Let's get real about Bible stories...!

[bananabrain]

penelope:

as faithfulservant says, i think you're taking this all rather too personally. and if you don't think i realise there's a real person on the other end of this, you need to reread my post #47 again in some detail, particularly the bits addressing your personal situation, which i don't think could be construed as anything less than sympathetic and helpful. again, i should point out i am not here to do counselling. i am an adult, so are you. let's try and act like it. if you make ill-informed and judgemental comments about something you clearly don't get, it will be picked up on. if it is about judaism, it will be picked up on by myself. if it is about catholicism, you will probably have thomas to deal with - and i think he's a better writer than i am! and both of us are a good deal politer than, say, tao!

P says: We all spout a lot of nonsense and rationalization.
B says: Speak for yourself. Personally, I try and avoid it.
P says: Try harder. You are not doing a very good job at it.

in your opinion. when you know more about judaism and my approach to it in particular, you will understand more about how i get to where i am and how rationalisation enters into it - or not, depending. however, thank you for your candour. the web is a brusque medium and does not convey tone well.

But you are the only person here at IO, so far, who has given me something of value (two things) regarding where I am going.

thank you. that is precisely what i was intending to do. i would like the place where you are going to be a useful place, not a place of angry, insecure self-satisfaction. that will only come if you are able to ask the hard questions about what are arguably the most important issues.

In my essay, here yesterday, I acknowledge that. I did some research.

so i see. good. are you expecting thanks for doing background reading on something you are attempting to learn about? look, i don't wish to patronise you or condescend to you. clearly you are an intelligent, educated lady, but i'd like to help you to focus on the real challenge, not the fluff. if you prefer, see it as a sort of jewish zen approach, with a bit of british edge (i know americans can find this approach a bit traumatic initially, so perhaps you should watch a few episodes of "have i got news for you", or jon stewart, or read a few terry pratchett books to acclimatise you):

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!

-- (Terry Pratchett, The Truth)

perhaps some more guidance would be instructive: never listen to a teacher who says "this is the answer." it is always about answering the wrong question with the right question and then digging a little deeper. broad-sweep hypotheses are for later, when you have your data.

b'shalom

bananabrain

 

[Penelope]

Nanobrain,

That "British sh't" sucks!
(you should learn how to play)

Penelope

 

[Penelope]

Some notes on Historic Method ... (Step 1)

The Bible can, and probably should, be treated like any other historic document.

Even a by-and-large amateur historian like myself has her favorite method of analyzing archeological and anecdotal evidence and trying to paint a coherent picture with that evidence.

Take the historic development of the American West, as example.

What do most people think of when they think about the 19th century American "Old West"?
- Gunfight at high noon on a dusty Main Street?
- Indians attacking a circled wagon train?

& & &

Step 1: Separate myth from reality.

Gunfight on Main Street:
Almost never happened.
- The gun laws in most 19th century Western towns (outlawing the carrying fire arms within city limits) were so strict that today's pro-gun 2nd-Amendment advocates would cringe.
- Most "Bounty Detectives" could not collect their cash Reward if they brought back their fugitive bail-jumper Dead rather than Alive.
- Duels (affairs of honor) had been outlawed across America well before Burr shot Hamilton dead in a duel in 1804. If you dueled, you did it in some foggy wood. If you did it on Main Street, the survivor got thrown in jail.
- Gunfight at the OK Corral (the West's most famous gunfight) was neither a fair fight nor a fight between lawmen and outlaws. It was a grudge match, with political undertones. Tombstone's business and mining interests elected a Republican town marshal (Virgil Earp), where the scrub farmers and marginal cattlemen (like the Clantons & McLauyrs) elected as Cochise County Sheriff a Democrat (Johnny Behan, friend of the Clanton crowd). The three Earps and Doc Holliday came to the gunfight, wearing badges and armed to the teeth with rifles and shotguns as well as handguns. The Clanton crowd, due to gun laws, had barely time to scrounge a couple handguns. After the deadly fight, Sheriff Behan arrested Holliday and the Earps for murder. But the evidence was too contradictory to sustain a conviction. Wyatt Earp was a brave, calm man with nerves of steel. But was not an honorable man. (Most lawmen in the West actually were quite honorable.) Wyatt Earp had the good fortune to live to a ripe old age, telling his lies and half-truths to any who would listen, publishing his memoirs a bit before he died. He finished his days living, where else? ... In Hollywood, California.

The first draft of history is often written by survivors and victors and good storytellers (like Wyatt Earp) who spin popular history to favor their cause. Myth often wins out over reality, because it makes for a better story. More dramatic, more legendary. Larger than life.

Something to remember when you read the Bible:
If an episode you read appears larger-than-life, you then have to figure ... some scribe is spinning actual human history into something legendary. You need to find a means to un-spin that story. Bring it back down to (all-too-complicated) human scale. Make it work. Make it feel believable as an expression of everyday human life.

Abraham lived "175 years." Conceived Isaac at age "100." His wife Sarah was "90" at the time.
- 1700bce was an era of human history when no better than one child in five could have lived past age 4. And those lucky survivors had a life expectancy of about age 30.
- 175 years is a dynasty. Five or more generations of male heirs - the passing on of the torch. Suddenly in one generation, no male heir ... Tribal leadership passes over to a brother or nephew. Is that what actually happened? Perhaps. At least this is a credible answer.
- Today a small handful of men in their 80s still have enough viable sperm to conceive a child. But even today, 100 is a bit of a stretch. And Sarah at 90? No way. I did read about a 58 year old woman, recently, who got pregnant. But she needed a battery of hormone shots to reverse the effects of menopause. But even if an Angel of God flew down in a space ship and gave Sarah regular injections, her 90-year-old uterus would spontaneously abort any fetus implanted there.
- The only way to make this work, is, if the numbers are wrong. Mistranslated somewhere along the way. You need to do some linguistics research on the numbers (base 7 numbering system: age 49 and 42?). Or research on the word, "year." Maybe the word "year" meant something like "migration" at one time. In the early summer, you migrated with your flocks to higher altitude pastures. In the early winter, you migrate back down to lower altitudes to winter pastures. Two migrations per year. Abraham would be 50 and Sarah 45 when they conceived Isaac. While not likely, considering the era they lived in ... but this does bring the numbers into the realm of credibility. And the birth would be a clear "miracle" by the standards of that day.
- There may be better answers. But if Abraham and Sarah were real people before they were "legendary" figures, you need a coherent method to un-spin scribal (larger-than-life) amplification.

& & &

(continued next post)
​

 

[Penelope]

(continued from previous post)
​

& & &

Some notes on Historic Method ... (Step 2)

The Bible can be treated like any other historic document, to paint a coherent picture of a world which has disappeared.

