waybread
Well-known member
Just to return to the thread topic. I have a lot of interest in the history of western religions and astrology. It does matter. But out of this interest and my studies, several points are really clear to me.
I don't think the Bible was divinely written. Divinely inspired, OK. But there is an interesting history to the question of who wrote the Bible, accessed through the field called Biblical criticism. This doesn't mean criticizing the Bible as in condemning it. It means analyzing it as a philologist. (Basically someone who studies the historical development of languages.) When philologists examined the Bible using their linguistic tools, they found distinctly different writing styles, that often corresponding to different and sometimes contradictory reports of events. (Starting with Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2. Cf. also the different nativity accounts in the Gospels. Or looking at the different words used for God.) So we understand the Bible (literally "library") to be a composite from different people who had different customs and agendas.
Spirit and faith have a universal quality to them (omnipresence) but ordinary human beings can access them only through our own time, place, and attendant cultures. Ancient gods were understood in anthropomorphized form throughout the ancient Near East and Mediterranean regions. (Even with the Egyptian animal-headed gods, who behaved like powerful humans.) If ancient societies were rigidly patriarchal, that's how they understood deities to behave. It's like water itself has no particular form, but it takes on the form of its vessel.
The God who created the universe cannot be confined by humans' limited understandings, rules, and doctrines. As God is of our time and all times, our understandings cannot possibly be constrained by those of Iron Age people living lives we can barely imagine with any accuracy. Nor could they have imagined our lives.
Worshippers today may joyfully partake of the age-old traditions of their faiths, but they don't live in those worlds of the past and cannot be constrained by them.
My personal belief-- which need not be anyone else's-- is that God by any name is an all pervasive Divine Consciousness or Divine Presence. However, human beings, limited as we are desire more human-like understandable forms that mirror our own cultures.
Just for example, the Bible talks about slavery as the norm, and a patriarch (Judah) ordering his daughter-in-law to be burned as his right, but we don't live in those worlds today. There is no Caesar, for example. So already we pick and choose what beliefs to follow and which ones to ignore based upon our time and place.
I don't think the Bible was divinely written. Divinely inspired, OK. But there is an interesting history to the question of who wrote the Bible, accessed through the field called Biblical criticism. This doesn't mean criticizing the Bible as in condemning it. It means analyzing it as a philologist. (Basically someone who studies the historical development of languages.) When philologists examined the Bible using their linguistic tools, they found distinctly different writing styles, that often corresponding to different and sometimes contradictory reports of events. (Starting with Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2. Cf. also the different nativity accounts in the Gospels. Or looking at the different words used for God.) So we understand the Bible (literally "library") to be a composite from different people who had different customs and agendas.
Spirit and faith have a universal quality to them (omnipresence) but ordinary human beings can access them only through our own time, place, and attendant cultures. Ancient gods were understood in anthropomorphized form throughout the ancient Near East and Mediterranean regions. (Even with the Egyptian animal-headed gods, who behaved like powerful humans.) If ancient societies were rigidly patriarchal, that's how they understood deities to behave. It's like water itself has no particular form, but it takes on the form of its vessel.
The God who created the universe cannot be confined by humans' limited understandings, rules, and doctrines. As God is of our time and all times, our understandings cannot possibly be constrained by those of Iron Age people living lives we can barely imagine with any accuracy. Nor could they have imagined our lives.
Worshippers today may joyfully partake of the age-old traditions of their faiths, but they don't live in those worlds of the past and cannot be constrained by them.
My personal belief-- which need not be anyone else's-- is that God by any name is an all pervasive Divine Consciousness or Divine Presence. However, human beings, limited as we are desire more human-like understandable forms that mirror our own cultures.
Just for example, the Bible talks about slavery as the norm, and a patriarch (Judah) ordering his daughter-in-law to be burned as his right, but we don't live in those worlds today. There is no Caesar, for example. So already we pick and choose what beliefs to follow and which ones to ignore based upon our time and place.
Whether the heads stayed on, I can't recall, because of course there were others I"m sure who came after them needing a Torso to commemorate their life. 
There's nothing in Judaism about female circumcision.