Quote from: drizabone on Jan 11, 2017, 02:26PMJust noticing that you think in terms of God being in tune with us, ie that God needs to accommodate us, where I think the other way.
This is a product of me not thinking that he's real. Those that think he is real I suppose might logically be able to view him as more flexible than the people worshipping him, but this seems uncommon in my observation - your position is usual for a believer, I think.
To amplify, Yahweh was created by the people that worshipped him, and so naturally he reflects what they thought he should be. It's a much longer, more complex process than that, and one shrouded in the mists of time; Yahweh was not originally the god of Israel (note the "El" ending the name - if it were Yahweh, it might have been "Israiah");
he was originally a son of El, but the perception of Israel/Judah shifted over the centuries to the point where he was perceived as not only the supreme god, but in time the only god, taking on various names of other gods. We can see this shift in the words we've been reading, where different books carry words from different eras - witness all those eye-opening psalms that talk about multiple gods.
Quote from: drizabone on Jan 11, 2017, 02:26PMI agree with you about Jesus attitude to money: money is a means to an end - and we should be generous with it. And he also says that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
But I disagree with your observation that all modern christians are big fans of socialism and communism... I guess you're actually being facetious
Yes, very much intended as sarcasm. It was a barb aimed at the unlikely and often aggressively authoritarian mash-up of Christianity and hard-core right-wing political views that one finds in the US particularly. The descriptions of Jesus are about as far as one can imagine from many of the attitudes that one is presented with. I am regularly perplexed to find that the philosophy of someone who seems to have been a blend of an old hippy and a left-wing radical is venerated by so many that profess to hate the morals that such a person typically has.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's been some years since I read the gospels, and I could do with a refresher. Fortunately, one is on the menu, here in approximately a year's time...
Quote from: drizabone on Jan 11, 2017, 02:26PM, in which case I agree but don't think its a problem. (I would argue that Marx got his ideas from the way the church was organised in Acts. And in its "idealistic" form of "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability", it would be a valid and great way for christians to organise their economy, but it tends to fail because of human greed, and where its organised nationally is often antagonistic to christianity, one of the opiates of the people. Communism is worse.) I think capitalism works well because it uses peoples greed/self interest and we're all good at that.
Important I think to avoid comparing in absolutes. We don't live in either a fully capitalist or a fully socialist society; in our world "the free market" has been fetishised for getting on for two generations now, making the balance of our mix more simply capitalist than it was up to the end of the 1970s, but even in the notoriously free-market-worshipping US there is some central provision for those that cannot afford necessary things.
Communism is rather different, and hasn't yet worked well on a national scale, though on a village scale it can work well. Too many personal incentives to improve are lost. We in the West are working towards a balance that suits over the centuries, and if we can avoid creating political crises destabilising enough to knock our system over (fingers crossed over Trump, who seems quite quite mad) we can continue to iterate our solutions. The last swing was towards unrestrained capitalism, and this has come to hurt many people in the last decade, so the obvious next step would be to go back the other way. But many people almost spit the word 'socialism', and so that is out of favour, leaving the whole thing drifting in zombie fashion until somebody charismatic and benevolent pops up to give the whole thing a new meaning that people can get behind.
Interesting idea about Marx. I look forward to comparing his ideas with those found in Acts when we get there.
Quote from: drizabone on Jan 11, 2017, 02:26PMSure Jesus is more concerned with your behaviour and attitude that your possessions, but having possessions in themselves are not condemned, its the love of possessions/money that is condemned. Its the attitude that counts not the possessions.
It is probably a moral hazard to collect nice trombones...
Quote from: drizabone on Jan 11, 2017, 02:26PMI don't think that Jesus "overruled" any OT commands - at least any you are thinking of.
- sometimes he set higher standards for those who wanted to follow him ( and I think that this was just to show that we couldn't earn our salvation by trying to be good enough. So an eye for an eye is a good rule for proportional justice, and the minimal standard, it is directed at the official who is sentencing a wrongdoer. "turn the other cheek" is different and doesn't replace the original, it is a new instruction directed at 'victims' on how they should react to someone doing them wrong. I think that both rules could coexist. There are really 3 rules aren't there: Don't hit people, Apply proportional penalties, Turn the other cheek. All directed at different actors.
- other times he condemned "rules" that were made up and added to the rules people were supposed to follow. The Pharisees were good at making up extra rules, some that were meant to excuse you from following the OT laws.
Not sure I totally agree about OT and NT being in such harmony, but this is I think better left until we are reading the NT. My current recall of NT is too hazy to be putting solid enough thoughts together.
