Christians. What are we going to do with them? Notorious greasy chicken dish Jonah Goldberg discovers and approves of The Obama turning the pardon-the-expression Health Care Debate away from "wonkish frippery" to the more serious matter of whether or not a public subsidy for grandma's statins and junior's braces comports with the proscriptions of an ancient sky deity.
Reaching out to progressive faith leaders in two massive conference calls, Obama insisted that God was on his side. Expanding healthcare fulfills a "core moral and ethical obligation that we look out for one another ... that I am my brother's keeper, my sister's keeper."Now it is true that both the Jewish and Christian texts at various points admonish people to be nice to each other, in between admonishing them to murder and massacre each other in various obscene and horrific manners.
But the Bible does not admonish anyone to be his brother's or sister's keeper. The question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a quintessential tale of human evil and disobedience, second only in Genesis to Adam and Eve's defiant munching on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The questioner is Cain, who has jealously slain his brother Abel.
God curses Cain, and perhaps implicit in that rebuking curse is the answer that yes, he is his brother's keeper, although the tale of Cain and Abel is made rather more . . . difficult to parse as a morality tale given the real suborner of that first murder, Yaweh, who rejected the offerings of Cain, a mere "tiller of the field," though he accepted Abel's mutton and sheep fat.
And in the process of time it came to pass that Cain brought some nice salads and a decent couscous to the potluck.True story.
And Abel also brought some stuff, a rack of lamb in a rich reduction. And the LORD was all like, Respect, Abel. For real, brah.
But unto Cain and his bullshit tofu or whatever, the LORD was all like, What the fuck is this shit, dude? Are you gay? And Cain was pissed as fuck.
And the LORD was like, Dude, why are you acting like such a little bitch?
And Cain found Abel and was like, What it is, yo! Then they went up the park and Cain killed his ass.
And then the LORD was like, Straight up, Cain, where's your bro? And Cain said, Why the fuck you think I know? I ain't up his ass, yo.
Point being, appealing to the bizarre alien god of Genesis based on some Gospel-induced misapprehension of what the Old Testament actually means and says in the service of passing social service legislation is retarded.
32 comments:
I think the last verse of your quotation should have Cain's name instead of Abel.
And is there a place where I might purchase the edition of the Bible that includes this excerpt?
i lol'd
Yeah, fuck, duh, anony. I am dumb. Fixed!
That Yahweh, what a scrote.
translating bible parables into modern colloquial language as a staple of wednesdays...a la foodie friday?
think it over.
Obama was not quoting the Bible, but rather that scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson quotes something that sorta sounds like the Bible.
PS - where is the outrage that Obama is invoking god? i remember when the nitwit from the north invoked god in her speeches and the reaction was "OMG, the end of times...what a dumb bitch. i am on the next bus to Canada if she is a heart beat away from the presidency"
now, not so much when the browbeating into submission by invoking the spooky unseen father is working in their direction.
Well, it ain't "retarded" ... it fools the rubes.
Given that Goldberg's talking, however inaptly, about My Brother's Keeper as an affirmative ethic, shouldn't you be referencing the ancient sky deity's "prescriptions" instead of "proscriptions"? If there's got to be some God in health care reform, I think Jesus would be a better choice for all concerned, say the sequence including "when I was sick or in prison and you did nothing to help me", and ending in, "whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for me."
Pandering, I think Obama's tactics could be described as pandering. He thinks if he quotes the bible enough times I won't raise an army from the rural uneducated lower class and lawrence of Arabia his ass. He is sorely mistaken.
Inkberrow, were you listening to the Dude's story? Then you have no frame of reference.
Translation problem. The Hebrew word here basically means "prison-guard" or "watchman." I think Obama's speech was more about keeping an eye on the Muzzies.
The Hebrew word here basically means "prison-guard" or "watchman."
Yeah, I'd always read that line from Cain as being a bitter joke. After Yahweh has scorned the gifts of Cain, the farmer, in favour of the offerings of meat made by his shepherd brother, and then has the nerve to ask Cain to where Abel is, Cain more or less says "Sorry, I'm not a shepherd like my superstar brother -- I don't spend my time keeping track of dumb animals." Oh, snap!
Anon 12:12 -- in case you haven't noticed, liberals think the apocalyptic doomsayer was the ur-hippie, the MLK Jr. of his day, who wanted to create a lasting society based on equality and being like totally righteous to each other. Hence, when they talk Jeebus, they trust that they all mean basically the same thing.
Conservatives accurately perceive the message to be primarily about a judgmental obsession with revenging oneself on all those different than you, so people are right to be wary of the Palins of the world, whether liberals are stupidly projecting modern humanist values back onto an Iron Age society or not.
There's no shortage of atheists willing to complain about either, thankfully.
