Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

I thought I'd start a new thread where I'll compare the Bible and the Koran. First of all, I'll say something about my reasons for reading the Bible and the Koran.

I read the Bible because it seemed to me that Evangelical Christians, or at least some of them, were using the Bible to oppress women. An article in Time or Newsweek from the early 1980s claimed that Evangelicals were very serious about their demands that women must obey their husbands, because the Bible says they must. Also, according to this same article, Evangelicals discouraged married women from having a career outside their homes, and they very strongly discouraged women from divorcing their husbands. It seemed to me that Evangelicals were using the Bible to demand that women give their lives to fulfilling their husbands' needs while constantly denying their own, and that we were talking about very serious oppression of women in the name of God.

And I felt that I just had to know what the Bible actually said about women. So, in the summer of 1985, I sat down to read it.

Then in the late eighties I read someplace that the Koran claims that women haven't got souls. Women are like animals in that respect, unlike men who have souls and are true human beings. Could it possibly be true that the Koran said that women lacked souls? If it was true, then Islam was indeed an unspeakably horrible religion. I just had to read the Koran to find out what it said about women.

Reading the Bible and the Koran

Reading the Bible proved to be easy, because I was already so well acquainted with the larger picture and the overall story of the Old and the New Testament. Wherever I was in the Bible, I knew what came next, so to speak. It was like walking through a neighbourhood that my parents had driven me through, admittedly while breaking the speed limit, so many times. I just had to go much more slowly and discover so many more details when I walked, or rather read, on my own. Also, my own Bible has little summaries printed ahead of every chapter in it. Therefore, after reading the summaries I was able to skip certain chapters and still feel that I wasn't missing much – so, for example, was I able to skip chapters which primarily consisted of long lists of names and genealogies. I also decided against reading Psalms, and I paid very scant attention to Acts. The thing is that I always felt that I knew what it was I was skipping, and why.

By comparison, reading the Koran was very hard and very boring. I didn't know the overall story. I couldn't foresee where the narrative was taking me. I got lost in the details, in the repetitions and in all the solemn invocations. I couldn't remember what I had read the week before. Eventually I was bored out of my skull, and I gave up when I had read about two thirds of the pages. The next summer I tried again, with the same result. I read from the beginning and gave up when I had read two thirds of the pages.

I contacted a Professor at the theological institution of the University of Lund, close to Malmö, and asked him if I had missed something important about the Koran's view of women. He told me that I had read most of the important stuff.


General similarities and differences between the Bible and the Koran

I was extremely surprised that the Koran “sounded” and felt” so much like the Bible. I recognized the solemn kind of language from the Bible, for example. Of course I read it in Swedish, and I have no idea what it would have sounded like in its original ancient Arabic. (Muslims often claim that the Koran must not be translated, because only in its original language can its full meaning be understood.)

An intriguing difference between the Bible and the Koran is that the Bible is like a cacophony of voices. In the Old Testament, for example, there are at least sixteen different books describing the prophecies by sixteen different prophets from Isaiah to Malacchi, and most likely these sixteen books were written by sixteen different people, too. And then I haven't even counted Ecclesiastes, whose book is written from the first person perspective, so that Ecclesiastes speaks to us as “I”. And then there is Song of Solomon… and Psalms… and Job… and Esther… and Proverbs… and…

And in the New Testament, there are four Gospels, giving four different accounts of the life of Jesus, written by four different people. There are several letters from Paul, but there are also letters from Peter, James and John.

In the Koran, however, there is one voice speaking to us, monotonously, for 114 Suras (chapters) and, in my copy of the Koran, 485 pages. That is Muhammed's voice.

Interestingly, the Koran is absolutely chock full of stories about characters that we recognize from the Bible – Abraham, Joseph, Jesus and Mary, for example. On the other hand, all the stories that are told about these familiar characters are different from the stories that are told in the Bible. The story that I can remember about Jesus in the Koran is that Jesus was a prophet who started prophesying already when he, Jesus, was a little baby in his crib. Interestingly, the Koran says that Mary was in fact a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, but that doesn't mean that Jesus was the Son of God. Mary's virgin birth was just another miracle, no different from other miracles wrought by God. The Koran claims that Jesus was not the Son of God, “only” a prophet.

The Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, is a story about waiting for the Messiah. According to the New Testament Jesus has already arrived, but he needs to come once more so that the Kingdom of God can be fully realized. The Old Testament says that the Messiah will come when the Jews have become righteous, so that they deserve the Messiah. And then when the Messiah comes, he will build a righteous nation that will be the Kingdom of God on Earth, and that Kingdom will then extend to other nations as well. At least that is how I understand it.

The point is that both the Christians and the Jews are waiting for something. The world they live in is not perfect, and they are waiting for the Messiah to bring them that perfection.

The Muslims, however, don't seem to be waiting for a radical makeover of their society brought to them by God. No Messiah is expected. Perfection on Earth is something that the Muslims must create themselves, by making sure that everybody in their society lives according to the rules and laws of the Koran. However, even obeying the Koran is not enough, according to most Muslims traditions. That is because it is said that Muhammed made a lot of “oral prophecies” that he never wrote down, and in order to achieve societal perfection, everybody has to obey all those other rules as well. These other rules, thousands of them, were written down by other people and collected in other holy books. It is in these other holy books that you find highly controversial rules, such as the rule that girl children must be circumcised, i.e., sexually mutilated. Probably you also find the rule that women must cover their faces, not just their hair, in those other holy books that Muhammed definitely did not write down himself.

Is the Koran warlike? I didn't particularly ask myself that question as I read the Koran, because at that time Islam hadn't become widely associated with political violence and terrorism. Nevertheless, the way I remember it, the Koran often talks about the right of Muslims to take arms to defend themselves against those who threaten them. It never says that Muslims should attack other people who don't bother them.

We should perhaps remember that the Old Testament is very warlike and cruel in places, and the books of Judges and Joshua contain passages that can actually be described as small-scale genocide. There is nothing like that on the first two thirds of the pages of the Koran.

On the other hand, in the New Testament there is really nothing that truly justifies going to war at all.

Does the Koran say that women lack souls?

No!!! Absolutely not. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the Koran that suggests that women would be unworthy of going to Heaven, for example. On the contrary, the Koran is more eloquent than the Bible when it comes to making it clear that women have the same right as men to go to Heaven. For example, it says in the fourth Sura, verse 123 (I'm sorry I have to translate it into English myself from my own copy of the Koran):

Whoever does good deeds, whether they are men or women, and is of the true faith, they will go into Paradise and never suffer any injustice.

There are other verses too, which make it even clearer that paradise is open to women as well as to men. (But please don't ask me to find those verses.)

Are there female heroines in the Bible and in the Koran?

To me this question is particularly interesting, because I think this is one of the important differences between Christianity and Judaism on one hand and Islam on the other. Because there really are female heroines in the Bible. Of course, it depends on how you define the word “heroine”. There are several women in the Bible who are important because they bear important sons, but does that make them heroines? In my opinion it is impossible to build a non-sexist society around the notion that the only way a woman can be a heroine is by giving birth to one or more sons. Therefore I'm not going to say that Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth or even Mary were heroines, in spite of their important sons. If giving birth to sons is what it takes for women to be heroines, then I guess we can start offering women mass abortions of female fetuses right away and offer every woman the chance to be a heroine by giving birth to sons.

No, but there are other heroines in the Bible. There most certainly aren't many of them, but there are at least three: Deborah, Jael and Ruth. Deborah and Jael play extremely important roles when it comes to defeating the army of an enemy of the children of Israel in chapter four of the book of Judges. Ruth is another sort of woman. She is brave, warm-hearted and unconventional. She loves her mother-in-law, Naomi, and leaves her own country to follow Naomi back to Israel, when both these women have become widows. Then in Israel, she gains protection and security for both Naomi and herself by getting herself the husband that she and Naomi prefer. Ruth takes Naomi's advice and gets into her chosen man's bed to make him interested! I love it. I also love what Boaz, Ruth's chosen man, said when he first saw Ruth: "Whose young woman is this?" (Ruth 2:5) Well, surprise, Boaz! Ruth belonged to herself and made her own choices.

So as far as I can see, there are three women in the Bible (and all of them in the Old Testament) who make their own choices and who do the right thing by doing so. Three heroines are not a lot, but three is better than nothing. And there are no heroines like Deborah, Jael and Ruth either in the New Testament or in the Koran. As for Mary, all she really does is say yes to a decision that has apparently already been made by others.

I believe it is crucially important that there are heroines in the Bible, even though they are so few. Thanks to Deborah, Jael and Ruth, Christian and Jewish women can use the holy book of their religions to ask for the right to try to be heroines themselves, and to ask for the right to make their own decisions.

Is there obvious misogyny in the Bible and in the Koran?

There is definitely misogyny in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament. There are some horrible passages in Ezekiel and Isaiah that describe, in sadistic detail, the punishments that will befall sinful women. Ecclesiastes says that woman is more bitter than death (Ecclesiastes 7:26). And Exodus 22:18 demands that witches must be put to death. In view of that, I think it is no coincidence that the Christian world has seen witch hunts, where women were singled out as instruments of the Devil and were burnt at the stake. The Islamic world has not seen anything like that. And indeed, when I read the Koran, I found no obvious misogyny in it. There were no descriptions of the horrible evil of women, no gleeful descriptions of ghastly punishments of women, and no mention of witches.

There is not a lot of misogyny in the New Testament, but there is some, at least in the Book of Revelation, where the City of Rome is described in detail as a sinful, lustful woman.

What rights does the husband have over his wife, according to the Bible and the Koran?

This is another interesting point. The New Testament repeats four or five times that women must obey their husbands. On the other hand, nothing is said about what a husband is allowed to do to force his wife to obey.

The Koran says something rather scary in the fourth Sura, verse 38. Would you believe that when I was looking for a translation into English of this verse, I found a site that would translate almost the entire fourth Sura but not verse 38, apparently because it is seen as controversial? So I will try to translate it myself:

Men shall be the heads of their wives because of the priority that God has given to some people rather than to others, and because of the costs that men have to meet; therefore righteous women shall be submissive and careful of what is hidden, because God respects them. And as for those, from whom you fear obstinacy, warn them, send them away from your bed, and physically punish them, but if they then obey you, don't seek to punish them further.

As you can see, the Koran appears to say that a man has the right to beat up his wife if she doesn't obey him. This is an important difference between the Bible and the Koran, because the Bible never gives a husband the right to use violence against his wife.

Another verse from the Koran that this Internet site would not translate fully was 4:19, so again I will translate it:

If a woman of yours commits a nefarious deed, then you shall call four witnesses against her; if they witness against her you shall keep her locked inside, until death takes her or until God provides her with some other means.

As horrible as this sounds, it should be remembered that there are rules in the Old Testament that sentences women to death for certain crimes. Death penalty for women is not peculiar to the Koran.

What does the Bible and the Koran say about polygamy?

The Koran makes it very clear that polygamy is allowed. It says in Sura 4:3 that a man may have two, three or four wives.

The Old Testament does not discuss polygamy as such, but on the other hand there are so many heroic Old Testament characters who have more than one wife: Abraham, Jacob, Moses and David, to name a few. Only Solomon is criticized for having too many wives:

He had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. And the only thing the Bible criticizes him for is that all those hundreds of wives and concubines made him worship other gods.

Well, at least the New Testament forbids polygamy, right?

Wrong. It doesn't. Nowhere in the Bible is there a ban against polygamy. The absolutely only restrictions against polygamy that you can find in the Bible are these two passages:

1 Timothy 3:2
Titus 1:6

And elder or an overseer (or a bishop) of a congregation is not allowed to have more than one wife. This restriction does not seem to apply to any other men, though.

Therefore, if it was possible to convert a group of polygamous Muslims to Christianity, it doesn't automatically follow that they would give up their polygamous ways. If they took the time to really read the Bible and look for restrictions against polygamy, all they would find is that they would not be allowed to be bishops or elders of a congregation if they had more than one wife.

However, even if the Bible doesn't forbid polygamy, this form of marriage has nevertheless always been anathema in Christian communities. It is and has always been impossible to practice polygamy and ask mainstream Christians to respect you for it. Interestingly, for the longest time polygamy has always been impossible among Jews, even though there is certainly nothing in the Old Testament that says that it is wrong. The reason why Jews shun polygamy is probably that polygamy was so severely frowned upon in Christian Europe, where the Jews spent so many centuries of their Diaspora.


The way I see it, polygamy is nothing short of disastrous if you want to create a society that respects the idea of equality between the sexes. How can you possibly have equality if a man can have many wives, but a woman may have to share her only husband with other women?

And as long as polygamy is accepted in Muslim societies, I don't think equality between the sexes is possible there.

Comparisons between Jesus, Paul and Muhammed

I'm going to start by comparing Paul and Muhammed, because I really think that they have a lot in common. Both are the principal founders of their religions. Obviously Muhammed is the founder of Islam, but in my opinion, it is Paul rather than Jesus who is the founder of Christianity. Paul tirelessly travelled around the Middle East of his time, arguing and canvassing for Christianity. Muhammed also travelled a lot, whereas Jesus never left his home province of Palestine. Both Paul and Muhammed also wrote down their revelations and thoughts about their religion, expounding in writing on what is the will of God. Jesus, by contrast, never wrote anything down.

Of course, an incredibly major difference between Paul and Muhammed is that Muhammed was a soldier and a general, who brought his religion to others by force and by war. Paul had absolutely no army and never tried to use any sort of force or threat to bring his religion to others. Instead he cajoled, occasionally flattered, and reassured the leaders of the mighty Roman Empire that he wasn't criticizing or questioning the Empire or its leaders.

