I think it's a useful thing to know about, just for the cultural references you don't get if you're not at least familiar with a some of the stories. I'd put it in the same category as Shakespear in terms being worth knowing because of it's contribution to language if nothing else.

I just got the impression that God was a bastard, also that the picture of the man getting stangled by the tree was scary. There were scary pictures in my bible!

And I don't buy the stuff about people being given second chances etc. God didn't have to flood the earth at all!

Does kidlet go to a faith school, Hive? I think it's fine for kids to be read these things in school, but the trouble is that having only Christian stories (read to them by authority figures) coupled with the standard what I call the your-hamster's-in-heaven belief can convince them of things before they're ready to make an informed choice. Your kid sounds like he'll be in a better position than most to deal with it, though.

quote:

Originally posted by Thirith & His Enormous Tibia:

quote:

Originally posted by D M:
I still see that as a simple get-out clause when logical arguments fail to work for religion. Sorry, Dweller. I think that's where any kind of reasoned debate on religion fails.

I'm afraid I don't have much time for a long reply here, but I don't think you're arguing with logic either, Mark. You're arguing with psychology, and rather basic, even simplistic psychology at that. Doesn't automatically make you wrong, but if you want to have an argument about these things based on logic then you really have to revise your own argument too.

If you argue that God ought to obey the laws of human psychology, and I argue that God says, "Your thoughts are not My thoughts and your ways are not My ways," (which he did say), and then say that my argument is a cop-out, then debate stops.

If I can't use the things that God says as demonstration of His character and nature, I'm not being permitted an argument.

Domi, I think the picture you're thinking of is Absalom, and he wasn't strangled by the tree. He got his hair caught in its branches and was killed by Joab, one of David's more . . . militant lieutenants. Absalom was David's sons and fomented a coup against his father, the rightful king of Israel. David returned to take back the throne, specifically requesting that Absalom be spared. Joab, as usual, had trouble remembering mercy in the battlefield. The Biblical depiction of David's grief over his son's death has been a wellspring of inspiration to generations of writers.

And why didn't the Earth need to get flooded? Because it would have been better to let depraved and dissolute people fall further into depravity?

well, let them if they want to - you don't go round killing people because they're 'depreaved and dissolute'. That way madness lies.

And I'd argue we should judge anyone on what they do rather than what they say - someone's gonna destroy cities on account of morality I'd take what he says with a pinch of salt.

quote:

Originally posted by Domitella:
well, let them if they want to - you don't go round killing people because they're 'depreaved and dissolute'. That way madness lies.

But we do go around incarcerating them, which may or may not be worse then killing them (bear in mind that god would have a much better idea then we do on the subject, and a different perspective.)

quote:

Originally posted by D M:
A question that's always bugged me about the Hebrew God;

God is all-powerful, right? Does He have needs? Does He crave anything?

Because I've never been able to square exactly why God would want to create little headaches such as us. If God is as all-powerful as the Bible says, we're pathetically nothing to Him. Why would he waste time 1) creating us, and 2) worrying about us? Why would He care?

He created us because He thought we could derive benefit from existence. He's doing us a favour. and He cares because...well, He created us out of Himself, we're part of Him and He's given us literally everything that we have.

As to the original question: it often seems to me the Old Testament, as well as many other religious texts/stories/myths, can serve as a sort of Rorschach ink blot for many believers (and non believers). What you see there is what you already expect to see. If you believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, just and merciful God, you can see Him there, like some people already described here. If you believe in Christianity as inherently illogical and somewhat cruel, you'll see that there too. Or something more complex, depending on your philosophy. This is how myths like that work, how they survive while the dogma evolves and the individual outlook varies. There's enough blank space there for you to be able to insert the meaning you want to, need to, hope for, or even fear.

On a personal tangent: I was raised in an Atheist/Agnostic family, but I attended a normal school and up till I was a teenager, participated in regular classes of religion, which are taught in schools in Finland. I got bullied for not being Christian. And I was very frightened by what I learned at school from my fundamentalist teacher, which is why I picked up the Bible at age 10 and started to read all of it (ok, not the genealogies, although believe it or not, I tried). I got more frightened, of course, and that's probably because at that age and because of my own experience, I just saw the same bullying going on there.

