1) I was merely pointing out that it is not as straightforward as you made it out to be. There are Bible verses that can be read in favor of the death penalty. Yes, there are verses that clearly can be read the opposite, but it's not as though I argued "There's absolutely no way you could read the Bible as being against the death penalty." I argued that the portions of the Bible COULD be read as endorsing the death penalty. Before you respond to argument you should read it carefully. 2) "These stories are so easy to understand a child can figure them out..." No, they're not. The Bible is a highly complicated text. That is why people spend years of their life reading it, interpreting it, and studying it. No doubt it has to do with the fact that it's been written by many different people, canonized, translated, and retranslated. Even so-called experts are always debating exactly what the Bible means, and religious persons are often hard-pressed to explain the many contradictions present in the Bible. 3) People use the name of Jesus to do a lot of things, like pretend knowing a few Bible verses makes them superior to other individuals. The fact is that there are moments in which the death penalty appears to be justified morally. Even looking at the Bible, this is not a black-and-white issue, and I don't think there's any point in pretending it is. 4) I want you to know I don't really care about this issue. I have my own views on the death penalty that do not concern the Bible at all, considering I am a Unitarian Universalist. I do not have a problem with what the Bible says or doesn't say. But I do have a problem with condescension. I'm sorry, but I don't think your comments gave due respect to my arguments, which were fairly reasonably and mild-manneredly delivered. Had you merely cited your examples, I would not have bothered with this reply. But immediately assuming I do not know what I am talking about and imply that I am more idiotic than a child is highly disrespectful.
What Jesus said came at the end of the Bible, he's the most important being in Christianity, it's named after him by the way, and so he has the final word. If Scoobeydooius in the OT said "let there be slaughter" it's negated by what jesus said. That's how we read a book, in a linear fashion. Meanwhile, if you cannot read and and understand the passages I posted then I do not respect you. You aren't automatically entitled to respect and it's just that easy. Over and out.
No, not "over and out." Christianity encompasses in both books, and many Protestant groups are now more focused on the Old Testament. I'm not an idiot. Christianity = Christ. But it also equals Old AND New Testaments, and many teachings of the Old Testament are important to the lives of Christians. Let me reiterate what I already: I DON'T mean that the Bible can't be read the way you suggest. I just mean that there are other ways to read the Bible. A child could understand my point of view if he bothered to read it... I perfectly understood what you quoted and what you are saying. You just ASSUMED I did not understand. As the cliche goes, when you make an assumption... I don't think there's any point in you being obnoxious. But you clearly think it will make everyone think you're some kind of genius about the Bible. Well, I'm decidedly unimpressed. Self-important people like you who think there's only one way to see the entire world from a text as ambiguous as the Bible are the exact reason I don't have a religion. "Over and out," as you would say.
... so basically what everyone is saying is it's probably easier to start with any type of deviant behaviour you want to for your characters. Most probably, once you've got the character and plot sussed, you can pad it out with some kind of philosophy/doctrine from one of 10,000 world religions (and/or a handy bible passage) that some people around the world believe justifies that behaviour.
If it wasn't for the death penalty the central tenent of Christianity wouldn't exist ie the atonement. (Not that I am a supporter or a Christian these days).
This thread is already getting way off OP, and is in danger of erupting into a flaming debate thread. If you guys have issues over how to interpret a holy book, one among many, duke it out in private or something. This thread is intended for research only, not preaching.:redface:
What an individual person believes and what their religion offically teaches are usually two different things. I know in the case of the Bible it can be used to support almost any belief system you want. I haven't read any other holy books but I would assume most of them are the same. Anyway I think it would be interesting if you somehow incorporated how even each person within a particular religion develops their own version of that religion based on what they like about it.
Actually, the Bible cannot possibly support the death penalty. The Bible does support justice - but who is to be the judge? Did the Lord not say, "I will avenge"? It's all over the Bible - we are not to take revenge, and we are not to judge. As the Bible again says, "Who are you to judge someone else's servant? Each is accountable to God." Based on that, I'd say it's quite clear that the Bible does not support the death penalty. God alone is the giver, and therefore taker, of life. Who are we to say how long a man "deserves" to live? According to the Bible, we're all sinners and therefore, if it wasn't for God's grace, we ALL deserve to die. THAT is "justice", because "There's no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves." (Romans 3:10-13) Just because most of us are not murderers/rapists/terrorists does not mean we're holy enough for the Holy God. That's why we need grace and forgiveness. But if we insist on justice, then the Bible says that that is justice - that all, not just the criminals, but all, deserve death. Based on that, who are we, sinful, flawed human beings, to say, "You, you deserve to die" and "You, you deserve to live"? Not picking a fight, but I just wanted to make it clear that that's what the Bible says. That we ALL deserve death and we ALL need grace, and Jesus alone is the great High Priest who ultimately judges. I think it's actually quite clear. (Not asking you to agree at all if what I've said, but rather I'm just saying what the Bible says)
It continues to be so, if the the reader approaches the differences in a rational manner and observers. As I stated, the passages I posted are extremely clear, especially the stoning story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. Yet, a person who believes in murdering will engage in obfuscation to warp a plain story into something self-serving. That illustrates why one doesn't need to know the various religions to the letter in order to write about them. That's because almost no one follows them to the letter and tends to warp what they do know to fit their own bias. In other words, there are few "followers" of any religion. So, if you're writing a novel you can literally write based on what you've heard about a religion because it's likely that some follower is doing the exact same thing.
