In response to this list.
Not to completely miss the point of the post (I'm ignoring the point; it's different), but as someone who actually studies the Bible, I have a lot of trouble taking this article seriously. Pointing out how ridiculous a lot of the Bible is? That's a noble end, and something that people have been doing basically since we had a Bible to point at (it's where we get the Rabbinic tradition of the Midrash, and the Kabbalah [and from that, Hasidic Judaism], and a lot of post-Biblical Christian commentary), and frankly, believers and non-believers alike should get in on the fun. We have way too many people setting the Bible up as The One Cornerstone of Western Civilization without reading it first, and I don't care if you want to rip it to shreds by pointing out the rampant ridiculousness — at least you're reading it.
But that being said, it starts with the inaccuracies in the first example. Elisha was the prophet who summoned holy bears, not Elijah. Moreover, if you wanted to show Biblical immorality and irrelevance through a rape story, it'd be better for your argument to go with the story of King David's virgin daughter, Tamar: not only does her brother Amnon rape her, but the Jonadab (the Jonah Hill to Amnon's Michael Cera) helps him set the rape up and her reward for struggling and being violated? Exile to the house of their other brother, Absalom.
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE! Unspoken but tacit in the story (at least in the translations I've read) is Amnon's assumption that, because Tamar is beautiful, she caused him to fall in love and, thus, rape her. Now, the text doesn't treat her rape as a good act, let alone a remotely excusable one... but by not calling out this assumption, it leaves it open for rape apologists and victim-blamers to come in and take Amnon's side, especially when Tamar tries to save herself with the compromise of having their father, the king, let them get married legally. (Their father, by the way, does jack shit nothing to punish Amnon for this.)
BUT WAIT. THERE'S STILL MORE! So, Tamar goes to Absalom's house, which means that Absalom must be a pretty good guy, right? …Well, yes, kind of. But he also says to her, "Has that Amnon, your brother, been with you? Be quiet for now, my sister; he is your brother. Don’t take this thing to heart." So, uhm. You know, pardon my projecting of my 21st century values onto the story, but exactly what kind of thing is that to tell your sister after she's just had her life ruined?
Oh, and in the end? The story of Tamar's rape is not only focused on the male experience, rather than Tamar's, but it's just used as a set up to Absalom's murder of Amnon and she ceases to be relevant as soon as she's living as a disgraced woman.
Yes, I am serious. YES, THIS IS IN THE BIBLE. If you're feeling really brave, check out Ezekiel 16 — it's even worse.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
“When something is firmly classed as anomalous, the outline of the set in which it is not a member is clarified.”
I'll get this out of the way: TL;DR: Kassie talks about the cultural importance of rituals and what they're supposed to mean, then ties it back to a thesis she has about how OCD is a pathological manifestation of the human condition.
Mary Douglas & Ron talking about her is supporting my thesis that those of us with OCD are just better at being human than everybody else. As Douglas (one of the founding authors of social/cultural anthropology) writes, every culture has some notion of cleanliness codes, and with them notions of certain things being pure or impure, good or un-good (I say un-good instead of bad, because "bad" has a moral implication that is not necessarily present in all of these distinctions), etc. In Judaism, you get the kosher laws and the emphasis on purity; in Hindu (this is from her work, not mine and I read it last night so I might be misremembering), animals are unclean, but because cows are special and sacred, their genitals can be used to remove a Brahmin's impurities; in most Western society, we have germ theory, whereby we define what's clean and not purportedly by what is "hygienic," ie, what has more or less germs than anything, what is more or less likely to make you sick or promote healthfulness, etc — but if you remove the presumption of sacredness out of all of these examples, you're left with a notion of what she calls "matter out of place."
Like, for example: if you put your shoes on the table, someone is going to go, "Don't put those there; they have germs on them." But let's say that you can theoretically remove all the germs from the shoes — you'll still get told, "Well, they still don't go on the table." Shoes are for wearing on your feet. Shoes go on the ground. Tables are for eating off of, and that means they need to be protected from things that transgress the boundary of "for eating off" vs. "not for eating off." Everyone has different rationale for what boundaries exist, why they exist, what they're doing and so on, but the boundaries are still there.
Things that cross these boundaries are often (at least in Western, Judeo-Christian society) called abominations, which has a negative valence because in the Torah (especially the Book of Leviticus), it's constantly repeated with regards to the various "Thou shalt nots" handed to the Hebrews, but the original Hebrew term, To'ebah does not have a negative valence like "abomination" does. In the words of Religious Tolerance.org: The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (circa 3rd century BCE) translated "to'ebah " into Greek as "bdelygma," which meant ritual impurity. If the writer(s) of Leviticus had wished to refer to a moral violation, a sin, he would have used the Hebrew word "zimah."
Furthermore: When "to'ebah" refers to the breaking of a ritual law it might be better translated "ritually improper," or "involves foreign religious cult practice." But neither of these sources get at the heart of the matter: examples of other terms when to'ebah is used include: Egyptians and Hebrews eating together (Genesis 43:32), eating aquatic animals that don't have fins or scales (Leviticus 11:10), women wearing men's clothes and vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5), and a woman returning to her first husband after taking a second (Deut. 24:4). The common factor in all of these things is that of mixing: Egyptians mixing their customs with Hebrews, eating things that are aquatic but aren't fish (especially lobsters, which are both aquatic and repheshim, or creeping things), defying prescribed gender roles, and trying to have two sets of marriage vows exist concurrently. Even pork not being kosher is like this: "pigs" to the ancient Hebrews would have been more like boars, which are both cloven hoofed beasts (ie, able to be domesticated, like cows and goats) and wild (ie, unsafe); because they are simultaneously both, they are anomalous and therefore, special, not to be eaten.
