Judgment

Judgment was a perennial topic at Knatz.com. I'm working at recreating those and others of my censored classics at my bogs.

The word judgment covers a series of logical types, not visible to the untrained or the careless.

1. Divine judgment
   That's the kind so many of us heard about as children: and since.
   The problem is, though we may be surrounded by divine judgments, there's no reliable way to tell: we have no objectively verifiable examples.
2. Religious judgment
   Careful now: don't confuse this one with the first: make sure it's a god you hear, not some trickster shaman, or priest.
   History gives us a slew of examples of religious judgments: women getting their tits cut off for witchcraft, babies thrown into the furnace, men broken, stoned, flayed, crucified ...
3. Secular judgment In modern times a state (a nation, a government, a secular coalition) takes over for the priests who had taken over for the gods. Egregious examples abound: Jews in German concentration camps, Japanese ethnics in American concentration camps ...
4. Individual judgmentIf individual judgments weren't so egregious maybe the religious and secular judgments would not have built such a head of steam.
   Still: note: Individual judgments come with sentience. But even the mouse to which we attribute no sentience judges whether the cat can get it before it grabs the cheese. Institutional judgments are recent: and degenerating. Go to any bureaucracy, and watch the bureaucrats make judgments: the law says you're entitled to this and that? not unless the bureaucrat behaves.

pk Online

I had five domains, several blogs, thousands of essays and other text files, thousands of images on line. The fed destroyed all that, all but destroyed me.

I can't afford to repost, so I've been recreating some classic pk modules at blogs.

Here's what I'm going to do now: get all my files into a blog, sorting by blog specialty.
Then, reorder, as logically as I can, so visitors can browse by Knatz.com type categories: Teaching / or Personal /

I'm going to stop explaining all this every time I mount a new post.
Then I'm going to my five destroyed domains back up, restoring the original logic, improving on the original logic.

pkTheo is less affected than the other blogs. Still, I share the announcement.

People's Bible

People think the Bible is about God, about Creation, about Christ: Jesus, the Messiah.

Well, sure; or at least maybe. But what I see the Bible being most clearly about is people: stories they tell, stories they edit, without even knowing they're doing it: stories they change over the centuries: stories that start off saying we don't know what because we don't have any original MSS, but which wind up censoring, sometimes reversing old messages: about women's status in the early Christian Church, for example. Older scribes indicated high status for women, later redactors reverse the position back to low status: victims of systematic misogyny.

People show off their (revised) Bibles: intend them, take them, as proof (ha,ha) that they, the people, are receptive to God.

I say it shows the opposite: in many, if not all, things.

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On editing the Bible to alter messages about women's status in the early Christian religion, see Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, 178 ff, 183 ff. For example, Romans 16.7 tells of a woman powerful in a Pauline church, in Paul's lifetime, named Junia. Some copies of Romans alter the name to Junias, suggesting that she was a he!

(And these Christians think God is going to put them into heaven?!?!?)

Episodic Gospels

The gospels included in Christians' New Testament give two conflicting accounts of Judas' death. In one he hanged himself from a tree, and another he fell down and his bowels burst. So, the literalists want to know: which is it?

One story has Jesus ride into Jerusalem on a pony, another on an ass, and one on both a pony and as ass. Really? At the same time? Why such a stunt?

To fullfil mystic forecasts in the Old Testament some said. Except when we look for a prophecy in the OT book indicated by the NT gospel, it isn't found there; but is found in another OT book with a similar name!

The Bible writers, like humans in all times and places, are making it up as they go along: and showing their carelessness, their illiteracy, their indifference to fact, to truth, as they do so.

Or: How about this explanation?

Every gospel variant is literally true, but they happened in different Jesus manifestations in different cultures in different times or on different planets. Maybe Jesus entered earth's Jerusalem on a pony, but entered some Jerusalem-like city on the second rocky planet of Albermarle epsilon on an ass.

Maybe on earth Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"; but on a Calvary of the fifth satellite of the third rocky planet of Andromeda's theta zone, star XYN~ he said, "Burn every !~%*#@^%ing one of these &*^%$!@#~$ers in hell!"

While we're at it, how's this?
On earth, on Albermarle ... all over Andromeda, Jesus gets crucified, but on the artificial human web around Gingadonk in the Coalsack, Caiaphas screams at Pilate and Pilate screams at Herod, and Jesus stands there bleeding, and the people crucify Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod and give Jesus a generous stipend to keep the money tables out of the temple!

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Next time I dip into Bart Ehrman I may upgrade my examples. I "know" them, but as an amateur, not as a Biblical scholar with variants and paths memorized. Meantime, don't bother to correct my references: understand the point!