- luv-talk - luv.asn.au

Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Rick Moen 16 Mar '18

16 Mar '18

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.

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Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Trent W. Buck 16 Mar '18

16 Mar '18

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.

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Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Rick Moen 16 Mar '18

16 Mar '18

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.

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Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Rick Moen 15 Mar '18

15 Mar '18

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?

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Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Rick Moen 15 Mar '18

15 Mar '18

Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck(a)gmail.com) > Nitpick: eu-angelos-izo (good-message-er) requires neither persuasion > nor religion; Pheidippides was an evangelist for the victory at > Marathon. Sure, OK. I do know my Herodotus, Trent, but I believe the meaning of the Greek word _as adopted into English_ is as I indicated. (I am not a Greek scholar, so I bow to you about my questionable translation. ;-> ) > Granted your explanation holds for sense #2, but you were talking > about the root :-) Fair cop. ;-> > >> Christians are INSTRUCTED to evangelise, [...] > > [...] > > I had a quick look for a biblical mandate, but the only cite I could > find was Carey quoting an instruction from Jesus to his apostles > (first-order followers). Maybe the commutativity is implicit? I was wondering about that, myself!

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Re: [luv-talk] English [was: Reading the Bible]
by Trent W. Buck 15 Mar '18

15 Mar '18

Mike Hewitt via luv-talk wrote: > 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. Common mistakes, which caused me to re-read > paragraphs are : singular plural confusion when addressing groups {a > group may contain one or many elements but it is a single item} > subject and object are often not clear : The cat sat on the mat. It > is wet. => so what is wet? cat or mat? FYI, that also has tense confusion. You typically want one of The cat sat on the mat. It was wet. The cat sits on the mat. It is wet. Re plural agreement, an error I often encounter is A bag of words are a method for ... which should be A bag of words is a method for ... ...because the copula plurality must agree with "bag of words" (i.e. "bag"), not "words". By far the most common source of problems seems to be adpositions, though, because they usually don't have any logic to them, and they're different in different languages, so you simply have to memorize. For example, I rode IN a car I rode ON a bus Is the difference because historically, car(riages) were enclosed and (omni)buses were not? :-) In English we "dream about X", in Spanish we "dream with X", &c &c

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Re: [luv-talk] Reading the Bible
by Rick Moen 15 Mar '18

15 Mar '18

Quoting russell(a)coker.com.au (russell(a)coker.com.au) > On Wednesday, 14 March 2018 10:45:34 PM AEDT Trent W. Buck wrote: > > Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote: > > > https://www.politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-forbes-why-white > > > -evangelicalism-is-so-cruel/ This article explains why most Americans > > > don't read the Bible. > > > > AFAICT, it doesn't explain any such thing. Can you clarify your assertion? > > Because the Bible doesn't support racism. Russell Coker Hand-Waving Lazy Mostly-Non-Sequiturs, number 34 in an ongoing series. Here, I think I can help you out: You might mean, Americans who still embrace slavery-descended racism, not exclusively but characteristically living in the former Confederacy, have at least a cognitive-dissonance reason to avoid reading the Bible and thus encountering the intellectual tradition of real (as opposed to evangelical) Christianity, in that they would encounter the Biblical (New Testament) admonishments towards helping the afflicted and poor, being called to serve and protect the least among us, etc., etc. In this narrative, one would note, as did the article's author, that even the Baptist Church in the 1800s United States split right down the middle, sometimes violently, over support of versus opposition towards slavery, with the mainline Baptists becoming (in some cases) heroically opposed to slavery, and the Southern Baptists being apologists, a sorry legacy the latter have never entirely repudiated and continues to poison them and other evangelicals. There are, however, lots of problems with this wowzer-like narrative. One of the biggest is that it's completely erroneous to claim that the Bible doesn't support racism. Moreover, it's also erroneous to claim that it doesn't support _slavery_. A couple of thousands of years of Biblical exegisis have found _plenty_ of support in the Bible for both. Admittedly, the lion's share of that is found by parsing passages in the Old Testament rather than the New, but you _did_, sir, say 'Bible', not Gospels -- with the result that your argument disintegrates upon even cursory examination. My mother's family were involved in this very matter, peripherally, because they were in the Kansas Territory (and then the State of Kansas), that was first an early battleground over slavery around 1850 and then among the most militantly anti-Confederacy states on the Union side of the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. As Kansans, some of my mother's folk conducted disputations with South-leaning apologists trying to justify slavery. And, it turned out, one of the cornerstones of the opposition's stance was its contention that slavery is glorified and institutionalised in the Bible. And they were not wrong. Seriously. It starts right away with Abraham, deemed in Christianity (and Judaism) the 'father of faith'. Genesis 21:9-10 shows him owning slaves, and God has no objection whatsoever. Genesis 9:25-28 has Ham's son Canaan being made a slave to his brothers. Again, this is accepted as natural. In Exodus 20:10 and 20:17, commonly called the Ten Commandments, slavery is mentioned in passing by God twice. Obviously, the grumpy guy in the clouds has no objection to it. Hey, how about the New Testament? Wasn't the coming of the Gospel supposed to replace the Law of Moses and renew it? OK, then it's problematic that in Ephesians 6:5-8, Saul of Tarsus ('Saint Paul') commands slaves to obey their masters. Then, in Philemon 12-16, that same asshole, Saul of Tarsus yclept 'Saint Paul' writes to say he's returning a runaway slave named Philemon to his master. But you're convinced that the Bible doesn't support racism. {boggle} Maybe, Russell, instead of saying the problem is that Americans don't read the Bible, you should concentrate on that beam in your eye, rather than trying to point to motes in the eyes of my countrymen. (That's a reference from Matthew 7:3-5, in case you are too Bible-ignorant to understand my sarcasm.) > My observation is that non-Christians know the Bible better than Christians. We do indeed. But the rest of what you said is dead wrong, and you really ought to know better _or_, perhaps, cease pontificating about matters you know nothing whatsoever about.

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Fw: 50th Steamfest all long weekend
by David E Payne 12 Mar '18

12 Mar '18

The Melbourne Steam Traction Engine Club's http://www.melbournesteam.com.au/steamfest.html is on again (50th time) this long weekend at 1200 Ferntree Gully Rd, Scoresby, Melbourne. According to another part of the website, the museum is also open for viewing each Sat & Sun 11am-4pm except in the Christmas - New Year period. And engines are operated on rundays on the last Sunday of each month (except december).

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Kali Linux
by Rohan McLeod 09 Mar '18

09 Mar '18

For the subset of those who read my emails AND have an interest in that other OS :-) https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/03/05/kali-linux-for-wsl/ regards Rohan McLeod

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Event of interest
by Mark Trickett 07 Mar '18

07 Mar '18

Hello All, I will be at the Lost Trades Fair at the Kyneton racecourse this coming weekend. There will be a lot of demonstrators of various older crafts and skills, many still relevant in many ways. I will be demonstrating handspinning, taking raw fleece, alpaca on this occasion, in the past sheep wool, and producing a yarn that can be turned into a fabric, by knitting, crocheting, or weaving. If any of you do get there, I will be using a steel framed spinning wheel with a bicycle wheel that my father made for me about 45 years ago. There will be jewellers, a printer with a hand cranked press, stonemasons, armorers, and I remember a fletcher who made arrows. Regards, Mark Trickett

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