PSA: The Bible: clearing up some misconceptions

[melengro]

• The Bible is, depending on the canon, between sixty-six and ninety-one books, not one big book. There's some stuff that carries over from book to book and some that doesn't. It's like the Upanishads. If you confuse the Isa Upanishad for the Shvetashvatara Upanishad you're seriously missing the point.
• The Bible was written by many different people in

Comments

[queenpeladon]

Does this make Jesus the first retconner? He should have given the Enterprise writers a few tips...

[melengro]

No. Jeremiah retconned the whole 'Hell' thing in Lamentations 3.

[airie_fairy]

Saying different things to different people is a given, it's the web of self-contradiction that results that is...well. But, as I've said before anyway, god is not confined to within a text.

"If God hates gay people, why did He allow so much potential for Ruth/Naomi femmeslash?"

Hee. =D

And I take a Milton/Joseph Campbell approach to Lucifer anyway. It works out well for me.

[melengro]

If God is complete, He's contradictory. Kurt Godel mathematically proved that (and yes, he WAS thinking of God when he did the Incompleteness Theorem; he was a committed Christian).

She married Boaz to legitimise teh hawt R/N secks. Yes. I'm such a terrible person.

There's a theory, popular in the Middle Ages and in some forms of esoteric Judaism, that there are two Satans. One, Samael, tempts you during life and when you die tries to shanghai you into his Army Of Evil. The other, Lucifer, takes you away from Samael when you die and, for lack of a better term, beats the sin out of you so you're ready for Heaven. It's not an especially pretty picture, but it has the virtue of making sense, unlike the traditional concept of the Devil.

[airie_fairy]

That still leaves me wondering where the expectation that you try to live according to god's word comes from when there's all that contradiction. I suppose it adds to the challenge, but then that leads into entrapment and then that gets into the question of worthiness of worship. It's not contradiction itself or the mercurial nature I have problem with; that much is interesting.

Ah. My perception of Satan doesn't even involve temptation. It's just possibly at play in the world, independently of trying to tempt anyone, and the way people deal with it is indicative of their own inner "good" or "evil," the latter reaction just proving Satan's cynical point about humanity being undeserving.

[melengro]

The fun part is trying to decide which parts of the Bible are delayed-action tests: bits that you're supposed to reject (without rejecting the whole thing wholesale) to demonstrate that you have a conscience. All of organised religion is absurd to some degree, and the main goal is to bring the absurd down and the transcendent up. Er, IMO.

I don't personally have the conception of the Devil that I outlined above (or any at all, really) but yours seems to work. I like to think of him (when I do, which isn't often) as being kind of like Crowley from Good Omens.