Oh, but there's ironies within ironies in this little tale. "Cain and Abel" is episode #5 in the literary origin myth of a religious bureaucracy sponsored by the meat industry and allied interests like wool and leather. It's legitimated by a sacrificial value system where the lives of first-born humans (over which Yahweh claims droit de seigneur) are exchanged for the lives of first-born herd animals-- whose choice body parts conveniently go to God's human factotums.
So here it all begins. Cain the first-born gives some fruit "of the Earth," the base inanimate material from which mankind/Adam was created, while Abel the second-born gives blood of his first born sheep (we later learn blood is equivalent to the life-force). How does Cain respond to the slapdown? He sacrifices Abel the second born!
At this point, the wheels are in motion forever. Cain the first-born is marked by Yahweh: ostensibly to make sure nobody human being "sacrifices" him. But in fact a precedent has been established: first-borns are sacrificed to Yahweh, i.e. fate, and second-borns live on. Cain's corrupt line dies out with the monstrous Lamech, and younger son #2 Seth is the ancestor (through Lamech #2) of the post-Diluvian human race. Second-born Isaac replaces Ishmael. Second-born Jacob replaces Esau. Last-born Joseph replaces first-born Reuben. Second-born Ephraim replaces Menasseh. Latecomers Israel replace Canaan.
It ain't violence, it ain't propaganda, it ain't advertising--it's litrature!
Then of course first-born Judaism is sacrificed to Christianity. But Christianity is all about Jesus sacrificing himself so it doesn't ever have to happen again, and with that we're back to the Garden, Cain's sin erased!
On the other hand, for this plot twist to work, every human being on earth become a good Christian and partake of Christ's sacrificial body on a regular basis. The much vaunted "Second Coming" turns out to be an analogical event: conquest of the universe by the Church, which is Christ's body, and isn't whole until everybody's in it. So that's kind of a problem. Which is why all those fundies in the Air Force were so keen to f*** up the Muzzies in Eyerack and why they keep financing the lunatics who want to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
I'm telling you, this theology stuff makes perfect sense if you just read it like a P.D. James novel!
I'd like to hear more from Aaron.
"Conservatives accurately perceive the message to be primarily about a judgmental obsession with revenging oneself on all those different than you, so people are right to be wary of the Palins of the world, whether liberals are stupidly projecting modern humanist values back onto an Iron Age society or not."
"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? "Turn the other cheek"? These cliches mean anything to you?
The idea of Jesus as a person who explicitly rejects violence and goes out of his way to help people even when it goes against established religious conventions isn't a fucking projection, it's the result of reading the fucking Gospels.
This shit isn't that complicated.
The Gospels are not difficult books. Is it so hard for people to fathom that "Iron Age society" could've created a character with more then one personality trait that they won't even accept it when the evidence is right there for anybody to see?
Is Jesus a lovey-dovey hippy or a meglomaniacal asshole? He's a floor wax and a desert topping!
Christopher, you stupid bag of shit, if you knew the slightest thing about historical criticism, you'd know better than to assert that the Gospels could be read as straightforward, descriptive history. Why don't you go peek into that, and maybe you'll start to fathom how it is that the mainstream of scholarship for more than a century has understood Jesus to be just another Jewish apocalypticist concerned more with the end of the world than anything else. At least, perhaps, you'll know better than to assert stories that scholars don't believe have any basis in reality ("cast the first stone") as proof of anything. Dumb motherfucker.
Any comment that starts with "[name], you stupid bag of shit,..." automatically gets my approval. Haha, blawg.
Christopher, you stupid bag of shit, if you knew the slightest thing about historical criticism, you'd know better than to assert that the Gospels could be read as straightforward, descriptive history.
So, you were talking about how conservatives understand "the message" and, well, the message of what? It's clearly not "the message of the bible" because when I talked about that you called me a sack of shit.
So what was your point? That religious conservatives have come up with a version of Christianity that, while not entirely supported by the Bible, nor based on any understanding of actual history, still coincidentally comports with the theoretical message that might likely have been preached by the historical figure that the character of Jesus was based on?
Why the hell would they get points for that?
The chances that Jesus Christ was an historical figure, let alone one who preached anything that appeared 150 years later in "the Gospels" seem pretty slim.
Let's start with his name. So you have a document that ideologists of the Church (after Tertullian) called the "New Testament." It is supposed to replace what these same propagandists called the "Old Testament." Now, testamentum is just the Latin word for 'law'--as Augustine and Ambrose often put it, their iconic figure had brought a "new law" to replace the "old law" of Moses.
Well it just so happens that Iesou is the way one spells 'Joshua' in Greek. And Greek was the language in which all the early Christian theologians, including the ones who wrote the gospels, read the holy books of the Jews. Until Jerome's Vulgate translation from the Hebrew was complete in about 420 A.D., even the Latin versions were all directly from the Greek. And if you read the Pentateuch with attention, you discover that Moses lays his hands on Joshua and passes the succession to him (Num 27:18). In other words, the "Jesus' of the Gospels is simply an allegorical commentary on a particular key passage of the Hebrew Bible. It signifies the replacement of one legendary law-giver by another one.