Paul and Muhammed are both patriarchal in their outlook on women, but they are not misogynists. They don't hate women. They don't want to make life harder for women than it already is. Indeed, they both want men to look kindly, if a bit condescendingly, on their wives. On the other hand, both Paul and Muhammed want women to know their place in society and to be obedient and submissive. Both Paul and Muhammed think that women should obey certain laws that apply only to women.

In my opinion, it is impossible to have equality between the sexes if men and women have to obey different laws.

Jesus, on the other hand, never once said that women should obey any laws that applied to them only! He never said that men and women should obey different laws. Never once did he say or do anything that is incompatible with the idea that men and women should be treated equally by the law.

Also, Jesus repeatedly defended precisely the kind of women that his society despised the most: the “fallen” women, the “sinful” women, the whores, the adulteresses. Interestingly, Christianity has continued to despise and punish precisely the kind of women that Jesus himself defended: the “fallen” women, the whores, the adulteresses. When it comes to its view of women, Christian congregations have often been exceedingly bad at listening to what Jesus said on this subject.


The separation between church and state: A comparison between the Bible and the Koran

Islam was founded by a man who was a soldier and a general. He spread his religion by war and by force. In Muslim countries, Islam became the law of the land right from the start. Breaking the rules of the religion was equal to committing treason against the state. In many cases, disobeying the tenets of Islam carried the death penalty.

Jesus lived in the province of Palestine, which was occupied by the mighty Roman Empire. Jesus had no army with which he could overthrow the forces of Rome and found his own state where he could make his own laws. Similarly, when Paul travelled around the Middle East in his efforts to spread Christianity to as many people as possible, he took pains not to alienate Rome. In his letter to the Romans, 13:1-7, Paul says this about the submission to (worldly) authorities:
By saying this, Paul ensured that Christianity from the start was a matter of private lifestyle and private conscience; it was a private matter, purely and simply. It had nothing to do with the state and the law. From the start, there was this very clear separation between church and state in the Christian religion.

And because there was this separation between church and state in the Christian religion, it was impossible for Paul and the other “founding fathers” of Christianity to ask for harsh punishments for those who disobeyed the Christian rules. It was impossible to say that a Christian woman who disobeyed her husband should be executed for this, for example, because executions could only be carried out by the state. In Christianity, therefore, breaking religious rules never carried the death penalty.

Later on, when Christianity became dominant, church and state merged in Europe. So many people were executed for religious crimes. So many women were executed for adultery, and a few were executed for practicing witchcraft. And the law did not apply equally to men and women.

To me, it is crucially important that the church and state remain separate in Western civilization. I think that this separation between church and state is the key to such things as democracy and equality between the sexes. To me, the main reason for why we in the west have democracy and gender equality, whereas they don't have any of that in Arabic and Muslim societies, is that they don't have any, or much, separation between church and state (or in their case, between mosque and state).

So please, let's keep church and state separate!!!!!

Ann

Ann, I always love all of your thread topics. This one is I can't wait to comment on but I may get distracted cause I'm at work but here it goes...


You may already know this because you've read both books but the reason the Koran is very similar to the Bible is because the Muslim people are descended from Ishmael, Abraham's first son (before he had Isaac). God had promised Abraham a son with his wife Sarah and when they became aged and still had not had a son, Sarah told Abraham to sleep with their servent Hagar (not an uncommon practice for this time). Hagar gave birth to Ishmael. Of course after this Sarah did actually give birth to a son, Isaac. So the Muslim's believe much of the beginning of the Bible but they believe Ishmael was the son that Abraham took onto the mountain and almost sacrificed, not Isaac. And that Ishmael was the son that was promised to Abraham that would enable him to become the 'father of many nations.' There is a movie that I watched one time called More Than Dreams where Muslims have dreams where Jesus (called Isa in the Koran) appears to them and they become Christians. They are very moving stories. One of the stories (my favorite) is about an Egyptian terrorist who was asked to read the Bible by his terrorist cell leader and to write a book on why the Koran is the word of God and the Bible is not. In the end, after reading and studying the bible, the man became a Christian because he saw that much of what the Koran says actually supports the Bible. All of the stories are in subtitles for their native language and very well re-enacted. They moved me to tears. Anyways, maybe you should check out that video because he does talk about some of the similarities he found in the Bible & Koran and he was a Koran scholar so you might find it interesting.

You are right about the Jews still waiting for the Messiah. The difference between Judaism & Christianity is that people who practice Judaism (I don't say Jews because I know Jews who are Christian - they call themselves Messianic Jews or Complete Jews) believe their Messiah is still coming whereas Christians believe Jesus is the messiah and he has already come. I agree whole-heartedly with your last statement in that quote. Christians and Jews are both waiting for the Messiah - only Christians are waiting for their Messiah to return , whereas the people who practice Judaism are waiting for the Messiah to come for the first time.


Right, the Muslims don't believe in a Messiah. One of the main reason Muslims hate Christians is because they feel we worship more than one God because Christians say God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To me, this makes perfect sense. Just as water can be gas, liquid or solid and still water. Or that an apple has a core, seeds and the part you eat and yet it is still one apple. As far as my knowledge goes, pretty much the same as yours, Muslims believe in Allah and only Allah. They should serve him in everyway that Muhammed has said. That's it. They do look forward to their Paradise however, so in a way they are waiting for something too.

That's interesting to me because I had always heard (but never read for myself) that the Koran does teach many horrible things about women and other horrible acts. Perhaps those are in the other teachings you referred to earlier...??

I wouldn't really consider these women Heroines either. I do consider them important women in the Bible. Partly because the authors of the books chose to focus on them for a specific reason and partly because I do think that many of them did do important things. Mary for one I think was definitely a heroine. I know that she was chosen to bear Christ but her attitude in accepting it proved why God had chosen her. She knew that not being married and suddenly becoming pregnant would be looked down upon greatly. So much so that no one would want to marry her ever. In fact, Joseph was going to break it off with her (in a very quiet manner) until the Angels spoke to him and let him know what was going on. I think Mary was a very brave woman. There are a couple other women that you left out that I consider heroines. There is Esther who became Queen during Persia's rule and risked her life to save her people. Then there's Rahab (a prostitute) who hid Caleb (I think Caleb...), & the other men who were checking out Jericho before attacking it. Rahab risked her life when she lied and said she hadn't seen these men. In the end, they spared her when they took Jericho. And Mirium, Moses' sister, was a phrophetess and highly respected as well. There's a really awesome book I read called Women of the Bible that goes through almost every women
mentioned in the Bible and depicts their lives and what they did in a very real and moving way.

Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes and it is meant to be a book of Lament. Many of the things he speaks about in that book are depressing. Solomon was saying "woman is more bitter than death" because he was upset and probably a little bitter with one of his many wives/concubines. I don't take offense to that because of the whole theme I see in the book. It's been awhile since I read it but here is a passage from the first chapter

2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

3 What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?

4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.

5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.

6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.

7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.

8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.

9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

11 There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.

As you can see, he is very depressed and many of the things he says are not true of the Bible. The Bible does not teach that life is meaningless, etc. In many books of the Bible, you have to know the context from which they are spoken, etc. My Bible, which unfortunately I don't have with me at the moment, has an explanation at the beginning of the Book on why the book is in the Bible and what we can learn from it. I'll look that up and post it later. In reference to the quote you said earlier about witches being put to death, that is true. The Bible did say to do that but not only about the witches. The Bible commanded for all mediums which includes warlocks, etc. to be put to death so I don't feel this really focuses on women specifically.

You are right. The Bible says over and over again that women must obey their husbands. But it commands that men must love their wives.

22Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

and

25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing[b] her by the washing with water through the word, 27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— 30for we are members of his body. 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."[c] 32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Now a part of me used to flare up when I read this. I HATE the word submit. But I've learned over the years that it doesn't mean I am less than my husband. I've learned that my opinions matter as much as his do. The Bible is not trying to show otherwise. What is saying is that we need to respect our husbands. Men are inherently different than woman. They have something called an Ego that surprislingly is very fragile and respect is a must for them. I don't think it means a woman should be like, "yes master, whatever you say master." Or that the husband should expect it. I think if the husband loves his wife like Christ loves the church then he will never make her feel less than him.


God has always looked down on Polygamy. I need to get my Bible later and find my references because I'd asked myself those same questions time and again when I read through the old testament. But I do agree here with the Bible looking down on Solomon's choice of wives. Because they led him astray and he was the leader of the entire nation, he led the nation away from God.


Crap! I have to leave work now and I don't have the Internet at home. I really want to finish commenting on everything though. I'll finish up tomorrow and bring some of my references with me.

Thanks for the thread Ann! I really do love talking about all this stuff!

Kay I'm back! I'm at my parents house using their Internet so yay. I think I was talking about polygamy. I don't think God planned for man to have more than one wife. Here is an example of what I mean:

God gives us only two other circumstances where a man can marry another woman:
1) If his wife dies [see Romans 7:2-3]
2) If his wife commits adultery [see Matthew 19:8-9]

I found this website very useful: Polygamy - What the Bible Says

I know there are numerous other websites encouraging it as a Christian belief/attitude but that is just wrong. I've read through the Bible and feel I have a good understanding of most of it (Revelation is still a little over my head though). I know this may sound silly but I know in my heart that it is wrong. God gave us the ability to know good & evil and no matter how people twist the Bible around to encourage Polygamy... it is just plain wrong!

I couldn't agree more!


I have to disagree with you here Ann because Christianity in itself is the following of Christ. There was not Christianity until Jesus The Christ came to this earth and had followers. Before then, everyone practiced Judaism. There's something to keep in mind when analyzing the Bible, The scripture is God Breathed, meaning the writings are by Humans inspired by God. Paul wrote most of the New Testament but nothing he wrote came from himself. He wrote what God wanted him to write. The fact that God used Paul, formerly Saul, a murderer of Christians, to fulfill his purpose is amazing. It shows me that no one is beyond saving. There is no one that is too far past God's grace. You really should read the book of Acts because that is where it talks about Paul's conversion and how he was before he was saved. And even if Jesus never left his home area of Palestine, his teachings were still around even when Paul started teaching (which was much after Jesus' death & resurrection). Paul was directed by God to preach to all the Gentiles (non-Jews) and Peter was directed to preach to all the Jews. Jesus told them to go and make disciples of many nations Matthew 28:19. In writing those Books, they have done just that.

The whole idea of Christianity can be summarized with one word: Grace. The fact is that Jesus Christ died for all of us while we were still sinners (me paraphrasing this passage)

“Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:7–8)

Something I heard at my church once, which has always stuck with me is that Justice is getting what we deserve, Mercy is not getting what we deserve, and Grace is getting what we DON'T deserve. That is what fills me with joy and love for Christ is that I'm getting eternal life when I have done absolutley nothing to deserve it. Before I was a Christian, I was into hard drugs, partied all the time, slept around, you name it. When I became a Christian, my entire outlook on life changed. I wish I was more like Jesus in his attitude toward the "fallen woman" (or man). I find myself judgemental too often. I love that Jesus is the perfect example in the Bible of how we should all be. Sadly, it is true that Christians have looked down on the "sinners" Jesus spoke about in the quote you referenced. We are not called to love the sin but we are called to love the sinners. I'd have to say as a whole, Christians fale miserably at that.


I love that passage that you quoted from Romans.

Paul is saying that everyone will struggle in different areas and that everyone should work on their own shortcomings.

I personally love that America was founded on Christian principals. I love that we say "One Nation, Under God" in our pledge of allegiance. There have been far too many moral issues for my taste brought up in the USA over separation of Church & state. I don't want the government to control everything. Something that makes this country different from many countries is our Freedom. I don't want to shove Christianity down people's throats. However, I can't be okay with taking God out of everything this Nation does. I'm kind of torn on this whole issue of separation of church and state because I want people to follow Christian principals because they love Jesus not because they have to because they're Americans; but at the same time I hate to see our Nation disregarding all of these Christian values because some people complain about it. Did you know that it's taboo now to say Merry Christmas to someone in America. It's always Happy Holidays so as not to offend anyone. Christmas trees are called Holiday trees. No more community christmas lights with nativity scenes, it could possibly offend someone else. So I'm a little bitter about the church being separated from state so much but ... again I'm torn on the whole forcing it people issue.

I know I really didn't talk about Islam very much but that's because I don't know very much about it. You've done far more reasearch than I have. You should definitly check out at that video I told you about in my previous post. It was awesome! I actually know one of the people in that video (through one other person). Some of our long time family friends are missionaries in Africa. They preach to the Filani (sp?). Most Muslim's in Filani tribes never hear about Christ because they're nomadic. But some Filani become Christians through their dreams and when I saw that video it had a Filani on there who had become a Christian. So I asked my missionary friends about that video and they were amazed. They were like, "Oh my gosh, that's one of our good Christian friends among the Filani." It really is a small world.

I don't have time to get into details, but polygamy is one of those issues that comes with a baggage of historical context/misinterpretation.

At least those are some of the arguments of Islamic feminists who condemn the practice as unnecessary and harmful to modern day society and are fiercely working to change it.
Full article here (but not all about polygamy) This is the most relevant quote:

Then there is also this article, whose basis I'm a bit more iffy (I don't know on which authority it stands even though on the 'net that's never a guarantee, but it's someone practicing as far as I can tell), but which has a pretty in depth interpretation that works with the current translation (for better or worse). Here is the article , below is its conclusion.

Wikipedia's page and several other more legit websites have comprehensive background on this subject as well. I just don't have the time to link to them all.

I guess my mini point is that this is one of those issues (of many) that is hotly debated within the community. And that it's good to know that these conversations are taking place.

Going by what I've read and heard on the subject, the political situation in a lot of these countries has placed fundamentalists in a position where they have had the power to intervene and coopt Islam to better serve them. What we are seeing through the incendiary eye of the media is then a twisted version of this religion, which is at base no better or worse than any other. It's a repetitive thing to say, but it's important to keep in mind all the same.

