5 Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords—
6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
As this came up in my serendipitous wizard chat earlier, I thought I’d share. Verse 5 tends to be skipped by most Christians for a rather obvious problem. Oh, this is the NRS translation of 1 Corinthians 8:5-6.
A reading I love to have in my head around fundamentalists.
Did a check as I couldn’t recall the exact verse… It was Genesis 6:4:
‘The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.’ NRS
I just get annoyed with literalists when you cannot get into humans in the garden without two massively contradicting chapters written in completely different styles of Hebrew. Faith brings joy to many but clinging to texts as some model of all truth is just an oversimplification which was never intended.
They were written as guides and notable struggling to grasp at the divine. Like the Song of Songs focusing on the sexuality of existence and living worlds away from the technical language of Isaiah.
A lot. I’ll have to sit down and check all of the texts which clutter my head. A New Jerome is an ok basic reference to work from. Then, it becomes a rabbit hole of Langton’s works on demonology, The Golden Bough, Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics and mining the pseudepigrapha to see where Jesus’ angelology came from. Storing all that crap in my head explains why I had a shiny bald head at 18.
Oh the works of Francesca Stavrakopoulou may be of interest to you. She’s my favourite atheist biblical scholar.
Here’s her on the 2014 Monkey Cage Christmas special. Brian Blessed (the beast himself), Rev. Richard Coles (an ex popstar, gay, married and now widowed national treasure) and Chris Hadfield (the astronaut) join for good measure.
Did reading the Bible induce her atheism, or was she just another atheist apologist reading the Bible. Quoting a bunch of Satanist apologists isn’t evidence…just opinion.
Generally going down the road of examining the texts makes people atheists or very liberal in their theistic scope. Which branch of Satanists? Hopefully not those who view Eliphas Levi as credible.
Levi, Gardner, Crowley, Rolo Ahmed, Blavatsky and the rest of the usual suspects were, as mentioned, nothing but a bunch of sexual deviants masquerading as shaggers of the Goat (they weren’t). The “god of this world” has made a career out of hiding in plain sight. The very last thing he (it) wants is mainstream attention.
