(August 31, 2016 at 10:52 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(August 31, 2016 at 10:47 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Yes. Mostly how not to act in the modern world.
Nah, I think the message of forgiveness and tolerance of Jesus in the New Testament is mostly pretty healthy. I mean, stopping a whore from getting stoned to death and calling her attackers out for their hypocrisy is pretty brave, and pretty progressive.
Some of the sayings in proverbs and so on give a kind of self-help-book food for thought as well.
I'm not sure that I like that particular story because it was probably intended to cast the Pharisees in a bad light. The Pharisees really received an unfair reputation from the New Testament that continues to this day. There is quite a bit in the Gospels that is nasty toward Jews and misrepresentative of Judaism in general.
But there are some things about some parts of the Bible that I find moving. Genesis flips through so many viewpoints and alternative narratives through the course of the story and in that way resembles to a degree some postmodern fiction. The narrative is often broken to show the feelings of those who were oppressed -- Esau by Jacob, Leah who was second to Sarah. Sarah and Hagar bemoan at some point that their own father has sold them to Jacob and taken their inheritance. I was surprised the first time I noticed the narrative about to culminate in Jacob's victory was broken to include how the women would feel about being sold by their own father to their husband. And it made me sad when Leah had t hire her own husband with her son's mandrakes. Hagar the slave's suffering is included later. The text doesn't explicitly tell us how to react to the breaks in the narrative that include these other perspectives. But I think it is significant that they are included. I can't think of any other books of the Bible that so often include how women and slaves feel about their lot -- even to the point of implicitly criticizing the hero of some of these tales.
There is much I love about the Torah in general. There are some standards it contains that are harsh by our modern standards. There are other values I think some aspects of modern society could emulate better -- there were provisions in the way society was run to care for the poor and widows. I am also fascinated by the remnants of henotheistic belief that are still present in the Torah and many other things in it. I don't really understand why it is demonized so much even by some Christians. It's thousands of years old: it's not going to be up to date in every respect. And sometimes modern societies aren't any damn better anyway.
