| Topic: |
Religions > Bible |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
05 Mar 2006 01:59:29 PM |
| Object: |
Time For A New Religion? |
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
"The Book of Bart"
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author
Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the
marrow of the bones?
In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers
on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and
the listeners' questions fade.
Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling
author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the
fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of
Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.
Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a
pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible
"is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally
inspired by the Holy Spirit."
But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman
became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the
scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling
dust of his own faith.
"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who
Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium
here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the
department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option --
legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of
the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on
the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New
Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death.
Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin
cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who
say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the
life of Christ.
There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that
go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for
centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the
sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of
God? Both? Neither?
These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His
take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as
a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white
in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the
unknowable.
"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate
things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New
Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many
Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his
faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.
"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to
prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after
Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was
no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from?
How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful
religion?
"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we
are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart
On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of
an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of
the most popular classes on campus. His text for today is the Gospel of
John.
Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the
narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a
cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is
distinctly different from the other three Gospels.
Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a
receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a
sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a
gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds
informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)
But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly
pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in
Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon,
there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The
crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the
cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The
resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire,
shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.
"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,"
he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the
other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's
ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from
the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe
it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to
politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good
enough."
The class files out a few minutes later.
"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their
lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's
very threatening."
Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel,
National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really
complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."
"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history
about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a
bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into
how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a
history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the
difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.
To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the
lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or
punctuation.
Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in
English, from Ehrman's book:
godisnowhere
Does it say: God is now here.
Or: God is nowhere.
Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he
was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity
Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were
casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman
felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights
after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.
One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It
turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a
nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the
group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was
nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to
prove it.
"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded
completely convincing," Ehrman writes.
One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went
home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and
asked the Lord to come into his life.
He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again
experience."
The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says,
the closer he felt to God.
His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone
about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a
religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more
spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual
exercise, like meditation."
He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the
Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith.
Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in
the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution
in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or
have physical contact with the opposite sex.
It was spiritually thrilling.
For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another
Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological
Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the
ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus
Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his
execution.
What he found there began to frighten him.
The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as
he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700
ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of
the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000
differences in those texts.
"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.
Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But
others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to
have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only
verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.
Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the
Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a
cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it
is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added
to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.
For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman
sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are
no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.
He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an
episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
A professor wrote in the margin:
"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.
"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible,
at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For
me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't
there."
Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was
never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of
Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion
of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be
facts, or there is no basis for the religion.
"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical
things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a
fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific
times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race
and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of
the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the
resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . .
according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and
void.' "
Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real
historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by
illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.
Dark Bubbles
It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?
Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's
novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian
minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon
in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The
sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling
bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while
teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in
Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in
full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that
not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was
there a God paying attention.
"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that
stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of
trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this
mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the
Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast
in hell.' "
He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds
of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful
author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he
awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone.
No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his
kids were grown. He stopped going to church.
"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was
something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of
medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I
respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the
logic by which he reached them."
"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental
evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the
answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at
Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they
were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.
"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."
* * *
Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not
necessarily a terrible thing.
Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW
convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves
him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic."
That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it
with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted
yesterday."
On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the
story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides,
according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell. Ehrman's desk is
filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door
giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.
Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?
Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling
through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.
=A9 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR200603040=
1369.html
.
|
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| User: "Mummau55" |
|
| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 02:29:08 PM |
|
|
"We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness."
The same thing was said by many who thought themselves to be wise in
the Reformation. The truth is that it simply won't happen. This is a
very interesting and thought provoking article. However, I don't buy
his point of view either.
Thanks for posting this and bringing it to our attention.
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "QuickTinker" |
|
| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
06 Mar 2006 01:16:33 AM |
|
|
I hope god has mercy on your soul
<perryneheum@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1141588769.204675.3240@t39g2000cwt.googlegroups.com...
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
=====
"The Book of Bart"
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author
Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the
marrow of the bones?
In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers
on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and
the listeners' questions fade.
Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling
author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the
fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of
Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.
Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a
pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible
"is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally
inspired by the Holy Spirit."
But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman
became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the
scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling
dust of his own faith.
"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who
Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium
here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the
department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option --
legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of
the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on
the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New
Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death.
Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin
cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who
say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the
life of Christ.
There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that
go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for
centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the
sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of
God? Both? Neither?
These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His
take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as
a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white
in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the
unknowable.
"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate
things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New
Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many
Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his
faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.
"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to
prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after
Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was
no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from?
How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful
religion?
"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we
are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart
On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of
an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of
the most popular classes on campus. His text for today is the Gospel of
John.
Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the
narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a
cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is
distinctly different from the other three Gospels.
Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a
receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a
sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a
gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds
informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)
But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly
pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in
Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon,
there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The
crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the
cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The
resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire,
shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.
"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,"
he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the
other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's
ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from
the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe
it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to
politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good
enough."
The class files out a few minutes later.
"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their
lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's
very threatening."
Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel,
National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really
complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."
"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history
about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a
bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into
how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a
history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the
difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.
