Parsing the Pontiff

BruceDavid,

Your posting lack validity of any kind because you didn't specify what the pastor had said and what scripture he aligned to say that the bible said this all along. Thus making your ranting one-sided IMO.

Provide something other than a strawman argument in which simple ones like sms29s66 falls so fast for.

BruceDavid, very well put. I lhave thought for some years now that the truths of the Bible are thruths of mankind because we are the ones who intuited them, thought them out, wrote them down, and try to live by them. It frustrates and angers me that people take what is finest in ourselves and "give it away" by ascribing it to God. Your take on it, that we realign "Christ" to suit the prevailing image of virtue. is great. Before long, I'll convince myself that I knew it all along.

There is something irritating about the message that "there is a simple truth in the Bible for simple people." It is true that the Bible can be interpreted in a way that correctly picks out how attitudes like humility, forgiveness, love, or wisdom-seeking can 'save' a person from a miserable life or relationship. But the Pope's message fails to give credit to the psychologists, brain researchers, social workers and therapists who have worked tremendously hard to figure out what these attitudes are, how they work and how to communicate them to someone whose brain's fear circuits are on overload.

A local pastor recently began to read about some of this amazing research and he told me "I'd love to tell them that this was in the Bible for thousands of years." Perhaps it was, but that is probably not how he got it. Most likely he received it (through the media) from the people workers who discovered it. Then he re-interpreted the Bible to match. This is evidenced by the gradual change of "biblical' definitions from abusive, manipulative meanings to meanings that match what the research has shown actually works.

There is also a trend to bypass this problem and say that while there is a lot of psychological advice in the Bible, its real message is "Christ" (Whatever that means.) But the problem doesn't go away because as our understanding about the important attitudes increases, we retro-actively ascribe them to "Christ." When we definitively learn that our parent's picture of "Christ" was actually that of an abusive male, pastors slowly change the picture to incorporate the new research. Thus, we do not learn about how to live a meaningful life by watching "Christ", though it can seem that way. In reality we learn about "Christ" though long, hard research into how to improve as people. Once we understand that, it makes sense that "Christ" would embody those principles

What the Pope, and those who hold the Bible as the only guide to life do that can be irritating is that they are not giving credit to the real discovers of how to "be saved." They take that hard-won message, claim that they already knew it, and that anyone who does not use them as a source is somehow deficient.