Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:32:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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4289 times
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Thanks for indulging me, John.
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And what makes Jesus’s “revelations” about God trustworthy to the point
where you seem to have supreme confidence in that trustworthiness?
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That is a revelation to me which I cannot explain.
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OK, I guess that answers most of the questions from my post. So, if I
understand you correctly, when it comes right down to it, the reason you believe
wholheartedly that Jesus spoke eternal religious truths about God and God’s
nature and God’s concerns (while, for example, Moses or Muhammed did not) is
because you had a personal revelation that convinced you this is true, one that
you can’t otherwise explain.
That helps me understand where you’re coming from. But it also seems like you
could hardly expect anyone else to share that same view of Jesus or God for any
rational reasons. And maybe you don’t.
But from an on-and-off reading of your posts to ot.debate, it seems as though
you fairly regularly make statements about Jesus and God that seem to wholly
depend on such a personal, unexplainable revelataion. It leaves me wondering
why would you expect anyone else to take such statements seriously (unless you
assume they already share your views about Jesus and God because they also had
a personal revelation of their own to mirror yours).
A person could potentially become convinced of any proposition or set of
propositions based on a personal revelation that can’t be explained. Somone
might become convinced that the Earth is flat, someone else might become
convinced that Karl Marx spoke eternal religious truths, and a third person
might become convinced that the number 3 is evil.
But in a public discussion, you would probably be surprised to see such people
bring such beliefs into play. If someone tried to make a valid point in a
discussion by pointing out that the Earth is flat (without even bothering to
explain why they believe this outlandish proposition in the face of all the
evidence to the contrary), you would probably laugh them off. Even if they
explained that they became sure of this fact through a personal revelation that
can’t be explained, you would still probably only snicker at the silliness of it
all. You might not bother to point out the foolishness of it, but I am guessing
you would still shake your head at the very idea from the safety of behind your
computer screen. (Though feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about how you
would react to such claims.)
The same would be true of any propositions that ultimately depended on such
propositions, such as someone arguing that the number 9 is probably super-evil
because 3 is definitely evil, and 9 is three 3’s!
My point is that propositions that are believed in based on personal revelation
(and arguments that depend on such propositions being taken for granted) have
this same aura of silliness and/or irrelevance to anyone who does not already
share those beliefs.
So I guess what I’m saying is, you won’t have much success in a debate (be it
about ethics or public policy) if you expect other people to take seriously
statements or arguments based on personal revelation.
Now, again, I could be reading you wrong, and maybe your intent is not to change
anyone else’s mind, or even logically defend your own positions. Maybe your
posts to ot.debate are simply to state your positions. But that’s not the
impression I’ve gotten, and it would kind of go against the whole spirit of
ot.debate.
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First of all, I am not a Jew (meaning I am not bound by Jewish Law).
Jesus never expected AFAIK gentiles who followed him to be bound
by it, either.
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On my reading of The Gospels, Jesus doesn’t seem to have expected gentile
followers at all. If you don’t think Jesus expected gentiles to follow the Law
of Moses, it seems equally likely that Jesus didn’t expect gentiles to follow
any of his other teachings.
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But see, revelation didn’t end with the Old Testament, either. Jesus, for
Christians, is the final revelation of God’s nature.
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I assume this is one of those propositions that you believe in based on a
personal revelation. So as an example of what I was trying to explain above,
your statement of this proposition comes across about as convincing as someone
simply stating “But see, the Earth is flat.”
I realize you are simply stating your beliefs about Jesus and God (and doing
so in this instance at my own request!), but by habitually posting in a public
discussion forum called .debate, it seems like you actually expect that other
people might in some way be convinced by such statements when I don’t see how
that is a realistic expectation in the least.
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Jesus correctly interprets the Torah (LAW)
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Again, I know this may simply be a proposition you believe from personal
revelation, but I don’t know I can even make sense of this. Sure, there is some
ambiguity in The Law (hence the Talmud in Judaism), but it is very clear in many
regards. How exactly does Jesus correctly interpret it?
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and we find out that God is less interested in the
minutia of forms of worship than He is about human behavior, especially
towards one another.
