Quoting Michael Scott (mds(a)inoz.net):
> Matthew 28"19 j <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote1>Go
> therefore and k <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote2>make
> disciples of l <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote3>all
> nations, j <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote3>baptizing
> them m <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote4>in2
> <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote5> n
> <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote6>the name of the
> Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them o
> <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote7>to observe all that
> p <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote8>I have commanded
> you. And behold, q <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote9>I
> am with you always, to r
> <https://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matt%2028.19-20#footnote10>the end of the
> age.”
>
> Romans 10:13-14 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be
> saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And
> how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are
> they to hear without someone preaching?
>
> Mark 16:15
> <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+16%3A15&version=ESV> And
> he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the
> whole creation.
What the fsck is this, a witnessing? {sigh}
OK, the Mark 16:15 bit is at least getting there. Context is this is
(pardon my irreverence) zombie Jesus speaking after the tomb got
reopened. However, please note that he said 'Go into all the world and
preach the gospel to all creation' as an instruction to the eleven
remaining disciples. (I guess at this point Judas Iscariot had been
voted off the island.) Jesus is NOT quoted as saying this shall be a
task for all future co-religionists. He said 'Go...' to the eleven
blokes. Note that a couple of verses before, he'd ghost-hullo'ed
to Mary Magdalene but didn't tell _her_ to wander the globe being a
religion salesman. So, all told, why are you cocluding that Jesus
was saying everyone in the future (but oddly not Mary Magdalene) would
be so charged? And, getting back to my earlier point, if this is a
critical instruction incumbent on all future devotees, why did only Mark
think to mention it? Hmm? (But wait, I've just cross-checked.)
Actually, I see that one of the other links you hurled out, Matthew
28:19, covers the same zombie Jesus speech to the eleven remaining
disciples. (Would it have hurt you to have mentioned this?)
Interestingly, the two accounts clash about where this was. Mark just
says it was where they were eating. That would logically be in or
really near Jerusalem, as people didn't just casually get on an
interurban bus, back then. Matthew says it was in Galilee. Take the
word of someone who's driven on the still-awful roads from Jerusalem to
northern Israel, that's a pretty serious trip.
But once again, Matthew gives this oddly specific instruction _very_
directly to the remaining eleven. If he'd meant '...and also I charge
this upon all future followers', wouldn't he have logically said so?
Now, I also have to back off and review our differrent perspectives.
To you, holy wisdom verbatim of your god; to me, a book. Specifically,
a book about which it's abundantly clear its text was nowhere near
contemporaneous, and shows very clear signs of tampering to support
later institutional politics. IMO, there has been backfilling of both
myth and later doctrine, and I see in these passages among others the
hand of the one-eyed Jew who couldn't get laid, Saint Paul the
politicker and noted misogynist.
You would of course greatly disagree, but that's what makes horse races.
Romans 10:13-14: That is NOT Jesus speaking. You are deciding to move
the goalposts. I didn't ask you what the one-eyed Jew who couldn't get
laid, Saint Paul the politicker and noted misogynist, had to say. If
memory serves, didn't I ask you where _Jesus_ asked this thing of all
future followers?
Also, say... Didn't I just get through asking you if you were claiming
I was lying? You certainly seemed to be.
As I said, I would much rather think well of people, but if you are
going to wander around attempting casual character assassination and
then ignoring polite queries about whether you are _sure_ you mean that
slur, then there really is absolutely no future in our conversing, and
we would be better off disengaging pending the heat death of the
universe, right now. I'm serious, dude. You have started down a path
on which nothing good can ensue.
Quoting Michael Scott (mds(a)inoz.net):
> Rick, you've made many comments, then told me to shut up, so which would
> you like? My answers, or my silence?
My goodness, I don't believe I asked you to shut up. I believe what I
said was that I was confused about you taking personal offense at my
comments that -- as you agreed -- were about a variety of Christian
entirely unlike you, in a conversation I was having in no way addressed
to you.
If you wish to clarify your claim that (paraphrasing) there is an active
requirement for all Christians to evangelise, I would be interested. If
you don't, there is certainly no obligation.
Quoting Michael Scott (mds(a)inoz.net):
> Here you go, Rick....just a few references. I've said before that you need
> to take them in context, but you rejected that
WTF? No, that is absolutely nothing like anything I said.