The issue of interpretation is also important to keep in mind, considering the sheer diversity within any given group religious or otherwise.

alcyone

Alcyone, I agree with you that traditions and historical coincidences are all-important when it comes to determining what kind of societies that different religions will give rise to. However, when it comes to polygamy, it is true that the Koran permits men to have up to four wives, at least under certain circumstances. It is also true that there is nothing in the New Testament that actually supports polygamy. That makes it more likely that Muslim societies will accept polygamy than that Christian societies will do so.

But as I said in the thread that was started by Pam, if you could turn back time and let the last two thousand years unfold all over again, it is almost certain that you would have ended up with other societies than the ones we now take for granted. There is nothing predetermined about either Christian or Muslim societies, so that they have to look like the Christian or Muslim societies that we know today. And speaking about the Bible and the Koran, there are indeed a lot of similarities between them.

Stepnachia, thanks for your kind and appreciative words! I will comment on a few things that you said. I think that separation between church and state is all-important, because if it isn't there, then the breaking of religious tenets becomes a crime against the state, and needs to be punished by the state (or the federation). For example, in the 1980s I read about a man in the United States who sued his wife for having been unfaithful to him, and if I remember it correctly, he demanded that she should be jailed for it. The man argued that because his wife had promised before God that she would be faithful to him, the American legal system ought to punish her for breaking that promise to him. This is exactly the kind of thing that I don't want to see in our Western societies, and it is exactly the kind of thing that you see in many Muslim countries. Men accuse women of adultery, and the legal systems of those countries punish the women. And in some Muslim countries, it may not be enough to jail a woman for committing adultery; she may, indeed, be executed for it.

That sort of thing happened all the time in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sexual "crimes" led to the execution of women. It was seen as particularly serious if a woman was unfaithful to her husband, more serious than if a man was unfaithful to hiw wife, and the woman's adultery was also easier to prove. It was enough that she had become pregnant when her husband was away on a journey. (And if an unmarried woman became pregnant, her pregnancy in itself was enough to prove that she had committed a serious crime against her religion, and she was sure to be punished by the legal system of her country for it.) What if she had become raped? Well, if she couldn't prove that she had been raped, the religious courts may well rule that she had just been adulterous, and then they might easily sentence her to death. That sort of thing happened often in 16th and 17th century Europe, and it happens in Muslim countries today.

We should perhaps remember that in the Old Testament, a woman was her husband's property, but he was not her property at all. He owned her, but she didn't own him. That is why he was allowed to marry more than one woman, and that is also why he was allowed to divorce any wife that he didn't like. So what, then, did "adultery" mean? Obviously it had to mean that a man was robbed of his right to own his wife. So if a woman was unfaithful to her husband, she was "stealing herself away" from him, and she had to be put to death for it. And if a man had sex with a woman who was already married, then he was stealing that woman away from her rightful owner, her husband, and if he could be caught he deserved to be put to death for stealing from the other man. Similarly, if a man had sex with a young woman who was still living with her father, her father could demand that the man should be put to death for stealing away the father's right to control the life of his daughter. But if a man had sex with a prostitute or a widow or an orphan, then he wasn't stealing that woman from any other man, and he wasn't committing adultery and couldn't be punished for it. And it didn't matter one bit if he was married to a woman, because he wasn't obliged to be faithful to her. At least that is the way it is in the Old Testament. Jesus spoke sharply against that kind of male behaviour, and he demanded that men must be faithful to their wives, which was a new concept to most Jews of his time.

Anyway, the Bible consists of both the Old and the New Testament, and Christianity has often been a sort of compromise between the two. Therefore, in the case of adultery, a woman's unfaithfulness was always seen as more serious than a man's in 16th and 17th century Europe, and it was punished more severely.

My point is that if we don't keep church and state separate, we may end up like many Muslim countries, where the law requires that women be put to death for sexual "crimes". According to a Professor at the Institution of Theology at the University of Lund that I spoke to, Islam regards a woman's unfaithfulness to her husband as a crime against God himself and therefore unforgivable, whereas a murder, for example, is a crime against another person and therefore forgivable, if the murdered person's relatives are willing to forgive. That is why honor killings of women so often go unpunished in Muslim societies: the murderers are the dead woman's own family - indeed, they themselves are the murderers - and they forgive themselves, of course.

We have traditionally never had that sort of honor killings at least in northern Europe, but we have certainly had the kind of cruelly fundamentalist society that uses the Bible to justify sentencing women to death for sexual crimes. I know for sure that I want no such religiously motivated executions of women in the society where I live.

I'll come back later and say something more about how I look at Jesus and Paul.

Ann

I don't think I was speaking to this when I posted--at all, actually. My impulse was to give a more well rounded view of some ways progressive Muslims are dealing with the matter, because let's face it, most of us recoil instantly from things like that (and the issue of how violence is being protested against has, I think, been talked about). Or not to speak for anyone, but reading that gives me the heebs reflexively.

Given that, it's good to know that stuff like polygamy is not swallowed by everyone unquestioningly, that it has been pointed out as problematic and at the same time, that there was some historical basis for its origins way back (kind of like a lot of what was said in some of the Old Testament books about living practices). That polygamy didn't come about because having many wives just rocked. And it's good to know this precisely because of that (or to be specific, my) gut reaction of ugh. It's kind of hard not to get bogged down by the negative.

alcyone

WOW! Steph, I seriously need to applaud your post! It was awesomely informative and even a bit convicting if I can admit that here. So many times I wish I could piece together all the stuff in my brain as succinctly as you have. It's an awesome testimony of your dedication to the knowledge of the Bible and your summary was informatively uplifting. When I first read this thread I wanted to hop in and discuss, but there's no way I can even add to your very detailed answer except that I want you know it was greatly appreciated. Rock on Steph!

TEEEEEEEJ

Don't have time to say much, but I did want to mention one more heroine that is found in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, when it tells about Peter healing her, and that is Dorcas, from which one gets "Dorcas Societies".

Just spotted this thread in a brief glance at the boards (woody, what are you doing on these mbs right now? You don't have time for anything but homework, seriously!). Sisterly admonishing aside, I had a few things to say on the issue of treatment of men towards women and vice versa.

You'll notice the twin injunctions in the NT (one of the four books after 1st & 2nd Corinthians, I forget which right now) where Paul writes that a woman must obey her husband, and a man must love his wife. One thing I've read in various places that seems to clarify this for us who look at it with modern eyes and recoil at the word "obey", is that they meant respect (I think it was Elisabeth higher up in this thread mentions this). Men and women are different creatures, innately, in a complementary sort of way, neither one being *better* than the other, but each fulfilling the other. This said, we approach life (and relationships) differently. Men are driven more by respect, and women more by love. When someone did a survey of men and asked them whether they'd prefer to be respected or loved, if they could only have one of the two, they overwhelmingly responded that they would rather be respected. This obviously doesn't mean unquestioning obedience, but a sort of respect for their skills and talents that negates running roughshod over them or ignoring their advice or preferences. I've found this to be very true with my boyfriend--he doesn't like it if I want him to decide everything, but it lights him up when I compliment or otherwise show my respect for his technical skills and knowledge (especially asking his advice on something).

The command for men to love their wives is because women, being creatures who run on love, need to be loved by their husbands. Men might think they, by providing for their families and being responsible heads, have done enough to satisfy their wives, but they need that reminder that they are to give their wives love, not just respect. Hence the twin commands are to elicit that which is not second nature from each of us.

A touch on polygamy and other such things in the Bible (such as the Mosaic writing on men divorcing wives): God started with people who came out of pure paganism. The pagan civilizations in those days did things we would be shocked at. Incest, religious prostitution and human sacrifice, lack of human rights (slavery and other abuses), etc. If you take a look at the background for what was happening at the time the command was given, you'll find they actually *limited* such practices. Through rules regarding being able to support wives properly and divorce them with certificates, wanton polygamy and the treating of women as goods to be traded off at the highest bidder were both restricted, and men couldn't mistreat women and cheat on them while holding onto them as their wives. Being forced to divorce their wife properly limited some of the fooling around they could do without social repercussions. This sort of thing happens over and over. It was a gradual process, transforming the Israelites. You'll notice in the New Testament there still are no actual prohibitions against ordinary men having more than one wife, but the elders, the leaders and examples of the church, were not allowed to have more than one. And now today it's a banned practice in nearly all Christian churches.

Thanks for the uplifting words Teej. Sometimes after giving my spiel, I feel like I went a little overboard but your words were very encouraging. Thanks!

Thank you Doranwen! That was exactly what I was trying to say and could not say it as eloquently as you.

Another thing I had rolling around in my brain that I could not articulate. That is so true. Thanks for making that point.

Doranwen, you said this in your post:

Where in the Old Testament do you find rules restricting men's right to practice wanton polygamy, treating women as goods to be traded off at the highest bidder and mistreating and cheating on women while holding on to them as their wives? As I read the Old Testament, I could actually find no such restrictions, apart from the criticism I referred to earlier against Solomon for having a thousand wives and concubines. If you bear in mind that the Koran allows men to have four wives, you have to admit that having a thousand of them seems a bit extreme by any standard.

Another man who had many wives, though not a thousand of them, was David. The Bible criticizes David for committing adultery against Uriah, the husband and owner of the beautiful Bathsheba, but David is certainly not criticized for being unfaithful to his own wives. Where in the Old Testament does it say that a man must not be unfaithful to his wife?

There is another story about David, told in bits and pieces in the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings and/or the Books of Chronicles. It is the story of how David has to flee from his son Absalom. (The reason why Absalom hates David is that David has not taken action against his oldest son, Amnon, after Amnon had brutally raped Absalom's favorite sister, Tamar.) Because David fails to punish Amnon, even though he knows what has happened, Absalom slays Amnon himself and then threatens his father. David flees. But he leaves about ten of his concubines behind to "guard his house" - at least that is what it says in my Bible. Absalom comes to David's house and rapes the concubines, apparently in retaliation for what Amnon, David's favorite, did to Tamar. Later, when Absalom is defeated and killed, David returns home. He locks his defiled concubines in their special little house, where they have to sit, as if in their own private jail, until they die.

That is from 2 Samuel 20:3. I guess we should be grateful that David didn't execute his concubines, and that he actually fed them.

This passage from Exodus 21:7 shows that it was certainly okay for a man to sell his daughter as a slave. And if she had been sold, she didn't have the right that the male slaves did to be set free after seven years:

It is clear from the verses that follow that some girls were sold in order to become wives. We are certainly talking about buying and selling wives. I can't remember that the Old Testament makes any general restrictions about how and under what conditions women could be sold. It does say, admittedly, that if a man has bought a woman as a slave in order to marry her, he is not allowed to sell her to a foreign people if she doesn't please him. (But maybe he can sell her to another Hebrew.) It also says that if the woman he bought doesn't please him, he shall either let her go or else go on feeding her. I guess that explains why David didn't starve his raped concubines to death.

Look what happens if a man takes a wife (probably after buying her) and hates her:

Okay, the man married a woman, had sex with her, and disliked her. Maybe he thought that she was not a virgin, or maybe he just wanted to accuse her of something. Then what should the woman's parents do?

The parents have to find the wedding sheet that the couple spent their wedding night on, and show it to the elders of the city. So what happens if there is blood on that sheet?

Well, the groom will be forced to pay a fine to the woman's father, and the groom will not ever be allowed to divorce his bride (which he might apparently otherwise have done).

Okay, so what if there really was no blood on that wedding sheet?

Well, in that case all the men in the city shall help stone the accused woman to death in front of her father's house!

Then there is the story about Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar. Tamar was married to Judah's eldest son Er (Judah had probably bought Tamar for his son). However, Er died before he had given Tamar any children, and according to the law at the time, a woman who had been left a childless widow had the right to marry her dead husband's younger brother, if he had one. And Er had a younger brother, Onan. So Onan had to marry Tamar, but he didn't like it, and he deliberately spilled his seed on the ground instead of making Tamar pregnant. This made God so angry that he killed Onan.

Now Tamar had been left a childless widow again, and so she had the right to marry Judah's youngest son, Shelah. But Judah refused to give her Shelah. At the same time, Judah refused to let Tamar go, so that she could marry into another family.

Because Tamar wanted children, and because she had the right by law to have a child by Judah's family, she dressed herself as a prostitute and covered her face. Then she went to the road that Judah used to travel and waited for her father-in-law. When Judah saw a prostitute by the roadside, he was immediately "up" for a bit of extramarital sex, and Tamar became pregnant from their encounter. Guess what happened?

Well, Tamar could produce evidence that it was Judah who had made her pregnant - he had given the prostitute his signet ring as payment - and Judah had to acknowledge that Tamar had the legal right to ask for a child from Judah's family. So he didn't execute her. But he had no qualms about holding Tamar a "prisoner" with him and then sentencing her to death for becoming pregnant, while he gave himself the right to go to prostitutes as he liked.

In a previous post, I have descibed what happened in the three last chapters in the book of Judges. What happened there can be described as a splatterfest, with the wholesale rape, dismembering and mass murder of women. Interestingly, the story is not followed by a general sharp warning to treat women better than that. It is clear that the Bible does not approve of what happens in these chapters of Judges, but the only comment it makes is that this happened before the children of Israel had a king. Anyway, the people who committed these atrocities were not pagans, because it is clear that they believed in God, and they actually communicated with God during parts of the atrocities, too.

There really is a passage in the Old Testament where a father admonishes his son-in-law to treat his daughters well and not take himself other wives as well. That is Laban, who makes a covenant with Jacob on these terms:

But this is an individual case, not a general rule applying to all women of Israel.