The historic development of the American West, as example.

What do most people think of when they think about the 19th century American "Old West"?
- Gunfight at high noon on a dusty Main Street?
- Indians attacking a circled wagon train?

& & &

Step 2: Spot the difference between normal and traumatic events.

Indians attack wagon train:
Almost never happened.
- The Oregon Trail - from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest and California - funneled migrants westward, year after year, for half-a-century. The Trail passed thru the territory of many Indian nations. In all that time, there were like maybe two documented cases of actual Indian attacks along the Trail (not including stolen livestock).
- Native Americans - young braves, usually disobeying their elders - often did go on raiding parties. They would target other tribes and, less frequently, target isolated frontier homesteads. The massacres were nasty, but small in scale.
- Why small? ... If the Leader of a raiding party returned to his home encampment hauling a dead comrade - who died while in his charge (say, foolishly charging a wagon train) - the women family members of the fallen brave would ostracize this "Leader" from the village. He would have to make a life for himself outside the circle of the clan, out in the wilderness alone.
- The largest massacre, by far, of white pioneers by Indians was the Mountain Meadows massacre of the Fetcher-Baker wagon train in 1857 in southern Utah. 120 men, women and children died. 17 survived (all children under the age of ten). The Paiute Indians were blamed. Turns out, these Indians were paid to do it (this was discovered later). And the Indians (it turns out) were led by paranoid fundamentalist Mormons in an act of "blood atonement." The pioneers needed to be killed to be cleansed of their (supposed) sins. (It was the worst religion-inspired act of terrorism on American soil before 9-11.)

Human atrocity (small in scale) is, sadly, part of the human story. It is usually disorganized, impetuous and the act of thoughtless youth ... hence, "if it happens all the time," it is something forgotten.
When human atrocity is magnified many times over in scale, it is usually organized and unconscionable and the act of middle-aged men ... and is rationalized as "necessary," and usually covered up. On the surface, the event looks like just a small-scale atrocity, magnified. But it seems "baffling" to the public, and is continuously recollected by people. The reason is, that people intuit that this "not quite right" event is in fact a very different breed of event. They intuit the deep trauma.

Something else to remember when you read the Bible:
Traumatic, big-scale things are publicly recalled, time and time again, anytime something else equally baffling occurs.
But the event is recollected in a confused, "searching for answers" sort of way. And every new interpretation repaints the event in different colors. It does not feel magnified out of proportion (not "larger than life"). It feels naturally large, but distorted somehow.
You need to strip the paint, and look at the event with a fresh eye, and cast about for fresh evidence (archeological or geological or whatever) to bring it into scientific focus.

"Noah's Ark & the Great Flood" and "the Garden of Eden" ...
Modern science is proving both Biblical stories to be true.
- The Flandrian Transgression: As the glaciers of the last Ice Age withdrew, 5000bce to 4000bce, the oceans (worldwide) precipitously rose. About one meter every seven years.
- Noah would have had to have been pretty dumb to miss that fact, if he lived on the coast. Particularly since he lived for 950 years. Oh, that's about how long the Flandrian Transgression lasted. Big surprise!
- If an ice-dam broke upstream of the Tigris River, or an earthen dam in the Gulf of Aden gave way, the Flood might have happened much quicker. But still probably giving Noah's clan enough time to herd all the valley animals out of harm's way and up onto the hillside (the new shoreline come a few hundred years).
- The "40 days and 40 nights" I have no answer for, though. But the Ark was the herding of valuable animals from a lower valley to a higher valley (took 40 days?). The Ark, originally, was never a boat.
- The Garden of Eden was an extremely fertile, pre-Flood (late Ice-Age, pre-Flandrian Transgression) river valley, where the Persian Gulf now sits. A site of early (Neolithic) agriculture.
- The fig (not the apple) was a wild fruit tree, native to this valley, perhaps the first fruit tree to become domesticated. It was the "forbidden fruit" - because it was the seed-crop, of these early farmers, intended for transport and planting at locations far away from this valley. A rule which every farmer knows: You do not eat your seed crop!.
- "Adam" is not the name of a person, but the name of a Village on a western hill overlooking the Eden Valley, a pre-Sumerian village which survived the Flood (above the Persian Gulf's high-water mark). Adam was an organized agricultural village. The first one on the planet. (This, at a time when all other Earth peoples were hunter-gatherers, or just stumbling onto agriculture in a disorganized way.) The town of Adam was the beginning of civilization. If you "came from Adam," you were a civilized person.
- satellite photos locate the Garden of Eden by salishan.
- Has the Garden of Eden been located at last? by Dora Jane Hamblin.

& & &

1. If things seem artificially larger than life:
Damp them down to human scale. Make it make sense.

2. If things seem comfortably large, but baffling:
Scrape away the paint and find the ancient trauma underlying it.

This is good historic method.
This is how you find the historic truth underlying the Bible.

 

[bob x]

see it as a sort of jewish zen approach, with a bit of british edge

I got a chain e-mail once called "Zen Judaism", but can only remember a couple of the bits:

With the first sip of tea, experience only the tea. With the second sip of tea, experience also the Danish.

You should feel compassion and love towards all sentient beings. So would it kill you to feel love toward a sentient being who just happened to be Jewish?

 

[bananabrain]

The Bible can, and probably should, be treated like any other historic document.

as long you're saying that the correct approach to a historic document is to say "how is this relevant to my life? why is it important? what is it trying to teach us?" rather than, say, 'what had thomas jefferson had for lunch the day he signed the declaration of independence?', or 'what was the weather like in runnymede during the signing of the magna carta?'

Even a by-and-large amateur historian like myself has her favorite method of analyzing archeological and anecdotal evidence and trying to paint a coherent picture with that evidence.

yes, but i am assuming that amateur historians also don't ignore what professional historians and those with greater experience have to say.

Step 1: Separate myth from reality.

that is assuming that there is a clear dividing line and that you have reliable operational definitions of both "myth" and "reality". speaking personally, i live in the reality created by the Torah. i can see that around me, because i live in the culture of the Torah. it is a "mythic" culture, the same way as you live in the "mythic" culture-reality created by the constitution of the united states.

Something to remember when you read the Bible: If an episode you read appears larger-than-life, you then have to figure ... some scribe is spinning actual human history into something legendary.

why do you have to figure that? the only honest answer you can give to that is "because it is a priori impossible that this occurred." now, unfortunately for you, it is going to be quite hard for you to prove that abraham never existed, because, as donald rumsfeld found out, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

You need to find a means to un-spin that story. Bring it back down to (all-too-complicated) human scale. Make it work. Make it feel believable as an expression of everyday human life.

yes, cut it down to size, because goodness knows we mustn't get above ourselves. how small-minded. what a failure of vision and imagination. imagine declaring that "all men are created equal" - how presumptuous! how unbelievable! the truth is, penelope, that the "make it work" part is what happens *after*. jewish culture is the means by which we "make" the Torah "work", the means by which we "make it feel believable as an expression of everyday human life" - because it *is* our everyday human life.