Right, that's twice in a row you attempted that idiocy, _plus_ calling
me a liar and ignoring being called on that. I am done with you. Have
a great life. We will not interact again. I have just reached and
passed 'fed up'. Bye.
Quoting Michael Scott (mds(a)inoz.net):
> The citation you've provided is pretty clear, I would have thought.
OK, if you are asserting that the extremely weak and indirect (and
metaphorical) statement included in _one_ Gospel (Matthew) and curiously
nowhere in the other three means Christians are abjured to find
converts, then that is an answer. Thank you.
Quoting Michael Scott (mds(a)inoz.net):
> Rick, without elucidating on every point of your colourful "response", what
> I take offense to is not that you expressed your opinion on luv-talk.
In that regard, for context, please remember that I was responding to
Trent Buck saying _he_ found the Bible inpenetrable after a few pages,
i.e., was not able to read far into it. Therefore, I was replying back
to Trent (Cc to the luv-talk assembled, of course) suggesting _another_
way to approach reading the Bible that could render it appealing, i.e.,
by interpreting it using a secular framing, seeing it in light of
politics and local history and literature, rather than through the
interpretive lens of religion.
IMO, it really should not have been necessary to salt and pepper my
prose with 'Of course, this is par-excellence NOT the only way to read
the Bible, for many, many reasons including people starting with
radically different assumptions about the universe than mine, e.g.,
those, not to put a fine point on it, who are devout and for whom this
is a holy book. For gosh sake, wasn't that obvious enough without my
needing to expostulate about it personally?
> It is that if _I_ came on luv-talk expressing my opinion about the Bible,
> about Christianity, about a certain kind of "Christian", I would probably
> be howled off, because I hold the views of a Christian, so I would be seen
> as "bible-bashing", "evangelising?", annoyingly expressing my religion in
> public.
Once again, you appear to be confusing the verb 'evangelise' with the
adjective (and noun) 'evangelical', even though those are extremely
different things. I will make no apology whatsoever for saying I find
evangelicals very alien to customary, traditional, and otherwise
universal characteristics of Christianity.
You aren't even an evangelical, so why the Gehenna are you offended?
The strange subtype of alleged-Christianity of which I wrote isn't yours
at all (you say). Is it that you've decided to become an ex-officio
ambassador for the evangelicals for purposes of taking umbrage on their
behalf? Have you decided that any time someone says something
unflattering about _any_ variety of Christian, you must leap forward and
state how shocked and offended you are?
(Are you perhaps bored and in great need of a hobby?)
> But those who come from the opposite end of the spectrum, who agree in the
> negative, can BASH the Bible and Christianity with impunity, without
> expecting any negative response.
Au contraire, Michael. Go back and read again what I wrote. You will
find that I neither 'bashed the Bible' nor 'bashed Christianity'. So,
stick your offense-taking in a pipe and smoke it, sir.
(Well, there was one small exception, the bit where I was startled by an
Israeli asserting that I am 'a Christian' simply because I had mentioned
observing Christmas as a secular holiday for the first ten years of my
life until my father, Pan American World Airways Captain Arthur Moen,
was killed in an airplane crash caused by employer negligence at
Christmas 1968. My subsequent swipe at Christianity as a
'Middle-Eastern death cult' was just a bit unkind, but IMO was
forgivable because it was also witty. If you cannot look past that one
ideological sharp slap, then you're far too hypersensitive, and the hell
with you.)
> And you, in one fell swoop, did a nice summary of BASHING the Bible in one
> email, in response to Russell bashing one kind of "christian" and the
> Bible.
If you call that bashing the Bible and bashing Christianity, then you
need to learn to read better, because it simply wasn't.
> Yes, you're right, there is a difference between evangelical and
> evangelising. They ARE different. But the discussion about evangelical
> "christians" turned to why a certain group don't read the Bible.
Which I objected to Russell saying, please note, because it was
illogically arrived at and simply untrue. So, I was ON YOUR SIDE
on that matter, yet you're complaining? Really?
> I wasn't offended by you.
Well, you have a really peculiar way of reflecting that.
> Again, in this latest post, you have expressed opinion as fact
Bullshit. Flagrant bullshit.
Rick Moen via luv-talk wrote:
> This is why the famous sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo features --
> yes -- horns on the abundantly bearded guy's head.
That reminds me of a story of religious iconography which went
something like this:
Mary's a virgin, right?
So when God knocked her up, he must have used some OTHER hole.
Probably her ear.