To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the
lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or
punctuation.
Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in
English, from Ehrman's book:
godisnowhere
Does it say: God is now here.
Or: God is nowhere.
Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he
was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity
Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were
casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman
felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights
after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.
One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It
turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a
nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the
group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was
nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to
prove it.
"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded
completely convincing," Ehrman writes.
One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went
home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and
asked the Lord to come into his life.
He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again
experience."
The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says,
the closer he felt to God.
His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone
about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a
religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more
spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual
exercise, like meditation."
He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the
Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith.
Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in
the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution
in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or
have physical contact with the opposite sex.
It was spiritually thrilling.
For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another
Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological
Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the
ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus
Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his
execution.
What he found there began to frighten him.
The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as
he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700
ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of
the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000
differences in those texts.
"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.
Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But
others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to
have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only
verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.
Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the
Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a
cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it
is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added
to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.
For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman
sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are
no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.
He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an
episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
A professor wrote in the margin:
"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.
"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible,
at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For
me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't
there."
Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was
never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of
Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion
of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be
facts, or there is no basis for the religion.
"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical
things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a
fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific
times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race
and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of
the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the
resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . .
according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and
void.' "
Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real
historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by
illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.
Dark Bubbles
It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?
Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's
novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian
minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon
in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The
sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling
bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while
teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in
Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in
full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that
not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was
there a God paying attention.
"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that
stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of
trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this
mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the
Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast
in hell.' "
He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds
of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful
author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he
awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone.
No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his
kids were grown. He stopped going to church.
"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was
something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of
medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I
respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the
logic by which he reached them."
"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental
evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the
answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at
Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they
were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.
"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."
* * *
Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not
necessarily a terrible thing.
Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW
convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves
him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic."
That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it
with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted
yesterday."
On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the
story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides,
according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell. Ehrman's desk is
filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door
giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.
Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?
Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling
through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401369.html
.
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| User: "john w" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 02:49:01 PM |
|
|
x-no-archive: yes
On 5 Mar 2006 11:59:29 -0800, wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Are you suggesting that we all leave
The Faith of our Fathers
and worship.....
You perhaps?
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
Intelligent people, mature people, civilized people,
"live and let live."
The rational, mature Muslim is as tolerant of my Christianity as I am
of his being a follower of Islam and Mohammed!
Some of my very best friends are Muslims, and I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
john w
There are joys which long to be ours.
God sends ten thousands truths, which come
about us like birds seeking inlet;
but we are shut up to them, and so
they bring us nothing, but sit and sing
awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
=====
"The Book of Bart"
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author
Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the
marrow of the bones?
In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers
on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and
the listeners' questions fade.
Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling
author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the
fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of
Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.
Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a
pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible
"is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally
inspired by the Holy Spirit."
But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman
became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the
scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling
dust of his own faith.
"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who
Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium
here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the
department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option --
legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of
the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on
the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New
Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death.
Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin
cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who
say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the
life of Christ.
There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that
go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for
centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the
sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of
God? Both? Neither?
These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His
take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as
a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white
in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the
unknowable.
"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate
things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New
Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many
Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his
faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.
"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to
prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after
Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was
no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from?
How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful
religion?
"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we
are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart
On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of
an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of
the most popular classes on campus. His text for today is the Gospel of
John.
Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the
narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a
cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is
distinctly different from the other three Gospels.
Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a
receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a
sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a
gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds
informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)
But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly
pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in
Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon,
there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The
crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the
cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The
resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire,
shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.
"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,"
he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the
other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's
ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from
the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe
it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to
politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good
enough."
The class files out a few minutes later.
"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their
lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's
very threatening."
Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel,
National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really
complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."
"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history
about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a
bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into
how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a
history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the
difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.
To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the
lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or
punctuation.
Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in
English, from Ehrman's book:
godisnowhere
Does it say: God is now here.
Or: God is nowhere.
Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he
was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity
Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were
casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman
felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights
after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.
One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It
turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a
nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the
group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was
nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to
prove it.
"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded
completely convincing," Ehrman writes.
One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went
home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and
asked the Lord to come into his life.
He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again
experience."
The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says,
the closer he felt to God.
His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone
about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a
religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more
spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual
exercise, like meditation."
He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the
Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith.
Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in
the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution
in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or
have physical contact with the opposite sex.
It was spiritually thrilling.
For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another
Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological
Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the
ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus
Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his
execution.
What he found there began to frighten him.
The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as
he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700
ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of
the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000
differences in those texts.
"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.
Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But
others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to
have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only
verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.
Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the
Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a
cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it
is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added
to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.
For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman
sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are
no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.
He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an
episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
A professor wrote in the margin:
"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.
"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible,
at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For
me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't
there."
Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was
never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of
Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion
of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be
facts, or there is no basis for the religion.
"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical
things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a
fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific
times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race
and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of
the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the
resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . .
according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and
void.' "
Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real
historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by
illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.
Dark Bubbles
It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?
Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's
novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian
minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon
in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The
sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling
bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while
teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in
Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in
full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that
not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was
there a God paying attention.
"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that
stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of
trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this
mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the
Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast
in hell.' "
He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds
of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful
author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he
awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone.
No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his
kids were grown. He stopped going to church.
"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was
something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of
medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I
respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the
logic by which he reached them."
"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental
evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the
answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at
Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they
were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.
"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."
* * *
Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not
necessarily a terrible thing.
Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW
convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves
him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic."
That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it
with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted
yesterday."
On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the
story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides,
according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell. Ehrman's desk is
filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door
giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.
Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?
Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling
through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401369.html
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| User: "John Bonanno" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 08:02:32 PM |
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"john w" <johnw@yow.how> wrote
On 5 Mar 2006 11:59:29 -0800, wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Are you suggesting that we all leave
The Faith of our Fathers
and worship.....
You perhaps?
Who said that? Why does anyone or anything have to be worshipped. I do not
worship. What does worship accomplish?
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
You have a rich fantasy life. But when fantasy becomes delusion, one should
get help.
Intelligent people, mature people, civilized people,
"live and let live."
Please, yes, Oh Christians, live and let live.
The rational, mature Muslim is as tolerant of my Christianity as I am
of his being a follower of Islam and Mohammed!
Some of my very best friends are Muslims, and I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
You both conceal your fangs excellently then.
john w
You are welcome to accept as your idol, the Bible, as the Word of a thing
that has never announced itself.
You are welcome to worship as your mangod, Jesus, a figure of which there
are no contemporary accounts or evidence and who has been fashioned from
countless Middle East resurrection myths.
"Not for the faint of heart, the Bible is a very long read. Almost 1,300
pages of tiny print, it is a mixture of fierce, bloody battles, scores of
twenty-generations-long, mind-numbing genealogies, and quite a bit of
indecipherable, symbolic secret code of some sort. There is also a pinch of
poetry thrown in for flavor. All in all, though, it is for the most part
boring, too often frightfully violent, and at all times very confusing. It
passeth human understanding.
I was unable to track down the actual author(s) of the book. Some of the
sections have titles like "Mark" and "Joshua," but nowhere could I find who
these people were or where or when they had lived. This is why authorship
must remain anonymous.
The book is divided into two main sections, the Old Testament and the New
Testament, "testament" apparently meaning that the authors were "testifying"
to the contents of the book. The problem, though, is that none of the
writers ever claimed to have witnessed, personally, any of the described
events. So I can't really say if this is a work of fiction, nonfiction or
both. For example, several of the earliest sections, for reasons unclear to
me, are believed to have been written by someone named Moses. However, these
sections always refer to Moses in the third person-Moses did this, and Moses
said that-and there is also an account of Moses' own death. Since the
personal pronoun "I" is almost universally used to describe personal
thoughts and experiences, and since it is impossible to write an account of
your own funeral, we can be fairly sure that whoever wrote these sections
was not someone named Moses.
I encountered the same problems in the New Testament. A man named Jesus
supposedly did all manner of astonishing things. Yet not one of the authors
ever claimed actually to have seen any of those astonishing things
personally. (This was a disturbing theme throughout the whole book.)
Obviously, some unknown, unnamed third parties had to have told the writers
about these feats by Jesus. But this forces the reader to wonder why the
firsthand witnesses weren't moved to put pen to parchment and describe what
were clearly wonders to behold.
As an example, Jesus supposedly performed miracles (such as literally
walking on water), healed very ill people with only a few uttered words,
and, most astounding of all, came back to life after being dead for about
two days! These are great wonders indeed, but with the glaring omission of
any firsthand accounts, the reader will soon find himself doubting all of
it. I, for one, find Agatha Christie's murder mysteries far more likely to
depict real events." -Judith Hayes
How can any sane human find comfort in this evil book?