Today a small handful of men in their 80s still have enough viable sperm to conceive a child. But even today, 100 is a bit of a stretch. And Sarah at 90? No way. I did read about a 58 year old woman, recently, who got pregnant.

and, astonishingly, if you read the Text, that is pretty much sarah's reaction too. she says "no way! i'm too old for that. so is my husband! are you nuts?" nothing human about that reaction, nooo, far too miffic.

But even if an Angel of God flew down in a space ship and gave Sarah regular injections, her 90-year-old uterus would spontaneously abort any fetus implanted there.

you see, this is the a priori exclusion of anything Divine or miraculous. it is no less than fundamentalist scientific materialism. i didn't have you down as someone so blinkered.

There may be better answers. But if Abraham and Sarah were real people before they were "legendary" figures, you need a coherent method to un-spin scribal (larger-than-life) amplification.

yes. the method is called "textual interpretation". it is the core discipline of judaism.

Step 2: Spot the difference between normal and traumatic events.

er.. so "normal" events can't be traumatic?

You need to strip the paint, and look at the event with a fresh eye, and cast about for fresh evidence (archeological or geological or whatever) to bring it into scientific focus.

which assumes that you can identify the "paint" and "strip" it reliably, as well as bring a "fresh" eye - but, amazingly, you're telling us that the only REAL evidence is scientific. you must have made the hell of a literature student.

"Adam" is not the name of a person, but the name of a Village on a western hill overlooking the Eden Valley, a pre-Sumerian village which survived the Flood (above the Persian Gulf's high-water mark). Adam was an organized agricultural village. The first one on the planet. (This, at a time when all other Earth peoples were hunter-gatherers, or just stumbling onto agriculture in a disorganized way.) The town of Adam was the beginning of civilization.

this is nothing but assertion and conjecture conflated to make a hypothesis.

1. If things seem artificially larger than life:
Damp them down to human scale. Make it make sense.

yes, because we know that it must be our "sense" that should be the arbiter of everything. cut it down to size - how dare it aspire to be something greater! damn, it, van gogh, stop doodling when i'm trying to teach you bookkeeping, you stupid boy! and you, tolkien, there are no such things as hobbits! i think dickens had a character called mr gradgrind....

This is good historic method. This is how you find the historic truth underlying the Bible.

no, this is assertion - and it won't do. you cannot simply ignore what the text actually *says*. what you are doing here is simply building a grand house based on your own prejudices and preconceptions. you are not approaching the text with an open mind. you claim to be on a journey - well, why don't you step out of your own front door to start with? you remind me of one of these people that is a huge expert on poverty in brazilian shanty towns but has never set foot out of the suburbs.

b'shalom

bananabrain

 

[Penelope]

Nanobrain

You claim a lot for your exegesis
... ("Pardes"? - did I get that right?).
But you deny the validity of my exegesis
... (let's call it "Historic Method" - till I come up with more exact title for it).

I don't know about you, Nano. But I don't want to live in "a world" with 930 year old men (the age of Adam when he died, according to the Bible). It's like you were trying to make me live in a Star Wars or a Hobbit universe. I don't want to live amongst Jedi Knights or within a Middle-Earth society. I don't want to be talking, seriously, about The Force or the Rings of Power.
Nano. Don't put your Scriptures there. I know there are people that do take those Star Wars or Hobbit "worlds" very seriously. But that is NOT the Bible for me. Don't try to make it so. I damn well hope it is not the Bible for you!

Religion is nothing if not built upon a Real society.
(I hate so-called Religion-speak about "last days." A healthy society needs to be Sustainable over long eons of time, then be adaptable in the clinch, when the world undergoes major shifts. "Last days" is a cop out. Religion needs to help a society sustain itself in a healthy way, otherwise that Religion is not fulfilling its Contract - its Covenant - with its society of Believers. In that sense a Religion has to be Green, has to be Sustainable. Otherwise Religion is the height of immorality, the height of hypocrisy.)
And when so-called scriptures do NOT picture this ancient society - out of which the Sacred writings arose - so as to feel in some pertinent way like a real society, I feel like I am living in a Hobbit or a Jedi universe.

1. HUMAN SCALE is necessary, Nano - if everyone in society were Superheroes, they wouldn't need Religion. (What inspires ordinary people to do extraordinary things? If they have already become Demi-gods, who cares that they do extraordinary things. It is expected!)
2. TRAUMATIC MEMORY - there is a major difference between normal wickedness and decisive, traumatic events buried in societal memory. (They are major engines for that society, how it sees itself, how it changes over time.)
3. GOODS & SERVICES - in a real world you understand how people fed and clothed themselves, what were their surplus goods they traded with others to obtain goods they do not produce for themselves, the network of a society's relative self-sufficiency and dependency on others.
4. COMPORTMENT & STRIFE - the means by which different groups within society managed to get along with each other, and why, and the places that comportment broke down from time to time, all indicating the primary glues which hold this society together. (Within this society - but also between this society and neighboring societies: sharing and exclusion, friendliness and tension).

(The Four principal points of my Exegesis ... so far.)

If you can take an era when Religion seriously meant something to a Society, and experience that Society as a Real place (not Jedi or Hobbit land) where Religion meant something serious to this ancient society ... I can look at our (your and my) contemporary society and see how Religion can play a helpful role in my (real) life too. Help me "live my life," as you talk about it, Nano.
But first of all:

Religion has to be Real, has to be Green, before I can find any deep Truth within it, a Truth worthy to live my life by.

Can't you see that, Nano?

Can't you see that?

 

[Penelope]

The real Garden of Eden ... and the real Adam ...

The thing about Oral history, is that it is like that 'whisper in the next person's ear' game. By the time the message passes thru several individuals, it transforms into a considerably different message than how it began. Over generations, stories get told and retold. Each new storyteller plays with the received text, some. Similar stories, from other sources, get woven in, their details entwining together.

But certain details are sticky. A length of time or a name or who begot who. Each new storyteller feels uncomfortable changing that one detail. There is something uncanny or forbidden about this detail. The storyteller makes that odd detail work within their personal reworking of the text, without altering the detail. So ... some bit of original information does survives - for many generations, for centuries - in tact.

But which bit of info in existing texts - in Scripture - is pertinent info?
(How do you separate these pertinent bits out from all the lavish embellishment, which accrued over time?)

