December 18, 2004

• With one week left until
  Christmas,

  I want to thank some of you for illustrating my point.  I tend, in
  my writing, to present the facts and observations that have led me to
  some conclusions, and leave the conclusions up to my readers.  One
  of my favorite clients, JadedFey, who became one of my favorite friends after I’d done some readings for her – it was she who persuaded me to blog on Xanga, by the way, in case anyone’s looking for someone to thank or blame – has called that style of exposition, “obscure.”

  I realized after reading the comments below that I was probably being,
  in Sarah’s sense, “obscure” again with my entries on some of the myths
  surrounding prevalent Christmas traditions such as Satan Claws, Gaspar,
  Melchior, and Balthasar.

  TheCrimsonNinja wrote, in response to my blog on the Three Magi:

  I always assumed
  the ‘three wise men’, like everything else in the Bible, was more
  symbolic than literal anyway. I just look at the Bible as a pre-Times bestselling novel written by a collection of anonymous authors.

  I would take vehement exception to the judgement that “everything
  in the Bible” is more symbolic than literal, and to the contention that it was written as fiction.  People have long
  been using symbolic and metaphorical figures of speech — a fine
  example of a disastrous misinterpretation of such a New Testament
  passage can be found in the recent news of a mother who killed her baby girl
  by cutting off her arms
  – but I feel it
  is safe to assume that most of what is written there is literally what
  the authors meant to say and, in many cases, what they remembered,
  understood, or believed to be true.  The propensity among
  preachers to
  freely interpret Scripture in their own symbolic terms is, in my
  opinion, one of the primary factors that have debased and devalued the
  Bible as a historical document.

  The various authors’ perceptions of reality might have been skewed, and
  in some cases
  their intentions might have been less than honorable.  After the
  end of the Babylonian captivity, a cabal of Judaic priests made a
  concerted power grab through a rewriting of Scripture, for example, and
  during the Holy Roman Empire, Justinian and Theodora convened a
  conference of tame scholars and Churchmen to rewrite existing Scripture
  to suit their beliefs and political advantage.  These are facts
  known to scholars because we have documents to compare from before and
  after the changes.

  True, some of the authors of biblical materials are now “anonymous,”
  their identities having been lost or having long been obscured by
  accident or design.  But we can also reliably trace the authorship
  of some of the Bible.  For the oldest parts of the Old Testament,
  it is fairly easy for a careful reader, for example, to determine
  whether a particular passage originates in the “E Document” (E for
  Elohim), or the “J Document” (for Jehovah), and we know the cultural origins of both documents.  Of the four authors
  of the Gospels of Christ:  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (to give another easy example), it is
  fairly evident that Luke was a Greek who never in his life laid eyes on Jesus the Christ.  That in no way betokens anonymity.

  This admirable comment from astrohooker beautifully embodies Buddha’s words from the Kalama Sutra that I have quoted in my sidebar, the quote that concludes, “…after
  observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with
  reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all,
  then accept it and live up to it.”

  I try not to pay
  too much attention to what is said in Bible other than the common sense
  things like thou shalt not kill and stuff.

  For most people that would be a wise course, but too many people
  believe in the literal truth of every word of Holy Writ, of whatever
  religion, no matter how debased, deluded, degraded or simply untrue
  those words may be.  And far too many people, perhaps even a
  larger number than those who believe the Holy Writs themselves, believe
  the symbolic interpretations, paraphrases, distortions, and specious
  additions such as the story of the Three Magi.

  I don’t often write of my beliefs or of my religion, not nearly so
  often as I simply express them in my actions and ideas.  Please
  note that my beliefs are separate from my religion.  My basic core
  belief is that the less we believe the better off we are.  My
  personal path of self-development involves questioning all my beliefs
  and either upgrading them into the knowledge category, relegating them
  to the ignorant myth, fearful superstition, or wishful thinking
  category and dismissing them, or keeping them as working hypotheses
  pending further investigation.

  I do not believe in God.  And, NO, I am not an atheist.  The
  deity I know is nothing at all like the jealous and vengeful
  micro-managing God that most atheists don’t believe in.  I am a
  Christian who does not believe in God.  I’m a gnostic, one of
  those outcast Christians that the mainstream of Christianity, the
  Apostolic followers of Peter and Paul, despise, fear and disavow. 
  They claim that because we do not accept the distorted creed of the
  Church Fathers that allows them to piously hate Pagans, Jews and
  Muslims and subjugate women, to cite just a few of the more egregious examples, we are not truly Christian.

  I use the tag anyway because one of the alternate tags that has been
  suggested, “Jesusonian”, is meaningless to most people, and “gnostic”
  to far too many people suggests “agnostic.”  People, far too many
  people, are grossly ignorant and stupidly content with their
  ignorance.  For the benefit of  those of my readers who are
  ignorant but not content with that state, I’ll explain.  The
  gnosticism which is my religion is not Gnosticism with a capital
  “G”.  That’s a group of organizations, each with its own set of
  creeds and dogmas. 

  The gnosis I practice is simply a direct communion between my spirit
  and the Spirit of the Christos.  The deity I revere is genderless,
  non-corporeal, omnipresent and infinite.   We mortals have
  powers of Will and manifestation that some people call godlike.  I
  do not hestitate to use those powers, nor do I blame the deity when
  what I manifest jumps up and bites me in the butt.

  While the deity of my understanding manifests itself to me through my
  own mind and soul, I do not avoid the study of other people’s
  expositions of their spirituality.  That is a form of fellowship,
  of sharing the Spirit.  From my pre-teens into my thirties, I
  studied many major and minor religions.  The year I was in ninth
  grade I read both the King James Bible and Webster’s New Collegiate
  Dictionary.  While it’s true that I did learn more of value from
  the dictionary than from King James, I got some interesting stuff from
  the Bible, too, and it sparked the rest of my religious study.

  To date, I have read (if memory serves) seven separate translations and
  one paraphrase of the Christian Bible.  One paraphrase was more
  than enough.  Such travesties of self-serving misinterpretation
  are, I think, responsible for much of the cultural decadence of our
  society.  Under cover of an attempt to render the bible into
  common American English, they omit or distort many of the key concepts
  of the original work.

  After those decades of study, I have settled on the NIV, New
  International Version, as my Bible of choice when I feel it’s
  appropriate to quote the bible (usually when some bible-thumper has
  been misquoting it at me).  That is, the NIV is the one I go to
  when I need to look up a verse to quote.  Its international and
  interfaith commission of scholars and translators did an accurate and
  thorough job, and where there are conflicts over the correct
  translation of a passage the book supplies all the possibilities. 
  I like that, their giving me the option of deciding which fits
  best.  Often, however, the quotations that come to mind without my
  having to look them up are phrased in the argot of the era of King
  James.

  In my opinion, as spiritual works and guides to highly-evolved human
  conduct, there are better works in print than the Holy Bible, Qur’an,
  Torah, Popol Vuh, or any of their ilk.  Two of these I most enjoy
  and respect are The Urantia Book and Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God. 
  To me, it stands to reason that as our species continues to evove
  intellectually, culturally, and spiritually, we naturally achieve a
  broader and deeper understanding of reality.  To rephrase that,
  the old books are obsolete.  In the absence of and toward the
  establishment of a direct communion with the Great Spirit, such
  recently channeled works can be of great assistance to the spiritual
  seeker, much more assistance than works composed millennia ago and
  perverted to the political ends of many power elites in the
  interim.   How can we expect to find God in books of human
  politics that advocate such ungodly practices as genocide and genital
  mutilation, to cite just an alliterative couple of examples?
  
  

  • 9:59 pm
  • 6 Comments