"THE MASSACRES
For my first book, "IN GOD WE TRUST: But Which One? " I threw together a
list of God-approved murders in the Bible. They are also referred to in my
October 2001 piece:
1- The entire population of the earth at the time of Noah, except for eight
survivors. (Genesis 7:23)
2- Everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. (Genesis 19:24,25)
3- Amalek and his people. (Exodus 17:816)
4- 3,000 Israelites. (Exodus 32:27,28)
5- 14,700 Jews. (Numbers 16:4449)
6- The people of Og. "So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people,
until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land." (Numbers
21:3335)
7- 24,000 people. (Numbers 25:49)
8- All Midianite males. (Numbers 31:612)
9- The Ammonites. (Deuteronomy 2:1921)
10-The Horims. (Deuteronomy 2:22)
11-The Amorites. ".utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little
ones." (Deuteronomy 2:3335)
12-The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and
Jebusites. ". . . thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them;"
(Deuteronomy 7:15)
13- Everyone in Jericho but one family. (Joshua 6:2025)
14-12,000 people of Ai. (Joshua 8:1929)
15-All the people of Makkedah. (Joshua 10:28)
16-All the people of Libnah. (Joshua 10:29,30)
17-All the people of Gezer. (Joshua 10:33)
18-All the people of Eglon. (Joshua 10:34,35)
19-All the people of Hebron. (Joshua 10:36,37)
20-10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites. (Judges 1:4)
21-All the inhabitants of the land of Goshen ". . . neither left they any to
breathe." (Joshua 11:1216)
22-The inhabitants of Hormah, Gaza, Askelon, Ekron. (Judges 1:1719)
23-10,000 Moabites. (Judges 3:29)
24-600 Philistines. (Judges 3:31)
25-All the hosts of Sisera. (Judges 4:16)
26-120,000 Midianites. (Judges 8:10)
27-1,000 Philistines. (Judges 15:15)
28-25,100 Benjaminites. (Judges 20:35)
29-50,070 people of Bethshemesh. (1 Samuel 6:19)
30-All the Amalekites. "Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.." (1
Samuel 15:37)
31-200 Philistine men, in order to obtain their foreskins as the price for
buying a bride. (1 Samuel 18:27)
32-22,000 Syrians. (2 Samuel 8:5)
33-40,000+ Syrians. (2 Samuel 10:18)
34-The Ammonites of Rabbah, who were tortured to death by the great King
David. (2 Samuel 12:2931)
35-70,000 people. (2 Samuel 24:15)
36-Every man in Edom. (1 Kings 11:15)
37-All the prophets of Baal. (1 Kings 18:40)
38-127,000 Syrians. (1 Kings 20:2830)
39-Moabite captains & "fifties." (2 Kings 1:914)
40-42 children, eaten by bears. (2 Kings 2:23,24)
41-185,000 Assyrians killed in their sleep. (2 Kings 19:35)
42-500,000 men of Israel. (2 Chronicles 13:1620)
43-20,000 Edomites. (2 Chronicles 25:11,12)
44-120,000 Judeans in one day. (2 Chronicles 28:5,6)
45-75,500+ people. (Esther 9:1214)
But there's so much more! "And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD
smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt.." (Exodus 12:29) "Samaria
shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall
fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women
with child shall be ripped up." (Hosea 13:16) What sort of God would order
such a thing? It's painful just to read those ugly words. But it's a popular
theme in the Bible. "Every one that is found shall be thrust through..Their
children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes..and their wives
ravished. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall
have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children."
(Isaiah 13:13-22) Is this not all revolting? Yet there are repeated
references to slashing open the stomachs of pregnant women. "..because they
opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that
were with child he ripped up." (2 Kings 15:16) Enough already."-Judith Hayes
"Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God,
"All your actions show your wisdom and love."
Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout,
"That's a lie!" - just to put things on a solid footing."~ Annie Dillard in
For The Time Being
"Surely there must come a time when we must acknowledge the obvious:
theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
Indeed, it is ignorance with wings."~ Sam Harris "The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason"
"The great unmentionable evil at the center of [human] culture is
monotheism. From a barbaric bronze-age text known as the Old Testament,
three anti-human RELIGIONs have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
They are - literally - patriarchal -God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the
loathing of women for two-thousand years in those [cultures] afflicted by
the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of
course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not
just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject
him must be converted or killed for their own good."-Gore Vidal
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| User: "john w" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 10:58:23 PM |
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On Sun, 5 Mar 2006 21:02:32 -0500, "John Bonanno"
<adigam@reeemoooveadelphia.net> wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
"john w" <johnw@yow.how> wrote
On 5 Mar 2006 11:59:29 -0800, wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Are you suggesting that we all leave
The Faith of our Fathers
and worship.....
You perhaps?
Who said that?
I was being funny.
Why does anyone or anything have to be worshipped.
Was that a question, or are you suggesting an answer.
If you are sincerely asking me a question, my answer is, "Do you
believe in America's "Freedom of Religion and conscience"?
IF you do, I believe in a "religion" if you will, in which the God I
choose to believe in demands / and is QUITE worthy of my worship.
Since I voluntarily CHOOSE to worship, what is that to you?
Do you make it your life's work to ridicule the beliefs of others?
I do not
worship.
I do.
What does worship accomplish?
As was said about video games such as "Doom 3", when people who do NOT
play such games ask, "Why would anyone play a video game?"
If you have to ask, you would not understand if I explained.
Surely you have lived long enough now that I can spring an old pith on
you.
"You get it or you don't!"
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
You have a rich fantasy life.
Again, are you so closed minded that you poke fun at those whose life
experience is VASTLY different than yours?
How intolerant! How ignorant! How petty and childish!
Since *I* have never eaten green cheese, and since in my world, the
vegetation is so think, I've never seen this thing you call "the sky",
there is no sky, nor is there a "sun."
Both are figments of your VIVID fantasies!
But when fantasy becomes delusion, one should
get help.
Again, it must truly suck to be you!
And I bet if you'd never seen a car, or a cell phone, you would deny
that THEY exist!
This is the 21st Century! Come join us!
john w
Intelligent people, mature people, civilized people,
"live and let live."
Please, yes, Oh Christians, live and let live.
I never said, "You MUST believe." I said, you have no right to
ridicule MY beliefs.
