Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for July 23, 2010

It may be an oldie, but it’s still a relevant-ie.

Ah, Leviticus - as relevant today as it was in days of yore!

Ah, Leviticus - as relevant today as it was in days of yore!

..funny because it’s true…

Linsy-woolsy?

Gawwd loves us so MUCH he kills us (through his delightful proxies/minions) when we violate his forth commandment.

Gawwd loves our slaves so much that he tells us how to beat them.

Aint Gawwd the greatest?

SO! No one had the slightest clue that lying, killing, stealing, and deceiving your spouse were inadvisable behavior before Moe came down from the big hill?

Rules for the clueless?

Perhaps surprisingly, JOE was not a fan of Leviticus. But then considering some of the personal things that JOE had told us in the past, perhaps not so surprising.

Years ago I read some Biblical passage that advised us that if we are walking down a road and feel the need to “make water”, we should stop and do it by the side of the road, rather than keep walking and let it run down our leg. I haven’t found that passage since, but it told me all I needed to know about the level of people for which it was written.

Fantastic - as a Christian I love the God-man series, and I suspect Jesus would like it too.

@poohbear8192 - don’t really know much about that book, do you?

Jesus: Hey, Moses! eyepoke Nyuknyuknyuk! Moses: Oh, a wiseguy, eh? headslap Jesus: Why I oughtta…winds up to punch Jesus, elbows Mohammed in the eye Mohammed: falls over, runs in circle on the floor woobwoobwoobwoob!

Tommy, it seems to me poohbear’s understanding isn’t too far off.

I figure “Biblical Authority” is pretty much a binary proposition. If you don’t grant that all of it is eternally true and applicable, what claim can you make for the rest of it?

As a moral guidebook, it’s OK (parts are wonderful, parts are awful) but pretty restricted. As historical chronicle, it’s often wildly inaccurate. As a science text, it’s laughable.

I might cherry-pick the writings of Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Freud, or Sartre and say “I accept this while I reject that”, but I’d never claim that any one of them was offering the Word of God-Man…

I just noticed - these are all sequentially numbered (in the copyright scrawl on the right margin). This is no. 997.

Has Bolling got something special in store for 8/13? Does God-Man pay attention to millennia? It’s also a Friday the 13th.

Ominous…

Tommy:

Here is a passage from Numbers:

15:32 And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. 15:33 And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. 15:34 And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. 15:35 And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. 15:36 And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

Read it!!

That’s it!

No more yard work on Sundays for me. (That is God-Man day, isn’t it?)

Bolling takes care of all the subtleties. I like the way even the “condemned’s” fellow slaves wholeheartedly join in the stoning once he is accused of violating God-man day.

Pooh, I am aware of the shocking degree of angry-vengeful God stuff in the Old Testament. I beleive you have to consider the context in which those passages were written. As for Leviticus, that text was written to help the Levites maintain their cultural identity in a cultural environment in which many truly shocking things were commonplace. So it is no wonder that the early Jews felt they had to maintain strict rules to avoid losing their identity.

For me, I take Jesus’ words as my guide - he stated that there are two commandments, one being to love and respect God and the other to Love and Respect each other. He said that his teachings kind of summarized and overruled the other stuff. In fact he didn’t really say anything about starting a church, either - he was a totally challenging and radical person in every sense of the word. To me he makes unwaveringly good sense.

And I think Boling’s point with the Godman series is not to attack God’s existence, but to show up the many ways we humans distort what we believe God is saying. So, for someone to quote Leviticus or Exodus and highlight the brutality is to overlook both the context and to make the claim that to be religious is to shut off your brain. I don’t think that is what J meant at all, let alone all the other Hebrew prophets from before. There are many ways to look at those early texts anyway - I do not have that the impression that today’s Jews condone stoning or any of the other cruelties perpetrated in the Bible stories either.

To me the message is God loves us, forgives us again and again, and just wants us to love each other. Which is in itself, perhaps the hardest thing to do.

fritzoid - it is not cherry-picking to examine the Bible texts in their historical and social context, unless you insist that it all be taken literally, which does not make any sense to me. Surely it is not hard to find passages to support one’s idea that God is cruel, but you are cherry-picking if you don’t see all the other stuff as well. So then you have to decide how to reconcile it all - not an easy task. For me Jesus provides the way to do that. Personally I just don’t get it when Christians use Leviticus to revile their favorite unclean group (gay people, of course) because in so doing they are ignoring Jesus’ whole life and teaching.

It’s not supposed to be easy to come to terms with religion - it is supposed to be challenging and to be life-changing, and to be a never-ending process.

In 2011, Virginia will celebrate(?) the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The celebration(?) wil include an appreciation for Southern Heritage, including slavery.

