ISIS bulldozes ruins of ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, Ira

Post Reply New Topic

I don;t quite concur with this. Many of the most committed Christians have read the Bible cover to cover more than once. It is true that some people become atheists after reading the Bible all the way through and deciding it is not for them. However, huge numbers of Christians have been able to read every chapter in the Bible and discover how individual sections of the Bible apply to their lives even without the application being on a word by word basis.

You are right that when you read all of the Bible that literalist interpretations of it fall apart. But the vast majority of Christians already knew that simply based on a fundamental understanding of Genesis, among other chapters.

But don't understand the moderates either. If we know that Genesis and the Noah story never happened, then why trust that the rest of the book really happened?

That's the fallacy of applying the modern mind set to ancient tribal stories.

The origins of the Genesis stories come from the oral traditions before writing, passed down through the generations for reasons other than literal truth. Historicity wasn't as important as spiritual truths. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 contain 2 different creation stories, compiled together side-by-side. (e.g. In the first story, man was created last. In the second story, man was created before all the beasts etc.)

But to answer your query more directly, most non-literal moderates don't know the theology I mentioned, yet they see such stories as metaphors and excuse them as poetry. It's a similar outcome, though less clear.

I find that investment and the need to believe will make people accept just about anything, including flying saucers and conspiracy theories. There's some personal experience here, as my own investment in belief was very hard to let go of.

The Old Testament is one messed up place to be.

It would be easy if everything it said was objectively true - it's not.
It would be easy if it were just an antiquated and outdated model of history that fell apart under later inspection - it's not.

There's all kinds of crazy gematria woven through the thing. So many huge symbolic references that are both profound and accurate if read in their proper context, just that both the Levite and the Primate kept the right kind of glasses for themselves. This stuff started coming back around in the late renaissance with people like Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg, blossomed great transcendentalism boom of the 19th and early 20th century - ie. Levi, Papus, the Golden Dawn and it's diaspora organizations, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, etc.. So much of what's called western occultism has little to do with weird people finding weird things to do with their time and a lot to do with people whose minds just couldn't turn off about the big issues of the bible.

I'm presently studying that viewpoint (particularly Rosicrucian/Golden Dawn) and it's huge, its abstract, and I still don't know if I feel comfortable claiming that I can really do the topic justice. I'd just say there are quite a few people, years ahead of me, who locked this area down very tight. All I can suggest is reading it for yourself.

Looking at this topic, I guess it's easy to see why it went off-topic so easily. What IS did was just plain idiocy, and no amount of discussion can mitigate that.

When it comes to religion, I find a lot of irrational thoughts and acts are legitimized under the umbrella of "faith."

The sad thing about what I said last:

The term 'catholic' for the Catholic church - meaning universal - isn't too far from the truth. From Lutheranism and Anglicanism outward to Methodism, Adventism, Pentacostalism, Baptism and Anabaptism, etc. it seems like it started with the Catholic church's pariticular angulation and just ran farther afield, largely for reason Narrator mentioned; in the Reformation these were people raised Catholic, trying to read the bible with Catholic conditioning, and correct what didn't jive based on Catholic logic as it had been taught to them. What they had might have removed some of the wrinkles in the logic but it simply became a derivative abstraction of the original thing.

The exalted figure of Mary's one of the huge secrets where the Catholic church just won't let on - she's Isis. You have God the Father, you have Goddess the Mother - they're the male and female faces of a God that's ultimately androgyne. You have the communion of saints that are all the little stars and replace the demigods of the pagan world. Your seven Elohim....geez.....Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon - pick what ever group of pagan gods you want and you'll find seven of their primary deities allocated to the 'seven planets'. Kabbalah/Qabalah is the step-up/step-down converter for polytheism to monotheism as the Tree of Life breaks one God out into 10 aspects - Androgyne, Father, and Mother as the highest trinity - the Macroprosopus - from which the seven planets hang down, Saturn doubling as both the Mother and the first in the string (the Mother giving shape to the primal force or Logos), that gives nine spheres - the bottom being Earth as we know it both on one level the planet earth itself and on the other physicality as we know it.
Christ is Tiphareth - he's the balancing principle, he's the V of the YHVH (Y is Father, H is Mother, V is Son, H is daughter - ie. Earth) and thus, as the bible would suggest, a lower or more imminent iteration of a higher principle - ie. the primal Yod, the Hermet of the tarot, the Logos of John.

So, underneath a very brittle and arthritic literalism that people have been getting put to death for all these years there's been a very soupy and abstract layer that most people in our Aristotelian/Cartesian culture wouldn't feel comfortable with unless they were on some really good doses of LSD. The trouble is it's all there, it's just - as I said - a hell of a thing to wade through and I couldn't imagine most people ever having the patience unless they didn't have the internal pressures already there to put in that kind of shlepping; for better or worse I find myself in that number.

