this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

i mean it's mostly all metaphor and allegory, meant to teach you lessons rather than to act as a historical document.

it's like a book of fables for people who think animals are silly

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The four gospels read as eyewitness accounts and reports of a real person, not as fables and allegories.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"read as" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most scholars say they were written well after the fact (decades to generations after), after a bunch of oral tradition related changes crept in. Plus, they were sort of down selected from a much larger corpus.

So this is just a narrative technique rather than an actual eyewitness account.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

By "well after the fact", it's still within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. Contrasted with other historical records, it's pretty good. Like Alexander the Great being written about 800 years after the fact, or some details about Julius Caesar being written down 200 years after the fact which nobody disputes. For something we can archaeologically prove which also happened at the time - the pompeii disaster - there is one record 30 years later. Despite it being an event witnessed by hundreds of thousands and likely having influential romans among it's victims. You're really overestimating the frequency of writings and documentation from the first century. In which the New Testament is abnormal in that it has a high frequency. So something that clearly was a big deal did happen. The traditions as well carried across societies, so must have been rooted in fact. As for the larger corpus - those were the centuries later forgeries that were removed for that reason - because they were much later and not seen as reliable. Some of them were attributed to more important figures also, like Thomas. So the early Church clearly cared about accuracy.

[–] Viking_Hippie 5 points 1 week ago

Most scholars say they were written well after the fact (decades to generations after), after a bunch of oral tradition related changes crept in

Almost like it's all a bunch of bullshit invented to control the masses 🤔

[–] Viking_Hippie 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

meant to teach you lessons

The foremost lesson being "obey authority figures or else"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

"Treat women and children like property. Always blame victims. Take slaves from neighboring countries, never your own."

Lots of great lessons in that holiest of books.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Second is "don't question them"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

personally i am a fan of "keep your religion to yourself", "don't use the veil of the church as a means to make money", "help those that others cast out, like sex workers", "don't engage in stereotype", and "rich people go to hell".

[–] Viking_Hippie 4 points 1 week ago

Yeah. Funny how the most influential Christians all tend to forget those 🤔

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

But only mostly!

Catholicism truly believes you are eating Jesus's body and drinking his blood at mass.

But it's not cannibalism because the bread and wine still keep all their properties after turning into Jesus 🤓

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-catholics-cannibals

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

it's not cannibalism because the bread and wine still keep all their properties after turning into Jesus 🤓

You could make a perfectly cromulent meringue out of human blood, and it'd have all the properties of a meringue made out of eggs (no, seriously, blood is effectively a one to one culinary equivalent of eggs, except for the taste and allergens)... but it'd still be made out of human blood. 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's this kind of mental gymnastics that killed church for me. Jesus had a pretty decent moral framework set up, but people mangled into a bunch of hocus pocus.