& & &

Timeline:
30,000bce - modern Paleolithic humans out-compete Neanderthals as hunter-gatherers, removing Neanderthals from the field of play on this Planet.
15,000bce - rainfall diminishes drastically, planet locked in a harsh Ice Age.
12,500bce - rudimentary Neolithic practices begin, tentative reliance upon wild and partially domesticated grains and animals (in Fertile Crescent, initially but eventually planetwide).
8,000bce - seasonal and permanent habitations, use of pottery, some irrigation.
6,000bce - retreating Ice Age, Neolithic Wet-phase, created great rich valleys for hunter-gatherer's foraging and hunting, which mixed with or competing with rudimentary organized agriculture (Eden, pre-Flood Persian Gulf, was such a rich valley, perhaps a site of such competition between remnant Paleolithic and early Neolithic peoples).
5,300bce - 4,000bce - Ubaid culture (people who brought dryland farming to Tigris-Euphrates delta).
5,000bce - 4,000bce - Flandrian Transgression (planetwide), sudden rise in sea-levels 400 feet. (Eden, now the Persian Gulf, confluence of then 4 great rivers, is slowly flooded - the Dilmun culture of people living there are pushed to the west shore of Eden/Persian Gulf.)
4,000bce - organized agriculture, with cities and sea-trade, begins in Dilmun, the northwest shore of the Persian Gulf (Dilmun is the remnant group of settlements from the original population of Eden, town of Adam being a centerpiece of this civilization).
3,300bce - 1,200bce - Bronze Age, metal tools and weapons, cities with large architectural projects, priesthood, rules of conduct, beginnings of writing - Sumerian civilization begins at the south end of the Tigris/Euphrates valley, to be replaced by Bronze Age Mesopotamian and Babylonian civilizations. (History and Civilization, as we know it, begins - first in Sumer then Egypt, India, and China; Abraham's clan leaves Ur - not far from the then ancient city of Adam - between 2100bce and 1600bce just as Dilmun culture dies out and the city of Adam is conquered, destroyed, or abandoned; Moses' clan leaves Egypt circa 1250bce, at the dawn of the Iron Age.)

& & &

Since Abraham's clan left Ur at the time when the Dilmun culture was dying out, one might wonder if Abraham's clan - his original people - was in fact not Ubaidian nor Sumerian nor Mesopotamian, but People of the Valley. That Abraham's people were Dilmun culture, the original people of the Garden of Eden. That the cultural memory goes deep. Even if this is not the case, the stories within this region of the world must have been flush with deep memory of the Flood (Flandrian Transgression) and the fertile, garden-like valley which existed before the Flood (Eden).

The length of Adam's life, 930 years, may well be cultural memory of how long the civilized settlement called Adam existed along the NW shores of the Persian gulf before it was conquered, destroyed, or abandoned - due to whatever calamity (empire-building by later peoples: Sumerians, Mesopotamians, Babylonians?).

& & &

Sure, this all is only a hypothesis. But it is one way of making sense of facts which otherwise do not make credible sense, to a sensible person.

The hypothesis is largely that of archeologist Dr Juris Zarins (Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, USA) and others (as detailed in Ms Hamblin's online article which I referenced, above). I agree with Dr Zarins' hypothesis, in large part. Only some of the shadings are original to me.

As hypotheses, Nano, it is a better hypothesis than trying to assert that Adam was a person who lived 930 years. Is this your hypothesis, Nano? If so, get real, okay?

Frankly, I do not see what is so threatening (or eyebrow-raising) about my hypothesis. It builds a context for much of the Book of Genesis to be taken as fact-based, not as mere folktale. Abraham brought the stories with him from the ancient Dilmun region, which have their origin in actual (geological and anthropological) events. And this, in turn, gives credence to much of what the Bible tells us happened to Abraham after he left that region, and also what happened to his descendents. Sure, there is bound to be scribal embellishments, but (because the basis of the earlier stories are credible) these later events are bound to, likewise, contain a certain degree of factuality underlying them as well (if you are shrewd enough to know where and how to look). That's if, and only if, you accept this (or some other) fact-based hypothesis lending credibility to the early stories.

A hypothesis (yours, Nano?) that a Man named Adam lived to be 930 years old, is so patently ridiculous to any sensible person, that it throws everything else in Genesis immediately into question. So much so that I doubt even your revered exegesis, Nano, can analytically turn the tables and make it all seem credible.

Is Genesis just wise and entertaining folklore (Remez) in your exegesis, Nano? Just James Joycean Postmodern Literature, full of fodder for later referencing (Derash) within later Biblical texts?

You should take literal facts (Pshat) more seriously in your exegesis (think Human Scale). Or treat such baroque silliness as a 930-year-lifespan for an individual, as an ecstatic but doggedly cleaved-to factoid (Sod) as - deep down - based in buried Traumatic memories of a people.

The very things you seem to offhand reject in my exegesis, Nano, are things which would lend credibility to yours - should you find a way to synthesize them with yours. Otherwise, all you are doing, Nano, is literary criticism. And all the Bible is, is a wise compendium of literature - but a book no different than (nor more significant in value than) any other book. An elegant work of fiction. Period.

I don't know what you want from the Bible, Nano. (To help you "live your life"? Good fiction, good literature, does that for many people. I know. Me, included.) But, Nano ...

I want Truth from the Bible. And if I can start with some factual truths - believable Reality - then I can honestly expect to locate deeper Truth as well, at some point.

Maybe it is all too American of me to say this:
But Truth starts from the Real world. Not from the Ridiculous.

 

[Avi]

What makes the Bible/Torah a document useful to modern individuals in her or his moral/spiritual growth?

Hi Penelope, I actually sort of like the font and color.

I have read most of this thread and some of your others and I am pretty convinced that your brain works completely differently than mine . Actually, I think you are quite brilliant. And you are a wonderful writer. A really great creative writer. I believe you think on the right side of your brain and I think on the left side !!

So I guess I am not surprised you would ask the question above. I do not know if anyone responded to this question (there are too many posts in this thread for me to find it).

But it seems to me that the most useful parts of the Torah are its moral insights. They appear in nearly every portion. Do you really not see the relevance to modern morality ? Have you heard of Pirke Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers) ? It is Talmudic. If you read that one, you will have some really great arguments with BB .

Where I think Torah is lacking are in the areas of the origin of the world and humans. It is weak in astrophysics and evolutionary biology . Although if I remember correctly, there is an interesting section where Jacob does some early genetic engineering with his sheep . Remember that portion ? Genesis 30.35-42.

 

[bananabrain]

You claim a lot for your exegesis... ("Pardes"? - did I get that right?).

you've got the word right, but you haven't understood how it works - yet.

