It's beginning to feel a lot like a winter power outage here, if I don't post the piece I'm working on tomorrow, that's the reason.
In the meantime here's a really interesting episode of The Bible For Normal People with Brent Strawn
This week, Jared & Pete talk to Brent Strawn about the Old Testament. They discuss some of the common criticisms of the Old Testament and how the modern Church has over-emphasized the New Testament much to its detriment.
Especially good is said about the most violent book of the Old Testament, Joshua, and how its violence seemed to trouble the authors of other books in the Bible who seem to have tried to quarantine the violence into it. It is a book that covers a very long period. I especially liked the point that the people who complain about the violence in "the Bible" don't seem to have the same problem with what they watch on TV which is extremely and popularly violent. I've come to see that a lot of such back handed moral indignation surrounding religion doesn't stand up when you look at the lives of those white-washed tombs and what they say about other things. I've been brawling with them online for almost 20 years, those people who will throw a fit over some passage in Joshua on a dime just looooove! them their violent TV. I should look up my ancient brawls over the promotion of torture as sold on 24. Naw, you can imagine what was said easily enough.
I really like this podcast. Even when I don't agree with it it's interesting to hear peoples' reasons for thinking as they do. It's not as if I believe anyone has the whole truth about it. or that what truth we have isn't mixed with folly.
A couple of textbooks back included some essays on torture; arguments about its effectiveness, basically. The essays pointed out how ineffective torture is except as a method of inflicting pain on others; and I would lecture on the topic and explain the Congressional testimony of the FBI interrogator who got the Al Qaeda prisoner to tell him everything with kindness and cookies; a man who shut up once he was waterboarded again, because the Administration at the time was convinced "torture works."
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, on TV and in the movies ("24" is just one of many to exploit the idea) torture always does work, so it was impossible to shake them in their erroneous beliefs. I found the same stubbornness in people who condemn the "Old Testament" (and yet never realize doing so makes them anti-semitic; funny, that).
The more you oppose something, the more like it you become. Didn't Nietzsche say that?