Can the Mosaic laws about the treatment of women really be seen as improvements? Can we assume that the pagan societies that existed earlier treated their women even worse? Can we reasonably assume that those other societies gave men the right to rape, sell and kill women everywhere as they pleased and with no punishment at all? I don't think it is possible that a society can survive if it allows its women to be killed, raped or sold with no restrictions whatsoever.

Muslims often say that the rules of the Koran meant an enormous improvement for Arab women at the time, because women were treated so horribly in pre-Muslim Arabia. Yes, maybe that was the case. However, few of us are all that impressed with the laws and rules that the Koran makes about women, because we think, and rightly, and these rules do not grant women equal rights with men. Why should we be so impressed with the very harsh and sometimes horrible rules and stories of the Old Testament?

Ann

Okay, I'm being repetitive, but I said I would post a comparison between Jesus and Paul, and I will.

Steph, you said:

Of course there can be no Christianity without Christ! I don't mean to imply that Christianity could exist without Jesus, believe me.

You are right, the story about Jesus was being preached by other apostles and disciples before Paul became an apostle. It was being spread to other people by others than Paul. And it was Paul's job to stop the work of those apostles and the spreading of that "heretical religon", and that, incidentally, was what he was busy doing when he had his amazing revelation on his way to Damascus: he was on his way to arrest those who spread the teachings of Jesus.

So it was not as if Paul just invented Christianity and made up a story that no one else had heard before. Of course not! But I still maintain that Paul was crucially important when it came to making the teachings and story of Jesus legitimate in the Roman Empire, which was the military and economic superpower of its time. To "travestize" that song about making it New York (New York, New York, what a wonderful place! If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere...) - yes, I think it was crucially important for Christianity to "make it" in the Roman Empire, because that, I think, is what made it possible for Christianity to eventually become the biggest and most powerful religion of the world. Christianity was given an enormous boost when it became the state religion of the Roman Empire around 325 B.C., and about a hundred years later it was the only permitted religion in the Roman Empire. All other religions were outlawed. When Rome fell, the (Catholic) church survived, and it remained in many ways the most powerful force in Europe for at the next ten centuries.

It was Paul who made Christianity's success possible, in my opinion. And that was no mean feat, because any teachings about Jesus were sure to be highly controversial in Rome. How so?

Well, the Romans were well aware that Jesus had been called the Messiah. They also knew that the Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would literally be the King of the Jews here on the Earth. The Jews waited for a Messiah who would defeat his enemies on this Earth and recreate King David's mighty kingdom here on Earth. And who were the enemies of the Jews here on Earth, then? Who were the people that the Messiah was supposed to defeat? Well, how about the Romans? The Romans had occupied what was once the Kingdom of David, turning it into the Roman province of Palestine. If a Jewish Messiah wanted to recreate David's kingdom, he would have to turn against the occupying Roman forces and try to oust them. In other words, if the Jews thought that Jesus was the Messiah, then they also expected him to lead a revolt against the Roman forces in Palestine. When the Romans saw that Jews called Jesus the Messiah, they thought that Jesus was a potential rebel leader and a sworn enemy of Rome.

Those of you who are Christians will object that Jesus was nothing like that. You can point to various passages in the Gospels where Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this Earth, and that his mission is to help people find salvation in heaven, not build a mighty kingdom on the Earth. But the Romans wouldn't have known or understood this. Remember that when Jesus was crucified, Pilate put a sign at the top of his cross which read I.N.R.I. That stands for, approximately, Iesus Nazareth Rex Iudea (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). Clearly this was a way of mocking the Jews and telling them that their Messiah had been executed.

But wasn't it the Jews themselves that wanted Jesus to be killed? Well, the Gospels say so, but I don't believe it. I can see no reason for a majority of the Jews to turn against Jesus. What had he done to offend them? He was not a powerful man, and he didn't have an army. There is no way that he can have oppressed, let alone tortured or killed, a lot of Jews. Why would the Jews hate him so? More to the point, why would they like the occupying forces, the Romans, so much better than their own compatriot that they would ask the Romans to kill Jesus for them?

I don't believe those parts of the Gospels which claim that Pilate had to kill Jesus because he was scared of defying the bloodthirsty Jews. I think those parts of the Gospels have been added later as a way of appeasing the Romans and to make it possible to bring the story of Jesus to Rome. After all, how could you possibly tell the Romans that Jesus was the Son of God and it was the Romans' fault that he had been executed?

Jesus was a confrontational sort of person. He often attacked figures of authority in the Jewish society, the Pharisees, the scribes, the High Priests. He rudely cleansed the Temple of the money-changers and those who sold pigeons in there. He was provocative. And he often, repeatedly, defended those who lived at the very bottom of society: the poor, the sick, the despised, the tax collectors, the women and the children.

You usually don't get very many brownie points from those at the top of your society by sticking up for the people at the bottom of it.

The Jesus who always defended the poor and the sick made this demand of those who wanted to go to Heaven:

I think that this was, by and large, a Messiah that you just couldn't sell to the Roman Empire. A Messiah who could be suspected of wanting to attack the Roman Empire, and an impolite rebel who spoke ill of authority and defended those that most powerful people had little interest in.

So in order to be presentable to the Romans, Jesus had to be given a rather radical make-over, and Paul was up to the task of giving him one. And the most important thing that Paul did to make Jesus look, well, much more "well-groomed" and "civilized", was not to quote anything that Jesus had said at all! Okay, I'm exaggerating - a little. I once looked for passages in Paul's letters where he quoted anything that Jesus had said while he lived here on the Earth, and the only thing I could find was that Paul quoted what Jesus had said at the Last Supper about the wine being his blood and the bread being his body. Apart from that, though, Paul never quoted anything that Jesus had said! All his teachings where he defended the poor and the sick, and all the times when he defended women in general and fallen women in particular: Paul never quoted any of it. In Paul's letters, nothing is left of Jesus the rebel, the man who defends the small and the powerless and those that are scorned by the rest of society.

Instead, Paul defended authority. His main message, I think, is that people gain salvation by believing that God has sacrificed his only Son for them, and that they will be let into Heaven if they believe that Jesus has overcome death for them. But in order to gain salvation people must also behave themselves correctly while they live here on the Earth, which means obeying authority.

So even though Jesus never issued a general rule that people should obey authority, and even though he certainly never said that women should obey their husbands, Paul repeatedly said that women must submit themselves to their husbands!

Was Paul a bared-faced liar? Did he deliberately distort the message of Jesus? No, I'm certain that Paul himself believed absolutely in what he was telling people. If he hadn't believed in his own message, how could he have persevered for so many years, overcoming so many terrible difficulties, so that he could keep telling it?

No, Paul wasn't a liar in any way, but I think that the revelation that he had on his way to Damascus was so strong that it made him lose interest in the Jesus who had lived on the Earth and spoken to people around him. Paul's Jesus was the blinding light and the booming voice from the heaven and the divine majesty it had revealed to him. That was the Jesus that Paul wanted to speak about to people around him, and that was the Jesus that he wanted to bring to the Roman Empire.

Paul was also a scholar, who knew the Old Testament quite well. I think Paul was a lot more interested in reconciling his vision of the majestic Jesus of Heaven with the teachings of the important prophets in the Old Testament than with reconciling it with the teachings of the Jesus who had walked the Earth like an ordinary man like the rest of us.

Anyway, to me the differences between Jesus of the Gospels and Paul are huge. Admittedly one of the Gospels, John, is closer to the teachings of Paul than the other ones. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Gospel of John is the Gospel that I personally like the least.

Ann

Ann, I have to ask: are your issues with the Bible's commands taken in light of the time? The things you're complaining about appear to be treated wholly separate from culture. And believe me, not all cultures are equal, despite what the multiculturalists of today might claim (a good read of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories makes that point very humorously). The culture the Israelites came from back then treated human beings as commodities, women as 2nd class citizens (if they counted as citizens at all), and generally didn't have any of the sort of equality and freedom we enjoy today. I would also ask that you take a look at how long it took to change culture so women these days have the freedom to vote, own land, etc.--and how there are *still* many people who don't believe women are as good as men. I believe you are aware of this. These changes occurred in a modern democratic/republic society where people have much more say, and dissent is tolerated (if not outright approved). Now let's go to a culture like the pagan past, where government and religion are intricately linked, where the concept of people having a say in the government is just about unheard of, and where the mindset of *everyone* is that women are inferior and belong having babies, etc. Trying to change people's minds overnight is impossible unless you literally brainwash them. Considering God is all about free will and letting *us* choose, that wasn't an option for him. Any change that happened would have to be very slow. God made laws, people obeyed those laws, and gradually as they followed them, their minds and hearts began to change, and the culture changed.

Let's take a look at a few of those laws in the light of the culture of the time:

Exodus 21 - God gives rules about treating Hebrew servants (since they're bought, we could call them slaves) fairly. Before, a man might sell himself to pay a debt, and be forever a slave, with no rights. With this rule, he could still pay off the debt, and after six years he would be free again to go on with life.
Selling a daughter as a servant--prior she could be sold and become someone's personal prostitute, or something just as bad. With the new laws, she had to be given rights as a daughter (if to be the wife of the son of her new master), or to be redeemed back to her family (and there were specific rules on how that worked). She also had to be provided food, clothing, and marital rights if the master married her and then chose to marry another wife also. Here you see how polygamy was limited--a man could only have as many wives as he could really take care of. And most men back then weren't "millionaires" to be able to afford multiple wives. The provisions for proper treatment of each wife limited polygamy and helped guide the culture towards seeing what marriage was *really* supposed to be.
The personal injuries laws restrict the revenge mindset that was common in the day--someone loses an arm, so the offended family kills someone on the other side, and the violence escalates. If properly followed, these laws would prevent the sort of family feuds that are often seen in honor-based societies such as those in the Middle East.

Those are just a few of the examples in the Bible. I would also ask you to not take the most shocking stories and hold them up and go "Oh my, look at that, how awful they treated women here!" without examining all the historical context and background. That sort of discussion is sensationalist and reactionary and does not engender thoughtful examination of things.

Anyway, as you can see, there are a lot of examples of where the Israelite laws restricted some of the excesses of their culture and set them on the path towards loving treatment of fellow humans. Was the culture still flawed? You bet; they were still human, and humans don't change overnight, even when they *want* to (and you can be sure many of the Israelites were perfectly happy exploiting others, with little conscience left). Were those laws helpful? Yes, even though a casual glance might not look like it. It's easy to see something that to our eyes would be abhorrent and automatically treat that law or story as if it were in our culture, our time. We have to be careful when we look at historical texts such as the Bible that we put on "glasses" to see as someone from that culture and time period might look at things.

I can't help it, guys--this is my usual rant. I'm sorry, but I can't help myself. Feel free to ignore, since I'm just venting here.

It never fails to crawl under my skin how the vast majority of people I've encountered can claim this without interrogating all the implications that are inherent in positing certain cultures above others (which is the ugly reality behind the "not all cultures are equal" claim).

It's easy to look to the past and chuckle at how deluded people were back then and how much better we are now. But unfortunately the rhetoric of "not all cultures are equal" has been a powerful tool for the further erosion of "human rights" in many parts of the world (and continues to be so which is the more chilling aspect). It's the basis for the argument that certain groups can't govern themselves, we need to teach (aka govern for ) them and while we're at it take a nice helping of their resources, y'know, 'coz nothing is free and they wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

Furthermore, on what basis are cultures not equal? On whether human rights are present or not (which seems to be the hot issues nowadays)? Human rights are a relatively recent phenomenon and I'm led to think their presence now partly obscures the collosal lack of human rights that has framed much of Western history (making it no different from history anywhere else, if we're framing it in those terms). But of course it's convinient to forget all the atrocities committed in so-called first world countries (especially ones that happen outside the aforementioned first world countries--the ones that the Enlightenment championed particularly). That way, we can point the finger and it can be some other culture that is less. Poor them, they don't know any better. Perhaps we should govern for them? That turned out well.

I have no problem condemning unjust actions, but I do think it's responsible and ethical to educate oneself about them first because there are logics at work that can't be undone until we know the root cause. More importantly than that, I feel that to be an ethical person especially in today's diverse world, it is necessary to let go of this "not all cultures are the same" ("some cultures are better than others," let's be real here) rhetoric which laid the foundation for a great deal of the conflicts in the world today and repeats itself like a self fulfilling profecy. It's useless and harmful.

How can we ever communicate with others when we're approaching them with an inherent sense of superiority?


alcyone

Well, the reason why I have indeed pointed out some of the most shocking stories in the Bible is precisely that I feel such a strong need to keep the church and state separate. I do believe that if we allow the church and state to merge, and if we start believing that everything we find in the Bible is good, and if we take the Mosaic laws and make them our own laws, then we are going to end up with the same kind of barbaric society and the same kind of shocking ill-treatment of women as we can read about in the Old Testament.

But I have never tried to suggest that everything about the Bible is bad. Far from it. I think many things and many people in the Bible are inspiring, and Jesus is my personal favorite, hands down. But I like many things in the Old Testament, too. The story of Ruth is my favorite, but I love Song of Solomon too, and in spite of its occasional awful sexism I can nevertheless enjoy the world-weary poetry of Ecclesiastes and the practical wisdom of Proverbs. I, too, am moved by the sufferings of Job. And yes, I like parts of Genesis and Exodus and even of Judges. I've never said that these stories are not inspiring and in many cases uplifting!

What I am saying, and here I'm not backing down a millimeter, is that if people claim that everything in the Bible is good, and if they say that we should have no separation between church and state, and if they say that the Bible should be made the law of our own modern western societies, then I'm going to keep repeating all the worst stories from the Bible. Because I don't want a religiously motivated society that gives itself the right in the name of God and the Bible to treat women atrociously.

