peoples' backs up if someone doesn't want to discuss what they've posted in any kind of meaningful fashion.
if i understand you correctly (you are right, it is good form to rephrase arguments!) you are trying to work out how you stand with the Divine and how to relate to the Great Whatever and your chosen means of doing so appears to be to write what are effectively your own kind of modern midrashim (see here:
Midrash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) as a way of working through your feelings. now, that is an entirely valid approach imo (not that you need validation from me of course!) and nowadays, almost a traditional one. given that you appear to need me to "honour" that, fine, i will honour it.
what you have to understand is that the environment where you have chosen to work through these issues is not a sort of creative writing "sharing circle", where people will suspend analytical and critical judgement. these issues are personal to us. these biblical figures you are dismissing as backward, ignorant, non-PC barbarians are, more or less, relatives of mine. there is blood involved. it is deeply personal. when i see someone drawing undue conclusions due to what i can see is a lack of background in the field, i feel more or less the same way i feel when i hear someone who has no medical or scientific knowledge whatsoever, holding forth on the iniquities of the MMR innoculation and its links to autism, which makes all the doctors i know roll their eyes and foam at the mouth due to its utter scientific indefensibility. all the more so when i hear christians defending a literalist view of the first two chapters of genesis. this is personal to me and these days, i fear, i have less patience than i should in trying to move people around to an *open* questioning of the Text rather than reading their own issues into it when they simply don't apply. if you wish to attempt to maintain such a point of view, fine - but then expect to defend it. we're all adults. (visors down! lances up! charge!)
i am aware that i can appear somewhat intimidating, but that is only because, generally speaking, i have more expertise in analysing these texts (and in the original languages) and certainly more familiarity with traditional interpreters than most of the people here - but i am by no means the last word in interpretation and there are certainly people around these parts that are quite happy to go at it with me hammer and tongs. and if you met mrs BB, you would understand that i do not always come out in front! as i've said, judaism is a culture of learning through argument and jewish texts are designed in my experience to open up and reveal their depths only in such an environment. in fact, in the case in point, ezekiel 6, i can tell you that i don't think i'd ever read it before you brought it up. nonetheless, with experience, if one understands the intellectual and cultural infrastructure that surround the text, it is not difficult to pull out at least the meaning of the "pshat" (that is the basic level of meaning in our four-level schema
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardes_(Jewish_exegesis) )
i can't help feeling, nonetheless, that you are here for company. it also seems that you are in a very sad situation, i feel - and you need good friends around you. an internet forum is not the place to go for such things. i have good friends from these forums, people who i've spoken to in real life, people who i would have no hesitation in inviting to my home for dinner. but that takes years to build. i feel like i know more about your life than i should. i feel you're being too open about your family situation in a "too much information" kind of way. honest and heartfelt though it undoubtedly is and sympathetic though i certainly am, when you bring it into the mix in such a way it feels like emotional blackmail. i am not someone who beats up on grieving widows and it feels somewhat manipulative for you to use a bulwark of personal grief to protect what appear to be aggressive, prejudiced but nonetheless weak arguments. it turns what is usually a free and frank exchange of ideas into a therapeutic support group. to be blunt, but i sincerely hope not brutally so, we are not such group, we don't have the sort of controls or professional qualifications that are necessary for such a supportive environment and we can't take responsibility for people's emotional and mental health. the internet is the equivalent of an discussion in a public square. i don't know who is listening, but i know it is more than the people who comment. with the information you have provided, you could probably be located in real life and taken advantage of and that simply isn't what any of us want. if you will take my advice, honestly meant, you will make sure your real-life social infrastructure is in place first and foremost. it is, in my experience, a
sine qua non of personal development. now, returning to the actual subject (as far as i am concerned anyway):
Religion begins, for me, in a morally complicated universe.