And if you aren't, why is this nonsense cross-posted to a group of
Christians?
The rational, mature Muslim is as tolerant of my Christianity as I am
of his being a follower of Islam and Mohammed!
Some of my very best friends are Muslims, and I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
You both conceal your fangs excellently then.
Is that your best shot?
smirk
john w
You are welcome to accept as your idol, the Bible, as the Word of a thing
that has never announced itself.
You are welcome to worship as your mangod, Jesus, a figure of which there
are no contemporary accounts or evidence and who has been fashioned from
countless Middle East resurrection myths.
"Not for the faint of heart, the Bible is a very long read. Almost 1,300
pages of tiny print, it is a mixture of fierce, bloody battles, scores of
twenty-generations-long, mind-numbing genealogies, and quite a bit of
indecipherable, symbolic secret code of some sort. There is also a pinch of
poetry thrown in for flavor. All in all, though, it is for the most part
boring, too often frightfully violent, and at all times very confusing. It
passeth human understanding.
I was unable to track down the actual author(s) of the book. Some of the
sections have titles like "Mark" and "Joshua," but nowhere could I find who
these people were or where or when they had lived. This is why authorship
must remain anonymous.
The book is divided into two main sections, the Old Testament and the New
Testament, "testament" apparently meaning that the authors were "testifying"
to the contents of the book. The problem, though, is that none of the
writers ever claimed to have witnessed, personally, any of the described
events. So I can't really say if this is a work of fiction, nonfiction or
both. For example, several of the earliest sections, for reasons unclear to
me, are believed to have been written by someone named Moses. However, these
sections always refer to Moses in the third person-Moses did this, and Moses
said that-and there is also an account of Moses' own death. Since the
personal pronoun "I" is almost universally used to describe personal
thoughts and experiences, and since it is impossible to write an account of
your own funeral, we can be fairly sure that whoever wrote these sections
was not someone named Moses.
I encountered the same problems in the New Testament. A man named Jesus
supposedly did all manner of astonishing things. Yet not one of the authors
ever claimed actually to have seen any of those astonishing things
personally. (This was a disturbing theme throughout the whole book.)
Obviously, some unknown, unnamed third parties had to have told the writers
about these feats by Jesus. But this forces the reader to wonder why the
firsthand witnesses weren't moved to put pen to parchment and describe what
were clearly wonders to behold.
As an example, Jesus supposedly performed miracles (such as literally
walking on water), healed very ill people with only a few uttered words,
and, most astounding of all, came back to life after being dead for about
two days! These are great wonders indeed, but with the glaring omission of
any firsthand accounts, the reader will soon find himself doubting all of
it. I, for one, find Agatha Christie's murder mysteries far more likely to
depict real events." -Judith Hayes
How can any sane human find comfort in this evil book?
"THE MASSACRES
For my first book, "IN GOD WE TRUST: But Which One? " I threw together a
list of God-approved murders in the Bible. They are also referred to in my
October 2001 piece:
1- The entire population of the earth at the time of Noah, except for eight
survivors. (Genesis 7:23)
2- Everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. (Genesis 19:24,25)
3- Amalek and his people. (Exodus 17:816)
4- 3,000 Israelites. (Exodus 32:27,28)
5- 14,700 Jews. (Numbers 16:4449)
6- The people of Og. "So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people,
until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land." (Numbers
21:3335)
7- 24,000 people. (Numbers 25:49)
8- All Midianite males. (Numbers 31:612)
9- The Ammonites. (Deuteronomy 2:1921)
10-The Horims. (Deuteronomy 2:22)
11-The Amorites. ".utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little
ones." (Deuteronomy 2:3335)
12-The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and
Jebusites. ". . . thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them;"
(Deuteronomy 7:15)
13- Everyone in Jericho but one family. (Joshua 6:2025)
14-12,000 people of Ai. (Joshua 8:1929)
15-All the people of Makkedah. (Joshua 10:28)
16-All the people of Libnah. (Joshua 10:29,30)
17-All the people of Gezer. (Joshua 10:33)
18-All the people of Eglon. (Joshua 10:34,35)
19-All the people of Hebron. (Joshua 10:36,37)
20-10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites. (Judges 1:4)
21-All the inhabitants of the land of Goshen ". . . neither left they any to
breathe." (Joshua 11:1216)
22-The inhabitants of Hormah, Gaza, Askelon, Ekron. (Judges 1:1719)
23-10,000 Moabites. (Judges 3:29)
24-600 Philistines. (Judges 3:31)
25-All the hosts of Sisera. (Judges 4:16)
26-120,000 Midianites. (Judges 8:10)
27-1,000 Philistines. (Judges 15:15)
28-25,100 Benjaminites. (Judges 20:35)
29-50,070 people of Bethshemesh. (1 Samuel 6:19)
30-All the Amalekites. "Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.." (1
Samuel 15:37)
31-200 Philistine men, in order to obtain their foreskins as the price for
buying a bride. (1 Samuel 18:27)
32-22,000 Syrians. (2 Samuel 8:5)
33-40,000+ Syrians. (2 Samuel 10:18)
34-The Ammonites of Rabbah, who were tortured to death by the great King
David. (2 Samuel 12:2931)
35-70,000 people. (2 Samuel 24:15)
36-Every man in Edom. (1 Kings 11:15)
37-All the prophets of Baal. (1 Kings 18:40)
38-127,000 Syrians. (1 Kings 20:2830)
39-Moabite captains & "fifties." (2 Kings 1:914)
40-42 children, eaten by bears. (2 Kings 2:23,24)
41-185,000 Assyrians killed in their sleep. (2 Kings 19:35)
42-500,000 men of Israel. (2 Chronicles 13:1620)
43-20,000 Edomites. (2 Chronicles 25:11,12)
44-120,000 Judeans in one day. (2 Chronicles 28:5,6)
45-75,500+ people. (Esther 9:1214)
But there's so much more! "And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD
smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt.." (Exodus 12:29) "Samaria
shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall
fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women
with child shall be ripped up." (Hosea 13:16) What sort of God would order
such a thing? It's painful just to read those ugly words. But it's a popular
theme in the Bible. "Every one that is found shall be thrust through..Their
children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes..and their wives
ravished. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall
have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children."
