Sunday School

Sunday School December 10th 2017

This topic contains 54 replies, has 7 voices, and was last updated by  Simon Paynton 5 years, 10 months ago.

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  • #6695

    Davis
    Moderator

    He was insane:

    Indeed Robert. And we need not get into Jesus’s approval of God murdering every human and animal on Earth minus a few people and two of each animal. Surely that was the utter pinnacle of morality. As Robert mentioned…he threatens hell for those who don’t believe in him. He condemned entire towns to hell because they didn’t accept his message of love. Threatening the following of a so called “forgiving peaceful loving” philosophy by roasting in eternal torture? Is this the kind of cutting edge philosophy you referred to? He claimed to come not by peace but of the sword. He judged all that came before him to be miserable sinners (perhaps just before he preached non-judgement?). His closest friends and his family thought he was crazy and didn’t believe much of what he said. Neighbors were fearful. He claimed that blasphemy is totally unforgivable (you’ll be condemned to eternal torture). That is…one of the worst things you can possibly do is speak badly about God. Is maybe this the highest priority when it comes to being a good person? Not trash talking an all powerful God?

    #6696

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    @strega – if Jesus lost it on a fig tree just because it didn’t have any figs on it – we can assume that was a fable.

    #6697

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    The fig tree would have to do a lot more than that to piss Jesus off.

    #6699

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    The bear incident was from the book of Kings in the Old Testament.

    #6700

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling

    – this looks very interesting, and I’ll have to stash it away for later.  It’s also recent, which is necessary in this field.  This is all about where it’s at.  It falls into the category of “small groups” – a small number of people living together and depending on each other to survive, which is a very special moral situation that breeds a particular kind of morality – the kind that is the basis of ethics.  It also falls into the category of “cooperation”, and the abstract theoretical situation is very tangled and interlinked, as the great Jessica Pierce pointed out.

    The abstract, at least, seems to show how story telling adds to, and helps, the general cooperative environment.  This gives it a direct survival function, and so, it’s not surprising if the human species are all about story telling.  This means, any human species who had language, including Neanderthals, which were actually very recent, and very like ourselves, and apparently had the “language gene” that our species has – must have been story tellers.  The fact that Neanderthals had the language gene shows that language goes back a lot further than them.  Michael Tomasello maintains that in order to achieve sophisticated cooperation, language is very necessary, so there would have been a strong selection pressure on the human family tree to develop language.  It can only have begun with the humble beginnings of making symbolic, pantomime gestures and facial expressions.  For example, humans are the only primates who have whites of the eye – we can use our eyes to indicate direction.  That’s a detailed and cooperative form of communicating.  Other primates don’t need to do that.  Chimpanzees only say things like “give me this”, “I want that”, “do this”, “don’t do that” – commands.  Humans share information for its own sake.  It’s easy to see how this cooperative information-sharing could lead to story telling.

    #6701

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    a very special moral situation that breeds a particular kind of morality – the kind that is the basis of ethics.

    – significantly, this coincides with the morality of Jesus, and also significantly, it comes from a time before generalised social norms, and Jesus is recorded as having rejected any and every social norm he didn’t agree with, even if he did say “I come to promote the Torah” or whatever – clearly he was only being polite when he said that.  Quite possibly he saw something there – the core of its morality – that is worthwhile, and the same as his.

    #6702

    I  use the “Bears” story when discussing Biblical morality with Christians. I often hear them claim that I have just made up a “horrible story” to annoy them or they say that “no such story exists in the Bible”. It is an easy reference to remember for debates – 2Kings 2, 23-24……..or as I call it, the grim fairy tale of “Baldilocks and the She Bears”.

    #6703

    As a point of interest Simon could you explain the verses you think are alleged to be attributed to Jesus that would be uniquely his. That is, ones where we could be at a “moral disadvantage” to never have heard about them.

    #6704

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    These are two cracking examples:

    Jesus stops the adulterous woman from being stoned

    By their fruits shall you know them.

    It’s an advantage to have heard them.

    #6705

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    If they’re not unique, that’s all to the good.

    #6706

    And what of the adulterous men? Who decided it was only a “sin” committed by women? I suppose it was some misogynistic high priest? It took centuries for Christians to learn this message. That does not even include the burning of women at the stake.

    I think we would have achieved equality by now if it was not for the dark age chains the Churches keep women in for so long. The Biblical attitude towards women still permeates much of Christian culture as I mentioned in a recent Sunday School.

    I don’t see any “moral code” in the parable of the fruit.

     

    #6707

    Simon Paynton
    Participant

    Jesus was rejecting the social norm, which was cruel, in favour of human rights.

    #6708

    The women was “caught in the act of adultery” so I can only assume that a man was also caught. He got no “social” punishment yet she was condemned to death. This “social norm” was part of the “Law of Moses”. Who gave Moses those laws?

    It is most likely that Moses did not exist. The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt. Do we have any evidence that Jesus did?

    #6709

    RE: The “Ten things we did not know last week” article. The source for it no longer seems to exist. I check each week but no sign of it yet. I am looking at a few potential replacements. Thanks for noticing 🙂

    #6715

    _Robert_
    Participant

    RE: The “Ten things we did not know last week” article. The source for it no longer seems to exist. I check each week but no sign of it yet. I am looking at a few potential replacements. Thanks for noticing 🙂

    That’s because we finally know everything?

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