I would like to offer you a relationship to the Bible that allows us to do what, I think, it was originally intended to be, which is a source of light, a source of affirmation, a source of deeper humanity. The Bible that you hear preached by some is a bible of rules, a bible of rigidity; occasionally, a bible of fear. This is not what draws me to the Bible, and it is important that somebody publicly present a different take.
So here goes.
The Bible starts with two profound stories: The first story we are given is of a God who cannot bear to be alone. A God who is driven by love to create a world of flowering and cascading diversity in which nothing is precisely like what came before it; in which each new creature is delightfully fresh and novel; in which God, thrilled by each new creation, says: This is good. And then God creates a creature with the capacity, also, to look at diversity, and to look at novelty, and to say: This is good! And we are told in this story that we are made in that God's image.
What is the characteristic of the God of Genesis? Unearned love that can only be made real when it is given away. And so without obligation, God creates a diverse and flowering universe, because God cannot be God if God cannot love. We are, my friends, in God's image. And we also, though, shrivel up and die if we do not have the ability to pour out our love; to celebrate difference; to rejoice in novelty; to see in each other's divine sparks; and to be delighted and thrilled by what we see. That is, says the Bible, our most God-like attribute.
The second book of the Bible, the Book of Exodus, tells the second foundational story of Western civilization. It is the shocker! The story tells of an obscure small group of people who are described by the Hebrew term to'evah -- abomination. Those people are so abominable that the Egyptians will not even sit at a table with them; they will not eat with them; they force them to live in a different neighborhood so they do not have to deal with them. And they oppress them, ruthlessly and harshly. And the Torah announces that the force that created the cosmos, the force that is known in the giving away of unearned love, that force cannot abide pharaohs. That force will rise up on behalf of the oppressed, on behalf of the abominable and that force will set them free. We Jews know that as our core story. Every year we recall that we, each of us, were slaves in a land that viewed us as outsiders, and that we were visited by the very forces that make the universe what it is: forces of liberation and freedom and wholeness. And that we were brought out of that narrow land into a place where we were free to be ourselves.
I am not making these stories up; I am not that good a writer. I am telling you, that the guys who are preaching hate are skipping the most important stuff. The God who is found on every page of the Bible is a God of love so radical, says the prophet Jeremiah, that it is an unending love; an eternal love.
So my message for you is that if you see someone hold up this Book, and sound full of fear and hate, they have not really read it right. We need to be the love. Love is not flighty; love is not fickle. Any of you who have truly loved know that love is resilient and persistent and determined and irrepressible. We need to face the people who are so afraid that they speak in hate. We need to face them with the resilient love that resides in justice. We need to let them know that the One who created each of us special and different delights in difference and sees all of God's children as flowers of divinity -- each of us as special and precious.
We need to remind them that we learned those lessons right here, in this Book. That love reverberates right here, in our hearts. It echoes right here, amidst our families and our loved ones.
My son Jacob is a 19-year-old man who struggles with autism. When I told Jacob that I would be writing about human dignity and the honor of LGBTQ people (and Jacob is very used to the struggle of gay people, because his Dad is the only straight sibling in his family), Jacob said, "That's my story too." And it is. So here is the last point I want to assert:
Freedom and dignity are indivisible. Either they include all of us, or we are all of us in danger. Those who are judged by the color of their skin, by their gender, by their faith or their lack of faith, by their looks, by their orientation, by their abilities or by some people's perception of disability, need to remember -- all of us -- that we already the way God would have us be, with one exception: God cannot force us to love ourselves or each other. We have to do that ourselves.
David Briggs: Hold the Judgment: Changing Attitudes on LGBT Issues Defy Religious Stereotypes
This I believe; I can do no other.
How about:
"If Man has the ability and knows and he allows suffering to exist then he is EVIL."
Man committed the first murder.
Genesis 4:6
"And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him."
I John 3:12
"For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother."
God's message was and is LOVE.
Ezekiel 18:23
"Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?"
John 3:16
"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
An offering for sin was required and Jesus gave Himself. God gave His Son to pay for man's sin! If anyone rejects His Son, it is on them, not God.
In fact, if you want to know the facts, the christian bible teaches us fear of the unknown, but G-d is not really the focus of the new testament. The only fear one should have is fear of his Creator. The rest is the world that our G-d runs.