But you deny the validity of my exegesis ... (let's call it "Historic Method" - till I come up with more exact title for it).

i don't deny its *validity*, certainly not for you. all i am doing is suggesting that you are using a teaspoon to weed your garden. your methodology will certainly get results, but from my perspective, they are flawed, partial, tendentious and myopic results, because you are hampered from the get-go by your assumptions and prejudices. now, granted, you could say the same about the traditional methods, but the fact remains that you are dismissing them out of hand without taking the trouble to understand them and we have found them pretty robust over the last couple of millennia. remember, many, many scholars have trodden this path before you and almost all of them have come to the conclusion that the traditional methods of interpretation are extremely well-adapted to their task, almost certainly because they have evolved over a very long time indeed, unlike the "historical criticism" of the bible.

But I don't want to live in "a world" with 930 year old men (the age of Adam when he died, according to the Bible).

what you want to be true is not all that relevant to what the Text actually says. i keep saying it: in order to get anywhere, first you must encounter the Text on its own terms. if you walked into a music, art or design school, would you necessarily understand the methodology behind the teaching? would you expect better results if you tried to teach yourself the piano, sculpture or architecture? let me tell you a story:

a non-jew once came to the famous Torah teacher shammai wanting to convert. however, he insisted that he would only learn the Torah while standing on one leg. shammai rejected him. he then went to shammai's great rival hillel, who taught him: "that which you dislike, do not do to your neighbour. that is the basis of the Torah. the rest is commentary; now go and learn!" another prospective convert, who accepted only the written Torah, came to shammai, who turned him down, so he went to hillel.

the first day, hillel taught him the correct order of the hebrew alphabet. the next day he taught him the alphabet backwards. this confused the convert: "yesterday you taught me a completely different way of doing it!" hillel responded: "this is to explain to you that simply reading the words on your own terms is insufficient. we need the oral Torah to explain the written Torah properly."

babylonian talmud, tractate shabbat 31a

It's like you were trying to make me live in a Star Wars or a Hobbit universe. I don't want to live amongst Jedi Knights or within a Middle-Earth society. I don't want to be talking, seriously, about The Force or the Rings of Power.

no, no, no. you are completely missing my point. do i talk like my head zips up the back? what i am saying here is that if you apply inappropriate or irrelevant criteria to a complex, multilayered system, you completely fail to understand its essential nature. certainly, you could apply marxist political theory to middle-earth, but you would miss out totally on the actual purpose of LoTR. that is what you are doing right now - watching star wars and going "how are the orchestra playing in space? that would never happen!"

Religion is nothing if not built upon a Real society.

firstly, that's an assumption and a pretty questionable one. secondly, you couldn't get a more real society than jewish society - and, if you looked at the oral Law, you'd get a pretty good idea about this society even at this remove:

I hate so-called Religion-speak about "last days."

i haven't mentioned this.

A healthy society needs to be Sustainable over long eons of time, then be adaptable in the clinch, when the world undergoes major shifts.

yes - like the destruction of the first and second Temples, the babylonian and roman exiles, the crusades, the expulsions from europe, especially spain, the karaite schism, the challenge of supercessionist theologies from christianity and islam, the false messiah scandals of the C16th, the enlightenment, pseudo-scientific anti-semitism, nationalism and genocide. yet jewish society has survived all of these so far - the reason? a lifelong learning culture, based on these traditional methods of interpretation. as the sages say, just as the jewish people keep the Sabbath, so the Sabbath keeps the jewish people.

"Last days" is a cop out. Religion needs to help a society sustain itself in a healthy way, otherwise that Religion is not fulfilling its Contract - its Covenant - with its society of Believers. In that sense a Religion has to be Green, has to be Sustainable. Otherwise Religion is the height of immorality, the height of hypocrisy.)

judaism agrees and so do i.

And when so-called scriptures do NOT picture this ancient society - out of which the Sacred writings arose - so as to feel in some pertinent way like a real society, I feel like I am living in a Hobbit or a Jedi universe.

you are ignoring the possibility that you are not actually perceiving the real society that the sacred writings picture. i mean, if what you say is true - and your view of the Text and the Law and the society based on it is true, then we should not have a real, sustainable society. yet, by even the most critical historical view would say that judaism is the sole surviving diaspora culture of the ancient world. so the evidence does not support your hypothesis.

1. HUMAN SCALE is necessary, Nano - if everyone in society were Superheroes, they wouldn't need Religion. (What inspires ordinary people to do extraordinary things? If they have already become Demi-gods, who cares that they do extraordinary things. It is expected!)

on the contrary, the point of religion - or judaism at least - is to inspire ordinary people to become extraordinary, to say, you too can be like this. avi mentioned one of the most important books in the Mishnah: the pirqei 'aboth, the "ethics of the sages". you can read about this here

My Jewish Learning: Pirkei Avot: Ethics of Our Fathers

you can find the actual text here:

The Translated Text - Ethics of the Fathers

(i do not endorse chabad, btw)

we read a chapter of the pirqei 'aboth each week on the Sabbath. the other side fo this, of course, is that even our "superheroes" have serious failings and are, in the final analysis, humans with human dimensions. moses, abraham, david - all of these people get things wrong, make mistakes and exhibit poor judgement. if that isn't "human scale", i don't know what is.

2. TRAUMATIC MEMORY - there is a major difference between normal wickedness and decisive, traumatic events buried in societal memory. (They are major engines for that society, how it sees itself, how it changes over time.)

we have extremely strong structures and processes for dealing with this. look here for a start:

The Three Weeks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

3. GOODS & SERVICES - in a real world you understand how people fed and clothed themselves, what were their surplus goods they traded with others to obtain goods they do not produce for themselves, the network of a society's relative self-sufficiency and dependency on others.

what do you think the Oral Torah actually is? take a look here:

Pe'ah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
My Jewish Learning: Pe'ah: The Corners of Our Fields

all of this is derived from the Torah.

