Oh, definitely! But it’s part of what you said about W. being “normal” kind of bad.
Not the howling void of greed and stupid and hate that is Trump.
5 Likes
6 Likes
5 Likes
“Let’s get these people converted to our religion. I know they worship the gods that are hiding in burning bushes, but I think we can work with that…”
“These heathens have a Winter Solstice holy day where they pray for an end to winter. And our guy doesn’t have a birthday party. Yet.”
The Bible has always been used as a political tool.
And that’s why the printing press has probably done more harm to Christianity than good. Suddenly the word of god was both fixed and widely spread, and everyone would notice if the powers-that-be changed it. When political unrest came around and stirred up controversy, like birth control, the pope could no longer just add a story where Jesus went into the temple and poked holes in all the condoms.
2 Likes
That’s an…interesting take. Christianity had schisms long before the printing press and so we can see whether anyone was still editing the books on the fly. Meanwhile Scientology has texts the masses aren’t supposed to read, and I’ve never heard anyone else describe that as a good thing.
7 Likes
I love the written word. It allows me to avoid other people, and still absorb knowledge. So, of course, the printing press is the greatest of all inventions. But…
1 Like
I should have qualified my statement:
By fixing the word of god on the page and distributing it to the masses everywhere, they’ve made it very hard on themselves to retcon new stories into place to handle current issues.
2 Likes
You might be interested to learn about how much Church business (and well-known theology) wasn’t in the Bible, not even backfilled later.
Limbo? Not there. Saints as intermediaries to God? Hinted at at best. The Eternal Virginity of Mary? Nope.
One of the biggest deals in medieval theology was the Harrowing of Hell: that Jesus died, and went to Hell and freed everyone there during the three days before he rose again. This was a big deal, and is the one of the reasons why Jonah and Daniel were so important. The idea of Typology meant that Daniel going into the Lion’s Den and Jonah in the belly of the Whale weren’t just symbolic of the Harrowing, they weren’t just predictions of it, they were literally pre-echos of it. They were seen as reflections of an event so momentous that it rippled through reality itself.
Show me in the bible, in any edition, any year, any language, where the Harrowing is.
4 Likes
also packed “three days” into 48 hours somehow
2 Likes
There’s a suggestion of that in the Apostles’ Creed:
…Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into Heaven…
Oddly the bit about descending into Hell is not in the Nicene Creed, which is supposedly the long form of the summary of the faith and considered as interchangeable with the Apostles’ Creed.
4 Likes
They didn’t have a “zero” yet. Day 1 was the Friday of the crucifixion, day 2 was the Saturday, day 3 was the Sunday of the Resurrection.
And where is the Apostle’s Creed in the Bible?
5 Likes
I wasn’t saying it is, just that it has remained part of Christian theology from the medieval era until the present day.
3 Likes
Daylight savings time. Plus he had extra hours because he turned off the sun for a while on Good Friday
9 Likes
Book of Stimulants, ch 23
12 Likes
HARROW ALL THE THINGS
7 Likes
Died on Friday - first day.
Dead on Saturday - second day.
Rose on Sunday - third day.
3 Likes
4 Likes
So which stories in the Bible did ”they” “retcon into place” before the printing press was invented?
(There are loads and loads of Christian denominations which broadly agree on the content of the Bible, starting in the early centuries CE, but there are certain books that are accepted by some and rejected, or relegated to second-class status as “apocrypha”, by others. In any case, errors in translation notwithstanding, it was seldom if ever necessary to actively tweak the content of individual Bible stories because – the Bible being the vast and self-contradictory jumble-sale that it is – churches never found it hard to find in it bits that supported their doctrines, or for that matter to make up novel methods of justifying their doctrines that referred to the Bible only indirectly, or not at all. Who says that when you die you become an angel? Certainly not the Bible.)
5 Likes
isn’t that from the veddas of a certain Buddhist sect in Thailand?
6 Likes
1 Like
