(no subject)
Mar. 5th, 2001 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonwiseBored, bored, bored and feeling stupid. The forecasters were swearing up and down that we'd have a foot of snow on the ground by now, so I stayed home from work so I wouldn't have to drive in it again, and so far there is nothing happening outside. Argh.
There's been a lot of unrest at the MB under my guidance (oh hell, all my friends know this is NR...) and I don't know how I feel about it. The mods are concerned about flames and controversial topics. The most recent unhappy topic concerned religion, which is unsurprising. It seems to be the one thing that just can't be discussed.
I read a quote in a Star Trek novel (of all places!) that says about religion (to paraphrase): "That which is supposed to be the balm of life ends up being the ultimate factor that divides us." How true this is. I'll be frank - I'm not a religious person in the sense that I don't like to go to church and I don't like being told that I'm going to hell if I screw up. I believe that the Bible may indeed contain the Word of God, but that Word of God was filtered through Man, and Man with an agenda at that. Only seven of the Letters of Paul were actually written by Paul; the rest were forged by others who wanted to use his name and his influence to advance their own vision for the Church. In this way, certain early Christians were disenfranchised, especially women (yes, women used to be priests; there is evidence for it!) And I'm supposed to take this propaganda as canon?
Of all the Gospels, John is the oldest and probably the most accurate. It was estimated to have been written 60 years after the death of Christ. The other Gospels -Mark, Matthew, Luke, Thomas, Marian - were written 100-200 years later. There is also clear evidence that one Gospel borrowed from another (unsurprising; they were all oral tradition for a long time.) The early fathers of the Church rather arbitrarily picked four Gospels to be the cornerstones of what would become the Catholic Church - four winds, four elements, four directions, four Gospels. The Gospels they chose were no more or no less the Word of God than the others, yet the Gospel of Thomas lies forgotten by all by Biblical scholars while we read Luke at Christmas. In the Infancy Gospels of Jesus, there are wonderful stories about him performing miracles as a child (there are also darker stoties, but I won't relate them.) Why do they lie forgotten?
The Book of Revelation, loved by evangelists and loonies alike, is really a diatribe against the Roman emperor Nero. It amazes me that it has survived so long.
I guess what bothers me about organized religion sometimes is that a certain people will claim that they have been "chosen" and that all others are wrong in their beliefs. I imagine that all religions have this element, yet it is so limiting! Who knows the nature of God? Is He (and She!) so small that S/He has to be fit into a box and presented in a way that people can understand? I see the Creative Power of the Universe in the incredible way that the planets dance to a set equation, in the way that matter can organize against all the odds.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm a slam-bang believer in evolution. Literal creationism claims that the Earth and the rest of the universe is only about 10,000 years old, not a few billion years old as some scientists are beginning to discover. I'm a scientist, and I believe facts and figures.... but this doesn't mean that there wasn't some Higher Power involved! I don't think that a deity snapped his/her fingers and there was the universe, but I do think that perhaps, just maybe, the Higher Power helped to create life by giving the proper evolutionary pathway a nudge in the right direction. How does a protein know how to fold? How did the elaborate process of DNA replication come to be? This is where God is for me - not in the metaphorical Garden of Eden.
It's arrogant to believe that we could ever understand God in our current forms. It's arrogant to believe that one religion is right and the other wrong, though I think that any religion that encourages violence in the name of God is severely misguided. No one people is chosen over another people; no one is better or more righteous than another. This is one of the reasons why I find the fighting in the Middle East to be so sad and so hopeless.
Guess I just had to get that out of my system. The whole NR fracas did stir up some emotion, though as a mod, I can't express it. Hope I didn't offend anyone...
There's been a lot of unrest at the MB under my guidance (oh hell, all my friends know this is NR...) and I don't know how I feel about it. The mods are concerned about flames and controversial topics. The most recent unhappy topic concerned religion, which is unsurprising. It seems to be the one thing that just can't be discussed.
I read a quote in a Star Trek novel (of all places!) that says about religion (to paraphrase): "That which is supposed to be the balm of life ends up being the ultimate factor that divides us." How true this is. I'll be frank - I'm not a religious person in the sense that I don't like to go to church and I don't like being told that I'm going to hell if I screw up. I believe that the Bible may indeed contain the Word of God, but that Word of God was filtered through Man, and Man with an agenda at that. Only seven of the Letters of Paul were actually written by Paul; the rest were forged by others who wanted to use his name and his influence to advance their own vision for the Church. In this way, certain early Christians were disenfranchised, especially women (yes, women used to be priests; there is evidence for it!) And I'm supposed to take this propaganda as canon?
Of all the Gospels, John is the oldest and probably the most accurate. It was estimated to have been written 60 years after the death of Christ. The other Gospels -Mark, Matthew, Luke, Thomas, Marian - were written 100-200 years later. There is also clear evidence that one Gospel borrowed from another (unsurprising; they were all oral tradition for a long time.) The early fathers of the Church rather arbitrarily picked four Gospels to be the cornerstones of what would become the Catholic Church - four winds, four elements, four directions, four Gospels. The Gospels they chose were no more or no less the Word of God than the others, yet the Gospel of Thomas lies forgotten by all by Biblical scholars while we read Luke at Christmas. In the Infancy Gospels of Jesus, there are wonderful stories about him performing miracles as a child (there are also darker stoties, but I won't relate them.) Why do they lie forgotten?
The Book of Revelation, loved by evangelists and loonies alike, is really a diatribe against the Roman emperor Nero. It amazes me that it has survived so long.
I guess what bothers me about organized religion sometimes is that a certain people will claim that they have been "chosen" and that all others are wrong in their beliefs. I imagine that all religions have this element, yet it is so limiting! Who knows the nature of God? Is He (and She!) so small that S/He has to be fit into a box and presented in a way that people can understand? I see the Creative Power of the Universe in the incredible way that the planets dance to a set equation, in the way that matter can organize against all the odds.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm a slam-bang believer in evolution. Literal creationism claims that the Earth and the rest of the universe is only about 10,000 years old, not a few billion years old as some scientists are beginning to discover. I'm a scientist, and I believe facts and figures.... but this doesn't mean that there wasn't some Higher Power involved! I don't think that a deity snapped his/her fingers and there was the universe, but I do think that perhaps, just maybe, the Higher Power helped to create life by giving the proper evolutionary pathway a nudge in the right direction. How does a protein know how to fold? How did the elaborate process of DNA replication come to be? This is where God is for me - not in the metaphorical Garden of Eden.
It's arrogant to believe that we could ever understand God in our current forms. It's arrogant to believe that one religion is right and the other wrong, though I think that any religion that encourages violence in the name of God is severely misguided. No one people is chosen over another people; no one is better or more righteous than another. This is one of the reasons why I find the fighting in the Middle East to be so sad and so hopeless.
Guess I just had to get that out of my system. The whole NR fracas did stir up some emotion, though as a mod, I can't express it. Hope I didn't offend anyone...
