jiii said:
Ruby-
I had the feeling that I was still missing the point of your post, so I decided would leave it alone and just follow the thread. However, you have made it perfectly clear with your last post.
Finally, I get it!
Jiii, yes, I think we are finally talking about the same thing. I've been asking myself why I keep insisting on posting, why I don't just turn my interests elsewhere. I felt somewhat embarrassed at my long epistle in response to flow. But if that is what it took for me to clarify what I mean, it was worth it.
I think this is so important to me because I was raised with the threat that if we don't believe these things as factual history then we can expect to go to hell. I've tried time and again to just throw Christianity out the window. But it never works. One time I thought I was successful. But it was Dec. Everybody had all their beautiful Christmas decorations out in front lawns, around front doors, along eaves troughs--you get the picture. A regular snowy Christmas in Ontario.
WHAT DO I DO ABOUT THIS? I wanted with all my heart to be part of this. But HOW? Perhaps the Jesus story is Christianity's sacred myth. I had learned about sacred myths in religious studies courses. Eventually I had opportunity to read Tom Harpur's
The Pagan Christ. Harpur had traced mythology to show that Christianity's Jesus (plus family) came out of Egyptian and other mythology.
There was one bug in the soup. A Christian prof whom I respected attacked Harpur's scholarship so severely that I had no idea how to know what was true or false. I contacted Harpur and eventually decided there must be some truth to his message. Yet if it was true, why didn't the religious studies profs ever suggest this? Needless to say, that Christian prof lost quite a bit of the respect I had previously felt for him.
And now I run into this wonderfully brilliant young woman who has so much education in biblical languages and literature. Not only that, but the beliefs she continually professes bold and loud and clear and uncompromisingly were identical to how I had been raised. Except for her statement that this Matt. passage was an embellishment.
I had wanted to discuss this with my mother many years ago when I first encountered the inconsistency. But she never liked my questions. It was in the Bible so it had to be true. That was her line of reasoning. Things that did not make sense were ascribed to the mystery and incomprehensibility of God and our utter depravity and inability to ever understand God.
That was the message I got. But it seemed no harm could occur if we just addressed the simple questions I was asking. It wasn't like I was challenging the Christian faith as a whole. I just wanted to understand the things I was told to believe. That seemed like a very reasonable request.
I guess with so much personal interest invested in the topic it makes sense that I could not drop it just because no one really understood what I was trying to say. I read your last post a number of times, and also went back and read your earlier posts on this thread.
I don't fully understand what you are saying. I will go through your last post and try to express my questions. Hopefully I can articulate them clearly. If not, maybe we can work through them. I now know that you are not a fundamentalist Christian, as I had first thought.
I can see why you might've groaned at my original post...it was certainly a little bit off the mark as far as your essential question. I would, however, try to reference some of what I wrote when I say that I think that all literalism is based upon an irrational trust toward ideas.
Are you saying here that some people will believe something just because it sounds like a mysterious idea??? If that is the case, I can see why I've been bumping heads with people all my life. To me, it simply makes no sense to believe ideas that make no sense. (Excuse the pun. I just don't know how better to explain it.)
If the preacher says this is the way the world works because the Bible says this or that, and I take a good hard look to find this phenonemon in "the world" and cannot ever find it, then I am more likely to trust my perceptions than the preacher and the Bible. Or my mother.
The biggest mistake the church made so far as my faith is concerned is the provable fictions it preached about "the world." If it could not correctly perceive what "the world" was like, perhaps it could not correctly perceive the meaning of the Bible either. Of course, it's not that simple. UGH!!! How often has that phrase been used to shut me up.
IF ONLY EXPLANATIONS HAD BEEN FORTH-COMING. Something, anything, to prove why I should believe this stuff, WHY or in WHAT WAY it was not "as simple as that." There never were. I would be condemned for my unbelief before they provided honest explanations.
To a certain extent, this might perhaps be chocked up to an affectatious attempt to "materialize" the elusive "faith" that is talked about in many religions.
This is what I think you are saying: Religions talk about faith. Faith is elusive. To make the faith more real they trust irrational ideas so they have "hooks" upon which to hang their faith. It also provides them with measurable evidence regarding "correct belief"--both their own and that of co-religionists.
In a way, I see many cases of literal interpretation of biblical texts as a confusion in which one believes that they must literally "wear" their faith by believing ideas which are ordinarily considered absurd. Kind of a way to prove that their faith is so great that they can use it to believe amazingly unlikely things that don't even need believing in to nonetheless be very meaningful.
Here I think you are saying: Religion must be meaningful. Great faith is rewarded. People need something by which to measure how great their faith is. So they invent irrational ideas that must be believed. In being able to say "I believe" to these ideas they are proving that their faith is great enough to be acceptable to God.
For this reason a person like me who questions everything is a very serious threat because I attack the very foundation (though unconscious to them and unknown to me) on which their entire belief system rests.
Whew! this seems like some precariously-built house of cards. Why don't they look deeper? I mean, this does not seem like respectable human thinking. Hopefully, I misunderstand what you are saying.
Specifically, in terms of your question, since what people choose to literally interpret sometimes is already absurd from a rational standpoint, there's really no limit to just how irrationally someone may believe so-and-so ideas...at that point, even uniformity of belief is unnecessary.
May I ask by what authority you say this stuff? What studies have been done to prove it? It sounds totally ridiculous.
I hope I at least addressed your question this time. Again, sorry about the misunderstanding.
-jiii
Yes, you have. Thank you. I look forward to further discussion on this--if nothing else, to prove that I am totally mistaken in what I understand you are saying.
Ruby