Ann

Who's saying that though? Is there really a mainstream Christian group out there saying we should go back to Old Testament ways? For real? I can understand doctrine that says that we should try to live by the example of Jesus Christ, and be proud if we have a government based on that example because everything Jesus upheld(two of the most important laws, love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself) because that seems to be the fairest and most logical way to live. But as with the Hebrews of Moses' day, there were "if's" and "buts" thrown in by people, human beings, flawed creatures, more detailed and expounded on than the basic Ten that God initially gave them, and no Christian group I've heard of anywhere(at least today) is suggesting that we live or govern ourselves this way.

There is a group, a radical extremist zealot group out there, demanding that everybody turn to their prehistoric and religious thinking, but I don't believe it's based in Christianity.

TEEEEEEEEJ

and this seems a very odd and useless waste of energy, because with all the jumping up and down and pointing out of ancient fallacies of Christianity, the stuff that's actually going on today, right now, present time; mutilation and assassination of women/girls, journalist and contractors being beheaded, riots and killings because of a freaking cartoon, is being pretty much glossed over. You want to know the difference between the Koran and the Bible? All you really need to do is look at what's happening right now, today and see who's following what and be honest about which one seems the most extreme.

TEEEEEEEJ

TEEJ wrote:

Ah, TEEJ, once again I think you must live in a really great place, because Christians who want to go back to Judaic law live right in my backyard (literally--they're across the street). And these are not cult members either. They LOVE the Old Testament and seem completely oblivious to the whole point that Christ came to fulfill prophecy and therefore, do away with a lot of Mosaic law. They're hellbent on bringing back the old ways. And I think you're right that they totally missed the point of what Christianity was supposed to be. But there are a LOT of them.

What I would say to you, Anne, is that I don't think you can look at modern day Christianity as a function of the Old Testament. That is the HISTORY of the church, but not the direction laid out in the New Testament. The time that passed in the Old Testament was plenty of time for man to screw everything up (and I do mean man . All issues with Paul aside (and trust me, I have issues with him), I do think Christ is supposed to be the focal point of the book. He wasn't there when they chose the books of the New Testament, and Paul was interpreting what he saw in the life of Christ, not necessarily doing so correctly (or at least that's how I read it--which I realise is horribly radical and probably makes my grandparents writhe in their graves).

Look at me, talking about religion. This is so bizarre.

And Alcyone said:

I don't think pointing out the flaws in other cultures is necessarily demonstrating a cultural bias that inherently says "my culture is superior to yours." I certainly wouldn't claim that, historically, Western society was more advanced in a lot of areas than the rest of the world. I WOULD claim that we've made a lot of strides, especially in the area of human rights, and on that basis I claim that CURRENT Western culture is a darn good place to be. I don't think we can necessarily make one culture superior to another, but I do think we can point to elements WITHIN a culture that are inferior. For example, I am a huge fan of some of the ideas of the matriarchal tribes in Africa. I am not, however, such a big fan of their religious practices. I am not a fan of Western society's preocupation with consumption, but I am a big fan of freedom of speech. Does that mean I think my culture is superior? It depends on your point of view. I certainly don't think it is superior because it exists, but I do think we have things to offer that aren't being offered currently in a lot of other cultures.

I think you misread me, Capes.

I'm specifically arguing against the idea that: "Not all cultures are equal." I see it come up again and again and it certainly holds the implicit view that the whole culture being spoken about is somehow less.

It's a statement that condemns an entire culture based on its flaws. Which is all I've said.

I have, however, never said that we shouldn't point out flaws. But that's all they are flaws. And the moment that we start taking flaws as an indicator of an entire culture's value (as it is implied when we say that not all cultures are equal), we are heading down a slippery slope to dangerous waters.


alcyone

Okay, alcyone. I think we're in agreement, then!

I'm not glossing over the atrocities being committed especially against women in Muslim countries, TEEEJ. Do you remember that I started that thread about a young woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to 200 lashes because she had been raped when she had accepted a ride in a car which was not driven by one of her male relatives?

However, while I'm very interested in why the oppression of women is so severe in many Muslim countries, it is true that my interest in how Christianity treats women is even greater. And the reason for why I'm so interested is that I grew up very close to people who were, in some respects, flaming fundamentalists. Except they weren't flaming and fuming, exactly. You can't get past the fact that my relatives lived and live in Sweden, which is a massively secular country. As a Christian fundamentalist in Sweden, you can be only so angry in public until all the secular Swedes start laughing at you. And since nobody wants to be laughed at all my relatives were well-behaved, but their beliefs were no less scary in spite of that.

And do you know what, TEEEJ? When the revolution happened in Iran in 1979, when the Shah had to flee and the U.S. Embassy was occupied and all those seemingly millions of people took to the streets and screamed and shouted and demanded a Muslim revolution, then I watched the spectacle in absolute horror:



I was so horrified because I realized that those screaming and shouting people who were dead set on taking the law in their own hands in the name of God and punish others and have their own way in the name of their religion, they could have been my own relatives. Yes, this is exactly what could have happened in my own back yard if Sweden hadn't been the secularized, modern society that it is.

I grew up terrified of my relatives. I felt that I could never quite foresee when I had done something that could make them sentence me to hell. Like when I had sewn a button on a blouse on a Sunday. Or when I formulated a forbidden word in my mind, never saying it, but thinking it. What if my relatives could read my mind? And what about the fact that my mother had contacted a children's theater group and made me join it? We performed an H.C. Andersen fairy tale on stage. And yet my mother impressed on me that I must never, ever, ever let my relatives know that I was doing this, because they would be horrified beyond belief and perhaps renounce our entire family for ever.

When I was eight years old my grandfather told me that Jesus was coming back any night now to bring his faithful ones to heaven. I knew without a doubt that I would never be let in there. I slept badly for months, wondering if it was tonight that Jesus would come and take my parents away from me.

Occasionally, very occasionally, my parents forced me to go to a Pentecostalist service with my relatives, for my relatives' sake. I was petrified with fear. The church was packed with people, everyone swaying and murmuring and shouting and crying. What if they suddenly "sensed" me, like a predator might sense a prey? What would they do to me if they suddenly sensed me sitting among them?

The reason why fundamentalist religions interest and frighten me so much is that I grew up so very close to such a group of people myself. And my impression remains that Christian fundamentalists are not so different from Muslim fundamentalists in their religous zest, and maybe in their wish to punish others. What separates the Christian fundamentalists in the West from the Muslim fundamentalists - what really, really separates them - is that they want to fit in a society that is basically secular, and that doesn't respect the kind of religious zeal that goes beyond a certain level. Western societies and western thoughts and traditions rein its Christian fundamentalists in. Muslim societies don't always do that with its Muslim fundamentalists, for a variety of reasons.

But when I was a kid I kept hoping that if my relatives and their Pentecostalist congregation finally "sensed" me, like a predator may sense a prey, then my parents would see what they tried to do to me and call the police. I trusted that there was a police force out there which wouldn't let the Pentecostalist do whatever they wanted with me, even though they may have felt that they had been given religious authority from God himself to deal with sinners here on Earth.

And that is why the separation between church and state is so incredibly important to me.

Ann

Unfortunately, I live in cold freaking Minnesota, one of the liberal meccas of the free world (and I call it mecca because they make liberalism to be their freaking religion) and every real Christian I've met, and every church I've been to(several since we've been trying to find a home church) never once suggested that women be stoned to death for cheating on their husbands, told us to stop eating hotdogs, or threatened to take our property if we don't pay a tithe(so far that's only the local liberal government).

Seriously? No extemporation or embellishment? for real? What denomination are they? I gotta see this doctrine to believe it.

Horse hockey and here's why. People rein themselves in. Real life mainstream Jesus loving Christians learned some time ago that being violent is not only against the the dictates of Christ, but it tends to turn folks off. That's just plain common sense. As I said before, anybody saying/doing different is after power, with no love of God involved.

...and here you see the powerplay in progress. It's their goal to establish a world wide Caliphate in the next 100 years and since regular preaching and witnessing isn't getting it done fast enough for them, they are turning to violence, a culture and belief system they've been nuturing since the 50/60's (Thanks for encouraging that, Jimmy Carter!)

Okay and when the rampaging terrorist Christians overrun Washington, we'll let you know how right you were.

TEEEEEEJ

Anne said:

OMG! At last we have something in common, Anne! I spent my entire childhood terrified of being alone, because I was positive that the Rapture was going to occur. I would be left stranded in some foreign country with no resources. My parents are actually great individuals for the most part, but the people they chose to associate with terrified me.

Seriously. I don't think they're crazy enough to do every single thing since they do live in the USA. I'm pretty sure if they were for stoning or animal sacrifice, they wouldn't tell me (since it's illegal). It all started out of a megachurch in my area that used to be a Bible church, but isn't technically affiliated with anything now. I also couldn't tell you if they represent the ENTIRE church or just a subsection of it, but there are an awful lot of people who do it that I've run into. I think it started as a backlash against liberal secularism and a desire to embrace traditional values, and turned into something incredibly nuts. I honestly don't get into too much discussion with them since I live a pretty non-traditional life. They probably see no hope for me

This is a picture of a witch burning in Europe, probably in the 16th or 17th century. The people who made the witch burnings happen were Christians, too. Why didn't they rein themselves in?

And why don't we burn witches? Is it because the Bible tells us that we shouldn't? No. The only thing that the Bible says, in Exodus 22:18, is that we should kill witches. It might be argued that this is a command. And even though Paul says that Christians don't have to obey Mosaic law, and therefore are under no obligation to burn witches, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that we are not allowed to do so.

So why don't we do it? It has nothing to do with the Bible. Rather, it was the general mood in Europe that turned against witch burnings in the 17th and 18th centuries. Eventually the witch trials were completely discredited. Rational scholars pointed out that the accused women were given no chance to prove themselves innocent, because the tests that might prove their innocence almost invariably killed them. For example, an accused woman was usually cleared of the charges against her if she was thrown into deep water and drowned. However, if she floated she had to be a witch, because it was believed that only the Devil could protect her from sinking.

In Sweden, a scholar demanded that those who accused a particular woman of being a witch should be cross-examined themselves. When and where did they see the accused woman do something suspicious? What exactly had she done? The testimony of the witnesses should be written down, and then they should be asked the same questions again a week later. This manner of interrogation quickly revealed that the witnesses couldn't remember what they themselves had said a week before, and when they they were questioned again they told quite different stories. It became clear that the witnesses lied. Worse, it was a revealed that a small group of orphaned young boys had travelled around in Sweden and made a living by accusing women of being witches and then witnessing against them for a small fee. One such boy had sent his own mother to the stake by accusing her of being a witch.

Well, even though these facts were revealed, quite a few Swedes still believed in witches. However, juridical Sweden was outraged, the King was embarrassed, the parliament was embarrassed, and the Church was embarrassed. The King and the parliament together a passed a law making witch trials illegal. Eventually, the very expression "witch trial" came to signify an outrageously unfair legal trial or some sort of horribly unfair treatment of a person. Now witch trials were not only illegal, they had also become impossible to "sell" to the general public. And I'm sure that more or less the same thing happened in the rest of Europe.

So that is why I don't believe that people rein themselves in. We grow up with all sorts of written and unwritten laws around us, and we quickly learn what is socially acceptable and what isn't.

No rampaging Christians will overrun Washington for now, and they won't ever do so as long as our societies stay the way they are now. But that is just it, the way I see it. The thing is, we want to follow the law. Most of us really want to do that. And we particularly don't want to break the laws that everybody consider, well, self-evident and "holy", for lack of a better word. We are so rarely proud of doing something that almost all other people find totally shocking and outrageous. There aren't many guys around who'd be telling everybody around them, 'Hi, I'm Stan, and I'm a pedophiliac and proud of it! Can I babysit your baby?'

And that's why you won't find a church anywhere in the United States whose members will tell you that they stone adulteresses and are proud of it. You can't do that in the United States. If you make a claim like that, the government will do their utmost to stop you, and the general public and all the media will cheer the government on. Everyone will want to see your downfall. Try to stone adulteresses or burn witches in the United States or Europe, and everyone will pounce on you and do whatever they can to stop you. Seriously.

That is what I mean when I say that our western societies rein the Christian fundamentalists in. But in some Muslim countries it is socially acceptable to stone adulteresses, which is why such things happen. (Actually, though, I heard on the radio a few months ago that there have been no documented cases of actual stonings of women anywhere in the world in recent years, even though there have certainly been other forms of executions of women for sexual crimes in Muslim countries.)

And my point is still that if we allow the teachings of the Bible to be our only guiding rule, then there is no obvious reason why we should not be allowed to burn witches and stone adulteresses.

Ann

Or been under the threat of being colonized since its sovereignty had long been undermined by the instalation of what was percieved as a corrupt puppet government. This is oversimplifying of course , I can't claim to know a whole lot about the Middle East, but I'm sure the revolution didn't happen only because of religion. It happened because of a general unrest in the populace that was engendered by the political situation. People will do horrible things when they're afraid and desperate about the status quo.

So religion was used to back up a nationalist project. Through Islam, the reactionaries could posit a stark contrast between "indigineous traditions" (more often than not, a distorted version of them to make 'em extra national and clean out differences within, hello fascism) versus foreign (Western) traditions that they thought threatened them. Place a charismatic leader on top and its a heady combo. Think about it. Where have we seen this before?

In that, it's nothing new. Nationalist movements have always posited their own "indigenous traditions" against what is felt as the encroachment of outside culture and religion is always fertile ground in this. Think of the Japanese with Shinto and the Emperor-directly-descended-from-the-Goddess in WWII or how Indian nationalist movements went back to classical Hindu myths and heroes or how Chinese nationalists employed Confucian symbols. These I know a bit more about and obviously they are different, but the structure of nationalism is pretty similar around the world.

