Symposium

[miusheri]

A Socratic debate: Socrates Meets Jesus

Done in the same style as Socratic debates you may have read before. Like a child, Socrates asks an authority figure (Jesus, in this case) a slew of simple questions. When you start taking all the answers into account, however, it turns out they're really not that simple...

Comments

[mqstout]

[zra42]

It would be more interesting if Jesus' responses were restricted roughly to things actually attributed to him by the Bible. However the dialog could be nearly fixed, in terms of historical accuracy, if "Jesus" were replaced with "Augustine," for example. Even so, using Jesus(or Augustine) as a mouthpiece for "whatever fundamentalist Christians believe" is a bit uninformed.

[miusheri]

Then I ask, what would Jesus say? ;)

Growing up Lutheran, I was told that if something was in the Bible, you were supposed to believe it. If it wasn't in the Bible, you were not supposed to believe it. So for instance, to be truly Lutheran (and therefore Christian), you were supposed to believe in the creation story and in the resurrection, because those were in the Bible- but you were not supposed to believe in Purgatory, because that is not in the Bible. Admittedly, I don't know if that's necessarily "fundamentalist," or what you have to do to be a Christian. In other words, I wouldn't mind some clarification

[zra42]

Yes. The Bible is tricky. I usually try not to concern myself with what religious people say about it. Also, trying to figure out how/why it is used by particular flavors of Christianity is too hard for me, and I have no interest in defending them.

But! Reading it is easy. In fact, it's possible to read everything that Jesus said in the Bible in an afternoon. If I recall correctly, in the gospels according to Mathew, Mark, and Luke, he mostly just gives some general guidelines. The rest of the new testament(including the gospel according to John) is people putting words in his mouth. It's really kind of spectacular.

The rest of the Bible is interesting to read, too, though it is pretty hard to follow sometimes. When I get lost, I refer to Azimov's Guide to the Bible. It puts things in a historical context without religious overtones.

[manycolored]

Eeek. Way different flavor of Lutheranism than I grew up with. Ours was sort of midway between Lutheran and Unitarian I suspect, in that we were never taught about hell. It was more like, "Sin is when you do something that causes harm, and it makes God sad because he hates it when one of his children hurts another one."

[price]

Jesus reads very much as a socratic Jesus, rather than the historical or mythological one.

It still boggles my mind that non-believers opt to enter the debate in this fashion. It's all the absurdity of evangelism pointed at the opposite end result.

[stardragonca]

There is a Sage in Kentucky.