Or, to sum up, "abomination" as a term gets its negative valence because of mistranslations and how often the term to'ebah is repeated, when really, what it refers to in context, is anomalous things that can be simultaneously one thing and another. Vampires are actually a great example of what to'ebah means: regardless of your opinion on the psychology, philosophical ramifications, and morality of vampires, they are functionally alive, in that they move around, exhibit sentience, interact with the world, etc. …but are still also dead, in that they are reanimated corpses. to'ebah does not inherently have a positive or negative valence; the Levitical and Deuteronomical prohibitions against certain things as to'ebah simply means that part of the ancient Hebrew identity is founded in eschewing these things that cross boundaries, or establishing themselves as a people who have strict definitions for the things around them and who set apart the anomalies because they did not fall into those definitions. Douglas's thesis is that the prohibition on anomalous creatures and behaviors is meant as a way to give them special status; because they cross boundaries, they're too special for humans to eat or engage in flippantly, and recognizing this and following the prohibitions sets the Hebrews apart as being closer to God.
Fun fact: considering this, there is absolutely no basis for using your faith as an excuse to call homosexual activity immoral, or morally wrong. (This specifically refers to male homosexual activity; according to the Bible, lesbians don't exist and I think there's a Talmudic commentary that posits it might be possible for two women to sleep together, but also says that it's either so unlikely we don't need to think about it or that it's just not wrong.) Anyway, all to'ebah means for homosexual activity is that it crosses an established boundary, ie that men have sex with women and not with each other, and that it's improper for men to do so as with womankind, ie in the same way they would with women, ie in a way meant to procreate. You'd think it would go without saying that two cis-men (because physical sex and gender are the same thing in the ancient Hebrew conception thereof) can't have a baby together, so I think that the emphasis on it here is not meant to condemn the homosexual sex acts themselves as much as it is to say that they just shouldn't be used in place of sex that can produce a child. Which, you know, makes sense, considering the Hebrews are an oppressed tribal people that suffered a genocide in their recent memory around the time the narrative surrounding Leviticus took place, and were in exile, having been pretty decimated beforehand, when they started codifying these texts properly.
Okay, so back to rituals. The purpose of rituals — both religious (ie, prayer, sacrifice, etc.) and not (ie, hand washing) — Ron and Douglas argue, is then to present by way of repetitive behavior, an anodyne or a comfort, which reminds the self of its inherent selfness in the face of anomalous things, or any degree of change that makes one question one's identity. In other words, rituals remind you that you are yourself, even when outside stimuli challenge this assumption. In the context of groups, rituals reinforce group identity in the face of the outside world, ie, kosher laws being kept to remind people that they're Jewish, secret handshakes being used to identify members of the He Man No Girls Allowed Club, etc. and specifically in terms of social and religious groups, rituals are a way to return to group identity after encountering anomalies that challenge the established order.
OCD is an anxiety disorder typified by extremely ritualistic behavior that has no logical or rational explanation. Like, from personal experience: I cannot tell you WHY it gives me comfort to count things in fours, but it does. I separate my M&Ms into groups of four, I try to take bites that are multiples of four, and four and its multiples just give me comfort for no definable reason. Three and its multiples also do this, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the boundary discussion, OCD is a need to reassert the boundary between the self and the rest of the world, even when it isn't being challenged. If we argue that a fundamental part of the human experience is defining categories and boundaries, and trying to preserve our essential selfhood in the face of the chaos that arises when our assumptions about boundaries (especially re: binaries) are challenged, then OCD is an expanded, pathological version of these tendencies.
Again, in my personal experience, an aspect of my OCD relates to being constantly aware of the universe's fundamentally chaotic nature and trying to assert order over it in ways that make sense to me, even though I can't explain them to anyone else because of their inherent irrationality. Religion and science (and by extension, statistics) operate in a similar way: life is chaotic and threatening and inscrutable; religious systems of thought give their adherents a way to think of the world that's less terrifying, and science as we currently understand it is a post-Enlightenment manifestation of the same tendency, which relies on defining some kind of law in the chaos and predicting what is likely to happen based on our objective, observable experiences. Every person has some way of using a system of thought, whether or not it's religion, and OCD is a similar thing... only it doesn't make sense, even to the people who suffer from it, just as our different systems of thought will eventually crumble under the scrutiny of an assumption that everything must at its core be infallibly logical when facing examination.
This is a really existential take on everything, and I don't think I'd have the chance of coming to any of my conclusions if I hadn't read Absurdism, Camus, and Sartre for various conference projects beforehand. But basically, if the human condition is one wherein we constantly seek to define the chaos around us, and to define who we are by mapping out our relationship to the chaos by way of establishing prohibitions and rituals, then OCD is this human behavior taken to an extreme degree, coupled with an uncomfortable recognition of the inherent meaninglessness of how we operate as a species. We who have the so-called disorder have, in the terms put forth above, very sensitive notions of the boundary between ourselves and the rest of existence, as well as an easily agitated notion of order vs. chaos, and regardless of the fact that our repetitive, ritualistic behaviors are inexplicable beyond a purely sensory level (ie, "it makes me feel better"; "things are wrong and this puts them right," etc), they do what everyone tries to do in the world: they remind us that despite the outside input, we're still ourselves.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into things.
(On a personal note, some cases of Asperger's [like mine] also manifest with this ritualistic behavior, but I'm not really read up on what, if anything, differentiates the two experiences.)
Mary Douglas & Ron talking about her is supporting my thesis that those of us with OCD are just better at being human than everybody else. As Douglas (one of the founding authors of social/cultural anthropology) writes, every culture has some notion of cleanliness codes, and with them notions of certain things being pure or impure, good or un-good (I say un-good instead of bad, because "bad" has a moral implication that is not necessarily present in all of these distinctions), etc. In Judaism, you get the kosher laws and the emphasis on purity; in Hindu (this is from her work, not mine and I read it last night so I might be misremembering), animals are unclean, but because cows are special and sacred, their genitals can be used to remove a Brahmin's impurities; in most Western society, we have germ theory, whereby we define what's clean and not purportedly by what is "hygienic," ie, what has more or less germs than anything, what is more or less likely to make you sick or promote healthfulness, etc — but if you remove the presumption of sacredness out of all of these examples, you're left with a notion of what she calls "matter out of place."
