Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 23:37 Writing private stuff after a very long while. Ughh, so thankful my parents pushed me to become an engineer. I remain convinced I would have become a decent hack able to imitate but never create original work!
The 31 year old is glad 18 year old me went to Engineering school. Writing code is so much easier than writing stuff that can move people, make them happy, give them joy, make them think etc.
Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 20:08 I tried and I tried, to run and hide,
I even tried to run away,
Ya just can't run from the funnel of love,
Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 09:41 You mentioned that there are two sets of the Ten Commandments, and that one of them included the injunction against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. I believe you said this version was in Deuteronomy. But I looked up the Deuteronomy version, chapter 5, verses 6-21, and I find no reference to boiling. In fact this recitation of the Ten Commandments appears to be in complete agreement with the recitation in Exodus, chapter 20, verses 3-17. Would you please explain where I would find the Ten Commandments recitation that includes the boiling the kid reference you described? Thanks.
Dear Rick,
You must have misheard. I said there are three versions of the Ten Commandments. The oldest one is Exodus 34, the second is Exodus 20 and the last is Deuteronomy 5. It is in Exodus 34 that you will find the injunction about "boiling a kid in its mother's milk." This version is almost totally cultic.
If you look again at Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, you will discover that there is not "complete agreement" as you suggest. The primary difference is in the commandment about the Sabbath. Deuteronomy suggests that the Sabbath was to be observed because they had once been slaves in Egypt and even slaves must have a day of rest. In Exodus 20, the original Sabbath Day commandment has been edited to claim that God, resting from the work of creation on the Sabbath, was the reason for its continued observance. That addition to the original fourth commandment was from the quill of the priestly writers in the Babylonian exile (roughly from 596 to 450 BCE, depending on which return from exile was the last one), who also wrote the seven day creation story at the same time. That creation story did not exist when Deuteronomy was written. So the versions of the Ten Commandments are really four: the primitive Exodus 34 version from the "J" writer in the 10th century BCE; the familiar one from Exodus 20, which is originally from the "E" writer in the 9th century BCE but has been substantially edited by the "P" writer in the 6th century BCE; and the Deuteronomy 5 version, which is from the 7th century BCE and from the hand of the Deuteronomic writer. The biblical writers accounted for these several versions by suggesting that because Moses broke the tablets, God had to redo them and God did not redo them in the same way.
The fact is that these rules, like all covenant rules, emerged through the life of the nation of Israel and probably always had several versions. That is not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.
– John Shelby Spong
Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 09:39 If, as you have suggested, there was no literal empty tomb and the miracle stories do not describe events that actually happened in history, what was there about Jesus that so deeply captivated the first disciples? Is there something about the Jesus of history to which I can point today that anchors one as a Christian to see Jesus as an icon of faith?
Dear Irving,
Since I think that we can document that both the empty tomb story and the miracle stories included in the gospels are later additions to the Jesus story, your question actually carries us into the Jesus experience. It was the Jesus experience that caused people to see him as victorious over death and as the messianic figure around which the miracle stories gathered.
I see the primary Jesus experience as being that of a boundary breaker. His humanity and his consciousness seem to me to be so whole and so expanded that he was able to escape the basic human drive of survival that binds so many of us who are less fully developed. Unlike us, he appeared to need no security barrier behind which to hide. He could thus step across the boundaries of tribe, prejudice, guilt and even religion into a new dimension of what it means to be human and this is what caused people to experience God present in him. His call to us is therefore not to be religious but to be human and to be whole.
That is what every gospel symbol, from his miraculous birth to his empty tomb, is seeking to convey, so we read them as doorways into the meaning of God.
– John Shelby Spong