In one sense modernity has everything to do with it because it definitely marked who was to live in fear and who was not (as much as "modernity" is directly complicit with imperialism). Most of us don't live with that fear, so I think we fail to recognize its power. But it's there and it's an important tool when you want to excersize control over a population.

And the links between nationalist projects and gender have been discussed. It just turns into a big ol' mess as women too are placed within the nation-building project.

Me and TJ have views at the opposite ends of the spectrum, but I agree with her that it's about power. Not just Christianity, but whenever religion gets coopted as part of nation-building, it's more about what it represents to a specific collective not what it is to an individual.

At this scale, it's always about power.

alcyone

Well, here I can agree with both TEEEJ and Alcyone. Religion that kills people in the name of God is always about power.

And I certainly agree with you, Alcyone, that most Muslim countries have been victims of colonialism and have had their national sovereignty undermined in various ways. I have sometimes asked myself why it is that we have had so few upheavals in Sweden, and one important reason is certainly that Sweden has never been colonized. (And that, in turn, may have been because Sweden was so far north that most potential colonialists couldn't be bothered to travel so far to conquer a country that was, particularly in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, so cold and barren.) Ever since the early 16th century, Sweden has had a strong national government. It has not been necessary for Swedes to defend themselves against others who tried to subjugate them. Instead, Swedes have been able to trust their own government.

Colonialism has many things on its conscience, that's for sure. Interestingly, when we speak about the Bible, we can say that the people who wrote that book has suffered more than its share of colonialism and oppression by others. And since the Hebrews/Jews themselves were a small people, it is no wonder that they cried out to God for protection. When they didn't get it, or didn't get enough of it, they tried to appease their God by becoming ever more religiously zealous. In the book of Ezra, you can read about how the Jews tried to purge themselves before God by breaking up mixed marriages and throwing non-Jewish women out of the land that used to be Israel.

So indeed, Alcyone, religion, fear and nationalism make a heady mix. Clearly other beliefs than religious ones serve just as well if you want to shore up and justify your nationalism, as long as you can find the right belief system to do the job. I take it you were referring to Nazism and Fascism in your previous post. (Although contrary to what some people believe, Nazism wasn't wholly atheist, and Hitler, for example, remained a member of his church all his life.)

Ann

As we all seemed to have concluded, it was about POWER, back in 16/17 century the land and property of the folks burned as witches (and it wasn't just women it was men burned too) got turned over to...THE CHURCH or whatever governing power was involved with the church at the time. Per everybody's reasoning so far, you have to blame the PEOPLE after power at the time. What it seems we have learned in our short 200+ years as a democractic republic nation is when some folk get too power hungry, they will get SHUT DOWN (and not quite understanding how other nations that have been around much longer haven't seemed to have caught on to this)

After the Jim Jones disaster(which was really more about communism than religion) a majority of mainstream MODERN Christian groups toned down the zealotry, not unenthusiastic about spreading the Gospel, mind you, but cutting off militant tactics.

Now we have folks like Billy Graham, Charles Stanley, and Jim Hagge out there, doing nothing with the power they've been given, but spreading the Gospel, trying to get as many folk saved before the Rapture as they can. To me that is a noble and loving goal, so I have a huge problem with theatrical hand-wringing about Christianity even being anywhere a danger that radical Islam is which is REALLY, honestly what this thread started out as.

Now you can go off wondering hypothetically what would happen if a bunch of Christians got voted into office(oh the horror )how they'd force all their policy on the poor liberal minority, but the fact is, the US is going exactly the opposite direction. You can comfort yourself knowing that recent events and trends have proved that a majority of folks nowdays have stopped raising their children with morals or ethics.

When policy on saving trees becomes more important than stopping the murder of unborn babies, it's time for Christians to start looking to the Heavens, because we all know we're not really meant to be here anyway and it's this knowledge(and hope) that comforts me when the realization of the hellmouth this nation has become crashes in on me.

DONE AND DONE

TEEEEEEEEJ

I was thinking of African countries and Latin American countries and the rise of dictators (the most violent manifestation of this "blotting out difference," nevermind the complexities of how these are enabled by foreign powers some times). I'm using fascism very, very broadly. But yeah definitely, Nazism fits the bill. I know only the basics of the situation in Germany then, but I remember hearing that it too was a movement that could be directly linked to a desperation over the political satus quo--only this time economic hardship was added to the mix.

Warning for EVEN MORE Thread Drift!

And you know, I don't need to look as far as the Middle East to be disturbed. That Chavez in Venezuela really, really scared me for a while. Why would you shut down the media that disagrees with you? Why would you try to end presidential term limits? Why would you give the State so much power? It all sounds like the worst case of deja vu. Thank god the National Assembly said no to those changes (even though I think the media outlet shut down was moved to Colombia, I think--not so sure).

It's a scary world.

alcyone

That's exactly how I feel Teej. That's what I meant in my earlier post when I said I don't really want separation of Church & State. My idea of church is not that of the old testament but that of a society that lives how Jesus lived. If a government could instill those values into people then I do think we'd see alot less of the violence/hate/unethical actions we see now.

Wow, I focus on classes for two days and come back to find a lot to catch up on. Apologies to anyone who thought I meant that entire cultures are somehow "bad" because of some beliefs or actions. What I meant was that some cultures have a lot more change to go through than others to be what God had originally intended--and those who don't look at it from a religious standpoint can certainly see the human rights standpoint. Some cultures have a lot less respect for human life than others, and/or separate humanity into various groups and subgroups (some marked inferior). Take cannibalism, which was only stopped in the last century in Papua New Guinea, or the twin killing that used to happen in various parts of Africa until Mary Slessor stepped in and started working to change it. Take the cultures where women are considered inferior to men, and have limited rights to education, health care, or any sort of independence. Those cultures run on a different set of morals than Western culture, and unless we go the route of relativism and say that all sets of morals are equal (and therefore their treatment of women or babies is perfectly fine because it's a part of their culture), we have to say that those cultures have serious flaws in their morals. Food, language, dress, those things are not morally related (except for the sorts of rules about not eating some things--like keeping a kosher household, and modesty does relate to dress). I will never call a culture's foods or language or dress evil or wrong. They might be very different from mine, but they're just as valid. But there's a big difference between those small things and the big issue of morality and related beliefs. And not all cultures are equal when it comes to morals. (And I still don't think ours is perfect--as long as abortion is legal, for instance, the sanctity of human life is not being respected as it should.)

I am also a huge supporter of separation between church and state, Ann, so I'm with you there. When beliefs and government mix (and someone decides to turn their beliefs into a country's laws), someone *always* gets deprived of rights (whether those beliefs are associated with a church or not). As it is, I believe that as time goes on, there will be a union of church and state once more--there are still old laws on the books that cross those boundaries. But that's a matter for a different discussion. The harder thing to tell is the careful boundary where secular laws and religious morals overlap, and how to determine the morals for secular laws when society changes so much . . .

I totally agree with you. Jesus' main message is 'love' and that is what is lacking in this violent world nowadays.

TEEEEEEEEEEJ wrote:
I have the impression that TEEEEEJ has left this thread, so perhaps she will not return to clarify this for me - maybe someone else can.

And maybe I'm just confused, but I'd like to know who this "majority" of folks are who aren't raising their children with morals or ethics. I don't have to be a mind-reader to feel confident that if I were to approach 100 different parents and ask them "Do you feel that you are raising your child with a strong sense of morals and the ethics of what is right or wrong?", that every single one of those parents would answer "Yes." Yes, none of us are perfect, and the problems in some families may be overwhelming and this really messes up a child's way of thinking, but doesn't just about any parent want to give their child a strong moral grounding. And it's a parent's choice as to whether or not they include organized religion as a part of that.

So who has decided that the majority of folks don't care? I really would like to know.

Kathy

So you want a religious state? But according to which church? Whose rules? And what about people who may still practice religion but whose religion does not have the exact same principles? What about people with no religion at all?

I've seen people disapprove of Islamic states. Isn't this just the same thing, but with a different religion?

I would want no part of any state which incorporates religious values into its laws, precisely because I value diversity.

Edit: I see Doranwen said it much better than I did:

Exactly!


Wendy

Isn't separation of Church and State one of the principles in the American constitution? So to change that would require a constitutional amendment, something that's really very difficult to achieve. I don't think they've even managed to ratify the ERA, have they?

c.

Carol asked:
The answer is "no." There is no constitutional premise for the doctrine of separation of church and state. The phrase comes from a letter which President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802. In this letter, he was trying to reassure a pastoral association that he, as president, would neither move to establish a state church nor would he attempt to disenfranchise those who were avid churchgoers from participating in this new democratic republic we call the United States.

And what many people do not know is that throughout Jefferson's presidency the House of Representatives was used as a place of Christian worship on Sundays. Jefferson was a regular attendee at these meetings.

The phrase "separation of church and state" was not made a basis for any judicial decision until 1947, but since then has been repeated so often that most people believe that it is Constitutional law. It isn't. It's set by precedent, which means that the courts have insinuated this principle into our legal fabric.

And I believe in Jefferson's principle of separation of church and state. I believe that the state should not directly associate itself with any church (or religion), nor should the state interfere with the peaceful practice of any organized religion.

But I also believe, unlike many in American government today, that one's religious beliefs cannot be conveniently "left at the doorstep" when entering public service. I do not believe that any religious leader should ever dictate governmental policy, but I also believe that if a president or senator or congressperson or member of the judiciary holds strong religious beliefs, they should not disqualify that person from serving in government. If one is a Christian, for example, those Christian beliefs will inform and guide that person's decisions whether that person is in public service or in private practice.

Thanks for the explanation, Terry.

c.

Much earlier, Ann commented:
Ann, the Gospels do not state that the entire nation of Israel wanted Jesus to die. The religious rulers, the puppet king Herod, and Pilate all awkwardly and almost unintentionally conspired to put Jesus on the cross. The majority of Jews didn't even know the trial was happening until it was over, and by then there was no way to stop the execution.

And Pilate, if we recall, was threatened with a report to his superiors that he was ignoring a situation which went against the current Roman religious system. The Romans didn't care if their conquered nations kept their own religions, but they did care if someone claimed to be a king without their permission. And that was what Pilate was threatened with. Remember also that Pilate wasn't eager to execute Jesus, and only did so when the mob outside his residence appeared to choose Barabbas over Jesus. All Pilate was doing was the same thing that politicians have done for centuries: cover his own assets.

Hi Ann,

I just discovered this thread and it's been a nice distraction from homework. I thought I'd pipe in with a thought that came to mind as I read your description of your relatives.

Tell me, what would you think of your relations if they firmly believed everything they do--deep in the firmament of their being--and *didn't* try to steer your down the path to God? What would you think of anyone who knew information that would bring *eternal* happiness (and that's a long time) to you and, more importantly, lead you to be (in the most completely objective sense of the word) a *good* person, but they just kept mum and took the "spoils" for themselves?

Especially consider if someone knew that in order to be A Good Person (we're still talking *the* objective definition here), they were required to let you in on what it would take to bring you eternal happiness, but they just decided not to. Or when they had the opportunity to take to the streets and bring it to their whole country, they stayed home and watched TV instead. Or participated in an H.C. Andersen fairy tale play.

What if there was some being out there that is so smart, so incredibly powerful, and so incredibly gracious that He made *everything*. That He thought you up and set you in motion. And all He asked in return was that people like you obey people who are made a little different from you (males vs females). That's your job. Perhaps its an experiment--how do people do when they are put in positions of power over others for arbitary reasons? How do people do when they are told by Me to be the property of other people for arbitrary reasons?

Whatever the reason He did this, this is the way He wants it. And if you put up with it for 70 years, be faithful to the One who made you and made everything and everyone you enjoy and hold dear, He'll reward you with an eternity of bliss. He'll answer your every question, give you love and respect and whatever you desire.

What if you knew this was the way the world worked, but your stubborn grand daughter was going to lose it all, because she would rather be in H.C. Andersen plays? (I'm being mildly absurdist here, but I'm sure you follow my point.)

I think if I were religious, I would be a crazy fundie. As an atheist, I became a physicist instead. Meh.

But it's interesting to think about. I don't think I'd have much respect for someone who really thought they *knew* something as important as how to be The Definition of a good person/how to have an eternity of paradise, and *didn't* try to push it onto others.

Then again, the wishy-washies who basically say "this is what I think but you're free to be a heathen" certainly make life easier, as I think their faith is mis-placed. But I wonder if *that* type of Christian doesn't, somewhere down deep, agree with me.

Isn't that the truth. I have class to prepare for tomorrow, but if I read any more on modernist aesthetics my brain is going to explode.

So I rather read about morality instead.



It's an awesome article.

alcyone

Wendy, when I say I want a religious state, I don't mean the word "religious". To me, Christianity isn't a religion (although I know that technically it is). Christianity is having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord. I am a Christian and I don't think I could truly follow Christ if I thought that other people's religions were just as valid. I know that may offend many people on here but it's not meant in a condesending way at all. I say this because I believe with all my heart that what the Bible says is true, that Jesus Christ is our Lord and that the only way to Heaven is through Him. If I wish that other people felt that way also and wish that they would go to Heaven as well, it's not because of a judgemental spirit or any other reason; I only wish everyone had the hope that I have in Jesus Christ.

I've kind of rambled on here. I don't think I've really answered your other questions. In my ideal church/state government, the people who didn't believe anything or followed a different religion would follow Christian principals. I say again, not the Old Testament law, but what Jesus teaches. This I think, regardless, of what religion you practiced, would be a good thing. I mean, who doesn't want forgiveness, giving, faith, hope, love, honesty, generosity, etc. etc. shown and instilled by their government? That sounds like a great society to me. So in my mind, the government that I would like would be that of a Utopian society. It won't ever happen....