I love Godman because he demonstrates that a narrative that includes the omni-God, conceived as person, is ridiculous. The Old Testament doesn’t portray God in this way, nor, for that matter, does the New. Some people think Milton’s paradise lost is a God-man comic strip.

Tommy

Men invented god in order to justify their choices. Right now women and men need to make better choices and value better things. Good and bad did not originate in an imaginary god, they originated in the practical imaginations of flesh and blood people.

We all pick and choose. (cherry pick) What we need to do is to choose well and own what we choose. Claiming god as our authority is abdicating our human responsibility.

Pooh, I don’t agree. I think men invented our various definitions of God in order to try to develop an understanding of some deep sense of the infinite that we all sense but can’t put our finger on. Imbued in this idea of the infinite something is the very real and evident ongoing renewal of life - no two living things are the same as any that came before and as far as we know, will ever be again. So in life there is infinite hope, and my sense of reason tells me this might apply to human existence as well. And the only way infinite hope can apply to a finite, frequently unsatisfying lifetime is to consider there may be something after it. Then you get people like Jesus (who has a sizable bit of historical evidence supporting his existence and teaching and influence on his contemporaries) who basically states these same ideas in a different yet wholly sensible way.

At least to me it is sensible, and I cannot say I learned this on my own - I credit it all to Pastor Jeff Minor at JesusMcc.org, whose energetic, question-asking approach should be the model for the entire the Christian Church. Before I came across Pastor Jeff and his preaching and classes, much of the Bible was really quite incomprehensible and seemed irrelevant to our time. But I don’t think that way any more. I don’t struggle too much with Bible stories that seem too far-fetched - I figure some of them happened similar to what is described and some didn’t and there is no way I can be sure, so I look at what I believe it is trying to teach me.

I will add that a problem I find with your philosophy (such as I understand it based on your paragraphs here, which I know is not much) is that you seem to be sure about your conclusions, whereas I am most certainly not.

Tommy, my point about cherry-picking is not that it’s impossible to “separate the wheat from the chaff”; in fact, I think it’s ESSENTIAL to separate the wheat from the chaff. I sometimes call myself a Christian Atheist; I believe Jesus was RIGHT about many things, but I don’t believe he was divine. I don’t believe in the Resurrection, and I don’t see the Crucifixion as any sort of “Victory.” But anyone who says “The Bible said it, I believe it, that’s that” must accept a lot of preposterous nonsense. If it’s discredited in parts, what claim to authority does it retain elsewhere? If it’s not literally true in ALL respects, how do you know what parts ARE literally true without extra-Biblical support? I think there are a lot of good ideas in it, but they’d be good ideas whatever their source, not because “the Bible tells me so.”

The problem with tying an ethos to a mythology is that, when the clay feet of the myths crumble, the ethos loses its foundation as well. Unfortunately, the reverse doesn’t appear to be the case. I see too many people who talk themselves blue in the face in support of the Books of Genesis and/or Revelation who have no use for the Sermon on the Mount; they figure they don’t need to be “good” as long as they’re “holy”, when it seems to me one becomes “holy” by being “good.”

@ Tommy

For me, I take Jesus’ words as my guide - he stated that there are two commandments, one being to love and respect God and the other to Love and Respect each other. He said that his teachings kind of summarized and overruled the other stuff.

He said that those two commandments summarised the other stuff (Matthew 22:40). He emphatically denied that his teachings overruled the other stuff (Matthew 5:18).

Actually, I hesitate to even bring this up. If you treat people the way that Jesus says to treat people in the Sermon on the Mount, then you are doing A-OK in my book, and I wouldn’t want you to change. I certainly would not want to convince you to treat people the way Yahweh says to treat people in Leviticus. I’m afraid that if I convince you that Jesus wanted you to follow Leviticus too (or just give you one more comment pushing you in that direction), then you might start following Leviticus, and that would be bad.

However, I have a suspicion that you are really doing the same thing as fritzoid, only not admitting it to yourself. If I’m right, then you really do have a standard of morality from outside the Bible, and you are using that standard to judge the Sermon on the Mount as applicable and useful in life today but Leviticus as outdated and not worth following. Then if you are ever convinced that Jesus wanted you to follow Leviticus, then you will just conclude that Jesus was wrong sometimes after all, and that would be fine.

I don’t know for sure which it is (be nice to people because Jesus said so, or listen to Jesus because he said to be nice to people), but I’m going to take the risk.

I do not have that the impression that today’s Jews condone stoning or any of the other cruelties perpetrated in the Bible stories either

Right, religious Jews have their own ways of rationalising those rules away. A common argument, as I understand it, is that most of the rules in Leviticus stopped applying after the destruction of the Temple, which I guess separates their theory from yours by only 40 years.