I'll paint that.
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck(a)gmail.com):
> The response I was actually expecting is that USA is a Christian
> millet, so non-Christian USians need to read their holy book to
> understand their legislation.
Heh.
My experience was not that, in part because I was raised (part of my
boyhood) in California, not in the Bible Belt or Oklahoma. In part
because my parents were non-militantly non-religious. We did observe
Christmas and Easter, but I as a boy would have been utterly astonished
by the notion of these being Christian.
Christmas was a tree and presents, and a dinner with family. Easter was
decorating and finding eggs in the outside lot of one of my aunts and
uncle's house, and then a dinner with family.
And, the larger point is, in California, nobody pushed religion at you.
That would have been deemed terribly impolite and Not Done. I was
distantly aware that religion existed, but it had no centrality in
public life, because that was (and still is) deemed inappropriate.
In 1980, I mentioned during my time as a kibbutz volunteer that my
family had observed Christmas in this fashion until 1968 when Dad was
killed by the negligence of Boeing Company and his employer Pan American
World Airways. One of my fellow kibbutzniks, an Israeli, made a comment
about 'you Christians', and I boggled and said 'Excuse me? _Whom_ are
you calling a Christian? I don't hate Christians, and some of my best
friends are such, but I never said I _was_ one, and haven't been one for
a day in my life, thankyouverymuch.' I was obliged to explain that,
among other things, we Scandinavians had been celebrating that seasonal
occasion since long before Christianity showed up, under the name, Jul,
that it is still known by in the Germanic-language Nordic countries such
as my father's native Norway. So, Christmas doesn't necessarily imply
Christian, dammit. Get it right, my Israeli friend. And never accuse
me of membership in a Middle-Eastern death cult again.
Because of a historical oddity, I am technically an arguable Christian
on account of baptism, even though absolutely not in any real sense:
When my parents found they could not conceive children, and arranged
adoption of first me and then my sister in infancy from private parties,
they found to their great annoyance that a fossil statute of the state
of California still required adoptive parents to give their children
some bare minimum amount of religious instruction and education.
(Christianity was not required.) Mom and Dad therefore sought locally
for the least-bothersome option. They found a new
social-activism-oriented congregation, that didn't yet even have its own
building. (It met at, I believe, a high school's building on weekends.)
The main attraction was the minister, a great and good man named
Reverand Stephen Peabody. Rev. Peabody met the highest ideals of
Christianity by my standards, in that he didn't care what if anything
you believed. He just wanted to help make the world a better place,
and he and his congregants would be found helping and feeding the poor,
doing civil rights actions, and other deeds of good character. My
family thus became in theory congregants from 1958 to 1962, and I
attended Sunday School there at which I remember colouring books and
instructive toys but no religion whatsoever.
Many years later, when the elderly Rev. Peabody and his wife retired,
they sold everything they owned and moved to rural Bolivia to spend the
rest of their lives trying to teach and feed poor rural children and
their families. And that was their story.
> Personally, I tried to read an English translation, but didn't get
> past about page ten. That seems to be about par for holy books for
> me.
The key to reading the Tanakh (the Old Testament) is to prepare to skip
great gobs that are just peculiar wastes of time, such as all the
begats, and read it in the framing of ancient politics, as if you were
reading about the Wars of the Roses. And of course there is obvious and
less-obvious mythology lying and pretending to be history, but you can
read all that tall-tale gibberish and just think 'This is mythology,
less accessible than Edith Hamilton, but also less grim and terse than
the Eddas and less alien than Hesiod.' There is some fine writing, such
as the tales of King Saul and King David. The history is suspect and
sometimes outright fraudulent, e.g., the invasion of Canaan and the 40
years in Sinai and escape from Egypt, none of which happened and are
pure literary fantasy. Even the _Iliad_ is better founded in fact.
But you don't read it as history. You read it as politics and
commentary on the human condition.
It helps to adopt the (imperfect) framing used for the Tanakh by Jewish
tradition, which divides it (the 'Old Testament') into three parts.
(1) Torah (law), the first five books. Of course it's not just the 613
commandments to the Jews from God, but that's the concept applied. (2)
Navi'im (prophets). These are the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.,
social critics of several stages of the (claimed) history, and a meaty
source of insight into character and society. (3) Ketuvim (holy
writings). This is the grab-bag of Everything Else, stuff like the Book
of Esther, a bloody-minded fairy tale set in Persia.