Mercy quoted:
Kind of what I was trying to say above...

But the very claiming of these values for Christianity, as opposed to any other religion, is itself offensive and a very good reason to keep religion (call it religion or call it Christianity; the latter is merely one branch of the former) out of politics. Yes, the values themselves are good, but don't Jews or Hindus or Rastafarians or Muslims also believe in those values? What about secularism? These are general values, not by definition attached to any religion.

And bring religion into the mix and you have politicians arguing that their own branch of private morality must be law. Alternative sexualities, even divorce or minority rights: all of these issues get decided on the basis of religious beliefs that may not be shared by the whole population. Be opposed to homosexuality on a personal level if that's what you believe; just don't turn that belief into a set of political principles. I looked up Fred Thompson's website, looking for his political position, and was horrified to discover references to 'sodomy'. I have gay friends and colleagues, some of whom have been with their partners ten years and more, and, sorry, I don't want to see them referred to as 'sodomites'.

I've left abortion out of the above list because it's not an issue of private morality; however, it's also something that tends to be debated and decided on the basis of religious beliefs and is likely to lead to disagreement on the same basis.

Incidentally, just so it's clear where I'm coming from, I was brought up staunchly Episcopalian; went to church faithfully every week and often more than once (in college daily), but gradually became disillusioned as teachings of the mainstream church diverged from my own sense of right and wrong (for example, on gender and other equalities), and as increasingly I see religion used to justify actions I don't support. I'm not at all anti-faith; I just prefer to see it as part of personal lives and kept out of politics.


Wendy

I have to echo Wendy here. As an agnostic, why on earth should I be obliged to follow so-called Christian principles in order to be considered a moral or ethical person? And why on earth do some Christians claim these principles as their own exclusively? My parents were quite able to teach me right from wrong. I need no god to tell me how to behave morally and I find the entire notion that I can't possibly be a moral person or behave ethically unless I follow the Christian god deeply offensive.

This seems to me to perfectly illustrate the entire problem with the premise being discussed. One person's religion being forced onto those who don't share it.

LabRat

Mercy, you asked me a very interesting question:

Let me tell you a little about my parents, Mercy. My father lost his mother when he was eight years old. His mother died of cancer. My father had to leave his home and spend several years with relatives, until his father remarried and could take him home again.

The relatives that my father spent some years with were fundamentalist Pentecostalists. I do believe they were kind to him. However, my father rarely spoke of his childhood, and he seemed relatively uninterested in religious matters. He never spoke about such things. Yes, he went to church with my mother every Sunday, but that was about it. I think the trauma of losing his mother so young and having to leave his father was so great that the religious things his relatives may have tried to teach him just didn't make such an impression on him.

My father was a member of a Pentecostalist church, nevertheless, but he left it when he was twenty-one. He never told me many details, but once he said that money had been disappearing from the congregation, and no one wanted to look into the matter because they were afraid of a scandal. My father disliked that sort of fear, so he left and joined a liberal church, the Swedish Missionary Society, instead.

Unlike my father, my mother has told me a lot about her own childhood. She belonged to a Pentecostalist family, and her parents believed in something that you can apparently read somewhere in the Bible, “you shall not sit down with sinners”. Don't ask me to find that passage for you, and don't blame me if it wasn't an exact quote. But that was the rule that my grandmother and grandfather lived by.

This meant that my mother was not allowed to have any friends who were not Pentecostalists. But since there were so few Pentecostalists where she lived, she was not allowed to have any friends at all except her sister and one other Pentecostalist girl whom she didn't like. None of her classmates were Pentecostalists, so she was never allowed to go home to any of them, or invite any of them home to her, or even spend any time at all with them outside school hours. She has often told me about a time when a circus came to her village. She stood some distance away and watched all the kids in her village file into the big circus tent. Only she, her sister and that other Pentecostalist girl were not allowed to go in.

When my mother was eighteen, she once went to church wearing a thin gold chain around her neck:



The pastor spoke to her after the service, but he didn't say anything about her necklace. But as soon as she had come home again the phone rang. It was the pastor, who wanted to speak to her father, my grandfather. And then the pastor told my grandfather that he had to make sure that his daughter didn't come to church wearing the kind of jewellery that made her look like a harlot.

Now my mother had had enough. As soon as she was able to, she left her home as well as her congregation. She moved to Gothenburg, Sweden's second biggest city, and joined a big church, the Swedish Missionary Society. She made lots and lots of friends there and had an absolutely splendid time. Later she met my father there, and they fell in love and got married.

My mother never returned to the particular Pentecostalist congregation she had left behind, but a person who still belonged there told her that the congregation kept praying for my mother's soul, Sunday after Sunday. They seemed to believe that if she didn't return to her Pentecostalist home, she would probably go to Hell.

When I was a small child, my grandfather took a very great interest in me. When I think back on my childhood, I can see what an imposing figure he was. Whenever we met my grandparents, my grandfather managed to be alone with me. And he often called, and when I answered, he would speak to me for an hour or more.

He always talked about religion with me, behind my mother's back. She never had a clue about what was happening.

My grandfather had lost his daughter to the Swedish Missionary Society. I think he was determined to win me for his own Pentecostalist church. He showered me with religious children's books about Christian little children who were almost supernaturally good and perfect. The horrible thing was that these kids didn't have to pretend to be good. They were absolutely perfect, through and through. They were never angry, petty or sullen. They were forever jubilant because God loved them, and they loved nothing better than showing God their gratitude by being wonderfully good little boys and girls in return. On the extremely few occasions when a girl did something wrong – because it was only the girls who ever did something wrong – she was tearfully happy and grateful to her parents for spanking her to save her soul.

My parents spanked me. I hated it. I never really forgave my parents for doing this to me. There was no way I could ever, ever, ever be grateful to my parents for spanking me. I was so bad. I could never be like the children in my grandfather's religious books. If people only knew how ungrateful I could be!

What would my relatives do to me if they knew how bad I was? I concluded that they would probably take me prisoner and lock me up in a small room, where they would pray with me and scold me and read the Bible to me and never leave me alone and never let me out until I folded and lost my ability to think for myself and became just like them. So I never dared to show them anything at all of my own sheer badness and my religious doubts and confusion, because if I could make them think that I was just a good little girl, they would probably leave me alone.

Up until I was ten, I spent most of my time with people from either the Pentecostalist Church or the Swedish Missionary Society. We spent the summers on an island with our Pentecostalist relatives. Those of my cousins – second cousins – who were girls had to spend much of their time doing household chores. They had to tidy up their brothers' room, hang up their brothers' clothes and make their brothers' beds, and then they had to help their mothers with things like cooking, washing up and doing laundry. When the girls were finally let out of their houses, they merged in a flurry of summer dresses and flowing hair, and then they took off like whirlwinds and disappeared where I couldn't follow.

During the rest of the year I spent a lot of time with girls from my parents' congregation, the Swedish Missionary Society. These girls didn't have to do a lot of household chores, and instead they were shown off by their parents as the family jewels they were. The girls did great at school (well, so did I), they wore splendid clothes and looked great (I didn't) and they certainly knew how to make others feel inferior. Once, when my mother had come to pick me and another girl up after choir practice, this other girl haughtily informed my mother that I had made a spectacle of myself by giggling during the rehearsal.

When I was ten, we moved to another neighbourhood in Malmö, and here I suddenly got some truly great friends. They were kind and tolerant, and they never talked religion with me. They never complained about me to my parents. They liked to be with me, and they didn't try to change me. They liked me for the person that I was! Wow! I had never come across kids like them before.

Thanks to my new friends, I was able to relax and stat looking back on my religious experiences and try to understand them. One thing that really bothered me was how the Pentecostalists and the Swedish Missionary Society people could be so different in their religious behaviour, even though they claimed to believe in the same God.

After thinking about it, I concluded that it was the Pentecostalists who were the better and the more devoted Christians. They seemed to love God more, and they seemed to be willing to sacrifice a lot more for God. The Swedish Missionary Society people, the SMS, seemed a lot more interested in worldly success, and their religion sometimes seemed to be just one more perfect little thing that they flaunted before others to demonstrate how good they were.

So I concluded that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites and the ones who were likely to enter Heaven before all others. I also concluded that while many and perhaps most SMS people would be let into Heaven, they probably knew deep down that they themselves were not as good Christians as the Pentecostalists. I suspected that all Christians somehow knew that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites.

When I was nineteen and in my last year of high school, we were given a school assignment which meant that we had to go to a religious service which was not given by the national Lutheran Church of Sweden which all Swedes were just born into at the time, which meant that practically all Swedes belonged to it. (Nowadays you aren't born into it.) We had to visit a service given by another church and find out facts about this church.

I hated that assignment, because I found it hard enough to deal with two churches, or rather three, the Pentecostalists, the Swedish Missionary Society and the national Lutheran Church of Sweden. I didn't want to find out things about a fourth church as well. But I always did what my teachers told me, so when my best friends decided that they would visit the Mormon church in Malmö, I tagged along.

The service was very unmemorable, but afterwards the pastor took questions from us. I had only one question for the pastor. What did he think about my Pentecostalist relatives and their faith?

At first the pastor ignored my question and pointedly talked to my classmates instead. But when I had repeated the question twice, he finally answered. And he told me that… my Pentecostalist relatives would go to Hell.

To say that I was thunderstruck was putting it mildly. My Pentecostalists relatives would go to Hell? Even though they had devoted all their lives to God? Even though they went to church several times a week and gave away much of their possessions in tithes and contributions to charities? Even though they uttered phrases like “Praise the Lord” and “Halleluia” in every other sentence? Even though their homes were plastered with pictures and posters and paintings of Jesus? Even though they spoke in tongues and burst out in spontaneous prayer at unpredictable moments? They were going to Hell?

I had no reason to assume that the Mormon pastor knew more about the fate of my relatives than my relatives did themselves. But then again, could I assume just like that that the pastor was dead wrong?

The other thing that was so unspeakably shocking about what the Mormon pastor had told me was that he seemed so sincere about it. He wasn't lying to me. He truly believed that my relatives were going to hell.

And finally I had to ask myself – how do I know that religious statements are true at all? Because people believe in them? But there will be other people who are every bit as adamant about not believing in them. How do I know if they are true?

The Mormon pastor told me that only those who had had the Mormon baptism could go to Heaven. What's more, the pastor also told me that now that I knew this, it was my duty to become a Mormon myself, because then I could have the Mormon baptism vicariously for my relatives and thus save them, so that they could go to Heaven. Many years later, I thought to myself that it would be sort of, well, “fun” if I had become a Mormon and baptized myself for my relatives. Because if God prefers Pentecostalists, then my relatives would go to Heaven because they are Pentecostalists. But if God prefers Mormons, then my relatives would go to Heaven because I had baptized myself for them.

Then again, what if God doesn't prefer either Pentecostalists or Mormons? There once was a Monty Python sketch where Saint Peter guarded the gateway to Heaven and told almost all the applicants: “I'm sorry, Sir, the Jews were right all along… follow this way to Hell, Sir…”

The truth is that it is not possible to know what religious creed is the right one, or if indeed there is a right creed at all. So, Mercy, you asked me if it isn't cruel *not* to steer people down the path that you yourself believe is the right one. Yes, perhaps it is. Then again, consider my mother. She was not allowed to have any friends when she grew up, because her parents firmly believed that God only loves Pentecostalists and only wants Pentecostalists to be friends with other Pentecostalists. Were her parents right to treat her this way? Perhaps you say that if she would go to Heaven thanks to the fact that she was made to shun non-Pentecostalists, then her eternal happiness in Heaven will be worth the inconvenience she suffered for a few years on Earth. But what if God doesn't care one bit if you are friends with Pentecostalists or Lutherans or Catholics or Swedish Missionary society people or Mormons or any others?

And what about Muslim parents who treat their girls in a way that we find cruel, just because the parents are honestly convinced that this is the only way for their daughters to get good lives and go to Paradise after death? Should we condemn the parents for treating their daughters in a way we find shocking, or should we say that it would be more cruel for the parents to treat their daughters the way girls are treated here in the west, if the parents thought that this could mean that their daughters will get to spend eternity in Hell?

All I can say is that if people want to deprive me of my rights for my own good, because this is the only way I can go to Heaven according to these people's own faith, then I guess I'm not going to be thankful to them for trying to help me to Heaven.

Ann

I can see I've ruffled some feathers. That was not my intent although I can understand why they were "ruffled."

I think I'll just bow out of this thread for now....

I realize that this thread is over 40 entries long now, but I'm just starting at the beginning, so forgive me if I'm going over old ground.

Ann, first let me so that I'm impressed with your reading - so many people have a habit of saying that such-and-such religion believes this or that without ever having read the source material. Kudos for not doing that! And I've never read to Koran myself (and for that reason I'm not in the habit of commenting on Muslim beliefs), so I was interested in some of the things you said about it.

Regarding female heroines in the Bible -
First, it's true that a lot of women are portrayed in their contexts as mothers. I certainly believe that there many types of heroism, but don't discount the work and sacrifice that goes into being a parent. Mothers (and fathers) make their mark on history in a very real way. Second, what about Esther? This is a woman who saved thousands of people from genocide. She did it by relying on her feminine attributes to be sure, and perhaps that isn't very feminist, but the point is that she did it.

It might be accurate to say that Paul founded the church - the congregation of believers - but he didn't found Christianity. That would imply that he came up with the basic tenants that we follow, and he didn't. He promoted them, and he did a darn good job of it, but they weren't his ideas.

I absolutely agree. Jesus said: 30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:30-31) This is hard to do - very hard sometimes - but I have difficulty understanding why so many Christians just ignore the second part completely and think it's ok to hate certain types of people.

I just heard this for the first time a few weeks ago. A visiting pastor, Ron Something, said it to me and just about bowled me over.

