Every Law of God and Man

[kingandy]

Funny, isn't it, how people pick and choose which passages from the Bible to listen to? There's more space in the bible devoted to the story of Jezebel and the moral of How Bad It Is To Wear Lots Of Makeup than there ever was about how bad gays are. (I'm paraphrasing Seanbaby here.) Now, apparently, big radio talk-show host "Dr" Laura recently quoted the passage in Leviticus that describes homosexuality as an abomination, and somebody posted an open response to this on the intarwebs somewhere. Rather than repost this, I will link to ubernils' post (not the original, but the first one I saw).

In other news, yesterday I found out two very different things about two very different people that changed my perception of both of them. I found out that one of them is the kind of person who will happily invent a persona and pretend to be them on the intarwebs. And I found out that the other one is just a persona and does not, in any real sense of the word, exist. Retrospectively I suppose that was only finding out one thing about one person, but you know what I mean.

Comments

Zero: I Am Full Of Vodka

[kermix.livejournal.com]

One, Doctor Laura is a fruitcake.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

I've never really done any sort of biblical study, but it seems to me like the sort of thing that is constantly going to be interpreted in any number of ways, given the poetic and cryptic nature of its numerous fables. My understanding of it is that the majority of its stories are, in fact, ancient fables based on the moral beliefs of its authors and their views of how society should behave. In this respect, given these views, I believe that law, including what we are presented with as "God's law", is man-made.

This is not to say that there is no God, or gods, or deities. It is only to state that I am largely agnostic due to the majority of organized religion being highly disorganized due to the constant varying (though artistic) interpretations of various biblical works.

Re: Zero: I Am Full Of Vodka

[kingandy]

Something that I realised a long time ago: God is a vast, unknowable, timeless, cosmic entity. The bible is that infinite awareness filtered through the minds of various Nth-century BC Hebrews. So naturally it's expressed in concepts and social constructs appropriate to that. Genesis talks about seven days because the proto-Jews had no concept of the sheer scale of time involved, and God was trying to explain epochs and galactic birth and so forth.

Christians who think those seven days are to be taken literally should read that passage that says "A day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day".

Obviously, I'm talking with the assumption that the Bible is a genuine message from the Almighty... I don't know whether that's true or not, but I'd like to think so.

[kermix.livejournal.com]

Good point about your assumption there, considering that I once chose to subscribe to the assumption that Genesis was largely a "creationist myth". I assumed that it was the only logical explanation, but now I understand that I chose to believe what I did.

But as we both know, people could argue this for their entire lives (and probably have).

Re: Zero: I Am Full Of Vodka

[arwel.livejournal.com]

Andy, try finding some of Spinoza's philosophy on the web. He was a heretical 17th century Spanish monk that argued that god was the sum of all things in the universe at all points in time. Pantheism I think they call it. Can't get more cosmic than that. Look I found you a link.

What really perplexes me is why anyone would want to worship the old testament god? He's a lying, mass murdering ego maniac, with horrible right wing beliefs. He's a cunt. Maybe being a parent softened him up a bit.

I was going to post what I thought of the bible and why all gods are fictional creations, but it was threatening to become a massive essay so I deleted it. Maybe I'll post in on my LJ.

Re: Zero: I Am Full Of Vodka

[kingandy]

Having skimmed that Spinoza stuff, I am reminded that I decided God is a giant talking galaxy the last time I watched Godfellas.

Re: Zero: I Am Full Of Vodka

[ubernils.livejournal.com]

Word up on that, yo. My favorite analogy is that the bible is about as clear as if you asked someone to translate Shakespeare's entire body of work from Arabic to Japanese, and it can't be longer than one paragraph. Also, the person doing the translating only speaks French.

That being said, I think God let it happen like that. Obviously, given the omnipotent, omnecient Christian God I believe in, God could quite easily clear things up. However, the way things are now, it forces everyone to actually think about what they believe, which is all God wanted in the first place.

I find it highly amusing that the same bible can give rise to Christians like me and Christians like Jerry Falwell. Of course, I think Jerry Falwell is a self-righteous prick who uses religion for selfish ego-boosting, but I'm sure he considers me an unreligious wanker who's going to hell anyways.

Five little Questions

[myki.livejournal.com]

Questions for the King...

1. Do you see your life as turning out as you expected it when you were a kid.

2. What's the best thing you ever bought

3. We are all aware that everybody loves Andy. IF the Lucille Ball foundation gave you a big bag of cash to film a pilot of "Everybody loves Andy" who would you get, appart from yourself, to play the lovable lead character?

4. You've just got to level 4, you can boost up one ability by 1. Which one and why?

5. If you had the choice of making any book you wanted into a film, which would it be?

And relax

[anberu.livejournal.com]

ouch.

-The thing with no makeup.

[kingandy]

Thinking on it, I don't think my perceptions were necessarily changed for better or worse. Just ... changed. I had them in one box, now I have had to move them into another.

That said, I am still disappointed by shoun's apparent behaviour towards someloser. It's more because of the leading on than anything else. But, everybody has the right to fuck up. The important thing is to learn and grow.

Intentionally vague and ambiguous for the ininitiated.

"Dr" Laura cannot handle infinity...

[pkgem.livejournal.com]

I was reading this article on how humans may conceptualise infinity the other day in New Scientist. To summarise a two page mag article that summarises a whole book, these two guys (Lakoff and Nunez) speculate that "the structures in the brain that control body movements might also be used to handle all abstract concepts...logical underpinning of problem-solving or reasoning about complex events may have some connection to the structure of movement ans structure of perception... the Basic Metaphor of Infinity (BMI), in which we simply impose a metaphorical end to cap off whatever process is repeating. The researcher believe the BMI appears in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, in which every object is an instance of a higher category. A cow is an instance of the category Cow, a goat an instance of the category Goat. Since the categories Cow and Goat are things in themselves, they are instances of some even higher category. This iterative process of categorisation goes on until you come to an end - the final category of Being. 'We claim that probably most monotheistic systems somehow deal with the BMI, in which you have to put together all kinds of frames of reference in one line, to give you one last bang - some sort of of an almighty being that is the end of the chain of relationships"
This to me suggests that monotheistic religions developed because people cannot handle the concept of infinity, this thing beyond their experience, so they decided there must be something out there. Faiths arise and we made a God into our own image.
Faith in itself is fine though. People should be free to believe whatever they want. It just when it becomes institutionalised and people use it to progress their own power and ideas become set in stone and treated as some sort of "religious law".
If you need to believe in a higher being to establish your own place in the scheme of things then do so - believe don't preach.

****
- I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract- REM
-I believe my throat hurts... - also REM but mainly me at the mo...