[split] The Symbol of the Bible

[Diana]

To a large extent, how one reacts to the Bible is going to depend on how they look at it.  If one realizes going in that it's largely a collection of folklore and tribal history, then it can be seen as a sort of Fool's Journey of a single people -the Hebrews- struggling towards the light from the near-total darkness of our animalistic pre-history.  It can even be seen to illustrate the "transformation" of God, or at least the concept of God, from the dark vengeful entity dreamed up by an early people struggling for survival in a very harsh environment, to eventually producing the teachings of Jesus, which attempted to clarify the distortions which had been introduced previously.

The problem, of course, is as Ra discussed on several occasions:  Jesus's message got distorted heavily almost immediately after he delivered it.  It was too "high level" for an ancient people who were still largely accustomed to the control systems and power focus of the early tribal materials, and his ministry was cut short before he'd fully had time to develop his message.  It's likely his own followers didn't really understand and so, left to their own devices, further misunderstandings were inevitable.

Either way, though, the Bible has inspired some of the best AND the worst that western civilization has to offer.  It gave us the Inquisition and the Crusades, but it also gave us Bach and Mozart and Michelangelo and Copernicus and Newton.  (People always forget that Newton spent a lot of his time investigating Bible codes.)  It contains whatever the reader seeks to find.  If they look for God's love, they can find it.  If they look for excuses to be a-holes, they can find that too.

Given that it's a book compiled from dozens of sources composed over the course of centuries, there's really no other way it could be.  The real problem comes when people refuse to look into the history of it, and try to give equal weight to every piece, with no regard to the cultural\temporal context of each specific chapter.

The bible did not give us the bolded individuals. Michelangelo, for instance, only painted religious scenes because that's all he could get as commissions. Newton's physics did not derive from the bible, they derived from observation. And Copernicus's idea that the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of our celestial system runs counter completely to the egocentric bible. Mozart's genius certainly did not derive from the bible or study of it.

On the other hand, the teachings in the old testament surely did justify the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, along with genocides throughout history.

If one were to look for God's love in the bible, they would have to look so hard between all the hate, jealousy, despotism, and cruelty it seems absurd to even try. Why do it? I really do not understand the point. I think the point is attachment to something that carries the energy of control, keeping people from thinking for themselves. If seen a s a socio-historical text, that is another thing altogether.