Worthy cause of the day: “STOP BUSH FROM TAKING A LAST STAB AT ENDANGERED SPECIES”.
Also: If you have not voted yet, please go out and vote now. We need everyone we can get to save the United States from McCain and Palin!
Relevant to Divine Misconceptions:
- “French magazine banned after some say it offends Islam”: This is an immature way to handle being offended.
- “Op-Ed: Prop 8 goes against God’s love for every person”: This is some of the lamest exegesis I have ever read. The author, Reform pseudo-rabbi David Ellenson, knows very well that Leviticus 18:22 prohibits male homosexuality. To quote:
Yet I refuse to allow such negative judgments regarding gays and lesbians to go unchallenged from a religious perspective. As Catholic scholar Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza has maintained in her powerful book “In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins,” the divinity of any passage in Scripture that diminishes the humanity of another—as the one in Leviticus does—surely can be questioned.
Essentially Mr. Ellenson has missed the point of Scripture. Rather than base his views of YHWH on what the evidence of Scripture has to say and reconsider his views if he finds any inconsistency, he reserves the right to reject any evidence that suggests that he is wrong. It makes no sense for him to claim he holds by the “biblical ethos” when he takes a view contrary to the Hebrew Bible. Furthermore, Mr. Ellenson does not even understand what the passage in question is about. Leviticus 18 consists almost entirely of prohibitions, mostly of a sexual nature, culminating in descriptions of the consequences of abiding or not abiding by these prohibitions. The whole passage is about behavior. Nowhere is it claimed that homosexuals are in any way less than human or are unloved by YHWH. It should also go without saying that desire, which is often not voluntary, is not prohibited at all, so that anyone with homosexual desires—or the desire to do anything else prohibited, for that matter—is not automatically culpable or incapable of being holy. I would also like to note that Mr. Ellenson misuses the term “fundamentalist”; as noted by Dr. Stephen Prothero in Religious Literacy (pp. 180-181), fundamentalism is a form of Protestant evangelical anti-modernism, and as such the term cannot be legitimately applied to non-Protestants.
The thrust of one such passage should not override an overarching biblical ethos that teaches us that God loves and affirms the full humanity of each human being. - “How to fix Orthodox dating”
- “LA Times Rehashes A Libel”
- “Animal Feed Is Fishy”
- “Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel”
- “Frozen mice cloned - are woolly mammoths next?”
Aaron
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