AletheiaRivers

Hehehe. I posted the story in our cafe here.

Mr. Smith. The perfect villain. I was thinking the exact same thing when I posted.

The Gospel According to Debbie Recent works like “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Da Vinci Code” seek to illuminate the life of Jesus. Not long ago, an additional text was discovered in an ancient linen backpack found in a cave outside Jerusalem, surrounded by what appeared to be early Roman candy wrappers and covered with stickers reading “I [heart] All Faiths” and “Ask Me About Hell.” A parchment diary found inside the backpack appears to contain the musings of one Debbie of Galilee. Many of the pages are still being translated from high-school Aramaic; here are some persuasive excerpts: October 5 I saw him in the marketplace! Everyone says that he’s the son of God, but I don’t care one way or the other because he’s just so CUTE!!! O.K., he’s not hot like a gladiator or a centurion, but he’s really sensitive and you can tell that he thinks about things and then goes, “Be nice to people,” and I’m like, that is SO TRUE and I wonder if he’s seeing anyone! October 21 Everyone says that he’s just totally good and devoted to all humanity and that he was sent to save us and that’s why he doesn’t have time for a girlfriend, although I swear I saw Mary Magdalene doodling in the sand with a stick, writing “Mrs. Jesus Christ” and “Merry Xmas from Mary and Jesus Christ and All the Apostles,” with little holly leaves all around it. And I’m like, Mary, are you dating Jesus? and she says, no, he’s just helping me, and I’m like, you mean with math? and she’s like, no, to not be such a whore. And I said, but that is so incredibly sweet, and we both screamed and talked about whether we like him better when he’s healing the lame or with a ponytail. December 25 I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. So I go, O.K., what about accessories, like a new rope belt or clogs or like I could make him a necklace with his name spelled out in little clay letters? And Mark said, I love that, but Luke rolled his eyes and said, Mark, you are just such an Assyrian. So I go to see Mary, Jesus’ mom, and she said that Jesus doesn’t need gifts, that he just wants all of us to love God and be better people, but I asked, what about a sweater? and she said medium. January 2 Oh my God, oh my God, I couldn’t believe it, but I was right there, and Jesus used only five loaves of bread and two fish to feed thousands of people, and it was so beautiful and miraculous, and my brother Ezekiel said, whoa, Jesus has invented canapés and I said shut up! And then my best friend Rachel asked, I wonder if he could make my hair really shiny, and I said, you are so disgusting, Jesus shouldn’t waste his time on your vanity, and then Jesus smiled at me and I’m telling you, those last seven pounds, the stubborn ones, they were totally gone! And I spoke unto the angry Roman mob and I said, behold these thighs! Jesus has made me feel better about me! March 12 Everyone is just getting so mean. They’re all going, Debbie, he is so not divine, Debbie, you’ll believe anything, Debbie, what about last year when you were worshipping ponchos? And I so don’t trust that Judas Iscariot, who’s always staring at me when I walk to the well and he’s saying, hey, Deb, nice jugs, and I’m like, oh ha ha ha, get some oxen. April 5 So Mary Magdalene tells me that Jesus and all the apostles had this big party and that it got really intense and Jesus drank from this golden goblet and now it’s missing and the restaurant is like, this is why there’s a surcharge. April 23 It’s all over. And it’s been terrible and amazing and I don’t know what any of it means or who’s right and who’s wrong but maybe I’ll figure it out later. Anyway, I’ll always remember what Jesus said to me. He said, Debbie, I can foresee that someday you’ll meet someone, someone wonderful, but for right now let’s at least think about college. Gospel According to Debbie - Link

Dude, it was your Gospel According to Debbie thread. Way too subversive and radical! Heh. I highly doubt they'd block you and not China Cat.

That's definitely a good understanding of perennial philosophy. Core truths are universal and can be found in many religions. Simone Weil said something similar to Aquinas. It was my sig line for a while. It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

Hi John. I have no problem accessing it. Perhaps it's your ISP? Brian has been tweaking the look of the site, but that shouldn't be causing issues for you.

Since the dawn of the industrial age I think we've come pretty damn close. However, no, I don't think we are. Humanity plays an important ecological role. Studies have been done showing that when tribal ("primitive") humans move out of certain areas, the land suffers because they are no longer there. It's modern society, west and east, that could be likened to a virus, an impurity.

It's taken quite a while. It's been 7 years since I left the JW's. I know they are not strictly fundamentalists, but they are pretty dang close. I went through a period of atheism. I even studied the philosophy of religion so that I could rebut all the usual "God arguments." After that, I went back to God, but not as a Christian. I think that leaving Christianity completely for a while allowed me to eventually come back and take a fresh look. I am able to see that the definitions applied to certain doctrines by fundamentalists are not how they have been historically understood. I still have problems discussing things like "sin" (as an example) with conservative Christians. We come at the idea from completely different points of view. It can be difficult to discuss such ideas with progressive Christians too, often because they hear certain doctrines and still read it through a fundamentalist lense. It's a pain in the ass, and you have my total empathy. Like I said in my other thread, I often wonder why I bother. For me, though, if I can't find meaning in Christianity outside of its being a social gospel, I'll have to move on. I want (and need) my religious path to 'mediate the sacred' (to borrow Borg's words). I often feel like I've got two choices within Christianity: conservative literalism or a liberal socio-political Christianity. I've been desperately trying to find a third option for the past year. It's hard.