Same thing with 'Christ,' which means 'anointed' in Greek, i.e. having had oil put on one's head. This was done to all the priests, but the high priest is the guy who is referred to repeatedly (e.g. Lev 4.16) as o hieros o christos, 'the anointed priest.' It's sort of a byword.
Ergo, to anyone paying attention, "Jesus Christ" is simply an allegorical reference. It names a literary figure who embodies political and the religious succession within the broad diasporic community organized around the symbols of the Hebrew Scriptures. It represents the claim by one schismatic group to take over those symbols.
Every single passage in the Gospels can be correlated in precisely the same way with a passage in the Five Books of Moses. There is no identifiable historical substrate. The New Testament is not history. It is literary criticism.
And verily, we shall take as our savior Sweeney Agonistes . . .
Sometimes I despise Eliot and his misanthropy, but then I remember I'm a misanthrope.
It was Aaron who led them into the 'Promised Land'tm.
Nice work.
Sometimes I despise Eliot and his misanthropy, but then I remember I'm a lycanthrope.
Aaron, I'm more or less sympathetic to your position, but you haven't established anything, and you're not making much sense. For example, you say, correctly for what it's worth, that the early Christian theologians used the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. (I'm not sure that "all" of them knew only Greek, however: Origen, for one, knew Hebrew.) So did many Jews in the Diaspora; that's why the Septuagint was produced in the first place; there was nothing specifically Christian about the LXX.
So where did those early Christian theologians come from? All I can make out from what you've written here is that they were just there, somehow, and misread or misinterpreted the Hebrew Bible because they read it in Greek. If they just wanted to claim continuity with Hebrew tradition, why move Joshua / Jesus ahead by a millennium or two, connecting him with historical figures like Pilate and having him crucified, which isn't a comfortable fit with Jewish concepts?
Not only Jewish priests but Jewish kings were anointed with oil, and the term 'anointed' was used more broadly just in the Hebrew Bible, for just about anyone especially favored by Yahweh: prophets, for instance, and sometimes all of Israel. I can't figure out what this has to do with your claims about Jesus and early Christianity.
None of this implies that the gospels are historically accurate, of course. They're not. But it doesn't follow that they are therefore "literary criticism."
You're wrong, too, about 150 as the date for the canonical gospels; even the most critical scholars I know of put them around 70-150 CE. The New Testament is not "a document" but a collection or amalgamation of documents. It wasn't called "the New Testament" until after the several documents were written and brought together, and as for the idea that "'testamentum' is just the Latin word for 'law'", um, no. You should also look at Paul's Espistle to the Galatians on that issue; it's a good deal older than Augustine.
Oh, and P.S.: The "Old Testament" isn't history either.
Yo, Pro!
I don't know what "critical scholars" you're talkin about, but reputable historians (e.g. Hopkins) go for the latish second century. There was no concept of a Christian canon until the collection of Marcion circa 140, so your periodization doesn't even make sense. Regarding the texts themselves, it is hard to know, since the oldest surviving physical papyrus fragment (from John) dates to 125, the rest to the late 2nd century and thereafter, and the earliest intact codex is post-Constantine. As we can see plainly from Nag Hammadi, people monkeyed around with language and plot quite a bit until the canon was fixed.
But this is all a red herring. The text of the Alexandrian Greek Pentateuch was fixed by about 150 B.C., and that is what the people who wrote the gospels, whenever they wrote them, were responding to.
Not sure what parallel universe you plucked your other complaints from, it's either non sequiturs or stuff I didn't say. My point was that 'Jesus Christ' in the Greek Gospels and apostolic letters is an obviously allegorical figure of succession based on a reading of the Greek Pentateuch. It signified rejection of existing temporal and spiritual authority within the "Bible community." All the early Church ideologists took this position, Tertullian's "new testament" was only its most succinct expression.
But since you mention it, kings were not called "christos" in the Pentateuch. That title was reserved for Aaron and his successors as high priest. One sees plainly from Judges that the very existence of kings was theologically controversial, let alone their anointing. Based on the current version of the Pentateuch, the Judean monarchs including David would seem to be descended from a roadside commercial fuck--probably to be taken as a vote of no confidence.
Summing up, while I certainly never argued that the early Christians were bad readers (exactly the opposite--creative readers, but very thorough ones!) I would venture to say that you are a bad reader. I wish you a happy Sunday anyway!
How about "Christians Against Health Care!" a la "Billionaires For Bush!" We'll show up at events with signs reading "Gen 4:9", "We are NOT our brother's keeper!" and "Healing the sick is [The] Jesus's business, not the Government's!", and what have you. Should be a good time.
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