Like, for example: if you put your shoes on the table, someone is going to go, "Don't put those there; they have germs on them." But let's say that you can theoretically remove all the germs from the shoes — you'll still get told, "Well, they still don't go on the table." Shoes are for wearing on your feet. Shoes go on the ground. Tables are for eating off of, and that means they need to be protected from things that transgress the boundary of "for eating off" vs. "not for eating off." Everyone has different rationale for what boundaries exist, why they exist, what they're doing and so on, but the boundaries are still there.
Things that cross these boundaries are often (at least in Western, Judeo-Christian society) called abominations, which has a negative valence because in the Torah (especially the Book of Leviticus), it's constantly repeated with regards to the various "Thou shalt nots" handed to the Hebrews, but the original Hebrew term, To'ebah does not have a negative valence like "abomination" does. In the words of Religious Tolerance.org: The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (circa 3rd century BCE) translated "to'ebah " into Greek as "bdelygma," which meant ritual impurity. If the writer(s) of Leviticus had wished to refer to a moral violation, a sin, he would have used the Hebrew word "zimah."
Furthermore: When "to'ebah" refers to the breaking of a ritual law it might be better translated "ritually improper," or "involves foreign religious cult practice." But neither of these sources get at the heart of the matter: examples of other terms when to'ebah is used include: Egyptians and Hebrews eating together (Genesis 43:32), eating aquatic animals that don't have fins or scales (Leviticus 11:10), women wearing men's clothes and vice versa (Deuteronomy 22:5), and a woman returning to her first husband after taking a second (Deut. 24:4). The common factor in all of these things is that of mixing: Egyptians mixing their customs with Hebrews, eating things that are aquatic but aren't fish (especially lobsters, which are both aquatic and repheshim, or creeping things), defying prescribed gender roles, and trying to have two sets of marriage vows exist concurrently. Even pork not being kosher is like this: "pigs" to the ancient Hebrews would have been more like boars, which are both cloven hoofed beasts (ie, able to be domesticated, like cows and goats) and wild (ie, unsafe); because they are simultaneously both, they are anomalous and therefore, special, not to be eaten.
Or, to sum up, "abomination" as a term gets its negative valence because of mistranslations and how often the term to'ebah is repeated, when really, what it refers to in context, is anomalous things that can be simultaneously one thing and another. Vampires are actually a great example of what to'ebah means: regardless of your opinion on the psychology, philosophical ramifications, and morality of vampires, they are functionally alive, in that they move around, exhibit sentience, interact with the world, etc. …but are still also dead, in that they are reanimated corpses. to'ebah does not inherently have a positive or negative valence; the Levitical and Deuteronomical prohibitions against certain things as to'ebah simply means that part of the ancient Hebrew identity is founded in eschewing these things that cross boundaries, or establishing themselves as a people who have strict definitions for the things around them and who set apart the anomalies because they did not fall into those definitions. Douglas's thesis is that the prohibition on anomalous creatures and behaviors is meant as a way to give them special status; because they cross boundaries, they're too special for humans to eat or engage in flippantly, and recognizing this and following the prohibitions sets the Hebrews apart as being closer to God.
Fun fact: considering this, there is absolutely no basis for using your faith as an excuse to call homosexual activity immoral, or morally wrong. (This specifically refers to male homosexual activity; according to the Bible, lesbians don't exist and I think there's a Talmudic commentary that posits it might be possible for two women to sleep together, but also says that it's either so unlikely we don't need to think about it or that it's just not wrong.) Anyway, all to'ebah means for homosexual activity is that it crosses an established boundary, ie that men have sex with women and not with each other, and that it's improper for men to do so as with womankind, ie in the same way they would with women, ie in a way meant to procreate. You'd think it would go without saying that two cis-men (because physical sex and gender are the same thing in the ancient Hebrew conception thereof) can't have a baby together, so I think that the emphasis on it here is not meant to condemn the homosexual sex acts themselves as much as it is to say that they just shouldn't be used in place of sex that can produce a child. Which, you know, makes sense, considering the Hebrews are an oppressed tribal people that suffered a genocide in their recent memory around the time the narrative surrounding Leviticus took place, and were in exile, having been pretty decimated beforehand, when they started codifying these texts properly.
Okay, so back to rituals. The purpose of rituals — both religious (ie, prayer, sacrifice, etc.) and not (ie, hand washing) — Ron and Douglas argue, is then to present by way of repetitive behavior, an anodyne or a comfort, which reminds the self of its inherent selfness in the face of anomalous things, or any degree of change that makes one question one's identity. In other words, rituals remind you that you are yourself, even when outside stimuli challenge this assumption. In the context of groups, rituals reinforce group identity in the face of the outside world, ie, kosher laws being kept to remind people that they're Jewish, secret handshakes being used to identify members of the He Man No Girls Allowed Club, etc. and specifically in terms of social and religious groups, rituals are a way to return to group identity after encountering anomalies that challenge the established order.
OCD is an anxiety disorder typified by extremely ritualistic behavior that has no logical or rational explanation. Like, from personal experience: I cannot tell you WHY it gives me comfort to count things in fours, but it does. I separate my M&Ms into groups of four, I try to take bites that are multiples of four, and four and its multiples just give me comfort for no definable reason. Three and its multiples also do this, but to a lesser extent. In terms of the boundary discussion, OCD is a need to reassert the boundary between the self and the rest of the world, even when it isn't being challenged. If we argue that a fundamental part of the human experience is defining categories and boundaries, and trying to preserve our essential selfhood in the face of the chaos that arises when our assumptions about boundaries (especially re: binaries) are challenged, then OCD is an expanded, pathological version of these tendencies.
