I have major doubts, but I feel like I’m moving into an area where I want to start seriously considering religion, and specifically Christianity. I talked about it at length in my last post, so go back and read it if you haven’t already.
Anyway, I’m possibly prepared to accept Christianity in a sort of provisional sense, as the most meaningful mechanism by which I can access the Divine Mystery of Unknowable Universal Truth and Miscellaneous Etcetera.
I even feel like I can turn to the Bible as something spiritually meaningful and religiously relevant. I would do so with the caveat that the Bible is the record of one nation’s interactions with the Divine, but that it is heavily filtered through their cultural lens and their milieu. Moreso than many other scriptures, the Bible is open in my opinion to this kind of interpretation. People wrote the Bible, after all, and they were people who lived in a certain time and place, with certain limitations. It aims toward ultimate truth even if it is not itself The ultimate truth.
As far as Jesus and his life, mission, and divinity go, I’m prepared to accept it conceptually without worrying whether it is literal fact or not. I can accept Christianity as a spiritual scaffold without needing to muck around with apologetics and debate.
However, the biggest problem for me, the stumbling block, is Judaism.
Unlike the rest of the Bible, the Law of Moses is supposed to have been directly dictated by God and written down the way He said it. Even the words of Jesus by comparison are removed enough from their original source to be a little bit shrouded in the mists of time, history, and myth. But the Law is a full document straight from God’s mouth to the stone tablets, and I think the Law sucks.
Not in the Paul “the law killeth” sense. I mean that the Law is simply not the kind of thing that could be given by any kind of God I could imagine, and unlike the rest of the stories in the Old Testament which may or may not be just stories, it’s kind of hard to say that the law is just a mythic interpretation of something.
It advocates death by stoning for all kinds of petty stuff. It condones slavery. It’s crap. And the way I see it, it’s not the kind of thing that is Mythic at all. Either God dictated it to Moses or Moses made it all up. It doesn;t come down to us shrouded by oral tradition. And the entire Old Testament from then on is fairly rooted in it. So what’s the deal? It’s kind of hard to separate Christianity from the Law.
I’m not talking about the no-brainers like “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery.” I’m talking about stuff like where if a man rapes a girl he just has to pay some money and get married. I’m talking about where it says to kill your family if they believe differently than you. I’m talking about the divine mandate to commit genocide. Or how you’re supposed ot kill your children if they don’t obey you.
You want to see me deny the existence of God? Convince me that the only possible God is the one that made those rules. I just don’t buy it. And that’s a problem, because it means there’s a whole section of the Bible that I can’t simply deal with in my wishy-washy liberal way, and that means I don’t know what to do other than junk the whole thing, other than as a piece of literature.
Sailing to Byzantium 
Just to throw my two cents in…
I’m not clear on why, on the one hand, you’re happy interpreting the story of Jesus liberally (“…without worrying whether it is literal fact or not”), but you take an all-or-nothing approach with Judaic law (“Either God dictated it to Moses or Moses made it all up”). Seems like you could either apply the same relaxed standard or the same strict standard to both.
My personal guess is that the Old Testament laws were the end result of the usual law-making process that happens in any society, and at some point someone decided they’d carry more weight if they were written down and given a divine stamp of approval. Might have even had something to do with Josiah – 2 Kings 22 seems suspiciously convenient – but that’s pure speculation on my part.
Hmm. Interesting point, Shishberg. I’ll have to mull that over.
Damn stumbling blocks! If only there were a scientific method for dealing with them.
It seems to me that Judaism is the foundation and old soul of Christianity … Mormonism gets and embraces this and just look how they act out a covetous latter-day Judaism. Seriously, I think Christianity without Judaism is like California Adventure without Disneyland — a non-destination theme park. Sorry about the lack of reverence.
Man, I just don’t see that at all. To me, the Old Testament looks nothing in the world like a ramp-up to Christianity. At least, that’s looking at it from a religious believing perspective.
From a cynical perspective, there’s a whole “basically just a product of time and place” thing.
wow, I was going to write a big ol’ comment and everything I might have said was already stated. That saved me a lot of time.
I am sure you have done the research as well, but I am one of the people convinced the Pentateuch was written by at least two people, if not three to five. To me it is highly doubtful that Moses wrote the first five chapters of the Bible, and I even doubt if he existed, but I am a cynic. Don’t even get me started on the flood.
I think the New Testament was written to try and continue the teachings of the Old Testament. And 2000 years ago this was plausible. But now to many it is easy to see the Old Testament doesn’t hold up to actual events, thus making the New Testament more difficult to base one’s faith in.
But I don;t see the New Testament as a continuation of the Old Testament’s teachings at all. To me, it is so radically different that I have a hard time buying the proposition that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, that he’s the one who gave the law.
I’ve been in a conversation with my brother Racticas for a couple of days about his. He’s been reading Simone Weil, and thinking about why many pagan religions look a heck of a lot more Christian than Judaism does.
It’s been awhile (10 years or more) since I researched it all. I have been kind of into it again since I started blogging and reading other blogs. But that is one of my main points. They don’t really relate, other than Jesus being the son of God. And if the New Testamant was truly written with the hand of God then surely we would know that it is the God of the Old Testament.
As far as pagan beliefs, without doing a ton of research right now (I can do more later), many Christian traditions are pagan traditions handed down as a kind of compromise to convert people. Even Christmas is originally a pagan holiday, a celebration of Saturn. Easter is full of pagan traditions. Ironically if you Christian by celebrating Christmans you are indirectly celebrating a pagan god, and breaking a commandment (even though indirectly). I have brought this up to many Christians and the most common answer is it doesn’t matter we are celebrating Jesus’ birth, it doesn’t matter the day. Yet, the God of the Old Testamant wouldn’t have let anyone ride that fine line, I don’t think.
Kullervo, just came across your journal yesterday. Hi!
You said: “But I don;t see the New Testament as a continuation of the Old Testament’s teachings at all. To me, it is so radically different that I have a hard time buying the proposition that Jesus was the God of the Old Testament, that he’s the one who gave the law.”
I don’t know if you have ever considered reading Rudolf Steiner’s works on cosmology, Christianity etc, but you may find some ideas that might mesh with your thinking there.
Wikipedia has a broad outline of his thinking, including links to some of his writing and lectures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner
Drat it, man! If you convert, you’re going to make me have to go back and write an addendum to my post about you. 🙂
More seriously, I hope you end up somewhere you’re happy and comfortable with, no matter what that is. You strike me as a good person and I’m sure you’ll make the right choice.
I can understand what you find so disconcerting about the Old Testament – without a doubt it’s one of the most savage books ever written. The New Testament is arguably better, though for me, its teachings about hell throw a big monkey wrench into the situation. As bad as the OT is, at least it never threatens punishment beyond death. That said, there are plenty of beautiful stories about love and compassion in there too.
The whole thing is very much a mixed bag, and in my experience, what you get out of it depends on what you bring in to it. People who are angry and judgmental read the Bible and see a god who’s a lot like them; people who are forgiving and compassionate read the Bible and also see a god who’s a lot like them. The book is sort of a cross-section of humanity, which probably isn’t that surprising considering how many different viewpoints went into producing it.