Bible Makes Me Squeamish
Certain Bible passages just seem so old-fashioned and make me uncomfortable. The obvious solution? Get rid of the offending archaic stuff.
Barbara at Tidbits and Treasures says that's what the Dutch are doing:
It seems a Dutch organization wants to take the stress out of reading the Word for contemporary Christians. So, they are literally doing the same thing as the young woman did - removing those parts they feel doesn't apply to us today - or, better still, those parts that they might have a hard time applying to themselves.That's because those troublesome verses about justice for the poor, responsibility for the rich to address their neighbors' needs, and all that talk about money, are gone. Not just edited out, cut out.
A report from Assist News Service said the Western Bible Foundation published the book to meet the "growing wish of many churches to be market-oriented and more attractive."
The Bible is only available in Dutch for the time being. Hopefully, it will stay there. Parts of the Ten Commandments, Isaiah, Proverbs along with the Sermon on the Mount has been removed. After all, 'it isn't useful for today'.
4 comments:
Remember the Strauss-Howe Cycle? How generational attitudes (and the resulting Zeitgeist) falls into a four-generation, 80-90-year pattern?
A generation hence, what "it isn't useful for today" will be different; in two generations (half a cycle), it will be completely opposite.
Each generation "gets rid of the offending archaic stuff" as defined by their generational attitude and Zeitgeist. Each generation has a different set of "offending archaic stuff" that is irrelevant (and can be gotten rid of), saving the "important" parts (which themselves change each generation).
After a couple cycles of this, how much will be left of the original?
And with this specific application, will we have a Bible by then? (Along with The Koran, which by definition cannot be edited change in any way.)
(I came up with this idea for a small-press SF story where someone in the future was trying to make sense out of documentation that survived from our time. Not wanting to do the conventional "all records of the 20th Century were destroyed in a nuclear war" shtick, I came up with this alternative methodology. No nukes needed.)
hmmm, how does one determine what should not be part of the bible any longer?????
Anon 7:03:
That's easy! Whatever I disagree with or makes me uncomfortable goes.
Interesting concept. Some churches would scream blasphemy for sure. We are going to visit a Unitarian Church for the first time for this very reason. So much does not make sense to us anymore and "regular" church seems empty and a big social circus. Church makes me tired all the way around. I've heard that Uniterian Churches are much different. We will see!
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