Again, in my personal experience, an aspect of my OCD relates to being constantly aware of the universe's fundamentally chaotic nature and trying to assert order over it in ways that make sense to me, even though I can't explain them to anyone else because of their inherent irrationality. Religion and science (and by extension, statistics) operate in a similar way: life is chaotic and threatening and inscrutable; religious systems of thought give their adherents a way to think of the world that's less terrifying, and science as we currently understand it is a post-Enlightenment manifestation of the same tendency, which relies on defining some kind of law in the chaos and predicting what is likely to happen based on our objective, observable experiences. Every person has some way of using a system of thought, whether or not it's religion, and OCD is a similar thing... only it doesn't make sense, even to the people who suffer from it, just as our different systems of thought will eventually crumble under the scrutiny of an assumption that everything must at its core be infallibly logical when facing examination.
This is a really existential take on everything, and I don't think I'd have the chance of coming to any of my conclusions if I hadn't read Absurdism, Camus, and Sartre for various conference projects beforehand. But basically, if the human condition is one wherein we constantly seek to define the chaos around us, and to define who we are by mapping out our relationship to the chaos by way of establishing prohibitions and rituals, then OCD is this human behavior taken to an extreme degree, coupled with an uncomfortable recognition of the inherent meaninglessness of how we operate as a species. We who have the so-called disorder have, in the terms put forth above, very sensitive notions of the boundary between ourselves and the rest of existence, as well as an easily agitated notion of order vs. chaos, and regardless of the fact that our repetitive, ritualistic behaviors are inexplicable beyond a purely sensory level (ie, "it makes me feel better"; "things are wrong and this puts them right," etc), they do what everyone tries to do in the world: they remind us that despite the outside input, we're still ourselves.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into things.
(On a personal note, some cases of Asperger's [like mine] also manifest with this ritualistic behavior, but I'm not really read up on what, if anything, differentiates the two experiences.)
Women! Am I Right?: Tiamat, Eve, Pandora, and the Terrifying Vagina... I mean, Chamber of Secrets.
Or: On the issue of mankind’s place in the world and Western society’s misogynistic creation myths.
OR: a somewhat disorganized tirade about gender, definitions, and mankind's quest to find a place in the world.
Humans have trouble agreeing on things and, barring myriad series of events right out of various science-fiction novels, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes, our children’s, or their children’s. True, we can find some kind of common ground on some issues, but our species has an alarming tendency to take that and find some way or another to go right back to taking issue with one another. Take religion, for example: even people who find accord on certain notions, such as a certain Galilean prophet being the religious leader with the best idea of how things worked, find other things to quibble over, such as whether the best way to follow his teachings is through the use of elaborate, symbolic ceremonies or through faith alone. Ultimately, the different religions all answer some need or set of needs in their adherents, but different people come to the similar texts or ideas with different backgrounds, needs, and ways of projecting onto what they’re reading (or hearing, or having explained to them via pictograph, etc.), and so matters that some people think have little importance end up being the focus of someone else’s entire theology.
Likewise, the point of religion has been a constant source of trouble for humans attempting to discuss it without resorting to violence, name-calling, or so on. There is an observable need in Homo sapiens that religion caters to — a desire to find some way to place ourselves in the universe, to give ourselves some tangible role in our global (often cosmic) systems. It’s a basic question: why are we here? What does our existence mean, if anything? Not simple questions, but asking them distinguishes us from our simian cousins and, in myriad ways, they’ve been essential to human existence since someone had the bright idea to start writing things down. Even atheists and agnostics rely on finding something else to adhere to, even if this predominantly happens because they meet with resistance from the various theists; the explanation that our world and its inhabitants are most likely a fantastic accident writ large, which exist on the planet lucky enough to be at a comfortable distance from our sun, evolved through a combination of luck and natural selection favoring certain traits over others, and might be alone in the universe (though it’s too soon to tell) but are certainly inconsequential to its larger designs because our lifespans (let’s take the Biblical/Dantean route and assume seventy years) aren’t even blips on the grand timeline of universal history.
In the paraphrased words of nigh on god-like superhuman, Doctor Manhattan1: the entire human race could cease existence, our Earth could become devoid of all life, and the universe wouldn’t notice; everything outside our world would continue on as it always has because Creation — the whole of Creation — has so many galaxies with so many stars, so many processes both large and small occurring regardless of whether or not humanity blows itself into oblivion (or is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass), certain political forces can’t agree over which “rights” are or are not guaranteed to all human beings by the fact that they exist and what the limits to those rights are, or Johnny takes Suzy to the Valentine’s Day dance. On a cosmic level, all of these events have the same amount of importance and that is none at all.2
If one wanted to get politically correct about it, then one could argue that the founding texts of our various religions, both living and dead, are all distressingly Terracentric. Projecting Western ideas onto other cultures without consideration for their traditions and modes of thinking is ethnocentric, as is assuming that our stories will have some universal truth that carries over into all cultures.3 “An ideological focus on males and men,”4 especially in topics where the male perspective is not the focus of the discussion is androcentric, and the corollary with females and women is gynocentric; related terms include phallocentric (as in Sigmund Freud and his infamous cigar) and anthropocentric (ideologically focusing on human beings, potentially but not necessarily including a belief in human superiority and/or humanity as the most significant aspects of reality).5 In the same vein, then, consider that we’re examining a system of belief (out of many) which posits that some supernatural entity — of varying degrees of power and ability to be comprehended by his/her/its human adherents — chooses to ignore the great, unfathomable expanse of the universe in order to focus on one mid-sized planet, in one star system, in one galaxy out of a potentially infinite number, often focusing on one particular group of people above all others… then isn’t it fair to call these modes of thinking Terracentric, or “ideologically focused on Earth and earthlings, to the potential exclusion of other issues”?
Well, yes. You can read it that way — but doing so really only serves to make my point for me.
Read the rest here.
_____________________________________________
1: Of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1987 graphic novel, Watchmen.
