"the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing"

". . . not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility."


I HAVE SAID that from now on I'll judge all interpretations of Scripture  according to the extent to which they agree with that summation of The Law and the Prophets as presented by Jesus and Hillel, Do to others what you would have them do to you.   Not only that of the Jewish and Christian Bible, by the way but all such texts and declarations claiming authority, certainly that includes the form attributed to Hillel, that which is hateful to you do not do to others.  Either you believe that summation of The Law and the Prophets is a Commandment of God or you don't.  If you do it was the Law in the time of Abram and Lot and Judges and for every other time when the Scripture asserts that the heros of the stories did all kinds of things to others, especially Women, things they would never have wanted done to them.  the story of Sodom and Gomorrah fails as a moral lesson under that standard for all the reasons I stated. So does Abraham's alleged behavior in many instances. As I said, I don't believe those legends are likely to have ever really happened, they were inventions likely of far later priests and scribes and fabulists that got written into Genesis and other books of the Bible. I think that Abraham pimped his wife twice in Genesis is probably an editing mistake, though if he did do it once and made out like it says in the story, a real life guy who would use his wife like that might do it again.  I prefer to think it's probably not how the couple who are the origin of the line that became The Children of Israel really were in real life.  Their behavior in regard to Hagar and Ishmael is especially disgusting, as told. Almost as bad as Lot's in regard to his daughters.

That and Great Commandments of Jesus, Love God and Love Others and his New Commandment which you can only try to approximate, Love one another as I have loved you.  None of us is Jesus, I doubt any of us is capable of fulfilling that one but that's no excuse to not try.

But I believe that so strongly that I will not only apply it to interpretations of Scripture but, also, to those parts of Scripture which most certainly do not agree with those Commandments which I take to be always and eternally valid on the authority of those two great experts in Scripture and those who have agreed with them.  I judge those using my other method of evaluation, the rule of thumb given by Jesus for judging the authenticity of would-be religious figures and movements and would-be morality, he using the metaphor of trees in an orchard, "by their fruits you will know them." If that's a valid rule for judging what people claim, especially in religious matters, it's as valid for judging the claims of those who wrote down the Scriptures.  If you don't do that, if you're not to do that, Christianity has a gaping hole in its integrity.

Good acts, good language will not generally bring evil results if those are carefully and responsibly understood and enacted.  It's conceivable that even the best ideas can produce bad results when they are stupidly or merely imperfectly applied.  In any case I can think of, if you follow those Commandments it's fairly obvious that huge swaths of claimed religious Scripture, doctrine, dogma, rules, laws, claims fail and People and other living beings will be hurt by them.  

It should never be forgotten that large parts of the Bible were produced by priests, scribes, etc. who had not only their own ideological point of view, but who often worked for the Temple establishment and the Kings.  Judges is, as one commentator I read said, clearly designed as a warning to those who don't much like the monarchy of what anarchy looks like. It's clear that it went through the hands of some who found same-sex-sex disgusting and even clearer that those who produced it were male supremacists, as most of humanity seems to have been.

The lines of Scripture and later theology and doctrine and dogma which asserts the rightness of the subjugation, oppression and abuse of Women is solid if not absolute proof of the falseness of those lines of Scripture, those stories contained in it. Everything in Scripture which supports patriarchy is false.  And by that I don't mean there is some "true meaning" which, somehow, people have just not happened to notice in the two-thousand years plus that they have been used that way.  Even those who invent that fig leaf to cover the shame of taking those as true and binding on us today don't really believe it. Though those scriptures are important as examples of how even within the written Scripture there are red flags of what to avoid believing and using to chart your course of conduct.

Lines of Scripture, even alleged laws that support slavery, that support wage slavery, that support the cheating of workers, etc. prove the falseness of those passages or the falseness of others twisted to do that.  If everyone followed the rule to not do to others what you would want them to do to you, slavery would be impossible, wage slavery, maltreatment and cheating, etc.  Any verse or story of Scripture, any law that would allow for what we understand, now, as being slavery has to fall by the superior means of defining The Law and the Prophets.

There were seeds of better things in the Scripture even for that, seeds that have germinated and developed into something like trees that bore better fruit, that's true in recent times for abolitionism, Women's equality, etc.  Those in history are inseparable from the People who argued for those using Scripture, not least of which was the Golden Rule, the other egalitarian passage and those which can be read that way.  Much of that goes right back to the opening of Exodus, something which, especially, Black Americans noticed from the start of their opposition to their enslavement, even as slavers used passages of the Bible to supposedly justify their holding people in chattel slavery in perpetuity.  Funny that American Christians who supported slavery in the American way never seem to have read the Commandments in the Mosaic books that said escaped slaves were to be allowed to live as equals in the place they fled to and not returned to slavery. For anyone who believes the Constitution is "based on the Bible." Today, the same ignore the failure of Slave owners and their progeny to pay reparations to slaves that are freed, though that's specifically laid out clearly in Scripture.