(Isaiah 13:13-22) Is this not all revolting? Yet there are repeated
references to slashing open the stomachs of pregnant women. "..because they
opened not to him, therefore he smote it; and all the women therein that
were with child he ripped up." (2 Kings 15:16) Enough already."-Judith Hayes
"Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God,
"All your actions show your wisdom and love."
Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout,
"That's a lie!" - just to put things on a solid footing."~ Annie Dillard in
For The Time Being
"Surely there must come a time when we must acknowledge the obvious:
theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.
Indeed, it is ignorance with wings."~ Sam Harris "The End of Faith:
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason"
"The great unmentionable evil at the center of [human] culture is
monotheism. From a barbaric bronze-age text known as the Old Testament,
three anti-human RELIGIONs have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
They are - literally - patriarchal -God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the
loathing of women for two-thousand years in those [cultures] afflicted by
the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of
course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is not
just in place for one tribe, but for all creation. Those who would reject
him must be converted or killed for their own good."-Gore Vidal
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| User: "Hengroen" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
06 Mar 2006 08:03:34 PM |
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In article <bfjm02dujmk5pb4dpupl3bbc3sjcc971mg@4ax.com>, john w
<johnw@yow.how> wrote:
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
Like the miracles of welfare, food stamps , charitable housing
By the way don't you think that in accepting these you are being
dangerously socialist
I've retired but I don't get a cent from the state.
But then I have a conscience
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| User: "Hengroen" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
06 Mar 2006 08:06:43 PM |
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In article <bfjm02dujmk5pb4dpupl3bbc3sjcc971mg@4ax.com>, john w
<johnw@yow.how> wrote:
I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
What a pity you never grew up again
I think the kudos from being born again five decades ago has rather run
out and I don't think you have got a lot of gold stars on the recording
angels register in recent years
Just a lot of black marks in the margin
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| User: "Graham J Weeks" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 03:25:16 PM |
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Not wanted in alt.quotations so do not cross post.
john w wrote:
x-no-archive: yes
On 5 Mar 2006 11:59:29 -0800, wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Are you suggesting that we all leave
The Faith of our Fathers
and worship.....
You perhaps?
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
Intelligent people, mature people, civilized people,
"live and let live."
The rational, mature Muslim is as tolerant of my Christianity as I am
of his being a follower of Islam and Mohammed!
Some of my very best friends are Muslims, and I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
john w
There are joys which long to be ours.
God sends ten thousands truths, which come
about us like birds seeking inlet;
but we are shut up to them, and so
they bring us nothing, but sit and sing
awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
=====
"The Book of Bart"
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author
Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the
marrow of the bones?
In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers
on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and
the listeners' questions fade.
Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling
author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the
fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of
Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.
Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a
pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible
"is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally
inspired by the Holy Spirit."
But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman
became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the
scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling
dust of his own faith.
"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who
Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium
here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the
department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option --
legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of
the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on
the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New
Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death.
Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin
cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who
say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the
life of Christ.
There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that
go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for
centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the
sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of
God? Both? Neither?
These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His
take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as
a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white
in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the
unknowable.
"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate
things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New
Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many
Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his
faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.
"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to
prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after
Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was
no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from?
How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful
religion?
"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we
are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart
On a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of
an auditorium. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of
the most popular classes on campus. His text for today is the Gospel of
John.
Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the
narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a
cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is
distinctly different from the other three Gospels.
Ehrman looks the professorial part -- a not-too-tall man with a
receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a
sweater. His shoes are scuffed. He is energetic and possessed of a
gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. (He holds
informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)
But as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly
pounces on the anomalies -- in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in
Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon,
there's no last supper. "None of that is found in John!" The
crucifixion stories are different -- in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the
cross; in John, he's perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The
resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire,
shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.
"In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,"
he says, his voice urgent. "In John, you do." He points out that in the
other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ's
ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from
the beginning. "You shouldn't think something just because you believe
it. You need reasons. That applies to religion. That applies to
politics . . . just because your parents believe something isn't good
enough."