You know, I've heard about this, but I haven't actually seen it in action. Around here people still say Merry Christmas and have Christmas trees. Then again, I live in the south, that may have something to do with it.

Ah, but were we, really? Do Christians have a monopoly on morality? I don't know much about other religions, but it's my understanding that most of them don't condone things like murder. I think it would be more accurate to say that that America was founded on humanist principals. After all, there is nothing in the constitution about God.

I don't. I do believe in the separation of church and state most wholeheartedly. Think of it this way - what if there is a tidal wave of change and in time the President and Congress are dominated by Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or Pagans? I don't want "In Allah We Trust" on my coins, either.

Skipping over lots of stuff about polygamy (because I've never thought much about it, honestly) and the role of women in Christian marriages (because others Steph and Doranwen have already eloquently replied)...

It wasn't the majority of the Jews; it was the Pharisees. The controlling party, if you will. They were threatened by the very fact that so many of their people believed in Jesus. He threatened their power, plain and simple.

Do you have any evidence for this aside from your gut reaction? The Gospels were written as biographies, with the exception John, which is a first person account. And as in all biographies, there is room for error. But, that being said, the Gospels been authenticated in as much as it is possible to authenticate documents that have been around for two millenia. (Check out The Case for Christ .) Regardless of whether a person believes that the events recounted in the Gospels are true, it is an undeniable fact that the Gospels themselves are valid historical documents. To say that they were tampered with is a pretty big leap to make without anything to back it up.

Ann, your story of how you interpreted Christianity as a child makes me so sad. I wish I could make you feel the presence of Jesus the way I do - love and grace without fear.

Hear, hear!

Yes, it does. Just what I quoted above - 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' No, Jesus didn't come right out and say "don't burn witches" in so many words, but he was expecting us to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. That's like a parent telling their child to come straight home after school. Instead, the kid goes to the mall and then says, "Mom, you didn't say I couldn't go to the mall!" Yes, she did, she just didn't use those words. Obviously there have been and continue to be horrific examples of people not following the spirit of Jesus's words, but that's a human failing.

The reason Christians don't follow Old Testament doctrine is simple - we are saved by grace. We don't need to burn witches or be circumcised because we are not trying to win or keep God's love. We already have it, forever.

It certainly seems that way when you watch tv, and I'm sure there are lots of parents out there that aren't teaching their kids things they need know. But I doubt it's really a majority - if I meet ten random people on the street, I doubt six of them are going to think it's ok to whip out a knife and stab me to death. I'd be suprised if even one thought so. There are still millions upon millions of people with morals and ethics in the world - some are Christians and some aren't.

Now this I certainly agree with. You can separate church and state, but you can't separate a person from their beliefs. When you elect an official, you're electing the whole person. That's why you learn as much as you can about them before you vote. If you don't like their beliefs, don't vote for them.

What the Constitution actually says, by the way is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Steph, I completely get what you're saying here, but you have to remember that Christians don't have a monopoly on these good traits. I know a lot of people who aren't Christians who are still good people. I'm related to some of them, even. I certainly wish they knew the grace of God, but even though they don't, they still have morals, ethics and a sense of right and wrong, and there are a fair few that I would trust to run the government.

Bottom line - I'm a Christian. I believe in the separation of church and state. Those values aren't mutally exclusive, despite with the media likes to tell us!

The only religion my two kids have been raised in is "The Golden Rule" and they are turning out pretty damn fine. I personally think that if everyone made an effort to just live life and try to incorporate that "Do unto others" concept (and lots of other faiths outside of "Christians" have versions of this in their creeds) that there would be a lot less sadness in this world...excepting of course the psychopaths and sociopaths but then they always play by their own set of rules anyhow, right?? All this worry over heaven and hell and how the neighbours are running their lives when we can create a better place here and now by treating others with the same kindness and caring that we'd hope they show to us. Idealistic I know but it works for me and many others to whom religion has lost all meaning and who want to live life at peace with themselves.

(emphasis mine)
The values Steph listed are the values of the Christian faith; thus, is is accurate for her, as a Christian, to describe them as "Christian values". She neither said nor implied that they are *exclusively* Christian. In fact, the way I read her post, she seems to be saying that they are *not* necessarily exclusive to Christianity. I understood her to say that she is more interested in a person's values than in their religion, and that as long as a man shares her values (forgiveness, giving, faith, hope, love, honesty, generosity, etc.), that is more important to her than what religion he practices. I also understood her to say that she feels we would have a better country if everyone practiced these principles, and that she is glad that the founders of our country believed in them (due to the fact that the founders happened to be, for the most part, Christians, and Christianity teaches these principles.)

I'm sure that's what she meant, Vicki; it's just not what she said. This is what she said:

If she'd said Principles espoused by Christianity and many other faiths, then I wouldn't have picked up on it, though it's true (as LabRat said) that this also excludes atheists and agnostics who also follow a strong code of ethics in their lives.

But I'm sure it was just a poor choice of words


Wendy

I'm not going to get into much but to clarify this for Ann since I don't think it has been clarified.

Another way to say Old Testament and New Testament that I think makes this clearer it is this:

Old Covenant and New Covenant.

The Old Covenant applied to us before Jesus. It was the prophesy and the doctrine telling us of his comming. The New Covenant applies to the new agreement so to speak that we have with God. This is the new doctrine and the new relationship we now have because of Jesus.

I could go into more detail but I think the simple explaination is best here.

~Jojo, who was a Christian Ethics major with a Christian Studies Minor but doesn't touch online debates on religion with a 1,000 ft poll. However she would love to have a cup of tea with Ann and talk about it cause it seems like great fun.

Lol, getting into Old vs. New Covenant could really open up a can of worms. From what I've seen, the OT has two sets of laws: the Ten Commandments (which are still binding, as Jesus kept them and never mentioned them disappearing), and the rest (which, although the principles behind them are still sound, the actual laws were designed for the culture and place that the Israelites were, and no longer apply to us today). I believe there's a couple differing views of that out there, though. Some believe all the ritual laws still apply today (and I wonder what they do because they don't have a temple to go sacrifice at), and others believe the Ten Commandments are somehow done away with now . . .

The Old Testament religion wasn't really based on works either--it's not like the sacrifice of the animal actually did take away the sins--but it was based on the hope of the future Sacrifice yet to come, and all the ritual was designed in a way to point minds and hearts towards the future Messiah, to help people see the gravity of their sins and repent. But God has never operated on works--the Israelites could no more earn their way to heaven than we can today. Salvation was a promised gift then, and it's a waiting gift now.

I would argue that the Ten Commandments are not exactly binding today, not all of them. First of all, the way the Bible describes them, it is hard to argue that there are ten of them. They way I see them, it makes more sense to argue that they are eleven. Here's how the Bible describes them:

Let's repeat them, commandment for commandment. This would be number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four:

Number five:

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight:

Number nine:

Number ten:

Number eleven:

Admittedly, it is possible to merge commandment number two, the ban against making graven images and other pictures, and commandment number three, the ban against worshipping the graven images and other pictures. If we merge them, we do get ten commandments rather than eleven.

What Christianity has done, however, is that it has merged commandments one, two and three, and then it has conveniently forgotten commandment number two, the ban against making graven images and other pictures, as well as commandment number three, the ban against worshipping such images. (To come up with ten commandments after this merger, it was necessary to split the last commandment up in two.)

Anyway, we have apparently lost and forgotten one or two entire commandments, the commandments against making pictures and worshipping them.

Who can say that we aren't making pictures?

Uncle Sam poster made up of 700 different pictures

And who can say that Christians have never been worshipping before graven images, like this statue of a man who is seen worshipping (a statue of) Mary? Can we say that no Christians have ever bowed down before statues of Mary and Jesus and prayed and worshipped before these statues?



Why have Christians forgotten the commandments against making images and worshipping before them, even though those commandments are there to read in the Bible, plain as day? There are two answers to that one. First, when Christianity tried to export itself to the Roman Empire, it quickly became clear that the Christians couldn't seriously challenge and ban all the statues and paintings that decorated the heartland of the Empire:



Could the Christians just demand that the Romans simply throw out all their statues and paintings? Sure. Why don't you ask them to spit on their Emperor, too?

The Romans made heroic statues of their Emperors. This is Augustus:



On the relatively few occasions when the Christians were persecuted in Rome, they were usually accused of refusing to bow down before a statue of the Emperor and worship before that statue. Refusing to do so could be seen as treason.

There was just no way that the Christians could make the Romans believe that it was wrong to make statues and paintings. If the Christians wanted to make themselves acceptable to the Romans, they had to stop criticizing Roman art.

And stop criticizing it is what they did, so thoroughly that most Christians today don't know that the commandments actually contain a ban against pictures. I'm very glad that no one in the west tries to uphold that Biblical ban against pictures. But it bothers me that some Christians are so sure that they are obeying the ten commandments, and yet they don't know what the ten commandments are, because they haven't looked for them in the Bible.

Ann

Dorawen wrote:
Separating the Ten Commandments from the rest of the Mosaic law isn't proper. You can say that they provide a general overview of the intent of the Mosaic law, or that they're an introduction to the law, that they give us a hint of what's in God's mind and heart, or that they're excellent moral principles to live by. But to state that they are separate entities is incorrect. The Jews of Jesus' day didn't do that, and there's no indication that the writer of Exodus intended that they be separate.

While it's true that Jesus never "turned off" the Ten Commandments, it isn't true that they are binding to us today in the sense that we have to live by them or get punished by God or by civil authorities in this life. They are, however, still binding in the sense that they are moral guideposts for us, signs to point us in the direction we're all supposed to live.

And it is also true that we are not responsible today to fulfill the law of Moses in its entirety, even assuming (as Dorawen correctly pointed out) that there was a Temple at which we could perform those mandated sacrifices. The other point I would like to make is that the Lord gave the law of Moses to Israel to follow, not to all mankind in general. Which means that, in order to live a righteous life, we must individually follow Jesus and discover what He wants each of us to do (beyond that which is revealed in the Bible, of course).

There are two reasons I make the distinction that I did. One is that we don't live in a theocracy as the ancient Israelites did. The other is the implication of what happened in the Temple as Jesus died--the curtain separating the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place ripped in two. This was a huge, thick, heavy curtain that no man could ever hope to rip with his bare hands. It was also far taller than any man could ever be, hence the ripping of it was a clear supernatural event. As it happened at the same time Jesus died, and Jesus was *the* Passover Lamb (plus other significance of the temple that I don't remember right now but have studied), the ripping of the curtain signals an end to the sacrifices. Many people have used this as an excuse to say that the Ten Commandments no longer apply.

I will pause to explain why ten commandments: they are ten because we group each commandment that speaks on a particular theme. I am not sure that it matters so much whether there are ten or not, as I can't recall Jesus ever naming the *number*. When he talks to the rich young man, he names off the six commandments that deal with relating to others (leaving off the four that deal with relating to God). It's pretty clear that the verses on making images and bowing to them are related and belong together; remember that verses are a construct of medieval scholars, as the Bible originally didn't even have punctuation, much less verses! And yes, you are correct, Ann, many Christians have not paid attention to the 2nd commandment. The Roman Catholic Church wished to bring more pagans into the fold, pagans who were accustomed to bowing to their idols and statues (and the pretty colors and images would make the worship a "richer" experience), and so they began to make saints of people and sell people pictures of them to pray to (the money didn't hurt either). Although I don't think they ever altered the Bible text itself, in many (perhaps even today, I don't have one to check) Catholic Bibles the special pages with the Ten Commandments on them for easy reference will look a little different than the ones Protestants are used to, as they cut the 2nd commandment (the one about idols) out entirely, and dropped much of the 4th commandment (as they had instituted Sunday as a day of worship to bring more pagans in, the glaring text proclaiming the *seventh* day was a little too obvious). Many Christians have bowed to idols unwittingly--but what God looks at is the heart. It is those who have led them astray that will bear the blame for it.

Anyway, although all the signs make it clear that Jesus was the ultimate Sacrifice (doing away with a need for more sacrifices), it doesn't do away with the moral precepts behind the law, which are embodied in the Ten Commandments. They are not separate laws so much (as I'm afraid I made it sound) as one set is the guidelines and the other set is the implementation. A good example is our laws today in the US. The Constitution sets out ideals such as everyone having the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If they left it at that, people would run roughshod over others because the laws aren't specific. So the specific laws were created to make the ideals obvious and to keep people from maliciously ignoring them. The laws, however, cannot be made to fit every single possible case that could ever exist, and so they are only partial approximations of the principles. In the theocracy the Israelites lived in, the principles in the Ten Commandments were the ideals to live by, and the laws were the approximations of the principles, but necessarily limited. This is another reason why we see laws that don't seem to be completely fair. God required enough to start changing people, but those who really followed Him would show it by applying the *principles* to what they did, not just the laws. We see some of the difference there in relation to the six levels of moral development that are known in modern psychology.

Hence, although we no longer need to follow the literal laws as laid out, the moral principles in the Ten Commandments are timeless and apply even today. The six principles regarding one's neighbor still apply: honor your parents, don't murder, don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't lie, don't covet. It also stands to reason that the four principles governing our interactions with God still do: put God first in everything, don't bow and worship images, don't use God's name lightly or for cursing, and keep the Sabbath day holy. The actual details of how each of these principles looks when put into practice may vary slightly depending on culture and upbringing (this is where the questions come in that will split a group down the middle, each side believing strongly that they're trying to do what is right), which is where it reverts to our conscience, and as Terry said, we have to seek out God's will and earnestly try to do what He impresses on us is right. In many cases there are other clues in the Bible that help us decide what God wants, but in the more complex dilemmas there isn't always an obvious right answer.

I hope that makes things a little more clear--thanks for correcting my error in making them seem too separate.