For the New Testmament, the main attraction is the four Gospels, which
comprise the three 'synoptic' ones, the ones that are in close agreement
about the life and teachings of Jesus, and then the outlier, the Gospel
of John, from an author who spent way too much time warping his mind on
Greek mystery cults and tried to overlay that on a biography of Jesus.
Following that, you have many books largely concerned with the annoying
and somewhat retrograde street-politician figure Saul of Tarsus (yclept
'Saint Paul'), the guy who inherited leadership of early Christianity
when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and Christianity's incumbent
(Judiasm-oriented) leadership along with it. Saul transformed
Christianty away from Judiasm, intuiting that he needed to broaden its
appeal, which paved the way for Emperor Constantine later to use it as a
unifying principle for his east-leaning Roman Empire. Saul is also
where much of Christianity's misogyny came from (or started and was
perpetuated). An Israeli friend called him 'a one-eyed Jew who couldn't
get laid', which is about the size of it. ISTR that if the book has
'Epistle' (letter) in its title, it's in almost every case Saul writing
to somewhere to speak in either a selling-his-religion role or writing
to other church functionaries to tell them what to do. (I'm perhaps a
bit vague on Saul/Paul's epistles because he struck me as repulsive in
his ways of thinking.)
And, as with the Tanakh (Old Testament) there is the grab-bag of stuff,
some of which will cause you much WTFery, such as the Book of the
Revelation of Saint John [of Patmos], which is like a terrible B-movie
horror film directed by someone on magic mushrooms. (One theory is that
it's mostly political allegory, avoiding using contemporary real names
of powerful people so the author would not be killed.)
> Shakespeare I had no problem with because it's mostly cross-dressing
> and fart jokes. The comedies, anyway. The tragedies and histories
> never interested me much.
They are worthwhile. And all of Shakespeare matters because a huge
amount of the vocabulary and expressions of modern English come directly
from his words. Seriously.
Quoting Mike Hewitt (mikeh(a)electroteach.com):
> Just to show that I, at least, am reading this discussion:
>
> I have some understanding of both(?) points of view and while I
>
> don't live in USA I can see some of the issues raised if only
> through the eyes
>
> of the style of some of the TV programs that we receive here in
> Melbourne, Aus.
My own parallax on this matter was having been raised, first as a
heathen in California, then during formative years studying in the
British government school in Hong Kong, a very Church of England place,
and having Lutheran relative and Catholic (and Jewish) friends. And my
main teacher in Hong Kong was a very, very Presbyterian Scot.
So, I ended up having a good grounding in mainline, normal branches of
Christianity -- C of E, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Catholic, etc. -- when
in 1968 with an immense sensation of cultural dislocation I landed back
in the USA and studied this preposterous and now-alien place as if I
were a 10-year-old anthropologist. And, my point is, you can recognise
the main themes of Christianity in all of those, plus (non-Southern)
Baptists, non-Holy-Roller Methodists, Quakers, and many more.
IMO, where the budding young heathen anthropoligist will be driven to
'WTF? Why is this called Christianity?' is when the young lad
encounters Southern Baptists and such lot. Or Mormons, though that
should go without saying. (Scientogists are equally crazy if not more
so, but only passively let people assume they're Christians because of
symbolism such as the cross-like symbol they use, but they actually
have no Christian roots at all.)
> Christianity seems to have been forked like early version of Linux
Well, yes, for well over 1000 years. You've heard of the Great Schism?
That was in 1054, and made the Protestant Revolt and the responding
Reformation look small by comparison.
Christianity forking is _old_. But the point is that the family is
mostly still close, from my outsider perspective. Faith versus works,
central authority versus decentralised, who's in charge, these are all
to my eye small points. Your Mileage May Differ.{tm}
> and now some
> Similar too for the use of English language : one point could be that
> when you read, or hear, sentences in 'english' you could take them
> literally or guess at the meaning and then you get shot for 'picking'
> wrongly.
http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/a-man-of-letters.html
Dear Editor:
Could you set me straight on apostrophe's? I can't keep its and it's
straight. All those possessive's and contractions are confusing.
Thank's.
Charle's Owen's
San Carlo's
Dear Charles:
Sure, no problem: It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its,
if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then, too, it's hers. It
isn't her's. It isn't our's, either. It's ours, and likewise yours and
theirs. See, it's handy to have a publication that knows its it's from
its its, isn't it?
