I’m in George Will’s camp. His thoughts on baseball, God and ISIS.
3 thoughts on “I’m Not Religious, But I Don’t Hate Religion”
The other night I was listening to a 2005 NPR interview with Harold Bloom, who was adamant that there was no way to reconcile the New Testament with what he refused to refer to as the Old Testament, saying that textually and theologically, the two works had virtually nothing in common, that it would be like trying to put the character Hamlet into King Lear. He also ranted that pro-Bush Republican Christianity was a perversion, but hey.
I thought about it for a bit, and the way I would explain it to him is that the Bible is like a boxed set of the original Star Wars trilogy and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” The second work is about epic events that occurred in the lives of some super fans of the original series, and none of the passing references to the original would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with it.
I’m an atheist. However the protections regarding freedom of religion are just as important to me as any other explicit protection written in the Bill of Rights.
Unlike liberal morons, I don’t pick and choose from the system.
I have a strong feeling that the Yahwist author of the Bible who wrote the foundational core was an atheist, or at least agnostic. Harold Bloom thinks the J author was probably a Judean lay woman in her 40’s, and I’d posit that a true believer wouldn’t feel free to just make up story after witty story that has YHWH proceed on a long character arc. Revering and writing creatively are two very different mindsets.
For example, In Rabbinic literature regarding the Tower of Babel it is said: “God has no right to choose the upper world for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God.” J should wrote that unfortunately, among the sons of Abraham building the tower was a Judean laborer named Harvey Goldstein (a long story in itself). In the language of the period, when all men spoke with one tongue, the word “world” as confusingly similar to “letter”. So Goldstein thought that the big plan was to make off with all the uppercase letters. Thus, when YHWH came down and divided the people’s by language, splitting Hebrew from Arabic, Goldstein stole all the capital letters, leaving only lower case cursive for the Arabs. That’s why Hebrew is still written in all caps while Arabic doesn’t even have capital letters, much less caps lock. You’d think that a people that perpetually angry would steal caps lock technology from the Jews, but they must think that it’s unclean.
The other night I was listening to a 2005 NPR interview with Harold Bloom, who was adamant that there was no way to reconcile the New Testament with what he refused to refer to as the Old Testament, saying that textually and theologically, the two works had virtually nothing in common, that it would be like trying to put the character Hamlet into King Lear. He also ranted that pro-Bush Republican Christianity was a perversion, but hey.
I thought about it for a bit, and the way I would explain it to him is that the Bible is like a boxed set of the original Star Wars trilogy and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” The second work is about epic events that occurred in the lives of some super fans of the original series, and none of the passing references to the original would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with it.
I’m an atheist. However the protections regarding freedom of religion are just as important to me as any other explicit protection written in the Bill of Rights.
Unlike liberal morons, I don’t pick and choose from the system.
I have a strong feeling that the Yahwist author of the Bible who wrote the foundational core was an atheist, or at least agnostic. Harold Bloom thinks the J author was probably a Judean lay woman in her 40’s, and I’d posit that a true believer wouldn’t feel free to just make up story after witty story that has YHWH proceed on a long character arc. Revering and writing creatively are two very different mindsets.
For example, In Rabbinic literature regarding the Tower of Babel it is said: “God has no right to choose the upper world for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God.” J should wrote that unfortunately, among the sons of Abraham building the tower was a Judean laborer named Harvey Goldstein (a long story in itself). In the language of the period, when all men spoke with one tongue, the word “world” as confusingly similar to “letter”. So Goldstein thought that the big plan was to make off with all the uppercase letters. Thus, when YHWH came down and divided the people’s by language, splitting Hebrew from Arabic, Goldstein stole all the capital letters, leaving only lower case cursive for the Arabs. That’s why Hebrew is still written in all caps while Arabic doesn’t even have capital letters, much less caps lock. You’d think that a people that perpetually angry would steal caps lock technology from the Jews, but they must think that it’s unclean.