Well, Vinnie…thanks for your explanation. I am glad that you liked the late George Carlin (heart failure , 2008). I know that I heard him in the late 1970s, liked it, but never went out of my way to listen further.
I don’t know Trippy…and maybe neither do you … but he was inquiring about the validity of this statement below:
“Religion convinced the world that there’s an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do. And there’s 10 things he doesn’t want you to do or else you’ll to to a burning place with a lake of fire until the end of eternity. But he loves you! …And he needs money! He’s all powerful, but he can’t handle money!” -George Carlin
Trippy said “I wonder if this guy had the right idea or if he doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
Really? Maybe George is good for a laugh, as you say. But is he worth taking seriously? And why was he that upset by the Ten Commandments? All ten of them? If we want to lock up the violators of some of those commandments, does it seen unfair to think God also has strong feelings about these things?
Does it really make sense to think that people the world over who believe in God (“an invisible man in the sky who watches everything you do”) do so because of some indoctrination they heard in a large building on the weekend in their youth? It does not explain me then… Yes, Carlin did not like the part about a burning place for all eternity. It is troubling, but even Jesus believed it.
I don’t know what Trippy thinks, but I think he was looking for some conversation on Carlin’s remark. And you said:
The Bible being nonsense is obvious. People are predisposed to literalism and read scripture through a lens of concordism as if it fell from heaven and reflects God’s divine perspective on every issue. When read in this manner, as an encyclopedia of theological facts, a lot of scripture fits into the heading of “BS” to use your terminology. Kangaroos and penguins swimming across vast oceans, tens of thousands of miles, to board an impossibly gigan
It’s your thoughts, of course. But evidently, fundamentalism is not just on the right. If the Bible were as way off in la-la-land as you said, then you would not have people like the Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim saying things like "“One can well say that the Old Testament reports with unrivalled excellence and thoroughness on the period following the eighth century BC and throws light in varying degrees of reliability on certain events of the preceding three or four centuries …In this respect, the Bible contains remarks that are far more revealing and exact than, for example, the travelogue of Herodotus on Babylonia …” etc., from Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization.
I do recall reading 19th century commentators snickering in print about the very idea of lions in dens…and a man named Belshazzar…and then archaeologists excavating in the area of ancient Assyria/Babylonia found that (gasp!) they actually did keep animals in dens in those days!..and Belshazzar’s name turned up on some other historical document or other.
There’s more than this, of course, and yes there are plenty of things for people to discuss and endlessly debate – as happens on this site (lots of flood stories around the world, btw, and many have some similar features–just for example) . But don’t forget, the biblical text is a founding document of Western civilization, evidently has *some * historical credibility (maintained that the universe had a beginning when others said it did not, etc). and has inspired people to promote various social reforms, education, charities, found hospitals, oppose slavery and abortion, and etc. Hard to see that in a text as befuddled as you describe it.
As I said, fundamentalism is not just on the right.
You did explain yourself as adhering to “Jesus and the incarnation is my hermeneutic.” And my question was then – a few blogs back – and now: what hermeneutic if the source of your hermeneutic is a nest of nonsense? How do you even believe in an incarnation? God is not who and what we want Him to be all the time. If He were…then He really IS an imaginary being of our own making, and the only hermeneutic is in your head (which might be different from the hermeneutic of Jesus and the incarnation in the head of the guy across the street from you). That’s not reality. That’s just fantasy — wanting God to be Who you think He is.
God either is – on His terms, not ours – or He really is not. And He definitely is not Who we want Him to be all the time. And neither is Jesus. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me.” A tough statement in some quarters. Jesus was and is loving and compassionate. But He could be and say tough things. And that is from the perspective that the gospels record reasonably well at least SOME of what He said or taught. You on the other hand seem to have problems with even that. But still…you find a hermeneutic of Jesus and His incarnation?
Just wondering