Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament's entirely unnacceptable intellectual dishonesty
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sat, 4 Mar 2006 19:24:07 GMT
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Viewed:
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1757 times
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Hi, Steve.
I’ve moved this over to off-topic.debate since that seemed more appropriate.
In lugnet.build.ancient, Stephen Bishop wrote:
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In this latest addition, you have portrayed Christ in a very unsympathetic
and bad light by only including a part of the entire story. This I find to be
intellectually dishonest and entirely unacceptable.
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I am presenting the story of how Jesus insulted a Canaanite woman. I grant that
this can also be seen as part of a larger story about how Jesus exorcised the
demon from the daughter of the same Canaanite woman, just as that exorcism can
be seen as a part of the larger story of Jesus’s miracles, which is in turn a
part of the story of Jesus’s life, which is in turn part of the Bible story as a
whole.[1]
By this point in the Gospels, Jesus has already exorcised many demons (and, of
course, also
explained that when a demon is exorcised from a person, it goes out and gets a
whole team of even worse demons to re-possesses the same person, leaving them
worse off than they were to begin with).
Since Jesus’s demon exorcisms have already been covered in The Brick Testament,
what stood out to me as new and noteworthy about Jesus’s trip to the region of
Tyre and Sidon is not that he merely performs another exorcism, but that when a
Canaanite woman begs him to help her daughter, Jesus first coldly ignores her,
and then makes a racist insult while refusing to offer help. That’s the novel
part of this story to me because it reveals something new about Jesus’s
motivations and character. We already know he can exorcise demons at will, but
it is not until this story that we learn of Jesus’s general policy of not
providing help to non-Jews[2], and his thinking of Canaanites as subhuman.
(Though considering
what his father had to say about them, I suppose that’s not too surprising.)
I certainly do not deny that the text goes on to have Jesus finally break that
policy and deign to exorcise the Canaanite woman’s daughter after she continues
to beg Jesus for help even after being racially insulted and refused help. But
to have the illustrated story end with Jesus’s relenting to perform the exorcism
would shift the focus and make it seem more like just another exorcism story and
thereby diminish what is new and interesting about it.
-Brendan
[1] Any time someone presents only part of the Bible, they will have their
reasons for selecting only certain parts of it and not others, and for
presenting that selected material in a particular fashion. This holds
true for priests, preachers, theologians, and lay religious believers as
much as it does for anyone else, myself included. I would argue that I am
much less selective than the vast majority of others about which Bible
content I choose to present. My style of presentation is also notably
different than most others. All too common is for a small selection of
Bible content to be presented amidst a large amount of exposition and
interpretation. I, on the other hand, have aimed to present a very large
amount of Bible content with an extreme minimum of exposition or
interpretation (limiting myself direct quotes of scripture and the LEGO
illustrations).
It is my estimation that the vast majority of people presenting Bible content
are moved by their own biases to be extremely selective, only presenting about
5% of all Bible content. Their audience is left to assume that this 5% of the
Bible’s content is truly representative of the Bible as a whole. When I
actually read the Bible for myself, it occurred to me time and time again that
the vast bulk of the Bible is not at all represented by the 5% of it that
usually gets presented. In fact, that 5% is often in stark contrast to other
95%. It occurred to me that people do not really know the Bible if all they are
ever presented with is that selected 5% of it, so I thought it would be a
worthwhile project to make my own presentation of the Bible that focuses on “the
other 95%”. The Bible’s “silent majority”, if you will.
So, yes, I have my biases, and I don’t pretend not to. There will probably
always be that missing 5% of biblical content from The Brick Testament, just as
there will continue to be a missing 95% from almost all other presentations of
Bible content. People tend to notice the missing 5% more in The Brick
Testament, because that 5% is the famous part of The Bible. They don’t tend to
notice the missing 95% of Bible content from other Bible presentations because
most people aren’t familiar with it.
The only way for someone to get a full knowledge of the entire content of the
Bible is to read the entire thing oneself. Although gruelling at times, I do
heartily recommend that option for anyone who thinks the Bible is an important
book.
[2] This policy is also seen in the story in Mark 7 where Jesus racially
insults a Greek Syro-Phoenician woman, and is strongly suggested in
Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out his disciples to heal the sick and raise
the dead in “all the towns of Israel”, and specifically tells them not to
go to any of the non-Jewish towns.
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