The class files out a few minutes later.
"Most of the students have never heard anything like this in their
lives," says Ben White, a graduate student. "For a lot of them, it's
very threatening."
Ehrman doesn't mind this. He's often on CNN, the Discovery Channel,
National Geographic, a scholar amused by "taking something really
complicated and getting a sound bite out of it."
"Misquoting Jesus" is just that to some extent, a book of pop history
about biblical misconceptions. The first of his 19 books to be a
bestseller, it reads like one of his lectures -- an exploration into
how the 27 books of the New Testament came to be cobbled together, a
history rich with ecclesiastical politics, incompetent scribes and the
difficulties of rendering oral traditions into a written text.
To get an idea of how complicated this can be, consider: Greek, the
lingua franca of the day, was written without capitalization or
punctuation.
Here, you play biblical translator. Look at this, an example in
English, from Ehrman's book:
godisnowhere
Does it say: God is now here.
Or: God is nowhere.
Sorting out these mysteries is the life Ehrman saw for himself since he
was an uncertain teenager in Lawrence, Kan. He attended Trinity
Episcopal on Vermont Street in Lawrence, but he and his family were
casual in their faith. Lost in the middle of the pack in school, Ehrman
felt an emptiness settle over him, something that lingered at nights
after the lights were out, when the house was quiet.
One afternoon he went to a party at the house of a popular kid. It
turned out to be a meeting of a Christian outreach youth group from a
nearby college. In private talks, the charismatic young leader of the
group told the 15-year-old Ehrman that the emptiness he felt inside was
nothing less than his soul crying out for God. He quoted Scripture to
prove it.
"Given my reverence for, but ignorance of, the Bible, it all sounded
completely convincing," Ehrman writes.
One Saturday morning after having breakfast with the man, Ehrman went
home, walked into his room and closed the door. He knelt by his bed and
asked the Lord to come into his life.
He rose, and felt better, stronger. "It was your bona fide born-again
experience."
The void in his heart was filled. The more he read the Bible, he says,
the closer he felt to God.
His devotion soon engulfed him. "I told my friends, family, everyone
about Christ," he remembers now. "The study of the Bible was a
religious experience. The more you studied the Bible, the more
spiritual you were. I memorized large parts of it. It was a spiritual
exercise, like meditation."
He soon became a gung-ho Christian, a fundamentalist who believed the
Bible contained no mistakes. He converted his family to his new faith.
Schoolmates went off to the University of Kansas, but he enrolled in
the Moody Bible Institute, an austere interdenominational institution
in Chicago that forbade students to go to movies, play cards, dance, or
have physical contact with the opposite sex.
It was spiritually thrilling.
For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another
Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological
Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the
ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus
Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his
execution.
What he found there began to frighten him.
The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as
he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700
ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of
the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000
differences in those texts.
"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.
Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But
others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to
have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only
verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.
Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the
Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a
cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it
is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added
to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.
For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman
sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are
no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.
He wrote a tortured paper at Princeton that sought to explain how an
episode in Mark might be true, despite clear evidence to the contrary.
A professor wrote in the margin:
"Maybe Mark just made a mistake."
As simple as it was, it struck him to the core.
"The evidence for the belief is that if you look closely at the Bible,
at the resurrection, you'll find the evidence for it," he says. "For
me, that was the seed of its own destruction. It wasn't there. It isn't
there."
Doubt about the events in the life of Christ are hardly new. There was
never clear agreement in the most ancient texts as to the meaning of
Christ's death. But for many Christians, the virgin birth, the passion
of Christ, the resurrection on the third day -- these simply have to be
facts, or there is no basis for the religion.
"The fundamental truth claims of the biblical record were historical
things that were believed to have happened, not 'once upon a time' in a
fairy tale or somewhere outside of time and space, but at specific
times and places that belonged to the total history of the human race
and that could be located on a map," writes Jaroslav Pelikan, one of
the field's most respected scholars. "If the history of the
resurrection of Christ had not really happened, the message . . .
according to the authority of the apostle Paul, had to be 'null and
void.' "
Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real
historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by
illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.
Dark Bubbles
It is a difficult thing to chart the loss of faith.
Where does it go, this belief in things not seen?
Let's look at "In the Beauty of the Lilies." This is John Updike's
novel of the fictional Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, a Presbyterian
minister, and his loss of faith. Wilmot, beset by doubt one afternoon
in the rectory, "felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The
sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling
bubbles escaping upward . . . there was no God, nor should there be."
For Ehrman, the dark sparkling bubbles cascaded out of him while
teaching a class at Rutgers University on "The Problem of Suffering in
Biblical Traditions." It was the mid-1980s, the Ethiopian famine was in
full swing. Starving infants, mass death. Ehrman came to believe that
not only was there no evidence of Jesus being divine, but neither was
there a God paying attention.