2: In all due academic fairness: as all things, these preceding interpretations of scientific observations can be spun however the reader wants to see them spun. For example, if there are so many processes going on, and so much random chance involved in human intercourse and conception, and each human being still exists as an individual, with the chances of someone ever being exactly like them being so infinitesimally small as to be statistically negligible— despite the differences that exist between us because of cultural influences, similar experience, and so on — then is that not potentially evidence for the existence of some design, and thus a designer, whether or not it’s “God,” as zie is commonly understood.
3: I’m specifically referring to anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of discussing Hamlet with the Tiv people of West Africa, seen here: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html
4: definition from the Wikitionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism
5: I want to note, for the sake of humor, that I’d first put “homocentric” in place of “anthropocentric.” Considering the Latinate proper name for human beings, Homo sapiens, I’d hoped that the term for “ideologically focused on human beings” would be a simple combination of prefix and suffix. Technically, it was, but it turns out that “homocentric” means “sharing a common center.” I learned something today.
OR: a somewhat disorganized tirade about gender, definitions, and mankind's quest to find a place in the world.
Humans have trouble agreeing on things and, barring myriad series of events right out of various science-fiction novels, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes, our children’s, or their children’s. True, we can find some kind of common ground on some issues, but our species has an alarming tendency to take that and find some way or another to go right back to taking issue with one another. Take religion, for example: even people who find accord on certain notions, such as a certain Galilean prophet being the religious leader with the best idea of how things worked, find other things to quibble over, such as whether the best way to follow his teachings is through the use of elaborate, symbolic ceremonies or through faith alone. Ultimately, the different religions all answer some need or set of needs in their adherents, but different people come to the similar texts or ideas with different backgrounds, needs, and ways of projecting onto what they’re reading (or hearing, or having explained to them via pictograph, etc.), and so matters that some people think have little importance end up being the focus of someone else’s entire theology.
Likewise, the point of religion has been a constant source of trouble for humans attempting to discuss it without resorting to violence, name-calling, or so on. There is an observable need in Homo sapiens that religion caters to — a desire to find some way to place ourselves in the universe, to give ourselves some tangible role in our global (often cosmic) systems. It’s a basic question: why are we here? What does our existence mean, if anything? Not simple questions, but asking them distinguishes us from our simian cousins and, in myriad ways, they’ve been essential to human existence since someone had the bright idea to start writing things down. Even atheists and agnostics rely on finding something else to adhere to, even if this predominantly happens because they meet with resistance from the various theists; the explanation that our world and its inhabitants are most likely a fantastic accident writ large, which exist on the planet lucky enough to be at a comfortable distance from our sun, evolved through a combination of luck and natural selection favoring certain traits over others, and might be alone in the universe (though it’s too soon to tell) but are certainly inconsequential to its larger designs because our lifespans (let’s take the Biblical/Dantean route and assume seventy years) aren’t even blips on the grand timeline of universal history.
In the paraphrased words of nigh on god-like superhuman, Doctor Manhattan1: the entire human race could cease existence, our Earth could become devoid of all life, and the universe wouldn’t notice; everything outside our world would continue on as it always has because Creation — the whole of Creation — has so many galaxies with so many stars, so many processes both large and small occurring regardless of whether or not humanity blows itself into oblivion (or is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass), certain political forces can’t agree over which “rights” are or are not guaranteed to all human beings by the fact that they exist and what the limits to those rights are, or Johnny takes Suzy to the Valentine’s Day dance. On a cosmic level, all of these events have the same amount of importance and that is none at all.2
If one wanted to get politically correct about it, then one could argue that the founding texts of our various religions, both living and dead, are all distressingly Terracentric. Projecting Western ideas onto other cultures without consideration for their traditions and modes of thinking is ethnocentric, as is assuming that our stories will have some universal truth that carries over into all cultures.3 “An ideological focus on males and men,”4 especially in topics where the male perspective is not the focus of the discussion is androcentric, and the corollary with females and women is gynocentric; related terms include phallocentric (as in Sigmund Freud and his infamous cigar) and anthropocentric (ideologically focusing on human beings, potentially but not necessarily including a belief in human superiority and/or humanity as the most significant aspects of reality).5 In the same vein, then, consider that we’re examining a system of belief (out of many) which posits that some supernatural entity — of varying degrees of power and ability to be comprehended by his/her/its human adherents — chooses to ignore the great, unfathomable expanse of the universe in order to focus on one mid-sized planet, in one star system, in one galaxy out of a potentially infinite number, often focusing on one particular group of people above all others… then isn’t it fair to call these modes of thinking Terracentric, or “ideologically focused on Earth and earthlings, to the potential exclusion of other issues”?
Well, yes. You can read it that way — but doing so really only serves to make my point for me.
Read the rest here.
_____________________________________________
1: Of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1987 graphic novel, Watchmen.
2: In all due academic fairness: as all things, these preceding interpretations of scientific observations can be spun however the reader wants to see them spun. For example, if there are so many processes going on, and so much random chance involved in human intercourse and conception, and each human being still exists as an individual, with the chances of someone ever being exactly like them being so infinitesimally small as to be statistically negligible— despite the differences that exist between us because of cultural influences, similar experience, and so on — then is that not potentially evidence for the existence of some design, and thus a designer, whether or not it’s “God,” as zie is commonly understood.
3: I’m specifically referring to anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of discussing Hamlet with the Tiv people of West Africa, seen here: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html
4: definition from the Wikitionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism
5: I want to note, for the sake of humor, that I’d first put “homocentric” in place of “anthropocentric.” Considering the Latinate proper name for human beings, Homo sapiens, I’d hoped that the term for “ideologically focused on human beings” would be a simple combination of prefix and suffix. Technically, it was, but it turns out that “homocentric” means “sharing a common center.” I learned something today.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
tumblr repost 3: "because it's Sunday and I skipped church."
Okay, okay. AS A GENERAL RULE, I'm not going to post content that isn't mine unless I want to discuss it in depth, but this comic speaks for itself, I think.
tumblr repost 2: religion in supernatural's apocalypse, pt. 1.
