- Oct 28, 2006
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To be clear, I was speaking of Paul's claim to know what everyone "knows" about "god" and not his morbid punishment fantasies. (That old "look at the trees" argument.) He is quite wrong about everyone knowing about god from looking at what exists in nature. Even believers don't all have such impressions.
To be clear, too, I fully understand the referrential difficulty we all have with some one verse or two written by Paul that is constantly quoted by Christians but REALLY has no clear meaning----at least not from the immediate context of only the letter in which it is a part.
I don't think that Paul was actually claiming that all humanity "knows God's Will" in the same way that many Christians unfortunately today insist that he does. His cultural and epistemic environment couldn't possibly have provided the same perspective and justification that many Christians today attempt to assert that it is; they insist that what Paul was saying is essentially an unsaid "magically inclined" fiat. No, I don't think Paul was referring to a "magical fiat" of spiritual recognition. To think he meant this is to be negligent in our reading and handling of the biblical text. This isn't to handle the text in a scholarly way.
That's not what Paul was saying. Paul was Jewish and one who lived in the 1st century. We need to stop assuming he saw the world and thought in the same way that a modern day Christian Fundamentalist/Apologist would tend to think. And it wasn't just "look at the trees." To mis-apply our interpretation methods in this way, too, can also bring a misconstrual going the other way. He thought in moral and natural categories typical of his Jewish and 1st century perspective, such as he mentioned in his Sermon on Mars Hill-----not the American perspective where either Modern Science or Fundie Christian definitions rule on either side of human conceptions about perceived reality ..................
The problem here is that I don't see anyone really applying a full investigation about how [various] 1st century Jewish people thought about the world. No, many people today want to claim that reading the Bible is "simple," which then allows them to ignore the many historical and cultural contexts which play into what are more or less still enigmatic statements in the bible (from Paul, even). This in turn then plays into various political machinations that folks have now, especially in the U.S.
This is unacceptable. Ignorance and anti-intellectualism are unacceptable. Polemical gerrymandering of terms for the sake of political gains (on either side) is also unacceptable, and I think this goes whether we're reading the Bible or we're listening in on a reading of a pro-LGBTQ+ story for children in a public school.
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