I have given three of the passages from the First Testament that are constantly used by those who most certainly want to treat LGBTQ+ People as they would never want to be treated as examples of, in two cases, the clear falseness of what those claim and in the other why it means the opposite of that use of it, I will note the others, in Leviticus and Paul, as those are commonly read, also fail on the Golden Rule rule of hermenutics, they also fail because it's clear those who wrote that had no idea of consensual, equal, loving, faithful, committed marriages of two men or two women.  The modern understanding of egalitarian marriage (I'd say impossible for them to imagine, both at the time of Leviticus or Paul) is an entirely different thing from what those passages imagine.  It's rare enough for straight-marriages, I'd say easily fewer than ten-percent of all marriages seem to be that kind of marriage.  When I speak about marriage equality that's what I mean, as I said in my last post on that topic, I mean that I want the best kind of marriages for all men and women, married to the other sex or the same sex.  I want those for any children who are living in all families, whether with two mothers or fathers or one of each.  Paul certainly couldn't imagine that even for straight married People, that is why his suggestion that Women be submissive to their husbands is so offensive now.  We can imagine a truly moral form of marriage in which no one is submissive but both practice the Golden Rule and work out disagreements and problems on the basis of consideration and love instead of patriarchal dominance.  

On the "by their fruits you will know them" rule you can look at what we know about the marriages and sexual conduct of those who hate marriage equality.  I doubt more than a small percentage of them are engaged in moral, faithful marriages, a number of them, when their sexual conduct is made known, don't have feet of clay, they've got feet of beach sand that washes away when the first wave hits.  I will just mention the current state of the unmarried Catholic clergy and hierarchy and its known history of the period since and before, say, Stonewall to say they generally don't have a leg to stand on in prescribing sexual morality and what constitutes a legitimate marriage.  As we can see from recent news, even full blown Republican-fascists opposed to marriage equality for same-sex partners can same-sex screw around, when you look at those who don't value any truth you won't find integrity.

The lie that Biblical Fundamentalism is based in,that there is or ever was a  "pure" written Scripture of which the currently had Bible is either a reproduction or a near perfect copy of, a Scripture that is literally true, every verse, every, sentence, every letter, is false.  The Bible we have is nothing of the sort.  Some books are rather coherently the product of a single author(with some editing).  Some of the New Testament is, I think, reliably seen as a good survival of the original authors' intent.  Some of the Bible, especially the oldest of the Scriptures is the product of centuries of copying, revision, editing expansion (probably contraction in some cases, not enough for Genesis and Judges, for example). As much as I am skeptical about an "historical-critical" reading of Scripture as producing a more reliable reading of it, what it has discerned about the handling and creation of the "editions" we have of Scripture is useful in discerning what to look for in determining what to believe and what to figure is better considered as allegory or metaphor or ideological imposition (Judges is full of that).  But most of us are not Scripture scholars and no Scripture scholarship is entirely reliable and the last word on the topic. We've got to read it for ourselves and choose what criteria we will use to evaluate it.  Evaluation is inevitably part of the act of understanding.

And no one, not even the looniest of claimed, be exact follower of the most the Scripture, the wackiest of Fundamentalist, really lives by every word of Scripture.  You couldn't possibly believe every word of it literally because there are glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in the collection and even within individual books of it. "Thou shalt not kill, a rather glaring example of that."  Fundamentalism and its Catholic and other equivalents, lie about that.  And as liars, they discredit their claims as reliable, in part or in whole.  Especially those who leave nasty comments on blogs and then whine when I or others won't post them.  You can ask a guy who trolled me for more than a decade,  I can be convinced by evidence and reason, you can't coerce me or shame me to "shut up."  I won't post your invective but I  will use what you provide.  But on my terms, not yours.  

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The objection to my saying that I think to retain the truths of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures that it will be necessary to reject the validity of Scriptures permitting slavery, the subjugation of Women and such stories as the Sodom and Gomorrah tale, the clear riff on that as found in Judges 19, such things as prescribing stoning and other capital punishment rather dangerously and other clear immorality in the Scriptures promoting inequality and what makes inequality real,  because human culture is in the process of leaving those, I hope, in the past.  Which  interestingly jibes with something I happened to read two days back, part of my project of reading more of Hannah Arendt's writing than I had.

To raise such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?"  has its difficulties.  They belong to philosophy or metaphysics,  terms that designate a field of inquiry which, as we all know, has fallen into disrepute. If this were merely a matter of positivist and neo-positivist assaults, we need perhaps not be concerned. Our difficulty with raising such questions is caused less by those to whom they are "meaningless" anyhow than by those who are under attack.  Just as the crisis in religion reached its climax when theologians, as distinguished from the old crowd of non-believers, began to talk about the "God is dead" propositions,  the crisis in philosophy and metaphysics came into the open when philosophers themselves began to declare the end of philosophy and metaphysics.  Now, this could have its advantage;  I trust it will once it has been understood that these "ends" actually mean not that God has "died"- an obvious absurdity in every respect -  but that the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing and not that the old questions which are coeval with the appearance of men on earth have become "meaningless,"  but that they way they were framed and answered has lost plausibility.

