Brad, Just a short note about something that is really none of my business except as you make the point, we are all affected by these Judeo Christian stories. It helps to know them just the same as it helps the Christians and Jews to know Husserl. I suspect we will eventually have to become knowledgeable about the Koran as well since they are the next missionaries on the block. Jews don't proselytize but they also don't seem to be better than the next guy when it comes to running a country with religious freedoms.
So here are a couple of statements about Abraham. The book was canonized A.D. I've seen figures that run from the first century to the fourth century A.D.. What that means is that it is good to poor history but is meant as cultural teaching stories for the Jewish People about their belief in a covenant with their view of Eternal Consciousness. I think you can only judge the story as that. They don't see that their "God" meant for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac but that it was a test for both father and son as to their willingness to face death of both of their most prized possessions. Or as the German composers expressed it, "Come sweet Death." (Don't mistake the German Pietistic statement for Liebestod, it isn't.) The test for Abraham was the son he had waited 100 years for and for Isaac, it was his life. According to the Rabbis it was the willingness to follow their God wherever He led that made them pass the test and receive another species as the sacrifice instead. Now that can mean a lot of different things, not the least of which is the killing of a domestic or soon to be domestic animal as a substitute. This need to propitiate their God with blood takes a difficult turn with the Christians where the early American cleric Jonathan Edwards equates all life as in the hands of an angry deity. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The Christians say that humanity is so polluted and degraded from the outset that only the death of the "First Fruit" of that deity himself will stop his anger cold. Up until Abraham the people of the Middle East gave an offering of the First Fruit to their Deities. In fact this habit of making an offering to the Deity is still done in most of the Indigenous world. But amongst our peoples, for example, it means that you give a piece of the food with your prayer or if you take a life for food, you give back a piece of the meat that the spirit of the animal will continue since all life is put in balance by the Creator and must be maintained if we are to survive. That is a little different from bargaining with God in the "First Fruits" argument where it is often stated like a business transaction. You give back the first fruit and you will get more. In the case of Abraham, it was clear that a 100 year old man and a woman in her nineties wouldn't have more to get and that this was IT. So the Rabbis wrote in the canon that God told Abraham to sacrifice his son as a test and then when he passed the test, stopped the action before it was completed. Since this is not history but teaching, and teaching is the only reason for the memory of the story in the first place, then you must accept its premise. To do otherwise is to treat it as something that it is not. At another part in their Bible a prophet tells a King that the religious are sworn to tell the truth in the Bible because it is not a history of people but of their God. A nice thought. And such a thought supports the truth, in some form or another of the story of Abraham. Deciding what that form is and how it should be interpreted is the question. If I apply Russian rules to playing Beethoven I will make Beethoven a Russian composer and create a world that never existed in history. It is knowing the systems of cultural and artistic styles that allows me to create a world, both in performance and in my own mind that allows me to "get the point" of the work of art as it was meant for those it was written for. One could say that ignorance of the language of the Preamble to the American Constitution has created a world that the Founders never meant and would have considered barbarous. That is easy enough. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, but especially Johnson, wrote dictionaries from that time in history. I have one. All you have to do is to look up the meanings of the words and compare those meanings to the Dictionaries of today. Also you need to check the punctuation and capitalization and other grammatical devices to truly get the point that those early writers meant. To assume that they had the same thing in mind that readers today do when they read that document is poor scholarship. I couldn't be a serious Artist and not know what they meant by those words. That is why even a minor Actor like Reagan and now Swartzenegger come across as great thinkers when they refuse to make such mistakes with texts. Of the two, Swartzenegger has thus far shown himself the more intelligent in that matter in interviews. But what they were and are, are two minor character actors refusing to be bad at their craft in an obvious way. To the world that is ignorant with texts, they come across as men of high character and even scholarly to some. It is important, IMHO, if you are, to have to, deal with the other person's religion, that you approach it logically and in a scholarly manner. That is respectful but even more important it is tactically necessary since you are dealing with people who either want to change your thought to their's (conversion) and who cannot see a safe world (heaven) unless you do change to their way or you are dealing with people who have built into their culture the rules of business and the ideal of cleverness (Jacob and his Father, or the many stories of authors like I.L. Peretz e.g. Miriam and the Angel of Death). In short, you had better be UP to a dialogue with them. It can be wonderful and heady if you are or it can make you very angry if you are not. I have often discovered the doors to Anti-Semitism are built in the walls of one's own ignorance. Like dealing with the Italians or Germans around Verdi and Schubert, you had better be BETTER prepared than they are since they carry the meaning in their bones and you do not. The Germans are polite, the Italians will pronounce you untalented and the French will call you lazy. But we all know which of the three carried the war behind their politeness. REH ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "eric stewart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 7:55 PM Subject: Re: > I just looked briedly at this site, but is seems to > me to get to the core of the "religion" issue, for > the Zoinists, the Islamists, the fundmentalist > Christian "Right to Lifers" and so forth: > > Is man's role to obey God whatever God > tells us to do? > > Or is man's role to use his faculties of investigation, > analysis and judgment to try to figure out what > is really going on with "God's commands", and, > even if we do find they come from God, that it is > our role to decide whether or not these commands > deserve to be obeyed. > > Abraham, just like Adolf Eichmann, could have > said: "I am sorry, but I do not believe these > are orders that should be obeyed. I will not > kill Isaac (or the 6,000,000)." > > And if Abraham or Eichmann did not want to risk > being summarily shot for disobeying orders, they > could at least have called in sick that day. If > you don't want to be a martyr, you can still > try to weasel out. > > The important question is not whether God > exists, but whether, presuming God > exists, God is part of the solution > or part of the problem. This is where > human rationality and all fundamentalists > part company. > > \brad mccormick > > eric stewart wrote: > > > > http://www.synearth.net/ > > > > > > > > -- > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com > > > > One click access to the Top Search Engines > > -- > Let your light so shine before men, > that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16) > > Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21) > > <![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ----------------------------------------------------------------- > Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