Hive, where's you kidlet learning about the Bible? Myself, I've made sure my kids attend a completely non-religious school. I'm sure they'll learn all about their heritage (which is Christian) at some point; I'd just prefer to have some control over who teaches it and how, or wait until they're old enough to find out about it themselves. And certainly not be taught by the same kind of zealot who told me that I and my loved ones are all going to hell for not being Christians.

In the UK all state schools (I presume unless they are faith-based Jewish/Muslim ones) are supposed to have an act of Christian worship (in the looser sense) every day, although very few do that really. Or you get round it but doing a normal assembly about bullying or friendship whatever then say that probably Jesus didn't like bullying and did like friendship.

All schools also have religious education, which is supposed to cover all religions, but inevitably most teachers know the most about Chrisitanity. Even though only 9% of UKnians go to church, in terms of our culture it's the most well-known.

There are also some UK schools which are state schools, but faith-based too. Believe me, there's debate about that. But in any school there's no out-lawing of religion, so if a teacher chooses to read bible stories to her class she's not doing anything illegal or whatever.

I was raised in a Catholic school and I think it was okay. They taught me evolution and discussed other faiths. We had meditation classes which was essentially the time to doze off for half an hour

I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with it, it just seems odd that there's state funding for these schools, when parents don't get much choice of where to send their kids.

I went to a private Catholic school, who didn't have to teach us anything they didn't want to, but we did barely any religion and had evolution and genetics from Year 7 (that's age 11, first year of high school, American dudes). We certainly never did bible study or anything, although our RE teacher did give you a mars bar if you could recite the books of the Bible in order. Good pub quiz knowledge.

The Catholic Church actually supports evolution, or at least is silent on the question, I think.

Our Bibles in RE were so thoroughly motheaten and doodled you'd get more entertainment from the dirty drawings on the inside covers.

we had shiny new ones, but I think that's because we never used them... We did get given Gideon bibles at one point, and my mate was pissed off becasue they only gave them to the 'Christian' girls (to my knowledge, no one in my year was Christian of any kind) which basically meant the white ones, as they weren't conspicuously of another religion

Thank you, everybody for this – it is really illuminating and incredibly useful. I’ve been learning a lot.

Some specific resposes:

Caspian: what you said was incredibly helpful, thank you. I think your post crystallised for me the approach I think I am already more-or-less taking with the bible and kidlet. I fully recognise that for you and your family, it isn’t appropriate to lump the bible in with folk tales, Norse sagas, Greek legends, the Mabinogion, Shakespeare, and so on, but actually, I think that might work very well for us. I’m not a Christian (although I have Christian forebears - my grandfather was a Methodist lay preacher, as well as a corsetry salesman), and I don’t have the same – or indeed any – relationship with Jesus that you do, so it simply wouldn’t make sense for me to approach it in the same way. But I do recognise that it is incredibly important in the world, and in the formation of major philosophical trends, and it is part of our cultural furniture.

Jocelyn: we haven’t got to the bit in the Old Testament with the robots innit yet.

Domi and Tis: no, kidlet doesn’t go to a faith school. Over my dead body! In my part of London they serve as state-sponsored religious apartheid for children, paid for unwillingly by me, and I think they are storing up a world of trouble for the future, even if some individual pupils do well academically in them. Paradoxically, because so many of the schools around here are Catholic (and exclusive, although they are taxpayer-funded), the non-faith state school that kidlet attends is about 70% Muslim, as local Muslims are a) least likely to be able to afford to go private, and b) least likely to discover their deep but hitherto unrealised spiritual connection to the Catholic church when their children are, oooh, about two years old.