"I just began to lose it," Ehrman says now, in a conversation that
stretches from late afternoon into the evening. "It wasn't for lack of
trying. But I just couldn't believe there was a God in charge of this
mess . . . It was so emotionally charged. This whole business of 'the
Bible is your life, and anyone who doesn't believe it is going to roast
in hell.' "
He kept teaching, moving to Chapel Hill, kept hanging on to the shreds
of belief, but the dark bubbles fled upward. He was a successful
author, voted one of the most popular professors on campus, but he
awoke one morning seven years ago and found the remnants of faith gone.
No bubbles at all. He was soon to marry for the second time and his
kids were grown. He stopped going to church.
"I would love for him to be there with me, and sometimes wish it was
something we share," says Ehrman's wife, Sarah Beckwith, a professor of
medieval literature at Duke University, and an Episcopalian. "But I
respect the integrity of decisions he's made, even if I reject the
logic by which he reached them."
"Bart was, like a lot of people who were converted to fundamental
evangelicalism, converted to the certainty of it all, of having all the
answers," says Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at
Yale University, and a friend of three decades. "When he found out they
were lying to him, he just didn't want anything to do with it.
"His wife and I go to Mass sometimes. He never comes with us anymore."
* * *
Life after the loss of faith, even for the deeply religious, is not
necessarily a terrible thing.
Ehrman tools home from campus on a recent morning in his BMW
convertible. He has a lovely house in the countryside, a wife who loves
him and an ever-growing career. He is, he says, a "happy agnostic."
That emptiness he felt as a teenager is still there, but he fills it
with family, friends, work and the finer things in life.
He thinks that when you die, there are no Pearly Gates.
"I think you just cease to exist, like the mosquito you swatted
yesterday."
On this particular morning, he turns his attention to his new book, the
story of Judas Iscariot, the man who betrayed Christ. Judas resides,
according to Dante, in the ninth circle of hell. Ehrman's desk is
filled with open books. His study is sun-filled, with a glass door
giving onto a patio and the gentle pines of the Carolina forests.
Where does faith reside? Does it leave a residue when it is gone?
Bart Ehrman begins writing, the day unfolding, shafts of light falling
through the window, the mysteries of the Gospels open before him.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401369.html
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| User: "john w" |
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| Title: Re: Time For A New Religion? |
05 Mar 2006 10:50:26 PM |
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On Sun, 5 Mar 2006 21:25:16 +0000 (UTC), Graham J Weeks
<gweeks@btinternet.com> wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
Not wanted in alt.quotations so do not cross post.
I suggest
you trim your headers
address this to "perry".
john w wrote:
x-no-archive: yes
On 5 Mar 2006 11:59:29 -0800, wrote:
copyright 2006 John Weatherly; all rights reserved; no portion of
this article may be used elsewhere without express written consent of
the author
We're reaching a point in time when the tenets and foundations of
christianity -- whatever that is--are being swept away from mankind's
consciousness. Like all religions--organized and not-- christianity is
solely a human construct. There is no such thing as "divine" or
"faith" as people construe them. Certainly we'd want no god-figure to
be as indifferent to the world's woes as one that would allow the
millenia of suffering homo sapiens have seen, and continue to witness.
Bart Ehrman has put to rest all the crass lies and horseshit that
buttress christianity, including the always laughable new testament and
its contradictory fables about jesus's "life," his "miracles," and his
"resurrection."
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME!
Are you suggesting that we all leave
The Faith of our Fathers
and worship.....
You perhaps?
Bear in mind that, although the Truths and the Miracles that we
Christians live and experience daily may not be "real" to you, they
are VERY real to us!
Intelligent people, mature people, civilized people,
"live and let live."
The rational, mature Muslim is as tolerant of my Christianity as I am
of his being a follower of Islam and Mohammed!
Some of my very best friends are Muslims, and I have been a born-again
Christian for OVER 50 years!
john w
There are joys which long to be ours.
God sends ten thousands truths, which come
about us like birds seeking inlet;
but we are shut up to them, and so
they bring us nothing, but sit and sing
awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
=====
"The Book of Bart"
In the Bestseller 'Misquoting Jesus,' Agnostic Author
Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; D01
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the
marrow of the bones?
In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers
on the AM dial seem to know. Believe, they say. Then daylight comes and
the listeners' questions fade.
Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling
author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the
fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of
Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.
Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a
pillar of conservative Christianity. Its doctrine states that the Bible
"is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally
inspired by the Holy Spirit."
But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman
became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the
scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling
dust of his own faith.
"Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who
Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium
here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the
department of religious studies. "But there could be a fourth option --
legend."
Ehrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of
the year. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. 16 on
the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New
Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.
Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death.
Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin
cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous
stories in the Bible.
And it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who
say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the
life of Christ.
There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that
go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for
centuries. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the
sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of
God? Both? Neither?
These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. His
take on them -- first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as
a skeptic who rejects it all -- suggests a demand for black and white
in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the
unknowable.
"I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate
things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New
Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Like many
Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his
faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's.
"Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to
prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after
Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. "There was
no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. Where did it come from?
How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful
religion?
"I can appreciate people feel differently. But sometimes I wonder if we
are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much."
Void in His Heart
On a recent afte | | | |