Personally, I think that stoning people for picking up sticks on Saturday was never OK, but I’ll settle for Christians and Jews who believe that it’s no longer OK.

Jesus (who has a sizable bit of historical evidence supporting his existence and teaching and influence on his contemporaries)

There is a bit of evidence, but it is not sizable at all.

I have no problem with reasonable people with reasonable common sense believing whatever they want, taking the bible in whatever light they want, if it helps you on your path in this life, great, go for it. What I have a problem with are all the other people with questionable common sense and reasoning destroying themselves and the world in the name of this god.

@tobybartels - the first source of actual evidence we have for Jesus is the writings of Paul, who was the earliest author (predating the Gospels) included in the collection of books known as the New Testament. So I suppose Paul could have made the whole thing up but why should we assume that but not take the same assumption for other early historians? Why not hold them all to the same standards? A number of early histories make mention of Jesus, and also make mention of what seems to be a substantial influence on his immediate followers - such as the many early Christians who, claiming to have been eyewitnesses to the Resurrection, were willing to be put to torturous death rather than change their mind. Paul was not writing history but he based all his written sermons/letters on Jesus and several times exhorts the readers about how they were witnesses to Jesus and some degree of amazing deeds. Is he just making it all up? If so why don’t I just go ahead and doubt all early writers on the same grounds? There is certainly room for argument either way, but were I not blessed (sorry) with an open mind I might be tempted to automatically distrust the evidence, as sop many people are willing to do today. To me this is the fundamental point - am I willing to trust that these early Jews were telling the truth or is it all made up? Am I willing to put my trust in people or not?

I was not raised Christian - rather a Unitarian atheist - as a critical adult I decided to look at the evidence with an open mind. And I am not one who is easily convinced especially by far-fetched claims. But I have decided that maybe those things did actually happen, or some version of them. Can’t be sure of course, but it just makes some kind of sense to me that agrees with how I see the Universe.

In any case it is way more convincing than that obviously biased web site link you provided.

This is a fun discussion - thanks to Ruben Bolling for creating such a fascinating and thought-provoking comic. really, who else even comes close to Tom The Dancing Bug?

Thank God Historians never make things up or write with a horribly biased hand.

Thank God Historians never make anything up or write with a ridiculously biased hand.

I personally have no idea who Jesus was and what he said. All I have are some really old, selectively edited and somewhat contradictory second-hand accounts. I agree, he seemed like a real nice guy in his Sermon on the Mount (apart from this bit: “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment…shall be in danger of hell-fire.”)

As far as Jesus rejecting Leviticus, it seemed that he did implicitly, if not explicitly, in John 8, in where he is reported to have said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (At which an old woman threw a stone and soon the crowd goes went with the stone throwing, whereupon he turned to the woman and said “thanks a lot, Mom!” Jesus wept.)

I really don’t know what Jesus believed. I’m much more curious about what Christians believe. It’s my belief that every last one of them cherry-picks from the Bible. For starters, the Ten Commandments are a cornerstone of Christian faith, right? Well, they appear in Exodus, right next to Leviticus. If these commandments are to be followed by modern Christians, why not the teachings of Leviticus? Even if Jesus was soft on adultery, there’s no reason to think he rejected the teaching that shellfish is an abdomination.

Most Christians don’t seem to acknowledge that they cherry-pick from the Bible, so they’re alarmed by passages in the Koran that seem to exhort Muslims to kill non-Muslims. Do these Christians know that their Bible also advises in Exodus 22:20 that “whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed”? Fortunately, the vast majority of Muslims (over a billion of them) cherry-pick just as Christians and Jews do.

Lastly, I don’t believe that Paul made it ALL up. But where the miracles are concerned, I find it significant that the Romans of Jesus’ time already believed in a demigod, born of god and woman, who performed miracles such as going to the underworld and returning, and who was elevated to full God status after his mortal death. Of course, I’m speaking of Hercules. If you cross Hercules with the Jewish concept of the Messiah, you have something close to Christianity.

Paul, who was trying to build a brand new religion, was in my mind playing to his audience.

Jesus was a pretty nice guy - quite a condescension and shows only the most superficial and really inaccurate understanding of the subject. Why not have an open mind? What is it about our time that makes us feel we know all we need to know? And why should you assume you know better about J than the many people who wrote about him who lived closer to his time? Doesn’t add up.

I don’t claim to know Jesus better than the apostles did, I’m just saying that their second-hand accounts paint a mixed picture of the man. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a nice sentiment, but teaching that anger puts you on the road to eternal damnation is kind of screwed up, don’t you think?

I mean, don’t get angry with me for my comments, or your God might torture you for all time. Am I reading this wrong?