All that said I think you can understand why I'd suggest that Protestantism just ran away with the Catholic church's mistakes and amplified them.

But if the stories are metaphors, then why does it follow (according to many believers) that the miracles and supernatural things in the Bible really happened? If Noah's Flood never happened, then why believe in the Ressurrection? And if the Ressurrection never happend the whole story falls apart. Why follow this messiah if his miracles are "metaphors" for something else? Is him being the Son of God also a metaphor and not real? That is my problem with cherry-picking bits of Holy Books. If their creation story is complete nonsense, then why believe anything else in the book? In the case of Islam, either the Quran is really the literal Word of God, or it isn't. There is no middle ground here. Of course I prefer religious people to be non-fundies, but I feel like I understand the fundies better. I fear if I became religious I would become a fundie because The Book is either true or not true. I got pretty turned off from reading the Old Testament, it was so far fetched I did not have the suspension of disbelief to read it in a serious way, instead I just leafed through to find the most outrageous passages about the punishments for adulterers and other crazy stuff.

I understand the reason for metaphors in Shakespeare stories. When MacBeth murders the king and can't wash the blood off of his hands, the purpose of that within story is that he has now become a murderer and a traitor. But in the case of a religious text it claims to be a factual account of what happened. In that case you would have to believe the king had supernatural blood that could not be washed off, or that traitors lose the ability to wash themselves. When doing that you completely miss the point of the story.
When reading The Lord of the Rings people can suspend disbelief for the metaphores, the phrophecies, the supernatural things that happen. But everyone knows it is not real.

The Egyptian Pyramids will only be in danger if the Muslim Brotherhood takes control again.

The loss of Nimrud is beyond tragic.

ISIL are so focusing on the annihilation of anything related to the Assyrians lately, the flesh and the stone.

That says it all, vote for morons who are not democratic anyway, morons get deposed by undemocratic tyrannical military government, that was there before.

The EU even gave a crapload of money to the Morsi government "to promote democracy". Aside from being a waste of money, I'm curious how much support a move like that has among the general population in Europe. I think most people would rather see the Muslim Brotherhood go away. Not sure why we are always supporting ideological enemies.

These savages are destroying the buildings of their ancestors. These people should be fortunate they have so much archeology left, the peoples of Northern Europe mostly built in wood so it's all rotted away by now. They are now also destroying another city, Hatra in Iraq, which was founded as part of the Seleucid Empire but it was one of the more important Arab cities outside of the Arabian peninsula. Pretty soon there will be nothing left, why are these people allowed to do this? Why are they not dead yet?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/07/isis-destroy-hatra_n_6822106.html?cps=gravity_2684_-4498184869117706949

Realistically I don't think the pyramids are in any immediate danger but one has to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood was the legitimate democratic expression of the Egyptian people, their revolution has came full circle and now we once again welcome the military strongman who slaughters his civilian population in Field Marshal Sisi. I don't think it bodes well for the future and I don't see their being an end in sight to the instability in Libya or the Sinai let alone Iraq and Syria. I think it is far more likely that this instability will spread than be totally quelled.

ISIS has also started demolition of the ruins of the ancient city of Hatra

Unfortunately - that was the will of the people.

It's just a basket case region right now, or at least that which hasn't either emigrated or been executed.

I ninja'd you on Hatra
But I don't think it is real democracy when people choose between a semi-secular dictator and the Muslim Brotherhood (crazy fundies). Since there is no real civil society in Egypt, no real organized opposition besides the Muslim Brotherhood, and many people are illiterate, Egypt simply does not have the fundamentals to have a real democracy. They need to fix these things first.

We have to understand that democracy does not necessarily entail they will adhere to the interests and values of the United States or its liberal western allies, these people just have different priorities than you or I do. Our mistake is trying to force our views and our belief system on these people, you can't fit them into the same box. We can't force a religious Islamic people to believe the same as we do, it does not matter the amount of education and money we throw at it. Its foolish for the US to use force overtly or covertly to spread "democracy", often that's more of a cover for our real intentions but when we do this these people will turn around blame the US for their problems and they have a point. What we should do is lead by example, we shouldn't conquer and overthrow. Change has to happen organically.

So we are entering a second Dark Age?
What I hear a lot from my fellow Dutch people is "build a wall around the Middle-east, let the Muslims kill each other" but I don't think that is the ethical thing to do.
These people need to build a civil society and have a secular, sexual revolution just like the West had. As long as they don't do that they will always be "a little people, a silly people" to quote Lawrence of Arabia.
And yes, a whole bunch of fundies just need killing, they are not going to come around.