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That is quite a revelation! Who’d have thunk that all along, the correct
interpretation of The Law is the exact opposite of its face-value meaning? The
correct interpretation of all those laws about the minutia of worship is to
ignore them! Brilliant!
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This idea even appears in the OT as well.
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True, there are a few bits in the OT which contradict the vast bulk of the rest
of the OT in suggesting that God doesn’t really care about animal sacrifices and
the other minutia of worship. But is choosing to take seriously .0001% of the
OT over the other 99.9999% of it the “correct interpretation” of the OT? That
seems entirely preposterous.
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EXCEPT for the fact that Jesus FULFILLED the Law! He didn’t abolish it, but
He completed it; His being was the Law brought to fruition. All of Judaism
came to completion with the person of Jesus Christ.
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For the life of me, I cannot understand this interpretation of the word
“fulfill” in this passage. It seems to force a meaning on to “fulfill” here
that makes this into a gibberish statement instead of one with a clear meaning.
I do not deny that the word “fulfill” has different meanings in English, and
from what I understand the Greek word pleroo has very similar multiple
meanings. But which meaning makes sense in context here? I would say that the
most obvious meaning of fulfill in Mt 5:17 would be “to fully carry out”. This
would be like someone saying, “I have come to fulfill the requirements of jury
duty.” You would hardly expect an interpretation of that sentence to be “I have
come to bring the requirements of jury duty to fruition; I will complete the
judicial system” because that simply makes no sense.
A second possible interpretation is that Jesus is saying he came to perfect The
Law. This is plausible, since several of Jesus’s teachings take elements of The
Law of Moses and make them even stricter (ie, not just murder is a sin, but
anger; not just adultery is a sin, but extramarital lust). But in light of the
fact that Jesus’s very next sentence is stating that not even the smallest
stroke of The Law will pass away before the end of heaven and Earth, I think it
is far, far more likely that Jesus means that he came to “fully carry out” the
Law of Moses to the letter.
The one meaning of fulfill that makes no sense here is “to complete” or “bring
to an end”. What sense does it make to “complete” a set of laws? Could someone
“complete” the US Constitution in whatever sense Jesus is supposed to complete
the Law of Moses?
Furthermore, any interpretation of this passage that has the net result of
making The Law of Moses no longer valid would fly in the face of Jesus saying “I
have not come to abolish The Law” right before this and “not even the smallest
stroke will pass away” right afterward.
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Well, remember, Jesus was VERY critical of the keepers of the Law (Pharisees)
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I agree that Jesus criticized Pharisees for following the letter of the Law and
not the spirit. It would be something like me criticizing someone who pays
their taxes to the US government but looks for every last possible loophole to
pay far less than their fair share. In both cases, we’re trying to get the
other to follow the laws in a less “legalistic” sense.
But he also implies that the Pharisees are exceedingly righteous, warning his
non-Pharisee listeners, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes
and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
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He broke the Sabbath on more than one occasion to exemplify religious
hypocrisy.
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Jesus does have, in my opinion, a strained interpretation of the sabbath law,
but seems to have thought he was within the law rather than breaking it, and
appealed to David’s similar God-approved (non)violation of the Sabbath to
support his own actions.
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Jesus was far less concerned by the letter of the Law than how we
treat each other.
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I get this sense in certain passages from The Gospels, but in others
(particularly the Gospel of John) Jesus seems more obsessed with people holding
certain beliefs about him than how they treat their fellow man. And throughout
the Gospels is the overriding concern with the imminent end-of-times judgment.
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The Law was good, but the Law became the object of
Israel’s affection, not God Himself (via the treatment of others).
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When did The Law become the object of Israel’s affections? That seems ironic,
since so very much of the OT is dedicated to describing how the Israelites
continuously failed to follow The Law properly, and were therefore relentlessly
and brutally punished time after time after time after time by God.
If there’s one message the OT gives more clearly than anything else, it’s FOLLOW
THE LAW OR GOD WILL DESTROY YOU. For Jesus to come along after all that and say
“Hey, you know what? Don’t sweat The Law too much. God just wants you to be
nice to each other,” is just insane.