(via fuckyeahsupernaturalsecrets)
Okay. I could write a dissertation on this secret and everything that's wrong with it, but the TL;DR summary version goes like this: the Antichrist and the Rapture are not in the Book of Revelation. To be fair, neither are the designations of the Four Horsemen and their colors that Kripke and co. came up with; I forget the exact sources, but everything that led up to the way Gaiman and Pratchett wrote the Horsepersons in Good Omens (which, all things considered, was probably a big influence on the Supernatural Apocalypse) came from post-Biblical interpretation of Revelation.
And the Rapture? That came from way post-Biblical (like, early/mid-eighteenth century post-Biblical) interpretation of the Gospels (Matthew 24:36—41 and John 14:2—3) and the letters of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:49–55, Philippians 3:20-21, 1 Thessalonians 4:15–17, and 2 Thessalonians 2:1-7). The primary source for belief in a "rapture" comes from 1 Thessalonians, which reads, in the King James Version:
For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
See, it's called the Rapture, because the word used for "seized up" in the Vulgate Bible was a form of the Latin verb rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum — see, raptum there? It's the participial form of this verb, and it means "snatched up." Raptum, Rapture — isn't etymology fun?
Anyway: as with the Rapture, the Bible says absolutely nothing about a singular antichrist, using those terms. 2 Thessalonians references a "Man of Sin" (or Lawlessness, depending on your translation), but he's only equated with the idea of "The Antichrist," again, in post-Biblical interpretation. The only times in the entire Bible where the term "antichrist" crops up are in 1st and 2nd John, and on each of those five occasions, it refers not to some guy who's going to come during the Apocalypse of Revelation, but rather several people, contemporaries of St John, who refused to acknowledge certain "truths"/believe what he did about Jesus.
So, yeah. Everything you thought you knew about how the Apocalypse is supposed to go? …Most of that is total crap, as far as the actual Bible is concerned. Some guys, writing long after Saints John and Paul*, made it up based on how they decided to read certain passages. And since Kripke, Sera, Ben, et al only read the Book of Revelation, that's why the Rapture and the Antichrist, as such, aren't in the show or aren't taking the role you want them to take.**
Basically, from a religious studies student who loves Supernatural — before you criticize how Kripke et al handled the Apocalypse, please, please, PLEASE: read a goddamn Bible.
*: The debate over the authorship of the Johannine and Pauline texts is very long and very complicated; suffice to say, historians don't believe that John and Paul wrote all of them.
**: I actually liked the way that Show handled Jesse — one of many possible Antichrists, born of a demon-possessed mother, potentially but not essentially part of the Apocalypse, believes in childhood superstitions instead of religion. They hit all the high points without breaking the show (which would've been all too easily, since they cribbed notes from Good Omens again and gave him reality-warping powers).
tumblr repost 1: It doesn't matter how many times I run afoul of them…
Evangelical Christians who use the Book of Leviticus to justify their homophobic tirades continually surprise me, especially considering how four of the seven "clobber passages" are from the New Testament. It's just like… they have so much material in their own section of the Bible (which has suffered terribly from translation issues, but that aside…), and they keep coming back to: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is an abomination."
Now… I don't have any statistics backing me up on this, but I'm pretty sure that statement from Leviticus is the most frequently quoted Biblical condemnation of homosexuality in America, at least. And every time that I see it, I have this constant, increasingly pressing urge to just find some Evangelical who will talk to me and ask them to their face if they've actually read the book that they claim to put so much stock in. Because insofar as I can tell, they haven't.
I mean, first of all, there's how Jesus himself says, on a few occasions, that the Mosaic laws and customs are unnecessary, or else contradicts them:
Okay, so. Let's get it out there that Jesus's relationship to the Mosaic law is at best very hotly debated amongst religious scholars and leaders. This passage can get spun any way you want it — which, har har, is true of literally everything in the Bible — but in the presented context, it goes like this: Jesus and his apostles violate the Mosaic law; the priests object; Jesus points out that they are being hypocritical. He isn't rebuking them for not following the Mosaic laws; he's rebuking them for trying to have things two ways… in order to prove that his disciples are in the right for violating the Mosaic law in the first place.
Moving right along:
This passage (which cuts off right before jumping into the Lord's Prayer) is sort of two-fold: on the one hand, Jesus instructs his audience not to be like the Pagans; but, on the other, many of the things he tells them to do also fall in violation of the laws of the Torah. In Leviticus we see many examples of the first precept, that of rebuking sinners (something of which Evangelicals are more than a little bit fond): rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. (19:17). And then there's:
…which Jesus deliberately contradicts early in this passage. And besides that, he deems the Mosaic laws and their to be spiritually insincere: his objection to his followers obeying them is that, in his view, they lend themselves too well to publicly purporting to be a faithful follower of God with insincere, self-serving, etc. motives.
What was that they said about history and those who don't learn from it, again?
This one is less overt than the previous passages I've quoted, but it's still in violation of pretty much every regulation in the Torah about honoring your father and your mother, the importance of familial relationships, etc. …and the only way to truly follow Jesus is to ignore those, abandon your family (the sum of your earthly cares, physical distraction masked as spiritual concern) entirely.
And then there's Saint Paul of Tarsus on the relevancy of Jewish customs to Christians:
Okay, so, some added context here: the Peter whom suffers Paul's rebuke here is, indeed, Saint Peter, born Simon, victim of the first pun when Jesus declared, "thou art Peter, and on this rock, I build my church." (See, it's funny, because naming someone Peter is basically naming him "rocky." Oh, Yeshua. You're a true master of witticism. This is about as funny as me telling Dean Winchester to fuck himself when, ahahaha, THERE ARE TWO OF HIM. I digress.)