I would have thought that it is essential to have a fairly good knowledge of any subject before you start to write about it. It's not just about being able to quote text or numbers, but knowing how the subject affects the characters, the plot, the sub-plots. If you only write about what you've heard about religion, you are in real danger of twisting facts, or getting them wrong altogether. And you can be sure that, if not all of your reader, at least some of them will know. Cheating the reader by depending on limited knowledge of a subject is not the way to gain fans.
I'm referring to the original post and to your assumption that it's ok.to cheat the readers by assuming you know something about a subject when you don't.
Once again, you are making an assumption. Why not give others the BOTD and assume that they are reasonably intelligent, well-read human beings? Perhaps he/she read the thread and--God forbid--doesn't agree with you! Or perhaps he/she didn't...but you don't know that, and frankly, assuming you do is obnoxious. Why do you feel the constant need to claim superiority? I've already admitted I don't care. I don't think other people on this forum care particularly either. I don't even think this is the correct space to talk about this, although if the poster was looking for a good example of conflict in religion, he/she now has a nice anecdote! However, the more you presume that other arguments have absolutely no merit, the more inclined I am to continue arguing. This seems silly to me--if you merely civil, we could avoid this whole discussion altogether. It's as easy as treating others the way you want to be treated, which, funnily enough, is something Jesus believed. If you were merely making a simple, non-aggressive statement that supported your point of view, I wouldn't feel offended. But the fact is, that is not what you're doing: you're taking a few fragments of the Bible and saying that they are the only important things present in that document. I have an Oxford Annotated Bible on my desk (did you assume I didn't own a Bible, too?). It is thicker than my roommate's Organic Chemistry textbook. Every page is swarming with footnotes that detail the historical context, meaning, and translational notes that deem nearly every sentence of the document open to interpretation. You should not presume that all others share your opinion and that everyone who does not share your opinion is ignorant. To think so is...well, ignorant. I hope that poster of this thread takes these debates into account, and notes that even among non-religious people, the Bible is still a highly important and controversial topic.
I thought this was a mighty interesting thread when I read the beginning of it five minutes ago, and I still think it has that potential. What I would love to hear is the OP coming back and narrowing down what he wants to hear a little bit, because that was *broad*, man. But it sounds like what he's really interested in is "religion from the inside"--what it feels like to be a believer. Hard facts he can find out on his own. And that's a really good question, actually, because it's what most writers get wrong when they write deeply religious characters--it seems like it's really hard to get inside the head of someone who believes/disbelieves totally differently from you. It would take absolutely hours to tell you all about how it all feels, and someone earlier whose name I forget gave a wonderful summary of the heart of Christianity already, so here goes with one little snippet I'll focus on for now. How it feels to worship. I'm a Christian and we typically worship by singing, or sometimes by silence. The singing comes in all shapes and sizes and I've experienced many of them. There's a big cultural element--people who chant the Psalms antiphonally while standing straight and people who lift their hands and sway and shout are typically not going to get into each other's worship styles very easily. Worshipping is supposed to be an emotional experience, but ideally the emotion is supposed to be coming from something real--either from the direct experience of God or from your belief about the reality of the things you are singing about God--not from working yourself up. But of course the achievement of this varies. I remember at my Christian high school, right before each break we had a morning off from classes to have a worship service all morning, with communion (that's bread and wine/grape juice, aka the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, btw.) We sang song after song, and by the end we all felt like God was there, and we were asked to come up with a friend and feed each other communion and it was this highly meaningful thing... well, one day because of some drama over a paper my computer had eaten, I arrived at one of these services near the end, when communion was about to start. I asked a friend of mine to go up with me, and she was practically teary with emotion, and I felt as casual as if we were at Denny's. That was when I realized that what I had felt all those other times was not necessarily God's presence in the room--that we had been working ourselves up, and this time I had missed that part. It gave me a very skeptical bent (well, I guess I had it a little before that, too) and I became very into testing every emotional experience to see if it was manufactured. But yet, though I entertained it seriously, I did not come to the conclusion that it was all fake... several years later, in college, a group of us gathered for an informal worship time with a guy who played the guitar, not really making big plans about it or anything, just singing whatever anyone suggested. In the