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If anybody has time to talk, please do!
how literally do “biblical” literal-ists take their creation stories?
This is not really a question so much as a catalyst for discussion..
why is it here in a tao forum? because of contrast and the role of science in relation to the tao
(personally i would say that to pose science in the middle, “biblical” literalism is like heading bass ackwards ass backwards and taoism is psychic projection to be corroborated by objective science/scientific method in near future..
first point: to say “biblical” is weak in and of itself.. nearly every culture had it’s bible either written or spoken of one form or another. the vast untolds of which drift off into ancient times LONG before the Israelites, Jews were born as a people..
who were these people and what were their stories and how seriously did they take them.. is a story a story useful for moral/artistic value or is it accepted as truth?
second point: first stop King James versus the Vatican, second stop King James as Freemason, third stop, Knights Templar in conjunction with Islam as collaborates with stellar observatories, fourth stop the origin of “jewish holy books” and the origins of the specific genesis creation story as a later add on.. also see side stops of galileo vs the vatican, tyndale vs vatican and the origins content of the vulgate
third point, and really the crux of the whole post..
does anyone REALLY believe the creation story in the beginning of Genesis.. because if they do, in my opinion, they are no longer the same level of organism..
it takes about two seconds to realize that you would never have this story without the book or oral traditions being passed down to you and to question… the king james translation, in what appears to be a comic like goof, throws “and then he created the stars also”, after the earth as aplanet with life is gifted with the creation of the sun and moon..
so we apparently have:
1) creation of the earth
2) creation of life
3) creation of sun/moon
4) creation of the starsNow this seems naturally and intuitively wrong to me since i was old enough to read listen, so it came as no surprise that science/hubble/astro-physics, rock ages, fossil records, human anthropology/archeology/dinosaur records backed up my own suspicions..
so does anyone, anywhere REALLY think this account is true, or do they somehow just say it for some reason, and if so, why?
or is it all just one big farce..
you have no idea how many times i have said:
i really have no idea if there is a god, i doubt it, i have no reason to think jesus walked on water, resurrected, or was born of a virgin, it sounds like superhero making based around a real prophet, but i do think the message spoken by Jesus is wonderful and worthy of a place in history
and that many cultures such as Hindu/Buddhist/Confusion chose the golden rule, even formulated it LONG before a jew named Jesus..
alas,
forth point: growing up in other cultures, such as hindu india where ages of hundreds of thousands of years and innumerable planets are thought to exist..
it’s still not science, but hey, it’s that..
so what about it? what is going on with all of this? What about science aimed at Tao creation?
other ancient civilizations chose the golden rule for one reason or another..
other civilizations had gods and creation stories,but don’t we have ample evidence that many of these people saw these as simple tales, stories, their value coming from their meaning not from their factual basis.. weren’t they right there at the level of Santa Clause..?
well what about “Old Testament” creationalists.. what is going on with these people?
do they REALLY think the earth was created BEFORE the stars in the heavens?
or are they just faking it? does anyone have personal experience..?
If they do, what the beep is wrong with them?
… and since kabbalistic cosmogony is totally compatible with taoism therefore so is genesis 1. When you get to leviticus you are not talking about the same thing! But the bible is a very difficult document and much-edited IMHO.
The people would have indeed believed it was a ‘true story’ but the priesthood knew the actual facts of the universe as taoists do. Biblical literalists nowadays are the headless chicken, they are running around saying look at my iceberg but missing 9/10 of it. Yes they do in fact believe that planet earth appeared before the stars and they are petrified of believing otherwise for fear of going to hell! This is payback for all of those people who drummed that story into the world’s ear for so long.
These cosmogonies are all descriptions of the same thing but to get them you need experience of the thing described. This being lacking in most people, what can be done? They have their book and as far as they are concerned that’s that. They are so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
j
PS Good commentary on genesis as description of universe can be found on rawn clark’s site, http://www.abardoncompanion.com, but I forget where exactly!
Who’s to say that don’t have doubts at 2am when they can’t sleep, but my goodness, if we’re to believe them they believe it. I mean one just has to say it’s their honest mistake! Mind you reading the original hebrew can tease out some very interesting things, and then there’s Carlos Suares who is much more like it. But you are talking about bible belters here? They believe it because it says so and it’s the good book. You don’t believe the good book you ain’t got no sense.