4. COMPORTMENT & STRIFE - the means by which different groups within society managed to get along with each other, and why, and the places that comportment broke down from time to time, all indicating the primary glues which hold this society together. (Within this society - but also between this society and neighboring societies: sharing and exclusion, friendliness and tension).

same answer: Nezikin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you can take an era when Religion seriously meant something to a Society, and experience that Society as a Real place (not Jedi or Hobbit land) where Religion meant something serious to this ancient society ... I can look at our (your and my) contemporary society and see how Religion can play a helpful role in my (real) life too. Help me "live my life," as you talk about it, Nano.

in terms of judaism, that era was the past, is the present and will be the future. one of the first things to understand about the Divine Name of G!D, the Tetragrammaton, is that it combines all three of these tenses of the verb "to be". the trouble is, penelope, is that this is how it works for me. i am not seeking a convert, nor am i permitted to do so. i can't tell you how religion can play a helpful role in your real life, i can only explain how it does in mine. it sounds, however, as if you already know much of what you need:

Religion has to be Real, has to be Green, before I can find any deep Truth within it, a Truth worthy to live my life by.

i wholeheartedly approve of this set of principles; it is covenantal in the best sense. and it sounds like you have got some excellent concepts of what "realness", "greenness" and "truth" are to you. 'owevair, you appear to be defining it using a false dichotomy with my religion and my sacred texts and in that, you do me a disservice and also yourself, in that you are basing it on an opposition to things that you perceive to be true, but are not actually true of the things you suppose them to be true of. judaism, to you, appears so far to be a sort of straw man for everything that you consider backward, primitive and intolerant. it is nothing of the sort. you are of course entitled to your opinion but you don't strike me as someone who is happy in ignorance.

Can't you see that, Nano?

Can't you see that?

yes, i can, penelope.

i can.

i'm not two years old.

sheesh.

and while we're at it, i think it's a bit infantile for you to be referring to me, effectively as "tiny-brain", like i don't get it. grow the hell up.

But which bit of info in existing texts - in Scripture - is pertinent info?

all of it - if you only know what you are looking at.

How do you separate these pertinent bits out from all the lavish embellishment, which accrued over time?

you don't. you understand the accrual process. otherwise, you end up in the same place as christianity, the karaites and classical C19th reform. your assumptions are wrong.

Sure, this all is only a hypothesis. But it is one way of making sense of facts which otherwise do not make credible sense, to a sensible person.

only if you assume that the ma'aseh bereisheet is there for that purpose. are you saying that i am *not* a sensible person? is it not at all possible that your criteria are mistaken? you sound like an anthropologist who encounters an alien culture and is amused because they don't have model T fords, because everyone knows that that is a necessary component of any sensible, credible modern culture.

As hypotheses, Nano, it is a better hypothesis than trying to assert that Adam was a person who lived 930 years. Is this your hypothesis, Nano? If so, get real, okay?

how very rude. how dare you tell me what i should or shouldn't think? why are you so unable to question your assumptions? how arrogant. how eurocentric, how chauvinist and how laughably ignorant. the adam and eve story is about free will and how that is a necessary component of what it means to be human. it is not some fabulous treatment of a clan migration. that is simply not how we understand it. it is not "threatening" or "eyebrow raising", but simply redundant. use occam's razor here for a minute. why not actually read what the text SAYS?

That's if, and only if, you accept this (or some other) fact-based hypothesis lending credibility to the early stories.

they're not necessary - this part of the Text has huge credibility when you actually understand the ideas within it, which you have not troubled yourself to do.

Is Genesis just wise and entertaining folklore (Remez) in your exegesis, Nano? Just James Joycean Postmodern Literature, full of fodder for later referencing (Derash) within later Biblical texts?

You should take literal facts (Pshat) more seriously in your exegesis (think Human Scale). Or treat such baroque silliness as a 930-year-lifespan for an individual, as an ecstatic but doggedly cleaved-to factoid (Sod) as - deep down - based in buried Traumatic memories of a people.

this shows how much you don't understand what peshat, let alone PaRDe"S actually is. peshat is not "literal facts" - it is the PLAIN MEANING of the text. remez is "implied hints" of things that are missing from the peshat. derash is homiletic exposition of the events, personalities and symbolism implied by the language. sod is the deep structure, the anagogical, mystical level. the ma'aseh bereisheet is the most recondite, complex part of the Torah - who the hell are you to come along and lecture me about it?

The very things you seem to offhand reject in my exegesis, Nano, are things which would lend credibility to yours - should you find a way to synthesize them with yours.

i do not require your credibility or your validation. you are simply making yourself look doctrinaire, shrill and small-minded.

And all the Bible is, is a wise compendium of literature - but a book no different than (nor more significant in value than) any other book. An elegant work of fiction. Period.

well, jewish culture, history, learning and life would disagree with you. "nor more significant in value"? it's more significant in value to me than, say, "finnegan's wake". what a fatuous assertion.

you are at far too early a stage of learning to sustain the positions you are presently holding. throwing me a link to some marginal academic theory is hardly guaranteed to make a difference.

b'shalom

bananabrain

 

[iBrian]

Nanobrain

...

Can't you see that, Nano?

Penelope, let's keep from the name-calling please - I don't think you would like it if members were allowed to distort your name into a personal attack.

We don't allow that sort of thing here, so please refrain from it in future.

 

[Penelope]

Hi Penelope, I actually sort of like the font and color.

I have read most of this thread and some of your others and I am pretty convinced that your brain works completely differently than mine . Actually, I think you are quite brilliant. And you are a wonderful writer. A really great creative writer. I believe you think on the right side of your brain and I think on the left side !!

So I guess I am not surprised you would ask the question above. I do not know if anyone responded to this question (there are too many posts in this thread for me to find it).

But it seems to me that the most useful parts of the Torah are its moral insights. They appear in nearly every portion. Do you really not see the relevance to modern morality ? Have you heard of Pirke Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers) ? It is Talmudic. If you read that one, you will have some really great arguments with BB .

Where I think Torah is lacking are in the areas of the origin of the world and humans. It is weak in astrophysics and evolutionary biology . Although if I remember correctly, there is an interesting section where Jacob does some early genetic engineering with his sheep . Remember that portion ? Genesis 30.35-42.

What makes the Bible/Torah a document useful to modern individuals in her or his moral/spiritual growth?

Hi Avi

I'm glad you noticed this sentence.
I was worried that nobody had.
(It was on Bananabrain's checklist for swift dismissal - thus he did not seriously address my remark.)

This question is actually the key underlying question for this entire thread. (At least, it is for me.)
And I am still waiting to hear a cogent answer from someone, or to come up with one myself.

So, again. Thanks for perceiving what is a core issue for me, not just one of the many side-issues (which are easier to discuss).

& & &

And thanks too, Avi, for the personal compliments.
As a teacher, I try to give each of my students compliments, regularly, as they earn them.
(Something British about Bananabrain is niggardly toward giving out complements - thinking people learn better when they are constantly being slapped across the knuckles with a ruler. It's so out of Charles Dickens, isn't it?)

I'm not sure it is entirely a Right Brain versus a Left Brain thing, which makes me 'come from a different place' than most of the people who post here. But that certainly could be part of it.

I think it has more to do with being mentally embedded inside Ecological Theory - which rips Metaphysical Philosophy to shreds. Ecological Theory not only solves all the problems of highbrow philosophy, but shows how silly all those problems in fact are.

