Religion: pros & cons (Religion)

by dhw, Thursday, October 16, 2014, 21:55 (3689 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Sorry for the extended pause here. Life happened, as it so often does with me, and I was kept unavoidable busy.-Relieved and delighted that you are back! Where were we? Ah yes, you thought I was holding the bible (and by extension God) “accountable for the actions of humans with free will.” This was a misunderstanding. My point was that the bible is a collection of books written by, chosen by, translated by and interpreted by a collection of fallible human beings and is therefore not to be trusted as a truthful record or as a reliable source of moral guidance, since it can be interpreted any way one chooses. (But we have agreed that people can live moral lives without religion.)-TONY: 1) I believe the bible to be the inspired word of God. Yes, it was penned by man, but done so under divine inspiration. The fallibility check is found in its internal consistency and prophecy. 
2) It is actually not as open to interpretation as you might think, provided it is taken as a whole and not cherry picked.-Those people who throughout history have interpreted it to justify slaughter, slavery, apartheid, racism, bigotry etc. cherry picked, and if they had picked cherries from other parts of the bible they would have found that these offered different cherries. But you say the bible is not as open to interpretation as I might think. I believe Jehovah's Witnesses base their rejection of blood transfusions on cherry-picked passages of the bible, whereas Protestants and even Catholics don't seem to have a problem. Is this because they don't consider the whole of the bible? Many a luckless Catholic has been confronted with the story of poor old Onan, whom God killed because he spilled his seed on the ground - a sure sign that God is against contraception, though the Church of England tells us there's nothing in the bible against it. So is it the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury who has failed to consider the bible as a whole? 
 
Our exchange concerning my marriage made me smile with sheer pleasure at your erudition, and at the trouble you have taken to answer me. Thank you. But it is a wonderful illustration of the problem I have in seeing the Bible as a whole. Jeremiah prophesies that there will be a new covenant, thanks to which God will write his law into the hearts of the Jews. You tell me this means that I as a Jew will be allowed to marry a Christian. Does it? The rest of your references are from the NT, which wouldn't count for much with the rabbi who refused to intercede with my father because according to him, the bible forbade me to marry outside the faith. But of course he would not have accepted your claim that the NT invalidates the divinely inspired Mosaic Law. Even your NT references simply talk of a new covenant, though, and when Paul (the same guy who forbade my wife to get yoked to an unbeliever, and therefore by definition an unrighteous man) says: “For Christ is the end of the Law, so that everyone exercising faith may have righteousness”, does he really mean it's OK for a Christian to marry an agnostic Jew? How much of the Law did Christ end anyway? Surely not the Ten Commandments. And according to Matthew 5, 17, Jesus said: “Do not think I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I came, not to destroy, but to fulfill.” I'm cherry-picking, of course, but I'm sure you understand why I'm not convinced that God said it was OK for me to marry my wife and for her to marry me.
 
I don't know if your post was truncated, but you referred me also to 1 Peter 3:1,2: “In like manner, you wives, be in subjection to your own husband, in order that, if any are not obedient to the word, they may be won without a word through the conduct of (their) wives, because of having been eyewitnesses of your chaste conduct together with deep respect.” I have difficulty understanding this, but it would appear to mean that wives must acknowledge the superiority of their husbands, and should keep quiet, so that if the husband misbehaves he will become a good man because he's seen that his wife has behaved herself. I'm not at all sure why you have cherry-picked this passage. I can't relate it to my marriage, but I can well imagine a husband teaching his wife that when he goes off the rails, the bible (God) tells her to shut up.
 
Tony, my knowledge of the bible is on a par with my knowledge of a hundred other subjects, including all the sciences - namely, pathetically weak. I accept and admire your faith and your learning, but as with the many other blank areas of my education, I'll argue the toss over the conclusions the experts draw, because they see the same material and cannot agree among themselves what it means. It seems to me that the bible is as wide open to interpretation as virtually every other subject connected with the great mystery of life.