middle of the first song, a song addressed to God that starts out "You are beautiful beyond description", something hit us--all of us. You could tell. For me it was like a sense of a huge darkness above me--huge and dark and even somehow heavy, but not in a bad way--not scary at all just awe-inspiring. It reminded me of passages in the Bible where it talks about God being hidden in darkness from human eyes b/c we can't bear to look at God's glory, like looking at the sun. After another song or two that feeling went away and we just all felt really joyful, almost bursting with it. To one of the next songs we jumped up and danced, not the hands-lifted swaying type thing but dancing round in a circle like a happy folkdance. Incidentally, NO ONE DID THAT at our school. After the whole thing was over we occasionally talked to each other about it, like a happy memory. We continued to meet & sing, but that particular thing did not happen again nor did we try to make it. (I want to add that this is not THE reason I believe in God by any means, but it was always one of the many things I found it difficult to dismiss in my periods of doubt.) But see, I did believe in that experience, because it was a surprise. Nobody engineered it, nobody even expected it. It was a moment of what I believe to have been pure direct experience of God. To a believer these moments are incredibly precious. I guess we believe those are the moments when we experience reality as it truly is outside our limited senses. I almost imagine that our spirits or souls have senses too, that would allow us to see the unseen world as it truly is, and that basically those have been lost or maimed, but we can regain them to some extent with the help of God. (I actually think that a lot of people sense this, though many believe differently from me about how the regaining happens--and you can see people's sense of it in the magic senses that people invent in fantasy novels.) I don't even know if I've given a good account of what it's like to worship with those two stories, or not... the thing is there's a third kind which is far more common and ordinary, which is just average good worship. You sing the songs, and you try to open yourself to God, and you basically just feel... grateful, humble, joyful, hopeful, one or all of those, depending on you and the song... Sometimes you don't feel anything much, especially if the musicians are having trouble getting through the song or something. In the small church I'm in now this is sometimes the case, and I find myself having to sing loud because I have one of the few strong voices, and it can be frustrating rather than worshipful, and yet... We sing a real eclectic mix, and a couple Sundays after Christmas we were singing an old Epiphany hymn, and as I sang the lines "Cold on his cradle the dewdrops are shining/Low lies his head with the beasts of the stall..." I started to cry. Partly because it was good poetry, yes, but partly also because I believe this is literally true about the person who made the universe and that he went there, and worse places still, for love of us. So that's where it comes from mostly. From the fact that you really believe it. If you simply can't imagine really believing it, don't write about it.
What are you talking about? The thread is about how to approach writing, I assume, a novel with various religious characters. Each character does not have to be an exact encyclopedia because, in my view, most people practice religions based on their own bias and not in a manner that has a lot of do with the actual religion. I illustrated that in the thread, and that's why I asked the person if they had read it. Thanks for your assistance though.
And that will be completely contradicted by some other "Christian" out there. For instance, in the southern US, there's a church where they handle rattlesnakes to see if they get bit. That practice is based on one line in the Bible where it says that you should know how to handle serpents. That likely means "evil people" but they take it literally and if they get bit it means something from their version of god. With that extreme example in mind, I doubt their thought process is close to what you provided for us. Since there is so much variety, I think an author can invent his own idea of what it's like through role play, or ask a believer, or ask a thousand.
I am the person - and yes I read it. I even contributed to the debate, which begs the question - did you read the thread? I am not particulary familiar with any religion. But I am familiar with writing and the point that I was trying to make was that you need to have a broad knowledge of the subject you happen to be writing about. I don't think you get that from this type of discussion. You actually made the point that most people practice and interpret religion in different ways, so even people with the same beliefs will see things differently. So, if you follow your own argument, there is no point in asking anyone about their particular religious beliefs or practices because all you'll get is their interpretation. I imagine that many people reading a book with religious content would be able to pick up any inconsistencies. And I'm sure they would also accept that different people have different views. However, they will not accept basic errors, which is the likely outcome of writing about a subject you are not familiar with. And if your only knowledge comes from an array of personal opinions, you are asking for trouble. Or perhaps you really do mean that it's ok to write about something you know little about because you have little respect for your readers and assume they won't know any difference!
