Ex-Christian

[The Grand Nudger]

The story of Lazarus, dismiss it it. The healing of blind folks, dismiss it... especially if you think it's all all made up. (And of course it is.)

But the parable of the sowers. If you can take a moral or meaningful message out of that, I say go ahead. It's a parable. It's not trying to make you accept some doctrine. It is using a metaphor to say something about reality. I'm not saying the parable of the sowers is true or says something significant, but if you it does, you'll be the first to know and the fundies will be the last.

The parable of the sowers is all about accepting doctrine.  It says as much itself.  It also tells us who the narrator was speaking to.  Jesus™ positively bursts with agrarian metaphors.  You'd think he was a field hand all of a sudden.  Lazarus is interesting because the narrator is clearly speaking to skeptics.  He has Jesus™ let his very good friend die...and stay dead for a few days.  This is crucial, because the other times he raises people from the dead in earlier stories he does it immediately.  Leading, as the narrator puts it into gods mouth explicitly in the text...to some doubts. It's also one of the only places in new magic book where jesus is explicitly called the messiah and the son of god. Seems that wasn't clear enough for "John" or his audience either.

I find all sorts of interesting and meaningful stuff in magic books, but it's never the stuff the believers want me to find, or expect me to find, apparently. The abrahamic god is essentially a test tube example of a bad actor and as a running list of shit you shouldn't do, it works as moral instruction of a sort. It shows us what it means to be a tyrant. How to be a bad friend, how to be a bad father. It flies off the handle at the slightest provocation and seems to feel that nothing other than human blood can satisfy it's urges, even when it wants to save people. Just in those two bits above it manages to showcase it's moral bankruptcy.