Bible Readers at the State Dept.

[HiTemp]

"We're big Bible readers at the State Dept., and it tells us to protect Muslims from global warming," said John Kerry.

Story and video here


What a moron. This is our top diplomat? No wonder other countries shun him and won't trust the US government as far as they can throw it. I especially liked the second-to-last paragraph of the article.

[Grug - American Neanderthal]

My God, about every word is blatant lie.

I remember the bipartisan slaps on the back he got when they confirmed him, he is a boob, he was when he ran for president and this is the proof of that. But what is more troubling is 1/2 the country still thinks its all Bush's fault and he is doing a good job considering.

[Stetto, man...]

This "administration" has been a humiliation from before they took office. The only things keeping the whole bunch out of prison are the Team Players, Enthusiastic Supporters and the total lack of adults in charge. The apparent best solution to all crises foreign & domestic is a round of golf and a nice loud "Bush did it!!"

Kerry should have been tried for dereliction and treason in the early 70s, but he had Ms. Kopecknic's murderer as a mentor, and you don't mess with the Swimmers Boy.

[HiTemp]

What strikes me about Kerry's Bible "readings" - aside from how he's trying to use it to claim legitimacy for something when the science behind it has been proved over and over again to be falsified - is that he's making a very common exigetical mistake by not making a distinction between what's "in" the Bible and what the Bible teaches.

This lack of distinction underlies much of the arguments biblical critics make. Bill Maher is one such example, who use the words of scripture as if they were a historical, factual telling of some historical event, and that event flies in the face of reason, mercy, love, and any other quality one might associate with God. Maher, for example, will read a passage containing a story about slavery and ask, "So your God condones slavery then?"

The entire Bible is not "a" book written by one person for the purpose of laying out a factual, historical set of events as though they were headline news of the day. It is inspired, I believe, by God but it is also written through the hands of men, many different men, living at different times, writing for different purposes, and writing to various audiences. The Bible, like any other complex work of literature, has to be viewed with that all-important genre in mind. If a person picked up one of Shakespeare's works, say, Hamlet, and read it as if it was a factual, historical telling of a real event, they would by the very nature of reading it that way, MIS-read it. The same applies to the Bible. Some of it is factual and historical such as the book of Acts, but much of it is saga, poetry (Hebrew poetic styles, not modern English styles), and other genres used not to tell history so much as to teach a spiritual or theological truth.

This is why when every single Republican presidential candidate is asked, "Do you believe the Bible is true/literally true?" they step right into the trap of answering with "yes" or "no." That's like asking someone if they take the local public library to be true/literally true. Well, certain parts, yes, but certain parts no. As soon as a candidate says no, they want to report he doubts the historicity of Jesus, one of the most well documented events of all history before the Middle Ages. If the candidate says yes, they report "he believes in talking snakes and people living in whale bellies for days." They can't win when they answer it with yes or no. Using the library analogy, if a candidate said they took the library literally, the media would drag out the Dr. Suess books and a stack from the poetry section; if he said no, the media drags out a biography of Lincoln and some encyclopedias to show his obvious lack of understanding.

This is the same mistake Kerry and his State Department are making when they try to read Genesis in such a twisted way that they come up with the notion it's teaching us to help Muslims by acting on global warming, more accurately, globally manufactured warming.

The Genesis account is saga. Saga is a long, dramatic or dramatized story of events. Genesis was not written to be a history book, it was meant to teach theological truth. If you look at the seven-day creation account you read that God "creates" virtually everything that was worshiped at that time as a god or gods. The sun, the moon, the stars, animals, nature. It's purpose was to establish God as NOT one of those things but the creator of all those things. It is teaching about transcendence, among other things. All this stuff about ruling over the creatures and the earth does not give us a course of action on global warming so much as it teaches that creation was organized, everything for a purpose and those purposes interlock and overlap but have man as the physical apex of all of it, and God as the spiritual apex.

If a river was god, or maybe some animal was a god, man would have no authority over it. But man does, and that's what Genesis is telling us, that all these other proposed gods are not, and that God is not a part of the created world as would be so if he were a cow or a tree. In almost all other creation-type accounts, the world came into being by a god or gods invading the world and through some act of violence or force subdues the world into some kind or order. Kind of like Mohammed did in the 7th century middle east, or ISIS is trying to do today. The biblical account teaches just the opposite; a creation spoken into being in an act of love by a creator outside of the creation. That's the primary theological truth it's trying to convey.

The authors of the books contained in the Bible lived in an era when slavery was commonplace, though it was a different kind of slavery than we think of when we think of the Civil War. Thus it shouldn't be surprising when we find mention of slavery when the authors write their accounts. In fact, it would serve to make the books suspect if they did not mention something known to be commonplace at that time. But because slavery is mentioned does not mean the Bible "teaches" it any more than Moby Dick teaches the best way to go whaling is by yourself in a small rowboat.

Most people, IMO, can readily and reasonably see this, as it would otherwise raise gigantic conflict between support of slavery and the Beatitudes. That's why people like Maher won't, because they refuse to look at it reasonably and only have intentions to mock it, not understand it. And guys like Kerry will try and slice a wedge out it when that slice will suit their political ends, whereas all the lessons about honesty, obeying laws, not bearing false witness, seem to slide right past him without the slightest concern.

What I want to know is, once Kerry saves the Muslims from global warming, who will save the Muslims from Kerry?