So, uh… about that. Saint Peter was the disciple who, in the Bible, is closest to Jesus — true, he denies Jesus three times, and I could make a case for Judas (who I really believe was closest to JC), but it's through that failing that he comes to understand the importance of what he needs to do as the rock on which Jesus built the church. He's the one who carries the movement forward after Jesus is dead. On the other hand, Saint Paul is basically a rantypants little upstart, who neither met Jesus while he was alive nor spoke to him personally, and was even directly opposed to the workings of early Christians. Before his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus and subsequent conversion, Saint Paul was one of the people helping persecute Christians; as much as he established himself as the evangelist to everyone with ears to listen, this is the equivalent of Sarah Palin publicly rebuking John McCain and telling him that he doesn't really understand what the Republican party stands for.
…Or, even more in keeping with how shocking this would have been to their contemporary Christians: this would be like Glenn Beck telling Thomas Jefferson that he doesn't understand what the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are really saying.
But the thing is: so much of contemporary Christian theology is founded on the letters of Paul to the various Whoevers of his world that we can't ignore this passage, or any other one, as being Very Important. And here? Paul just outright says that Christians have no use for the Jewish laws and that following them when redemption is supposed to come through Christ alone is spiritually disingenuous.
So, you know. There's that.
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE:
Hey, guys! You know all those tedious, irritating laws that Moses said to follow? Secretly, they're just a form of slavery and Jesus died to make it so that we don't have to follow them. And if you do still follow them while calling yourself a Christian, then you're just not in Christ's good graces because you're trying to get salvation through something other than faith.
See, the especially interesting thing, to me, about Paul's objections to following Jewish law and customs is that Paul is the source of all but one of the four non-Old Testament "clobber passages" that I linked above. The source of his homophobic comments all seems to be due to issues of translation, and even if they weren't, then his letters are still being appropriated to condemn homosexuality based on a trend of adherence to he Mosaic laws that he outright condemned. And yet… people continue to use Paul and Leviticus side-by-side, without considering this fact, and I do not understand why.
It's not that I object to Christianity, or to Christians, or to people's rights to say whatever they damn well please. This is, after all, America, and as a writer, I'll protect to the death someone else's right to free speech, even if I disagree with what they have to say, because they're human beings and if I get that right, then they get it too. What I'd like to see more of, though, as a religious scholar-in-training and as someone who has a great deal of respect for and personal attachment to the Bible, is some more internal consistency in how it's applied by different groups to the modern world.
EXAMPLE 1: if you're going to use the letters of Paul to condemn homosexuality, then you don't get to use Leviticus too, because maybe the Hebrew Bible is divinely inspired, but the founding father of your faith says to exclude it from your worship practices — and stop telling the homosexuals that they're damned because you have to remember what Jesus said about loving your enemies. The whole 'rebuke the sinner' thing comes from the Old Testament, first, and then from the writings of later religious reformers who definitely never spoke to Jesus personally, and since Paul says that Jesus is the highest authority (which, being a Christian, you nominally agree with)… Get cracking on that tolerance and acceptance.
EXAMPLE 2: On the other hand, if you want to use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality because it's divinely inspired and the New Testament and the entire Christian movement itself wouldn't exist without the foundations of the Old Testament, then toss Paul out the window as a crackpot… oh, and get going on honoring the other 613 mitzvot set forward in the Torah. Circumcise your sons, learn the Torah (THAT MEANS ACTUALLY READING IT, GUYS) and teach it, read the Shema prayer every night and every morning, stop eating shellfish and cheeseburgers and meat pasta with alfredo sauce (they're mixing meat and dairy, which is not allowed), don't hold grudges (yes, even against the gays), give more charity to the poor (but don't make a big show out of it), start helping every stray on the side of the road (Deut. 22:4: If you see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it. Help him get it to its feet.), start celebrating Passover, Shavu'ot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot… and, well. The list goes on.
Oh, and the best part? If you try to mix and match from these examples (like, say, using Paul and Leviticus to condemn gay people), then you're being a massive hypocrite and, as we saw in the three Jesus passages, that means that Jesus would say you're being a very bad Christian.
tl;dr version: people who don't read the book their faith is based on make me do this:
gif courtesy of ~fuckyeahladygaga.
YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS AND STILL BE RIGHTEOUS, GUYS. THAT IS CALLED HYPOCRISY, AND IT IS NOT WHAT JESUS WOULD HAVE DONE.
Now… I don't have any statistics backing me up on this, but I'm pretty sure that statement from Leviticus is the most frequently quoted Biblical condemnation of homosexuality in America, at least. And every time that I see it, I have this constant, increasingly pressing urge to just find some Evangelical who will talk to me and ask them to their face if they've actually read the book that they claim to put so much stock in. Because insofar as I can tell, they haven't.
I mean, first of all, there's how Jesus himself says, on a few occasions, that the Mosaic laws and customs are unnecessary, or else contradicts them:
Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don't wash their hands before they eat!"
Jesus replied, "And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, 'Honor your father and mother' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.' But you say that if a man says to his father or mother, 'Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is a gift devoted to God,' he is not to 'honor his father' with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
"'These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.'"
Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen and understand. What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean.'"
Matthew 15:1—11 (NIV).
Okay, so. Let's get it out there that Jesus's relationship to the Mosaic law is at best very hotly debated amongst religious scholars and leaders. This passage can get spun any way you want it — which, har har, is true of literally everything in the Bible — but in the presented context, it goes like this: Jesus and his apostles violate the Mosaic law; the priests object; Jesus points out that they are being hypocritical. He isn't rebuking them for not following the Mosaic laws; he's rebuking them for trying to have things two ways… in order to prove that his disciples are in the right for violating the Mosaic law in the first place.
Moving right along:
"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
"So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Matthew 5:38—6:6 (NIV).
This passage (which cuts off right before jumping into the Lord's Prayer) is sort of two-fold: on the one hand, Jesus instructs his audience not to be like the Pagans; but, on the other, many of the things he tells them to do also fall in violation of the laws of the Torah. In Leviticus we see many examples of the first precept, that of rebuking sinners (something of which Evangelicals are more than a little bit fond): rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. (19:17). And then there's:
If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. Anyone who takes the life of someone's animal must make restitution—life for life. If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born.
