sovay | You've every cause to doubt me

Can I get someone with a liberal Christian perspective on this issue?

I have thirteen minutes before I have to reappear in the seven hour meeting of doooooom, so this will be brief:

I mostly agree with the article, both for the stated reasons (argument by shrimp presupposes a "we" that is protestant and implicitly white, it is disrespectful of Jews (and Muslims!) who keep dietary and other purity laws) and for the additional reason that people who use the argument by shrimp are often smugly self-righteous and don't actually have a good hermeneutic position of their own. Probe them about any of the other "clobber" verses and they completely fall apart, much like the proponents of said clobber verses, actually. ALSO, Christians, specifically, as opposed to atheists or secular humanists, who present that argument completely fail to understand why we believe we are exempt from Jewish dietary laws (it was basically a sop to Gentiles who were struggling to conform to Jewish culture and went hand in hand with that whole "no you don't have circumcise your adult men" thing). There's a lot more I could say about American Christendom and the Law but that would take more than the seven minutes I have left, and would probably be a tangent.

There had better be a bed and some sleep soon. I am tired of making lists.

*hugs* I hope you get some rest soon.

disrespectful of Jews (and Muslims!)

(True! I wonder if that would have been flagged for the author of the article if the popular pseudo-argument had been "God hates pork.")

and for the additional reason that people who use the argument by shrimp are often smugly self-righteous and don't actually have a good hermeneutic position of their own.

I am not entirely surprised to hear that. I was surprised to read it was a Christian tactic; it reminded me of Richard Dawkins on his eternal quest to prove that all religion is a bunch of inconsistent gibberish. Disprove one part of it, the whole thing falls apart, right?

why we believe we are exempt from Jewish dietary laws (it was basically a sop to Gentiles who were struggling to conform to Jewish culture and went hand in hand with that whole "no you don't have circumcise your adult men" thing).

Which I did not know, because I have very patchy knowledge of the history of early Christianity and the ways in which it differentiated itself from Judaism, and is one of the reasons I wanted a Christian perspective. Thank you!

There's a lot more I could say about American Christendom and the Law but that would take more than the seven minutes I have left, and would probably be a tangent.

GOOD GOD DO NOT BE LATE TO THE SEVEN-HOUR MEETING OF DOOOOOOM I AM SO SORRY.

I hope you get some rest soon.

Thank you. I hope the meeting is not as interminable as it could be!

*hugs*

It has actually been going well and might not even warrant the extra ooos in dooooom. Two more hours. . .

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has made a number of very good posts about the clobber verses and how countering them with clobber verses of your own is a bad tactic. He traces the roots of this dynamic in American Christianity back to the abolitionists, when you had pro-slavery advocates quoting pro-slavery verses, and anti-slavery advocates quoting anti-slavery verses, and then a growing strain of anti-slavery advocates saying "don't look at the trees; look at the forest." And the forest, quite clearly, has an arc that bends toward good things like liberation and respect.

pro-slavery advocates quoting pro-slavery verses, and anti-slavery advocates quoting anti-slavery verses, and then a growing strain of anti-slavery advocates saying "don't look at the trees; look at the forest." And the forest, quite clearly, has an arc that bends toward good things like liberation and respect.

Oh, interesting. Has this tactic been applicable to liberation movements since?

Applicable, absolutely -- you can do it with gay rights. Applied? Depends on who you're looking at. He's definitely in favor of that approach himself, and there are people who use it.

For me, the really enlightening thing was finding out how much of the "literalist" approach has its roots in the defense of slavery. It explains . . . a lot.

and there are people who use it

I'm fond of Patrick Cheng's arguments in Radical Love, as well as the critical biblical scholarship Peterson Toscano has done. Stephanie Spellers' Radical Welcome is a good introduction of sorts for the back-patting white barely-left-of-center kind of congregation, the ones that want to be nudged towards being better but still have emotional attachments to the June Cleaver lifestyle.

Applicable, absolutely -- you can do it with gay rights. Applied? Depends on who you're looking at.

Yeah, I was trying to ask if it had been successfully applied, not if it was ever relevant again. I've been awake for a very long time now.

For me, the really enlightening thing was finding out how much of the "literalist" approach has its roots in the defense of slavery. It explains . . . a lot.

Yeah.

Agreed on Fred Clark. I like and respect him a great deal.