People need to be trained in how to do 'whole system thinking.'
(Most people, when they hear the world "ecology," think some catch-phrase like "Environmentalism," or "Sustainability" - as if they can keep thinking in the tired old way that people have been thinking since the Golden Age Greeks, and just add-on Green values to their value system - wear it like a political button - rather than totally transform the way they look at this world, and behave within it.
Ecology is much larger than mere add-ons. Eco-Theory is, instead, the mother theory which includes within it: Chaos theory, System theory, Cybernetics, Fractals, Transactional analysis, Game theory, Communication theory, and on and on. Affective Rationalism, in sum.)

But my reason for coming to a 'Religion discussion' website, Avi, is to get beyond Philosophy. (Beyond the 'secular.')
I'm looking, at this stage in my life ...

For answers that even Ecological Theory cannot give.

& & &

Thanks for the 'Pirke Avot' scoop. I will have to take a look at it.

Jacob was a rascal, wasn't he, in his sheep-breeding scheme?
(Seems from time immemorial, smart farmers are cross-breeding livestock or tree-fruit, trying to improve their annual harvest. In America, not only brilliant men like Thomas Jefferson were ever trying this and that, but even farmers with middling scientific brains like George Washington were always experimenting.)

& & &

Regarding "astrophysics and evolutionary biology," the Torah is actually no worse than any other Religion, that way. (Probably a good deal better than most.) Have you read the Creation Stories from cultures around the globe? You'd think, just by statistical odds, some culture would hit on a close approximation of Evolution theory or the Big Bang or the Geophysical forces which created Plant Earth. But if there is, I'm yet to find it. Not in the major traditions, nor in Navaho nor in Bantu nor in any 'sacred' folktales which I've looked at ... from anywhere.

Religion has a remarkably bad record at anticipating scientific discovery.

The normally hardheaded Confucian Chinese came up with some remarkably absurd theories. The Greeks never got very close to the truth, but they at least began to ask the right questions when they began to ignore their own culture's pantheism. The Nordic mythology, its Creation Story based upon "Fire and Ice," should have been exactly what the doctor ordered - regarding the geophysics of how the Planet Earth was formed (and continually re-formed over the 4.5 billion years of this Planet's history). Geophysics is largely the story of the interaction between two formative forces: volcanic-activity/plate-tectonics (fire) and glacial-activity (ice). You'd expect, in Norse mythology, for there to somewhere be intuitions about how these formative forces carved out this planet. But I've never encountered any passage or story which suggests to me such an intuition ever sparked to life.

But Genesis 1 ... ?
It's not half-bad. It gets two things half-correct.
1. There is a good intuition here about how you build a Planet: first, create water, then create atmosphere ("water above"), then create mix of sea-water and dry land, then create vegetation (actually, in the sea first, then on land), then create fish and birds and reptiles starting from the sea and ending on the land, then create the higher forms of life - the mammals, and finally humans. This is remarkably close, as a thumbnail description, regarding the sequencing of how life came to be and would evolve on earth over the first 4.5 billion years of Earth's existence. (The Chapter throws in the making of the sun and moon, weirdly, in the middle of the Evolutionary process, Day 4, between 'plants' and 'animals.' Maybe because, in childish logic, animals have eyes to see the light and plants don't - with no intuition about chlorophyll.) I am yet to find intuitions about Planet-building which are this good, embedded in the lore of any other Religious tradition.
2. Day 1 of Creation, many people have noted, has the feel of the physics of the Big Bang. Though the wording is not exactly a blackboard with mathematical formulas upon it, the wording does sound almost smart. Words like "Darkness" and "Surface" and "the Deep" and "Wind over the Face of the Waters" and "Light" does, taken together, feel like an alchemy formula or a Wizard's incantation. Which, while it is not good math nor good physics nor good chemistry, is still - in symbolic language - a pretty good intuition about how you build a universe. Not even the brainy Greeks were this good, or came this close, at giving a cogent description of the Big Bang. It is a bit like how you might explain the physics of the Big Bang to a 3 year old (or how God might explain it to a Bronze Age Mesopotamian priest and that same priest to his or her scribe, and how the clan-members with good memory in Abraham's tribe would recount this tale to less-sophisticated peoples as they took the tale westward with them when they exited the Tigris-Euphrates delta - which, in Abraham's day, was the smartest place on Earth).

In its childish, naïve way, the Torah begins with a description of how the Universe was formed and how life came into existence on Planet Earth that, scientifically, out-classes by a mile any other Creation stories out there which I am aware of. (If anyone knows a better one, let me know.)

So, Avi, don't knock the Torah for its bad science. It did a pretty good job for the era it was written in. (Though it probably got a major chunk of it 'from God' via Mesopotamia.)

...

Penelope

 

[Tao_Equus]

(Something British about Bananabrain is niggardly toward giving out complements - thinking people learn better when they are constantly being slapped across the knuckles with a ruler. It's so out of Charles Dickens, isn't it?)

As far as I am aware fatuous praise is no more useful than the Dickensian sternness you criticise. And to us Britishers there is nothing more nauseating than American insincerity with a smile. Praising a child for doing well is not useful and there are several studies that demonstrate this. A child should be expected to do well without praise as the 'reward' of praise should not be the goal.

 

[Tao_Equus]

Penelope, let's keep from the name-calling please - I don't think you would like it if members were allowed to distort your name into a personal attack.

We don't allow that sort of thing here, so please refrain from it in future.

Penelope Pitstop is eminently appropriate I would say.

 

[bananabrain]

I'm glad you noticed this sentence.
I was worried that nobody had.
(It was on Bananabrain's checklist for swift dismissal - thus he did not seriously address my remark.)

are you kidding me? have you actually read my post? my whole post was about how it is useful to me, as a modern individual (leastways i think so) in my moral/spiritual growth. in fact, the ma'aseh bereisheet is a particular stand-out in that respect.

And I am still waiting to hear a cogent answer from someone

how about trying to understand the cogent answer you've already been given - at length, if i may say so, rather than avoiding dealing with the response by calling it a "side issue".

I'm not sure it is entirely a Right Brain versus a Left Brain thing, which makes me 'come from a different place' than most of the people who post here. But that certainly could be part of it.

so now you're insulting most of the people who post here like we don't do "right brain"? you're doing well.

I think it has more to do with being mentally embedded inside Ecological Theory - which rips Metaphysical Philosophy to shreds.

if that is so, it is news to most philosophy departments.

Ecological Theory not only solves all the problems of highbrow philosophy, but shows how silly all those problems in fact are.

i'd gape in slack-jawed astonishment, but i'm laughing too hard.