With statements such as ‘The Scripture cannot be broken’ (John 10:35) and ‘Until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the law, until all is accomplished’ (Matthew 5:18) and “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” (Mathew 5:17), Jesus seemed to be endorsing, say, Exodus 22:20 that “whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed”?

Why don’t you have an open mind to the divinity of Hercules, or the fact that there are striking parallels between their stories, and that one might have colored the other? Or to ask yourself why Christians follow Exodus 20:1-17 (the ten commandments), while chosing to ignore Exodus 21:20-21, on which this fine comic is based?

“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”

I think the attitude that many Christians have towards their Bible is the same as their attitudes towards their own bodies: it’s all holy and a divine creation, even the nasty bits which we’ll pretend don’t exist most of the time.

@Tommy1733

I’m generally willing to accept the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical person. The evidence for him is not great, but there is some; so why not? I only object to your claim that the evidence is ‘sizable’.

I hold Paul to the same standard to which I hold Muhammad. Both described spiritual visions which they had, but I don’t believe that what they saw was real. If Paul’s writings were the only evidence for the existence of Jesus, I would discount it entirely; as it is, we have the gospels and the existence of a group of people, not all followers of Paul either, who believed that he existed. (All of the non-Christian writers who were to Jesus are only reporting what Christians said, so they add nothing.) The link that I cited doesn’t count that either, since it’s hearsay, but it’s close enough for me.

But it’s far from clear. Even a lot of atheists assume that he must have existed, so it’s interesting that the evidence is actually pretty vague.

Anyway, it’s all right if you don’t agree. I’m much more interested in what you think about Matthew 5:18.

scotchfaster, if you find the Herculean parallels intriguing, look into Mithras. Born on Dec. 25, visited by three wise men who gave gold, frankincense and myrrh, 12 followers, last supper, martyred at the Spring equinox, ressurrected, will return at the end of the world to judge the dead. His followers made the sign of the cross, cleansed sins through water, and kept a Sunday Sabbath. Originally Persian, but a very popular religion throughout the Hellenized Middle East and in Rome itself, not only during the time of Jesus but hundreds of years earlier.

tobybartels - thanks for your comments. I can’t claim to be an expert on the Bible. But what I have read (this is a rough approximation of Garry Willis) is that one has to consider the four Gospels as each being written separately, and quite a bit later than Jesus lived. By this time there were separate communities of Christ followers and the different authors had different goals in mind. One characteristic of Matthew’s gospel is that he is constantly tying Jesus’ life and deeds and words back to the Torah, emphasizing the continuity of this new Way with the Jews’ traditions.

I can’t cite the location but Jesus also said (according to a Gospel author, who was writing down the stories and sayings passed along orally by his group) that there are only two Commandments, that we should Fear God and that we should Love Each Other. This invites the question of what these mean - why “fear” God? And to me this is one of the most compelling things about the Gospels and Paul’s sermons, and other things - there are so many concepts and ideas encompassed in them that it would be truly foolish to imagine one can read the Bible without endless questions arising.

And this is the point, and why it seems “alive” to me - so much treasure to find in there. We are not here to blindly follow directions, because there are few if even one clearly, obvious, easy-to-use standards to follow. I like the two that Jesus listed, but you can’t just stop there - those two little statements invite endless thought, and especially discussion with other people to figure out what each of us feel, which is guaranteed to be different from any other person on earth past present or future. I think we are challenged to keep an open mind even if we think we have decided about something.

I have always been fascinated by how unfathomably complex the Universe seems to be. And when I found a church and a pastor who helped me see the Bible in the same way it all seemed to click for me - that same kind of rich infiniteness seems to be in the Bible too.

scitchfaster - Again I find your comments condescending. -““Love your neighbor as yourself” is a nice sentiment, but teaching that anger puts you on the road to eternal damnation is kind of screwed up, don’t you think?”

To answer this, first I will say that it is not at all a nice sentiment. Love Your Neighbor is a great goal and for anyone to really do it takes a lot of dedication - I get frustrated by others every single day, and at myself too. It is a Big Idea, not a nice sentiment - it is a challenge, and one that is very hard to fulfill.

And as for being on the road to damnation, again you are just not thinking it through. Consider who suffers when you don’t love your neighbor? Maybe the neighbor, but surely yourself - you are the one who carries around the tension inside. Medical science has shown us in no uncertain terms that stress contributes negatively to our lives. So who suffers? we do, when we don’t meet the challenge, when we miss the mark (which is a fair translation of the word “sin”).

The concept of Hell is interesting too. The Biblical word translated as “Hell” was “Gehenna” which referred to a garbage/refuse dump located just outside of your typical Bible-era town. There were often fires there when people needed to burn away the trash. So one might conclude that to go to Gehenna was to be cast away from God, which if you are a believer in God is perhaps the worst fate imaginable.