common sense

[mirthtones36]

Out of all the assignments I've ever been asked to complete, this paper has been one of the most intellectually challenging, and by far my favorite. After reading Clifford Geertz's "Common Sense as a Culture System" and realizing that common sense is NOT a universal like we assume it to be, I was asked to choose one concept that I hold to be common

Comments

Re: Post-Scriptum to "Interesting attempt"

[_rck_]

I am always for socio-historical contextualization, so no need to convince me there.

really only laws made by the Hebrews and old stories passed from mouth to mouth

Naw, they are not. That's 19th century scholarship, what you are talking about. They are documents of an organized effort of identity finding by elite members of the Jewish communities who are trying to deal with their politically changing landscape around them, primarily the renewed expansion of the Assyrian Empire in the 6th century. Current scholarship is pretty certain that Deuteronomy was never a law anybody could have actually lived by, but was an ideal toward which the community returned from Babylon was supposed to aspire to. Sure, there are parts in there that were opinio communis of the whole Ancient Near East, and so presumably someone tried to live by them, but those were clearly not made up by the Hebrews.

while the new testament is largely PERSONAL letters never intended to be seen by anyone save who they were written to

Not true either - there is probably no real concept of a "personal letter" in the Mediterranean world of that time, and people were collecting their letters to be published for general education and edification all the time; see the letters of Pliny the Younger, for example, Cicero, even Plato etc.

If you choose to turn away from christianity because of its general oppressive view on women, thats your choice.

I was only talking about (Protestant) Christian fundamentalism, not Christianity in general, since we were having a discussion about truth of documents and so on. It was a biographical footnote, not part of an argument.