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I think we are using different definitions of “immolate”. I was referring to
it specifically as a sacrifice to God, such as a burnt offering, not just
torching somebody.
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Well, then you were using a different sense of immolate than Dave! who made the
comment you were replying to in the first place. Dave! was referencing
Leviticus 10:1-2 in which Yahweh himself kills Aaron’s two sons Nadab and Abihu
by shooting fire at them, burning them to death. Their crime? Worshiping Yaweh
incorrectly, seemingly as Dave! suggests, by using the wrong incense.
It is just this very sort of minutia and insanely-harsh punishment for failure
to exactly follow such minutia that gives The Law of Moses its reputation. The
thing is, when Jesus was around, his fellow Jews believed that God himself had
personally given them all these laws to follow on pain of death and destruction
for their families. If Jesus thought it was important to correct this
incredibly huge misunderstanding about what it is God really wants, it seems
like it would have been incumbent upon him to state in the clearest possible
terms that The Law is not what God really wants, and also explain why they
have all been miseld for the past 1,500 years into thinking that that was
exactly what God wanted, and that it was their failure to follow every last
bit of God’s obsessive minutia which was the reasons the Jews had suffered all
kinds of horrible invasions, oppression, slavery, pestilence, etc.
I know if I were Jesus, and that was the message I needed to get across, I
would not have wasted time criticizing Pharisees and speaking in parables. I
would have just said over and over to anyone who would listen, “Oh, man! You’re
never going to believe this, but we’ve been TOTALLY WRONG about God and what God
wants for the past 1,500 years! There’s been some terrible, terrible, terrible
mistake! I suppose I’m partly to blame because I’m kind of God myself, but
let’s set the record straight once and for all! All our people’s holy
scriptures are totally wrong. Throw them out! Well, keep a couple of copies
around as historical curiosities, but SERIOUSLY, God is totally not like that
(even though everything up to this point in history has lead you to believe he
is)! Aren’t you glad I’m here to set you straight? Oh, and by the way, the
world is about to end and you’ll spend eternity in hell if you don’t believe I’m
God’s son and everything I say is true!”
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But don’t be too surprised if others don’t see it
with the same clarity or think that the Bible supports that view.
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They would, if put this way: God is perfect.
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While I agree that many modern believers conceive of God as somehow being
“perfect”, perfect is a subjective term and I think you’d find much disagreemnet
on what it means for God to be perfect. As far as I know, there are also modern
believers and probably far more ancient believers who would not have thought of
God as “perfect”.
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If God is perfect, than any change in God would be something
LESS than perfect, which ISN”T perfect, and therefore that what
God isn’t. So, God must be immutable. Logic, really.
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I really don’t even know what it means to posit that “God is perfect”. What
would a “perfect human being” be? What is “a perfect car”? What is “a perfect
color”? All of these can only be answered given a starting set of subjective
judgments. Perhaps a perfect God for me would be a nonexistant one. :)
But can change really not be in the nature of something that is perfect? What
about a perfect sunset? Isn’t change a part of any sunset? The sun changes
position, the clouds change colors. Perfect!
It seems more likely to me that the ability to change would be a necessary part
of the nature of something like God. Isn’t a God who has the ability to change
more perfect than the God who lacks that ability?
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I suppose we could also have a debate about how exactly an “immutable” God
can take any actions at all (such as sending his son--or himself in human
form? to live on earth), but I’m much less interested in that subject to be
honest.
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Oh good, I’m beat. I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.... ;-)
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Nobody expects the Brendan Inquisition!!! :)
-Brendan
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Well, let's say that it "rings true" to me; I find the wisdom valid for my life. Why? I don't know the reason. But it does. Why do you believe what you believe? Upon what rational basis do you (presumably) deny the existence of God? How do you (...) (18 years ago, 18-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Of course I believe the NT is as well. For example, Paul writes letters to specific communities with specific issues. Even the Gospels have specific audiences. Yeah, lots of the issues addressed are of the universal type, but some aren't. One (...) (18 years ago, 18-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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