A morally complicated universe where you have, only, the raw edge of emotion to guide you.
i agree with everything except the bit about only having emotion. what about intellect? what about reason? logic? insight? analytical rigour? surely these things are also important in morally complicated environments? my honest opinion on these things is that the greatest challenge in a morally complicated universe is that of trust, which is how faith arises in my experience. this is the conundrum at the heart of the "binding of isaac" episode.
The rush ... is because I want to work thru it and get to the (upper) 60%
if i am correct in understanding where i am, it's more like you are still dealing with the issues of "world of formation". now that isn't a bad thing at all, but there are "higher" worlds than this. these are less accessible without a great deal of challenge.
I think they are actually pretty good religious writings ... ? Because my emotions were fully engaged, as I wrote them. (And, in a sense, pure - my emotions. I was not trying to do something or say something. I was just responding to the text I was reading. I was just going where my emotions took me.) I was having a religious experience.
and that is all very well, but emotions are only part of the picture. religion is about far more than this. religion based on emotion alone lacks balance, to my way of thinking.
By your standards, Dream, and BB's standards ... it is probably a pretty low-grade religious experience.
i don't know about "low-grade", but i would say that it unchallenging. religion, at its best, challenges our comfort zones, our assumptions, our biases - and forces us to confront deeper, sometimes more difficult truths. this is the thing with the later prophets, you'll find; many of them find prophecy an exceedingly difficult experience to be part of; this is true for isaiah, jeremiah, hosea and amos, i wasn't so sure about ezekiel, but i think you may actually have persuaded me of this, so perhaps i have learned something from you. not what you thought you were revealing, but nonetheless of value. and the most difficult of all come from either the philosophical integration of the complete picture (that's a world in itself) and finally the direct experience of the Divine.
Ezekiel's revelation is probably up in the 60% terrain - stuff I know next to nothing about yet.
that is certainly true of chapters 1-2 which are some of the most recondite, but nonetheless practical, guides to the mystical experience that exist. the "account of the chariot" is a core text for jewish mystics.
My revelation sits down in the lower realm of religious experience, a moral revelation.
well, perhaps, except i don't think it has taught you anything you didn't know already. you already know it's wrong to disrespect women and all the other stuff you were talking about. so do i. that's hardly a revelation as such. the value of the Text starts when you learn something you *didn't* know, or you think about it in a new way. in this case, you didn't actually learn it from the Text in this instance, because the things you thought you were seeing aren't really there. on the other hand, maybe this is a lesson to you about what is most *important* to you, about how your moral centre is constructed. in which case, i suppose it is certainly a valid piece of learning, even if the Text was the *stimulus* rather than something you can read your conclusions back into. if anything, you see, ezekiel and the tradition agree with *you* about relationships, perhaps just not in the way you think.
But as a moral force, Mosaic Law is Tribal Law. I would bet my entire reputation, thin as it is (as an 8th-10th Grade historian), upon that fact! I am that positive I am correct!
perhaps you are. we certainly consider it the law of our tribe and it is applied in a tribal way. but if we are talking about BIG BUTs (and this is really the jennifer lopez of them all) it does NOT therefore signify that THIS tribal law is "BAD"; that is the conclusion that you have leaped to in the most unwarranted of fashions, leading you to make such absurd statements as "Raping non-Israelites is just fine. Such peoples have no connection to genuine Deity, and thus are hardly people." and if you can't see why that would result in a certain amount of exasperation on my part, perhaps that is something you need to address.
I don't find the Bible particularly moral. It has a different agenda.
perhaps you don't understand the moral issues the bible is dealing with or the way it works. i hate to say this, but you are only dealing with the 10% of the iceberg that is showing above the water. there are two Torahs, the Written and the Oral - and you are only looking at the written bits. most non-jews don't even know the other bits exist. just to give you an idea, you will find detailed laws of divorce in the Torah, yet no laws of marriage. yet people are obviously getting married right from the get-go. but how? how did they get married? the Oral Law is where you have to go to find this stuff out.
these are the basics, penelope. i'm actually trying to help you out.
b'shalom
bananabrain