Jeep! You're 87? No way! Welcome back youngster.

He means me. I don't think I'm an indigo child, but I do have a swampy core.

I'm definitely a forest kind of gal. Not that I can't get hung up on the trees to. I do and sometimes it's fun. All the tree arguments going on over at Tweb, though, has got me burned out. And you survived!? Did ya like it? I've heard it's actually pretty bad. I'd vote for him.

Whoa! I go away for a few hours to visit the doc and the conversation explodes! Whew! I'm glad. I'm overly sensitive to offending anybody (unless I get really cranky), but I especially wouldn't want to bug you dude! I am right there with you. Sometimes I feel like I'm hanging on by a hair. More so lately, actually. I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!

Okay, I'm done with my Wayne's World flashback. I'm just saying that literalism, followed to its conclusion, imo, will lead to one of those two camps. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but that's been my experience. If you accept that Jesus literally rode into Jeruselem on one donkey, then you can't literally accept that he rode into Jeruselem on two donkeys. Stuff like that. The inerrantist will say that those passages are reconcilable, which they might be, but only with dissonance. I'm not sure, but I think I we might be talking past each other. I only brought up the historical/critical method because you mentioned Rice. She's Catholic, and as a rule, the historical/critical method is of secondary (or less) importance in scripture interpretation. The historical/critical method seems to be more important to liberal scholars, who, in their quest for the historical Jesus, might be missing the bigger picture. What you've said above is closer (imo) to approaching the gospels as literature. Approaching the gospels as literature doesn't mean that Jesus didn't historically exist, or wasn't literally raised from the dead. It just allows that what is written, although inspired of God, may also have errors, because it was written by humans. Here's a quote about a lecture by Professor Johnson: "He approaches the Gospels and our perceptions of Jesus from a different perspective than the popular quest for the "historical Jesus." Professor Johnson asserts that the portrait of Jesus addressed by such an approach, legitimate and compelling though such an approach may be, leads to questions that are virtually "impossible to answer satisfactorily" through proper historical methods. "It is, after all, as literature that the Gospels influenced history. And it is through literature that present-day readers can continue to encounter Jesus," he says. I haven't hit a nerve have I? I didn't mean to.

ROFLMAO! LOL! I'll reply to the rest of the post when I can calm down.

Boy did I ever have a post glitch above. The end of that sentence should be "I find that it is the above (Jesus' self-possessed authority, wisdom, and personal charisma) that impresses me and convicts me about Jesus even more than the miracles.

LOL! Me too. Yup. Yin/yang baby. Duality in unity. Multiplicity in singularity. That's why they call me the yin/yang kid. Although flow now wants to call me 'swamp thing'. One of these days I'll get around to reading them all. I do like Thomas.

Oh yeah, it did that to me too. She turned me onto Luke Timothy Johnson and got me to re-examine Catholicism. Which, as Jeanott pointed out, looks at the Bible through literary lenses, rather than thru the historical/critical lense (ala Jesus Seminar). The historical/critical method leads either to fundamentalism (accepting everything as literally true) or to extreme liberalism (tossing aside everything that couldn't be [in the opinion of the scholar] literally true). That impressed me as well. I'd never heard of or thought of that before.

I like to do this too. I'll look at it from a literal pov, a historical pov, a literary pov. I find that it is the above that impresses and convicts me about Jesus more than I'm looking forward to deeper readings. Readings looking for what Borg calls the More than Literal meaning. I definitely am not implying that you are doing that. And in actuality, I don't think we can get away from it. As Jeanott said, even Jesus did it.

Your post made me think of the charge that some Christians make against other Christians about "cherry picking" bible verses. (I'm not saying that you are doing that.) In actuality the entire bible is cherry picked. It's made up of a bunch of little books, which in turn are made up of a bunch of smaller stories, written by different people, that don't always agree with each other. (That's why your post made me think of this.) In addition, the books that currently make up the bible were picked out of numerous books to make up the canon. And the Luther took a few out, to cherry pick the protestant bible. Wow. That's a lot of cherry picking. I am outside the norm in that I don't mind it, the contradictions. I try to look at the "big picture," but I also am willing to take each verse as it stands on it's own.

Encouraging dialogue here is a bit difficult. And to be honest, I too am at a loss for subject matter. So, here is a thread where you can post whatever you want about religion, spirituality, Christianity, etc ... If you have nice stuff to say, post it. If you have a rant, post it. Hopefully something said will in turn cause someone else to say something else, and Voila! dialogue. 1, 2, 3, GO!

Christians and pagans have more in common than they think. All religion does. I'd have to say this is my main prayer: that everyone wake up and realize it!

Yes!

It is a breath of fresh air. Not that we don't have our differences on this board (which we have), but it's not nearly as contentious.

Heck, I've already mentioned I like Brian McLaren and NT Wright. I think I'm on her hit list just for that. Hehehe. But honestly, that's why I begged you not to report me as spam. Hopefully, she doesn't read this board. Oops. DeeDee, I'm not trying to be subversive. I promise! Tweb is awesome, but sometimes it's just too hostile to a liberal like me. In all fairness, I've also told quite a few about Tweb. Darby will testify for me!

Welcome to the board Szymon (although it looks like you joined last December, actually).