Good point, Allegro. It illustrates the generality of what I'm trying to say very well: those people really believe *that*, or they obviously wouldn't be picking up poisonous snakes! And I don't think I ought to undertake to write a character who snake-handles unless I can imagine really believing it--it's less the actual knowledge than the intellectual empathy with the character, because otherwise your character will probably end up flat... Actually there's a rather good non-fiction book about snakehandling that kind of illustrates that... I forget the title, I wish I could remember, but it's by a journalist who went to Appalachia to kind of study the phenomenon, but he had a lot of empathy for the people b/c his heritage was from there, and he really got to know & like them & so was able to see beyond the usual stereotype... it was really very interesting & the best treatment of it I ever saw.
I think you misread what I wrote. The person posting asked for information about religions in rather broad terminology. This conversation is a pretty useful anecdote in describing the complexity of the Bible and difficulty in reaching a uniform interpretation. All I meant in my last post was that the person who posted could possibly glean something useful out of the discussion in his/her writing. I never said a character had to be an "encyclopedia" and I frankly don't know where you got that from; I agree that characters should be complex. Yes, people practice religions based on their own biases, but the Bible is such a big document that it has the potential to support them, and interpretation is always far from certain, even when some stories seem to unequivocally promote one point of view. My point has unwaveringly been that whether the Bible supports or does not support the death penalty is ultimately an opinion and that both sides can be supported by evidence in the text. My point has NEVER been that people don't have their own biases when practicing religion, but I think you are being ignorant when you presume that their biases are automatically to be considered "absurd." Who are you to say whether a person's so-called "bias" prevents him from practicing a religion "correctly"? There is no "correct" since we can't exactly ask the writers of the Bible (who, in the Old Testament, are largely unknown) what they meant by their stories; anyway, even if we could, I have a feeling they had radically different ideas from what many modern Christians believed. I don't believe I have helped you to achieve what you think I have because you are clearly unwilling to actually read and understand what I have been saying all along. I think you'll find that if and when you do, you will realize that your assertions prove nothing very special, except that you are rigid in your definition of what you think a "Christian" means to the point where you do not listen to evidence to the contrary. If you thought I had trapped myself into some kind of hole & shown what a truly brilliant, rational person you were, I am sorry to disappoint you.
Yes, and there's even more to it than that. There's an astonishing complexity. It says in one of the Old Testament law books, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed." In the context of telling Israel to execute murderers. Now, that's in the Bible, and it's pretty unequivocal. On the other hand, I'm a Christian pacifist who doesn't believe in the death penalty, war, or any of that stuff. I take that stance because I believe that the words of Jesus that Allegro quoted much earlier are gospel (literally good news) and supersede what came before. Yes, I believe God changed the rules on us, I believe God did it according to what we were ready for. That's a belief usually known as dispensationalism, defined as the belief that God acts differently toward the human race in different "dispensations" or ages of the world. But if you look it up (though you yourself may know this already) you'll find most dispensationalists are way conservative (politically--I don't like to use that word about theology) and use the idea of different ages rather to discount the Sermon on the Mount and its "turn the other cheek" and "give freely" than to place it above what came before. Which doesn't make any sense to me; but basically the deal is that I am placing the Gospels above the rest of the book, and they are placing the Old Testament and the letters of Paul above the Gospels. So, there's not only interpretation questions, there's which book takes priority. B/c the Bible has an astonishing variety within it. It's not a book, strictly speaking, it's more like... an anthology, really. So yeah. You're quite right. It's complicated.
I completely accept that the New Testament makes a lot of statements that can be taken as supporting the abolition of the death penalty. Heather Munn's post is the kind of polite, respectful, informed response I was expecting to see when I posted my response to Allegro's comment. Had Allegro's response been like this, I would not have felt the need to continue posting even after my point was clear. I don't really think that Christians following the New Testament strictly really should come to the conclusion that the death penalty is supported; I just mean that the opposite position should not be considered "absurd" given that there are Bible verses in the Old Testament (which is still an important part of Christianity) that very clearly support it, even if they are antiquated. I think I will stop now. But I thought I'd thank Heather Munn for that informed, highly respectful post.
Don't you think that handling snakes to see if they bite you is an inconsistency? How about beating yourself to the point of drawing blood? I recall the Mel Gibson belongs to a Catholic sect that does that. Where did Jesus say to do that? I once asked a couple of inner city kids who attended a "christian" school what Jesus had to say about violence (They were getting into fights) and the kids answers, "Don't mess with me, I'm Jesus!". Thus, whatever interpretation the author has or the basis religions is as good as any that exist in society. He's got a very defensible position, as long as he's not writing a factual book about world religion. Second Bold: Real world research will find that the average person has little respect for their "religion", thus the work will be reflective of reality. Seriously.