What has come to an end is the basic distinction between the sensual and the supersensual,  together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides,  that whatever is not given to the senses - God or Being or the First Principles and Causes (archai) or the Ideas - is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears,  that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the sense. What is "dead" is not only the localization of such "eternal truths"  but the distinction itself.  Meanwhile, in increasingly strident voices the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilism inherent in this development;  and although they themselves seldom invoke it they have an important argument in their favor:  it is indeed true that once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearances as understood for so many centuries is also annihilated.  The sensual, as still understood by the positivists, cannot survive the death of the supersensual.  No one knew this better than Nietzsche who, with his poetic and metaphoric description of the assassination of God in Zarathustra,  has caused so much confusion in these matters.  In a significant passage in The Twilight of Idols,  he clarifies what the word "God" meant in Zarathustra.  It was merely a symbol for the suprasensual realm as understood by metaphysics;  he now uses instead of "God" the word "true world" and says:  "We have abolished the true world.   What has remained?  The apparent one perhaps?  Oh no!  With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."  

Hannah Arendt:  Thinking and Moral Considerations A Lecture

I will though I can't think right away why it's significant note that she dedicated it to the poet W. A. Auden. I think I need to read more Auden.   Maybe I gave more of it than needed to make my point about the impossibility of us thinking of God as they thought of him in the times of the assembly of Genesis or when Paul was writing from his experience and understanding, so different from our time.

Note that at the start of that passage, she asks about the future of such questions as "What is thinking?"  "What is evil?,"  two things which, as a political blogger arguing against materialist, atheist, scientism on the one hand (elite materialism) and political gangsterism, the Republican-fascist party, (vulgar materialism) those have been very important here.  I think the nihilism that she noted is a problem when you take materialism seriously is not only a product of that but any time people reject morality which comes with a price.  I have repeatedly said that the evil that results from secularism, atheism, materialism, is inevitable when the choice to believe in God and in the reality of Commandments of equality and reciprocity is rejected. Without that equality and democracy are doomed.  And, as the vulgar materialists prove, many of the most fervent Bible Thumpers and Catholics who are more Catholic than the Pope reject that as well.  The phenomenon of Christians without not only Jesus and Paul but The Law (when it applies inconveniently to them but not when they can dole false details of alleged law out unequally on others) is something Arendt might have expanded on, even then.  There were such people around when she wrote, though not that many as shameless as those on cabloid TV and hate talk media such as EWTN and sitting on the Supreme Court and in Congress right now.

Post Script:  I had a straight friend of sorts, a man who was of my parents generation who I phoned more than three times a week, to check on and talk to. I liked him but it was more out of a feeling of duty than of preference. I wasn't out to him, though I'm sure he may well have well suspected I'm gay.  In the course of our three-times a week phone conversations he came to expressing his disapproval of gay sex, by which it was clear, he meant anal sex. I knew the survey figures of how many gay men there were in the population and that a sizable percentage reported they never engaged in anal sex and I'd seen figures of the large percentage of the straight population who engaged in straight anal sex so I was able to estimate, for him, that, by far, most of the "gay sex" by his understanding was done by straight couples.  It's literally true that whatever gay couples do for sex there are more straight couples who do the same thing.  And that, other than a few practices physiologically restricted by the genders, if you're going to condemn all of gay sex on a physical description of what's done by some, you could do the same thing for all of straight sex.

I have yet to hear one of the gay-basher moralists utter a single word of condemnation to the many more straight couples or straight non-coupled who engage in anal sex, oral sex, or other things you mention as your last argument against marriage equality.  Surely, if that's the objection to maintain your integrity you must start a public campaign against that among straight people. Considering the beginning campaign by Republican-fascists to allow states to ban contraception you should start that right away because there will probably be a lot more of that about if they get their way.  And since Alito is running the Court, they probably will.  I wonder if there is some obtainable record of what he and his cry-on-cue wife did in that regard.  

In fact, as I controversially pointed out recently, the evils that can arise from bringing about an unwanted or unwise or unhealthy pregnancy, that straight sex is open to a whole other dimension of potential for doing evil that Lesbian and Gay sex doesn't risk.  

The hypocrisy that is the shadow of those who throw false witness  against LGBTQ+ People is staggering.  I have yet to see them mount a scolding campaign against the straight people who engage in anal sex.  I have, actually, on the basis of morals, something I have repeatedly pointed out is not hygienic or safe for straight people anymore than it is for gay men.  I can report that straight people don't like that pointed out when they  do it, they are really resentful when someone brings up problems with straight sex.