There IS good stuff in there, but it’s lost in translation. Does it matter? The truth is still out there… ๐
i mean, have you directly asked them these things and had them come back with what i would call inane responses?
if so, what does this indicate to you about them?
would you say they are just born stupid and do not comprehend, much like a monkey in front of a mirror,
or are they a person just like you who thinks the same thing you do and lies/fake sit for manipulative reasons
With an actual fundamentalist I don’t think it’s possible to have a real conversation! Did you see Steven’s post with the youtube vid of the mad woman?
http://forum.healingdao.com/general/message/13868/
Some people need to believe what they need to believe. Many others are deserting the church and other such institutions in droves of course. There are more pagans in the hills of Europe than is suspected and always have been, but on creation stories this is a very specific question. Either you believe they are symbolic or you believe they are literally true. If you believe they are symbolic then there is hope for you because a symbol is a symbol *of* something else.
But a literalist/fundamentalist is someone who believes in the *literal* truth of (say) Genesis. I know few; I’ve talked to fewer; I’ve had a serious conversation about spirituality with none! What would there be to say?
What this ‘indicates’ to me is that these people build their life around the hope of heaven and jesus or whatever and they are scared of talking about anything else. I think a monkey in front of a mirror understands plenty more than them, anyway about being a monkey. Do I think they’re born stupid? I don’t make a rule about that. Some are born stupid, some achieve stupidity and some have stupidity thrust upon them.
Not to mention, I expect there are alot of very decent people who believe these things they aren’t all emotionally deranged like that woman! It’s a fuzzy thing. SOme people believe in the bible in a rather idle fashion, the way you might believe in washing behind the ears. But these people aren’t what I call fundamentalists. Fundamentalists believe what they believe rabidly and believe it’s evil to believe otherwise.
They’re certainly people just like me, this doesn’t mean they are lying but that they’ve been lied *to* IMHO. They are not earthed; they have no real faith; they need these things the way a baby needs mother.
Out of curiosity, why does it matter so much to you? They’ll never stop *you* doing what you gotta do! I mean I love the idea that, given the commonality of human experience, fundies will listen to reason, but I’m not about to start preaching to them! And I think the idea they are falsifying their beliefs is way way way off-base! How could they ‘think the same thing I do’, when the first article of my belief is that the truth can’t be believed?
Why worry so much about them? j
i guess, to put it this way,
when i wake up in the morning or fall asleep listening to people talk, i FEEL like there is a commonality of consciousness and perception and a feeling of simultaneity, like when everyone gets the same thing about something, almost like we all have the same general common sense inside..
but by about mid day, some of these same people have changed into, well, blasphemous infidels..
they claim the absurd, they profess the illiterate, they argue the inane
and even then it’s barely any of the above, it’s simply put an argument that barely even happens…
i talked to a freemason friend’s wife recently..
she said:
“oh *** doesn’t believe any of that, he’s an athiest”
“but i believe all of it…”
I said, well that’s funny, one of the lodges i went to said “you must believe in god”
and another, in direct contrapose said ” you must believe in separation of church and state”
i said, i don’t like the word belief, and i certainly have no evidence that god exists and never agreed to that lodges’s paperwork
I said, why would anyone believe these things, to say believe means you think it’s true.. i have never seen these things occur, i have no proof, they sound like “mythical” story making as fable or superhero..
she said “it’s just something you know in your heart”
well give me a break! perhaps joseph ben joshua did carry a genuine spirit, perhaps there is a divine intelligence, BUT to claim belief in a virgin birth and a resurrection are wishful thinking at best
furthermore to profess a six day creation as verbatim truth based upon a book you’ve never read is beyond ignorant, it’s flat out idiotic…
so what is it?
a genuine prophet framed with supernatural hogwash..
probably
but what about these followers?
are they really that stupid?
the problem is that these people have created a bullshit scenario of “oh you must accept him as king or go to hell, even if you are a buddha… if you deny him as king you are going to hell” then act like they are real people based on their hearts..
i am sorry, but if you think the universe is that selfish, patriarchal, gender biased, and monarchy based, then you are delusional
there is no principle to it..
if these christians said “love is the law” that wold be okay.. but they don’t
so what isup with them, are they just brainwashed chimps or are they similar souls just lying.. it’s a real headache
jesus taught love is the law..
and i said well buddha was around before jesus and many egyptians taught love as the law as well..
and they said, well they are cool.. that would be one thing..