Nowhere in the Bible is any group described as an abomination. The sin may be but they are not.
"The God who is found on every page of the Bible is a God of love so radical, says the prophet Jeremiah, that it is an unending love; an eternal love.
Jerremiah 6:15 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the LORD.
16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.
"... found on every page of the Bible is a God of love..." - GOOD GRIEF have you read the Bible Rabbi Artson?
You have just cherry picked the Bible and omitted all the evil doings of God to make a nonsensical case that God is love.
If God is love then explain all the pain and suffering that all animals (mankind included) endure in their lifetimes.
There are 4 possibilites for the suffering ordained by this God of love;
1) God is omnipotant and omniscient. - Then God choose not to allievate suffering and thus is pathological.
2) God is not omnipotant and not omniscient - Then there is no reason for God to exist.
3) God is not omnipotant but is omniscient - Then God is good but can't eliminate suffering. So there must be something more omnipotant than God.
4) God is omnipotant but not omniscient - Then God is evil.
But even from the beginning, God made a way back to Him through Jesus Christ.
Re 13:8a The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
If you were omnipotant and omniscient wouldn't you do a hell of lot more to alleviate suffering?
What a cop out. God coulde be anything it wants to be. How the hell do you know that "God is not a God that" whatever.
why not open the Book and
look for love, not hate?
Love is hard to find in the middle of all that hate unless you read the Jeffersonian Bible where Thomas Jefferson edited the Bible and took all the vileness out. There wasn't much left. Jefferson's Bible is a quick read.
My feelings are ridiculously mixed about this. If people are going to worship ideas from this book these are the kinds of lessons I hope people venerate. And it's an incredibly appealing message.
At the same time, it seems to me to be an absurdly one-sided account of the messages in that book. Yes, there are paeans to a deity of inclusive love there, but it is also filled with the advocacy of genocide, enslavement, misogyny, ethnocentrism, and religious bigotry.
I am ever so grateful that there might be theological evolution among those who are theists towards worshiping a deity or deities of inclusive love (a la the arguments of the brilliant Robert Wright in the Evolution of God, http://www.evolutionofgod.net/, which I'm listening to as an audio book). Maybe the Charter of Compassion is one good example of these movements (http://charterforcompassion.org/). And I agree with Wright that since a large proportion of humanity are theists, hastening this evolution might be both necessary for human survival and humanity's best hope for building a collectively more caring cooperative, sustainable, peaceable, future.
(continued in my comment on this comment)
Like Spanish they have to call everything "he" or "she" even when it doesn't actually have a gender, or is both at the same time (hermaphroditic)
A monotheistic god can't be gendered.
He's and she's, by definition, can't create life by themselves.
The proper translation is therefor, It.
How many other words in the Bible "can be understood to mean" something else. From religious apologists I hear all sorts of words that "can be understood to mean" something else. For instance the word "virgin" can be understood to mean "young woman" which means Mary was not a virgin.
If you accept "abomination" as "uncustomary" you should accept "virgin" as "young woman".
"Can be understood to mean" can explain away anything anyone wants to explain away.
The answer isn't "everything goes" or the cynical "nothing goes". The answer is proper scholarship, which is the difficult and the time-consuming way.
It seems like you've missed the last thousand years of human development.
Who are you to judge and codemn 5 billion non Christian people in the world to your HELL?
Don't you realize that if you go to Christian heaven then at the same time you will be going to Islamic Hell?
Do you think you are some sort of god?
If you want to believe in a god that is your business but don't rightiously condemn those that don't believe in your mythical god.
All is in the book. Love and hate. Freedom and slavery. Nurturing and exploiting.
The book is a giant grab bag of every possible point of view. If it is about god then god is schizophrenic and changes from moment to moment.
The thing the book does well is illuminate the soul of the **reader**. What you see in that swirling maelstrom of contradiction tells me about *YOU*.
Do you twist the good passages to your own ends? Do you struggle valiantly to make the evil passages justifiable?
What does your reading reveal about you?
Good news. Your reading means you, dear blogger, are a decent sort.
But it doesn't tell me anything about god or the bible cause to reach your interpretation you had to leave a lot out.
Don't worry, everyone does.