Kidlet does go reasonably often to a Quaker children’s meeting for an hour a week, which from time to time has done bible stories. As I’ve said before, Quakerism comes from a Christian tradition, but one needn’t be a Christian to be a Quaker. They seem to have a fairly non-fundamentalist and flexible approach.. For example, at kidlet’s first meeting, they were reading the story of Noah’s Ark. Kidlet asked what it was about, the teacher said “it’s a story about God”, and kidlet, who had never encountered the bible before, said “is that the blue one who looks like an elephant?”, and the teacher just went “ahhhhhhhhh... ye-eeees, sort of”, and went on to explain how she perceived people have different spiritual journeys and paths to God. I found myself from the start profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of kidlet being taught from the bible (hence this thread), but if he’s going to learn it, I’m happier with it done within this non-dogmatic context. They’ve just set the children’s programme for this term, which includes no bible readings, but does include the chance for the children to write their own additions to “Advices and Queries”, which a big red book, kind of like a Quaker exploration of faith and how to live life well with responsibility, and which is added to and changes over time, rather than being fixed dogma. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I have introduced him to the idea that plenty of good people don’t believe in God at all.

quote:

local Muslims are a) least likely to be able to afford to go private, and b) least likely to discover their deep but hitherto unrealised spiritual connection to the Catholic church when their children are, oooh, about two years old.

That's one of the huge problems with faith schools, and it also then leads some... shall we say 'less enlightened' parents to push even harder for their kids to go there, so they don't have to go to the mostly Asian school down the road, making the segregation even worse.

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Originally posted by Hive:For example, at kidlet’s first meeting, they were reading the story of Noah’s Ark. Kidlet asked what it was about, the teacher said “it’s a story about God”, and kidlet, who had never encountered the bible before, said “is that the blue one who looks like an elephant?”, and the teacher just went “ahhhhhhhhh... ye-eeees, sort of”

Awesome.

And I've had to talk about religion with my oldest several times, too. It's unavoidable, and actually not something I'd want to avoid either (I just don't want other people to scare or confuse her). Her best friend is Jewish and only eats kosher food, and my husband's side of the family's Catholic (one of the uncle's actually a priest in the Vatican), so... lots of tricky questions are being asked on a regular basis here.

I find it very difficult to explain the concept of God and religion to a 5-year-old, who seems to be in a very black-and-white developmental stage anyway, always boiling every question down to who's right and who's wrong. She came up with a plan once to start mass mailing people to tell them to convert to Christianity (because it must be true since the all-knowing St. Nicholas who brings good kids presents in early December here in Holland is also a Christian). Then she decided God can't exist because invisible witches don't exist either (and was a little surprised to deduce it meant St. Nicholas is wrong about something). Right now she seems to be ok with the idea that some people, including her grandparents, believe in someone invisible helping them out sometimes, and that they put a little statue of "baby Joses" on the table around Christmas.

Mind you, her questions about the Big Bang, the end of time and the evolution of species are just as difficult.

Uh, ending the mommy-hijack here.

Children are ace! I want one. Not a baby, though, becasue they are gross.

quote:

Originally posted by Tismalleen:
Mind you, her questions about the Big Bang, the end of time and the evolution of species are just as difficult.

oh, yes, especially with the current infinity-obsession: "what's outside the universe, mum?"

Argh!

quote:

Originally uttered by kidlet:

"what's outside the universe, mum?"

Strip malls.

quote:

Originally posted by Domitella:

Children are ace! I want one. Not a baby, though, becasue they are gross.

Cleaning their cages is the worst part.

Children are pretty gross, too, Dom.

Explaining God to Graeme was pretty easy.

"Who made dinner?"
"You did."
"Who made the food that we made dinner from?"
"Farmers, and the sun."
"Who made the farmers and the sun?"
"I don't know."
"Some people think that they just happened. I think someone made them, too, and his name is God. He has other names, too."

I was leading the conversation to God make the farmers and the sun because I think the distinction between those acts of creation is important - people don't really make stuff, they cultivate it, people aren't made the same way that other stuff is, but it's sort of similar. It's a chance to introduct an issue as fairly black and white and then immediately muddy it up which is pretty much the world works.