God and Satan were the same person, but they weren’t a person at all – they were a pigeon named Sebastian and they kept following me in the park, whispering things that I couldn’t hear.
Eve wasn’t Adams wife she was a friend and his equal and there to help take care of the garden you can’t change my mind
i’m with you! for one thing, biblical Hebrew doesn’t have language for the concept of “husband” and “wife” and had no concept of marriage akin to ours; and surely the first humans didn’t have a concept of marriage either! I’ve posted about that based on a textbook from my Old Testament class before.
Once marriage similar to what we know as marriage does enter the Bible, in the Second Testament (aka New Testament), it is saturated with patriarchy (as it tends to be in our own cultures): the wife is subordinate to the husband in a way that is not implied when it comes to Adam’s and Eve’s relationship in Genesis.
The phrase ezer kenegdo (עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ ), often translated helpmate, used to describe Eve in Genesis 2:18, includes that word ezer that is used most often in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) to describe God! It means a helper, not in the sense of a subordinate but in the sense of someone who is at the very least your equal helping you out with something you could not accomplish yourself. That other half of the term, kenegdo, means something like “as opposite him” – she’s face-to-face with him, on equal footing. God is a helper for human beings who seems more distance, someone we cannot see face-to-face; Eve is for Adam a helper who is right next to him. Hoperemains talks about this Hebrew (and it all checks out based on my knowledge of Hebrew from seminary).
“Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery.”
Inspired by Vera Famiglia (sp?)’s character wearing a rosary wrapped around her hand, I decided to keep my Joan of Arc rosary close by for protection and courage.
“They say Jesus was a friend of sinners, but he didn’t describe himself that way. His motto wasn’t “eating and drinking with prostitutes and tax collectors.” Those were the labels used by the religious community, by the disapproving onlookers. What’s amazing about Jesus is that when he hung out with sinners, he didn’t act like they were sinners. They weren’t a “project,” a “mission field.” They were his friends. People with names. Defined as beloved children of the Creator, not defined by their sins. Icons of God’s image. His brothers and sisters.”
biblically the whole universe was thrown together in a 1 week project, and that explains a lot
like that was not a reasonable target date. now we’re on a buggy beta version that never should have been released in the first place
And this is after the big guy edited everything with that flood of his too
Tikkun Olam–The Repair of the World
If you see what
needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece
of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see
what is wrong and what is ugly in the world, then it is you yourself
that needs repair.
Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Yeah …. The thing is, gang, that the world is a group project. And it always has been.
“The day is short, the work is much, the workers are lazy. You aren’t required to finish the work, but nor are you free to refrain from it.”
So this isn’t just to say the easy “hey the context was different, so *shrug*” thing that a lot of people do, but if Christians would actually read the new testament, particularly the epistles but also a lot of what Jesus said, as one part of an ongoing conversation about just what it is that the fledgling movement meant — and particularly what it meant in the context of imperial domination — instead of assuming that the authors were creating ex nihilo prescriptions for the ideal christian life, then so much shit would be much easier to resolve and would make a hell of a lot more sense
like, let’s take Paul’s instructions on family structure in Ephesians. The context in which they all lived was no stranger to men’s domination of women, or husbands’ authority over wives. So it would literally make zero sense for Paul to be using Christian language to craft a “husband is the head of the wife, wives are to obey their husbands” model as if his audience were unacquainted with such a model. It would be nothing new. If the Christian narrative involved domination, Paul would not have needed to write anything about marriage, they would have just accepted the marriage practices around them. So when we see things like “the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church,” we should instead read “husband is the head of the wife” as something that was causing problems for early Christians, something that needed to be illuminated. And from there we should not just assume that we know what “husband is the head of the wife” means independently of “just as Christ is the head of the Church.” A redefinition, not merely a definition, is happening here.
And so if we read it as being in response to the church at Ephesus trying to work out how people in a radically leveling movement should engage with inextricably hierarchical social arrangements, we come away with a reading of Paul in which he is instructing them to be “in the world but not of the world,” where he’s saying that yes, we live under social structures, but Christians are to reject the hierarchy entailed in them. In a context where a husband’s headship over his wife was absolute, Paul was saying “but you’re not at liberty to exercise any headship that is not of the most self-sacrificing and christ-like kind.” In a context where a wife’s obedience to her husband was to be complete and unquestioning, Paul was saying “obey your husband as we obeyed Jesus’s message, a message in which obedience was the accepting of life and rejection of the prescriptions and proscriptions that had grounded rejection of others from society.”
It’s hard for modern Christians to not read these sections burdened with the legacy of 2000 years of moralizing and 1700 years of a Christianity married to the state. But if we do intentionally reject those lenses, even the parts of the bible that have been used as justification for domination can be seen to have been written as radical critiques of a culture of domination
bennu rising 