Leviticus 24:17—22 (NIV).
…which Jesus deliberately contradicts early in this passage. And besides that, he deems the Mosaic laws and their to be spiritually insincere: his objection to his followers obeying them is that, in his view, they lend themselves too well to publicly purporting to be a faithful follower of God with insincere, self-serving, etc. motives.
What was that they said about history and those who don't learn from it, again?
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26 (NIV).
This one is less overt than the previous passages I've quoted, but it's still in violation of pretty much every regulation in the Torah about honoring your father and your mother, the importance of familial relationships, etc. …and the only way to truly follow Jesus is to ignore those, abandon your family (the sum of your earthly cares, physical distraction masked as spiritual concern) entirely.
And then there's Saint Paul of Tarsus on the relevancy of Jewish customs to Christians:
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs?
"We who are Jews by birth and not 'Gentile sinners' know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.
Galatians, 2:11—16 (NIV).
Okay, so, some added context here: the Peter whom suffers Paul's rebuke here is, indeed, Saint Peter, born Simon, victim of the first pun when Jesus declared, "thou art Peter, and on this rock, I build my church." (See, it's funny, because naming someone Peter is basically naming him "rocky." Oh, Yeshua. You're a true master of witticism. This is about as funny as me telling Dean Winchester to fuck himself when, ahahaha, THERE ARE TWO OF HIM. I digress.)
So, uh… about that. Saint Peter was the disciple who, in the Bible, is closest to Jesus — true, he denies Jesus three times, and I could make a case for Judas (who I really believe was closest to JC), but it's through that failing that he comes to understand the importance of what he needs to do as the rock on which Jesus built the church. He's the one who carries the movement forward after Jesus is dead. On the other hand, Saint Paul is basically a rantypants little upstart, who neither met Jesus while he was alive nor spoke to him personally, and was even directly opposed to the workings of early Christians. Before his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus and subsequent conversion, Saint Paul was one of the people helping persecute Christians; as much as he established himself as the evangelist to everyone with ears to listen, this is the equivalent of Sarah Palin publicly rebuking John McCain and telling him that he doesn't really understand what the Republican party stands for.
…Or, even more in keeping with how shocking this would have been to their contemporary Christians: this would be like Glenn Beck telling Thomas Jefferson that he doesn't understand what the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are really saying.
But the thing is: so much of contemporary Christian theology is founded on the letters of Paul to the various Whoevers of his world that we can't ignore this passage, or any other one, as being Very Important. And here? Paul just outright says that Christians have no use for the Jewish laws and that following them when redemption is supposed to come through Christ alone is spiritually disingenuous.
So, you know. There's that.
BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE:
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
Galatians, 5:1—6 (NIV).
Hey, guys! You know all those tedious, irritating laws that Moses said to follow? Secretly, they're just a form of slavery and Jesus died to make it so that we don't have to follow them. And if you do still follow them while calling yourself a Christian, then you're just not in Christ's good graces because you're trying to get salvation through something other than faith.
The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.
Hebrews 7:18—19 (NIV).
See, the especially interesting thing, to me, about Paul's objections to following Jewish law and customs is that Paul is the source of all but one of the four non-Old Testament "clobber passages" that I linked above. The source of his homophobic comments all seems to be due to issues of translation, and even if they weren't, then his letters are still being appropriated to condemn homosexuality based on a trend of adherence to he Mosaic laws that he outright condemned. And yet… people continue to use Paul and Leviticus side-by-side, without considering this fact, and I do not understand why.
It's not that I object to Christianity, or to Christians, or to people's rights to say whatever they damn well please. This is, after all, America, and as a writer, I'll protect to the death someone else's right to free speech, even if I disagree with what they have to say, because they're human beings and if I get that right, then they get it too. What I'd like to see more of, though, as a religious scholar-in-training and as someone who has a great deal of respect for and personal attachment to the Bible, is some more internal consistency in how it's applied by different groups to the modern world.
EXAMPLE 1: if you're going to use the letters of Paul to condemn homosexuality, then you don't get to use Leviticus too, because maybe the Hebrew Bible is divinely inspired, but the founding father of your faith says to exclude it from your worship practices — and stop telling the homosexuals that they're damned because you have to remember what Jesus said about loving your enemies. The whole 'rebuke the sinner' thing comes from the Old Testament, first, and then from the writings of later religious reformers who definitely never spoke to Jesus personally, and since Paul says that Jesus is the highest authority (which, being a Christian, you nominally agree with)… Get cracking on that tolerance and acceptance.
EXAMPLE 2: On the other hand, if you want to use Leviticus to condemn homosexuality because it's divinely inspired and the New Testament and the entire Christian movement itself wouldn't exist without the foundations of the Old Testament, then toss Paul out the window as a crackpot… oh, and get going on honoring the other 613 mitzvot set forward in the Torah. Circumcise your sons, learn the Torah (THAT MEANS ACTUALLY READING IT, GUYS) and teach it, read the Shema prayer every night and every morning, stop eating shellfish and cheeseburgers and meat pasta with alfredo sauce (they're mixing meat and dairy, which is not allowed), don't hold grudges (yes, even against the gays), give more charity to the poor (but don't make a big show out of it), start helping every stray on the side of the road (Deut. 22:4: If you see your brother's donkey or his ox fallen on the road, do not ignore it. Help him get it to its feet.), start celebrating Passover, Shavu'ot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot… and, well. The list goes on.
Oh, and the best part? If you try to mix and match from these examples (like, say, using Paul and Leviticus to condemn gay people), then you're being a massive hypocrite and, as we saw in the three Jesus passages, that means that Jesus would say you're being a very bad Christian.
tl;dr version: people who don't read the book their faith is based on make me do this:
gif courtesy of ~fuckyeahladygaga.
YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS AND STILL BE RIGHTEOUS, GUYS. THAT IS CALLED HYPOCRISY, AND IT IS NOT WHAT JESUS WOULD HAVE DONE.
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