posted
Omega, I just remembered seeing such a verse, and, I thought, who would be better qualifies than you to place said verse in to it's time frame and placement in the Bible.
None else than you of course.
And thank you for filling in the blanks for me.
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Just for the record, the bible doesn't say anywhere that Jesus was never married.
And, come to think of it, if Jesus hadn't been married, then, when Paul wrote his little "the world is ending soon, so you single people should stay single like I am" rant, shouldn't he have used Jesus as an example, rather than himself?
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, he would've gotten lots of practice with nails then...
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Y'know, it's probably a good thing that blasphemy laws don't apply to the internet.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
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Sorry if I got a little agitated, Ritten. I can never quite tell around here when people are asking questions to gain information and when they're asking questions to be asses.
Oh, and to answer Liam from a few posts back (which I TRIED to do yesterday, dumb school network...), I'm saying that the Old Testament law does not apply to Christians, in that we are't obligated to stone witches or homosexuals or adulterers or what have you. But we can still learn from the fact that God doesn't seem to like those actions very much, and we can assume THAT hasn't changed. We shouldn't stone adulterers, because that command wasn't given to us, but adultery is still a Bad Thing.
Just for the record, the bible doesn't say anywhere that Jesus was never married.
True enough. In fact, given Jewish society of the time I suppose it might be odd if he wasn't, though being odd relative to society didn't seem to be a problem for Christ.
-------------------- "This is why you people think I'm so unknowable. You don't listen!" - God, "God, the Devil and Bob"
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
OK, now I'm a bit confused. . . I saw a report on TV about that statue being removed, and of course I got to see the statue itself. . . and now I'm not sure what the problem is. It's a depiction of a couple of stone tablets inscribed with laws. In front of a courthouse. Now, I divide my work between two buildings: one is right next door to the Central Criminal Courts on Old Bailey, London; the other is down the road and from the higher floors has many amazing views, but most significantly has a view of the top of the Old Bailey itself, with its golden statue of blind Lady Justice, with the scales and, er, the other thing. In other words, an abstract image of law.
Now, I'm not religious, but if I was to sit down and try to come up with some other abstract concepts of law, those two stone tablets would come up pretty quickly. Sure, they're of a religious origin, but then so are many things. So what's the big deal?
posted
The big deal is that justice should not be based on a group's personal religous beliefs and thus can not be said to discriminate against those not of that belief.
Erect a statue of the open Koran and watch all the supporters of the Ten Commandments statue foam at the mouth to tear it down (as it's not their religion). I doubt it'd lat a whole day before someone ripped it down.
What if I sculpted a nice inverted pentagram in front of the courthouse? It's really the same thing, just not as popular.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
You're missing the point. The Ten Commandments aren't just a symbol of religion, they're a symbol of LAW. The real question is whether you can use a symbol of law that's also a religious symbol.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
You can't have a religous symbol as the syblol for law in a society with many religions: it's exculsive.
The law has outgrown the religous pretext it was established on.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Really, Lee, this sort of thing isn't, and perhaps shouldn't be, a major issue. There are three kinds of groups that get involved in this sort of thing, to varying degrees, and in most cases they're the only ones who notice. I haven't followed this case, so I don't know who's doing what, beyond what one inevitably picks up, but in general, what I'm about to describe is how it goes. (That was very pretentious-sounding.)
Anyway, on one side you have a small but politically powerful group of Christian fundamentalists. On their own the beliefs of these people would bar them from any serious engagement in the affairs of state. (This says nothing of the validity of said beliefs, just their minority status.) But they vote a lot, and anyone interested in broad right-wing appeal needs to at least acknowledge their existence. (One can take the centrist approach, ala Schwarzenegger, and try to shut out the minority extremist groups on both sides, but this is historically a much harder row to hoe, since almost by definition a movement designed to appeal to people from lots of different movements is going to have a much harder time organizing itself politically and getting the message out. That's what the whole party apparatus is for, after all.) On another (note, not the other) side, you've got an even smaller bunch of hardcore athesists with a specific agenda of purging religious iconography, ala Madeline Murray O'Hare, but there are so few of these and they wield so little influence that they aren't real players, despite being the favorite punching bag of the fundamentalists.
On the third side you have a bunch of people who are unified under a sometimes vague dedication to certain political principles, namely, in this case, a seperation between religious and governmental matters, and in the name of which they often pursue goals whose ideological importance far outweighs their practical impact. While one might wonder how visibly non-Christians fair in this judge's courtroom, but I'm not aware of anyone making claims about that. It isn't even on the table.
So, I suppose what I am getting at is that, in the United States, this kind of conflict is rarely about what it seems to be about on the surface. On the one hand you have people who firmly believe that the United States is, or at least ought to be, a Christian polity in the classical mode, and putting the Ten Commandments up in courtrooms is only the symbol of a wide-ranging set of reforms. On the other, you have people who firmly believe that the United States was organized along explicitly multicultural, and thus multi-religious, lines, and who tend to see apparently minor seepage between church and state as warning signs of far more serious structural problems.
Having said of all that (and surely having said too much), the mention of Lady Justice calls to mind Ashcroft's infamous decision to have the bare breasts of that particular icon covered up in a Department of Justice briefing room. One could argue that that was simply a matter of wanting firmer control of the press briefing environment. But lots of people didn't take it that simply. Symbology is where we spent a lot of our mental time, I think, and not without reason.
Anyway, uh, there you go. (This sort of transatlantic bewilderment is surely also a result of official state churches, and thus official religous icons, being just a normal piece of history on one side.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
Or mabye you're none too bright. "The Onion" is a parody newspaper and website. I thought you opted out of this thread. Would'nt want you to have blood pressure problems or anything.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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