Found out this evening that my eldest Basque nephew and his Spanish wife have joined an ultra Christian sect that’s using the war in Gaza as the fulfillment of an Apocalyptic OT prophecy about the ‘end of times’, or the and that he’s just flown out to speak at a conference in the southern US.
It must be genetic 'cos after the divorce my former sister-in-law took the kids out of school and bounced from one silly cult to another - mystical Hindu off-shoots to ones with bizarre, exclusively Old Testament diets.
The weird thing is that the younger son, who grew up in an OT cult in the Pyrenees escaped as a teenager and now makes a living installing industrial solar panels around Western Europe, whereas his brother, who never lived in the OT cult, has now taken up Bible-based Christian fundamentalism.
Worrying, but my laid back brother says they’re ‘happy’.
My nephew was taken out of school at the age of thirteen and, much later ‘educated’ himself online.
I continually post about the need for critical media studies education, so that kids can learn the need to evaluate the reliability or otherwise of sources of information before reaching a conclusion.
For me the intellectual problem with fundamentalist Christianity, or Judaism or any other such religion’s reasoning lies in people taking these ancient texts literally in the context of the present time.
I can speak only for Christianity, but Bible-believing Christians take some parts of the Bible as literally true (like the history, including the material about Jesus, in particular the key elements like birth, death and resurrection) and some parts as poetry (like the poetry).
Don’t worry, one of the half dozen elderly American men who apparently is the direct channel to the man upstairs, Stephen Lett, said we’re in the final days of the last days of the final days of the last days of the final last days of the final final days… or something. As clear as mud.
He really should be given a comedy show between his gurning and delivery.
The last decades of the first Christian millenium were characterised by similar fears.
Because through textual analysis, the NT is now widely believed to be the work of many writers and was probably written over a couple of centuries, it’s both a fragmentary historical account and a mish-mash of parables and metaphors. It’s also a reflction of the social values of an ancient society. By contrast I’d argue that spiritual faith is none of these things - it must of necessity be timeless and not culturally specific.
I’ve met many former cult members over the years and honestly 80% of them are incredibly smart people. They’re also incredibly empathetic, as the reason most join is because they want to make the world a better place. The ones who tend to be awful people are the ones born in because from the moment of birth they’re part of a horror show where black is white and up is down and it screws up the internal wiring the rest of us naturally have. But the ones who join are almost always very intelligent people who have the best of intentions.
When first reading I took NT as a reference to your often used reference piont the Newyork Times then realised it was the New Testament. Both full of the same BS though
Someone drove into the back of my wife’s car yesterday. She’s OK, but the car is a bit damaged, though driveable. At least it was completely not her fault, so there’s no ambiguity over blame or reason for her to feel she was being careless.
Also, all these accounts were written by men.
The so called Gnostic Gospels have been put aside because of political reasons and those using Christianity for reasons of keeping themselves in power.
When you read the New Testament the overwhelming sense is of a man who lived a simple life, who cared for his fellow people and was so much more spiritually advanced than anyone else he met at that time and even now.
You might say that he was totally enlightened and yet his message has been appropriated by men for their own benefit.
It’s taking me longer to do the paperwork for the 108 exams I have to sort out than what it did to mark them . on the upside it is raining so not being tempted to the garden
Well, yes, though we believe it was the Holy Spirit who inspired the writers. You’ll be aware of the many times that women were afforded rather more respect in the Bible than was the cultural norm.
And the key witnesses to the fact that Jesus’s body was no longer in the tomb were women.
The Gnostic gospels were excluded from the Bible because they were inconsistent, bore false attributions (and were probably also written by men!) and contained material which contradicted the four Gospels of the NT.
. on the upside it is raining so not being tempted to the garden 