“In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of ย or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”
The Exhibit:
http://www.monticello.org/library/exhibits/tjbible2007.htmlThe Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth by Thomas Jefferson
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefJesu.htmlThe Jefferson Bible Online:
http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/Buy a copy:
The story on Frontline, which also brought much to light concerning the War against Iraq
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html
I haven’t read it..
I have looked over it and read about it, and have thoroughly read the old and new testaments organized by King James..
as far as the idea goes, sounds great to me, i love the king james version aside from the phoof.. and personally felt there was a genuine white/clear light of the void spirit coming through
i am buying a copy
I wouldn’t go within ten thousand miles of anyone who says something like this:
>>We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of ย or, shall I say at once, of nonsense.<<
The list includes myself and would include Michael too for example. It's precisely the kind of limiting mindset I dislike, where people are not willing to talk about things because they aren't in the bible. And it seems Jefferson wants only the bible *he edited himself* to be discussable! That just makes it even more narrowminded to me.
Obviously I'm not a fan of the material anyhow, but it does sort of sound like Jefferson is closing off all discussion to me. You obviously don't think so?
jOrigen, a ‘church father’ and one of the most distinguished of these (3rd century AD): “What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first second and third days, in which the evening is named and the morning, were without Sun, Moon and Stars, and the first day without a heaven? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, like a husbandman? I believe every man must hold these things for images under which a certain sense lies concealed.”
Early Christians talked of ‘the gods’ just like pagans.
Is the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ not more practically interesting to those who use the methods of this website than those official four, containing such paragraphs as:
“When you make the two one, and when you make the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male be not male nor the female female, then you will enter the kingdom.”
… I find this much closer to what I am interested in than the four ‘official’ gospels! And the thing is talk of ‘male and female’, talk of Gnostics (Thomas being a gnostic gospel) etc. is dismissed out of hand by Jefferson as (I quote) nonsense. It’s easy to see what someone like him would make of Timothy Leary!
The early Christians were far from agreed as to what was cannon and what wasn’t. What eventually became cannon was the four gospels we have today, endorsed by a bloody roman emperor, literally interpreted as true (overruling the objections of fathers like Origen who snorts at literalism), and finally translated by King James to weld church and state into a political machine.
The pagan critic Celsus says the Christians “altered the original text of the gospels three or four times, or even more, with the intention of thus being able to destroy the arguments of their critics.” Modern scholarship agrees. Origen admitted no two ‘official’ gospel texts he had seen were alike. There was not this single monolithic thing called ‘Christianity’, that was a later invention and is still being invented. There certainly was not one single cannon.
By the middle of the second century the literalists were attacking the gnostics and their political connections were better. Gnostics did regard matter as evil but they still did encourage women priests. Literalist christians like Tertullian: ‘You [women] are the devil’s gateway.’ That became doctrine too, Origen already noting in his time that it would cause people never to see the truth behind the words from taking the words too literally. It’s this doctrine that modern literalists such as the angry woman in Steven’s vid have inherited.
To me the Jefferson bible is a part of that tradition, not only reducing wisdom to ‘that book’, but even picking out only the best bits and saying they are the real thing. Of alchemy, of magick, of spiritual science, spiritual art, nothing. Gnostics, male and female, etc. are all ‘nonsense’…. eesh I don’t like it!
๐ j
I find it to be supperfical to discuse logic or make these things into a debate. Can we help those we hate and judge. Teaching is an art that is developed over time. People do not like losing there heart, so smile to it and help give them what they need to regain it.
I think you are missing the value of it in contrast to the King James bible..
also, i have to argue the king james issue…
james was scottish and apparently part of the scottish rite masonry lineage..
the masons were descended from the knights of the temple of solomon who had themselves
been invaded in France by the pope..
the opes had killed many, including tyndale and others (burned them at the stake) for trying to create an english bible..
i think that tyndale’s and others bibles contradicted the go king created by the pope..
i have head that the king james would not be what it is today without the struggle between the vatican and britain.. he could only get away with so much..
also the templars were coordinated with the muslims for quite awhile as afr as i know including all the horrid battles with the vatican
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