People need to be trained in how to do 'whole system thinking.'
(Most people, when they hear the world "ecology," think some catch-phrase like "Environmentalism," or "Sustainability" - as if they can keep thinking in the tired old way that people have been thinking since the Golden Age Greeks, and just add-on Green values to their value system - wear it like a political button - rather than totally transform the way they look at this world, and behave within it.

penelope, a rare piece of real-life info about me: i do "systems thinking" professionally and, if you're familiar with belbin, i am also a plant/resource investigator. so do us all a favour and don't patronise us with this idea that you're the only right-brained thinker on the site.

Ecology is much larger than mere add-ons. Eco-Theory is, instead, the mother theory which includes within it: Chaos theory, System theory, Cybernetics, Fractals, Transactional analysis, Game theory, Communication theory, and on and on. Affective Rationalism, in sum.)

and do you have a unifying general systems theory? i work within one - and it predates the golden age greeks - and, more to the point, is derived in large measure from the ma'aseh bereisheet.

Regarding "astrophysics and evolutionary biology," the Torah is actually no worse than any other Religion, that way.

have you ever seen the work of r. aryeh kaplan, penelope? take a look at this one:

Amazon.com: Kabbalah and the Age of the Universe: Aryeh Kaplan, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: Books

as for evolutionary biology, judaism is, except for certain sections of ultra-orthodoxy, broadly comfortable with it, as it poses no problems to a non-literalist understanding of the ma'aseh berei****.

think, just by statistical odds, some culture would hit on a close approximation of Evolution theory or the Big Bang or the Geophysical forces which created Plant Earth. But if there is, I'm yet to find it.

it's right there in genesis, in front of your nose, penelope. you just can't see it because you don't understand the text. there's a very famous book:

Amazon.com: Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery Of Harmony Between Modern Science And The Bible: Gerald Schroeder: Books

Religion has a remarkably bad record at anticipating scientific discovery.

and yet religious cultures have a surprisingly good record of producing epoch-making scientists. newton? galileo? einstein?

(The Chapter throws in the making of the sun and moon, weirdly, in the middle of the Evolutionary process, Day 4, between 'plants' and 'animals.' Maybe because, in childish logic, animals have eyes to see the light and plants don't - with no intuition about chlorophyll.)

the fact that it talks about "evening and morning" and the first two "days" of creation before the sun and the moon are Created ought to tip you off that we're not talking about "days" in the 24-hour-orbit sense.

It is a bit like how you might explain the physics of the Big Bang to a 3 year old (or how God might explain it to a Bronze Age Mesopotamian priest and that same priest to his or her scribe

yes, because ancient people were just like children, don't you know? what sort of understanding of science or historical method can be deduced from your constant dismissal of that which you have clearly failed to understand?

b'shalom

bananabrain

 

[Penelope]

As far as I am aware fatuous praise is no more useful than the Dickensian sternness you criticise. And to us Britishers there is nothing more nauseating than American insincerity with a smile. Praising a child for doing well is not useful and there are several studies that demonstrate this. A child should be expected to do well without praise as the 'reward' of praise should not be the goal.

Tao

The studies I've seen show just the opposite.
When children receive praise, which they have earned, they pay better attention in class.
{But that may be just American public education.}

Penelope

 

[Avi]

As far as I am aware fatuous praise is no more useful than the Dickensian sternness you criticise. And to us Britishers there is nothing more nauseating than American insincerity with a smile. Praising a child for doing well is not useful and there are several studies that demonstrate this. A child should be expected to do well without praise as the 'reward' of praise should not be the goal.

Hey Tao, since I feel some of your criticism is directed at my compliments, I will respond as well. My praise was neither fatuous or insincere. To show someone respect for their thoughtful posts is common courtesy.

Please be more careful with your criticism of the person giving compliments as well as receiving them.

I personally agree with Brian's comment about not allowing name calling. And I think Penelope should not have any expectations of receiving approval from BB. In fact, as is usual for him, he has patiently addressed many more of her comments than I could have done. I think she should be appreciative of his thoughtful responses.

 

[Tao_Equus]

Tao

The studies I've seen show just the opposite.
When children receive praise, which they have earned, they pay better attention in class.
{But that may be just American public education.}

Penelope

Yeh, you said it. The US is 24th out of 29 developed nations, and falling. Though due to the increased Americanisation of this country we are sliding fast too.

 

[Tao_Equus]

Hey Tao, since I feel some of your criticism is directed at my compliments, I will respond as well. My praise was neither fatuous or insincere. To show someone respect for their thoughtful posts is common courtesy.

Please be more careful with your criticism of the person giving compliments as well as receiving them.

I personally agree with Brian's comment about not allowing name calling. And I think Penelope should not have any expectations of receiving approval from BB. In fact, as is usual for him, he has patiently addressed many more of her comments than I could have done. I think she should be appreciative of his thoughtful responses.

I do not criticise compliments in general. I even give them on occasion. Penelope chose to use a frankly ridiculous stereotype of Victorian England. It was that and the use of meaningless platitudes by teachers I addressed. As for name calling... I think it a useful tool to make a point. If the shoe fits....

 

[Penelope]

... 'Nano' ... 'name-calling' ...
Penelope Pitstop is eminently appropriate I would say.

Tao

It is obvious, neither you nor I, Brian have paid close attention to this thread, or you'd realize there is no rancor or meanness in my calling Bananabrain "Nano." (It's actually kind of affectionate. How can I carry on a conversation with someone while calling him "Bananabrain"? I picture either a sexual image or mushy food.
But the Etiquette Marshal has ticketed me, so I will call Bananabrain such if I must. It's a shame. I was actually warming to "Nano." And I think Bananabrain would have over time, too. But tow the company line I shall.)

Are all British intellectuals so uptight?
(Stick up their ... ? - oops!, better not finish, oh dearie me, you might also become offended).
You guys need to learn how to play.

Speaking of "name-calling":

... how very rude. how dare you tell me what i should or shouldn't think? why are you so unable to question your assumptions? how arrogant. how eurocentric, how chauvinist and how laughably ignorant ...

I am getting used to Bananabrain's rhetorical excesses. I was not offended by this (and other similar caustic bursts of rancor). But maybe I should be ...

But I can't be objective. What do you think, Tao?
Maybe it is Bananabrain that needs the 'Time out' ... ?

(Do wish Bananabrain would become as perceptive at reading my prose - in its full arc - as he claims to be at reading Torah and Talmud. It's easy to attack something when you snip it into little pieces, and address each devoid of context. The very thing Bananabrain claims I am doing, regarding Scripture. Any suggestions, Tao, how I might improve Bananabrain's reading skills? Or is it because I "write like an American"? Thus there is no hope ... ?)

Penelope