EricPH wrote: ↑December 24th, 2021, 9:39 am
Sy Borg wrote: ↑December 23rd, 2021, 2:37 pm
People often refer to a cause worth dying for. It may be better to work for their causes rather than dying for them.
Test pilots risk their lives and many have been killed. They clearly did not want to die; but they took the risks on our behalf; so we can fly safely. The emergency services, the armed forces and many others are killed in the line of duty. They recognize the risks and take them for a greater good.
I have been a volunteer Street Pastor for fourteen years; we wonder the streets of our town until around 4 am on A saturday morning. We have walked in the middle of countless druken, angry, violence. Broken bottles have been used as weapons, we have asked people to hand over knives. We don't go out with the intention of getting hurt and we don't like to see others getting hurt either.
Eric, you have my deep respect. That's a fine thing that you do. Still, while it's highly dangerous, is it actually a cause one dies for? What percentage of your fellow helpers are killed in the line of duty?
I do have rather a problem with the whole Jesus tale, ie. God demands a blood sacrifice. It's an attitude that one might find in the Iron Age Middle East, but not something that would be demanded by an alleged being of higher sensibilities. Given that God is said to have appeared to numerous people, all it had to do was to unambiguously reveal itself to the people. But it didn't.
So let's call a spade and spade, both of the Abrahamic gods are obvious myths. They are metaphors. Miracles don't happen in the modern world for one reason - fraud and delusion can be disproved. That said, I remain agnostic, open to the idea that elements of the great myths are true, if poetically expressed - perceptions rather than imaginings or delusions.
I don't think there's a snowflake's hope in hell that the ancients got the details right about God; the anthropomorphism is obviously absurd. However, I'd rather not toss out the baby with the bathwater here. That same mistake - contempt for the ideas of ancient cultures - was made by colonists invading the lands of indigenous people. They assumed that they knew better and failed to appreciate the great environmental knowledge of tribal people, and the result has been mass extinctions, climate change, loss of arable land and depression caused by rapid displacement from one's evolutionary roots.
So, if we treat Biblical material as it was intended by the ancients - metaphorically - what were they trying to convey with this myth? It strikes me as a critique of the brutality of life at the time, much exacerbated by the same arrogance in Roman rulers as found later in the conquistadors and British colonists. The Jesus myth speaks of a thirst for wisdom and kindness in an atavistic and harsh world. In context it does not make much sense of JC to go to Hell, given that he and his fellow victims had already gone through hell, so to speak. That would seem redundant.
Heaven and hell too are obvious allegories - emotional states, not places. Emotions are the link between mind and body, thought and flesh, so hell can be thought of as a disconnect between mind and body. So hell is when one is out of tune with oneself and, given the intensely social nature of human life, this also extends to one's mind being out of tune with one's environment, be it social or more broadly.
It's interesting that hell is posited as being beneath our feet - within the Earth - while heaven is associated with the atmosphere and space, and neither is hospitable for life. Given that we are, each of us, as much a part of the Earth as any rock, tree or beetle, the conceptions suggest that the ancients of early civilisations were themselves out of tune with the Earth. Ironically, that disconnect would have come because their ancestors made the exact same mistake as 19th century colonisers - they disregarded the environmental knowledge of the indigenous people they themselves had displaced.
Sorry for rabbiting on so long. Hopefully it wasn't too dull. Merry Christmas :)
- By Fried Egg
- By Bethel Saint Bright