Agreed on Fred Clark. I like and respect him a great deal.

I have never read any of his blog. I have just put "Slacktivist" and "clobber verse" into Google, however, so this shall be swiftly remedied.

Him and Ta-Nehisi Coates are probably the two most consistently enlightening bloggers I read. Clark is a white evangelical who detests the general direction and politics of white evangelicalism over the last few decades, and calls them out on their bullshit from an insider position. Which is very different from -- and for me, at least, much more educational than -- arguing with them from the outside.

I got into reading his blog because of his painstaking takedowns of the Left Behind series, which he calls the Worst Books in the World. ("Worst" because they are both terrifyingly influential and bad in every aspect, from their theology to their logic to their prose.) It's been more than ten years now, I think, and he's only on book three . . . .

I continue to be impressed that he hasn't burned out completely on the Left Behind takedown blogging. For a while there was a LBFridays fansite with fanfic, but I can't remember now what it was called.

It's been more than ten years now, I think, and he's only on book three . . . .

That is way too much Left Behind still to go. I am amazed by his tenacity and worried I need to mourn for his brain cells.

Here is Fred Clark showing why Christians don't have to keep the food rules in Leviticus, without mocking other rules in Leviticus.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2004/07/16/the-abominable-shellfish/

Not just that, but he goes on in other posts to talk about how a lot of evangelicals will insist that passage applies to food and only food, because food is what shows up in the vision. Which requires you to ignore the fact that Peter gets a vision of food and then goes and applies the lesson to people. It's an excellent example of why you need to look at the story rather than the verse.

I will say that I think the argumentum a squillis has a valid and non-anti-Semitic angle, albeit one that comes bundled with problematic alternate interpretations. The point to me is not that only stupid people think God hates shrimp; rather, only stupid people claim they read the entire Bible as the inerrant and utterly literal word of God, and then ignore the parts of it they don't feel like dealing with. There's a great deal of hypocrisy in the standard white evangelical hermeneutic; even if Peter's vision meant the dietary laws (but only the dietary laws) can go away, where's his vision of mixed-fiber clothing? If you can wear cotton-poly blends, why isn't gay sex okay? I disagree with the people who do in fact take all the laws of Leviticus as rules society must follow, but my disagreement with them is different from the one I have with the white evangelical tradition.

The point to me is not that only stupid people think God hates shrimp; rather, only stupid people claim they read the entire Bible as the inerrant and utterly literal word of God, and then ignore the parts of it they don't feel like dealing with.

That’s how I’ve always taken that response to people quoting Leviticus 18:22 against homosexuality — as criticizing the bigots’ familiarity with their own (most typically some flavor of Protestant) religious tradition.

(My eyes sort of glazed over a couple paragraphs into that article the message I got from it was that no argument against oppression that doesn’t presuppose and depend on the author’s particular Correct interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures is worth making. By anybody, whether they adhere to that particular tradition or not.)

Here is Fred Clark showing why Christians don't have to keep the food rules in Leviticus, without mocking other rules in Leviticus.

That's very neat. (Wow, "God Hates Shrimp" has been around longer than I realized.)

Edited 2014-08-12 23:02 (UTC)

Is Virconium the post-apocalyptic magic setting that reminds me of Moorcock, specifically Elric? I read those, long ago.

Is Virconium the post-apocalyptic magic setting that reminds me of Moorcock, specifically Elric? I read those, long ago.

I would say it starts out that way with The Pastel City (1971), but rapidly becomes something much more deconstructive with A Storm of Wings (1980) and only accelerates, as far as I can tell, until it reaches "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium," which Harrison eventually reprinted in Things That Never Happen (2002) as "A Young Man's Journey to London," smashing the last presumptions of his secondary world once and for all. Even considered separately from their place in this trajectory, I really like the two novels and the handful of stories I've read.

Hmm, I think I only read the novels. I wonder if I still have them?

I only skimmed the article you linked, but as a liberal Christian, this stood out to me:

In this formulation, even if there are Jews still observing their commandments, they are simply doing so in the mistaken belief that the covenant in which the commandments were made is still operative when in fact it is not, Christ having done away with the law. There’s no doubt that liberal American Christians, who have led the way in initiating interfaith dialogues with American Jews, do not mean to suggest this.

On the contrary, we absolutely mean to suggest this. It's central to protestant theology. If we didn't believe that, we'd be Jews.

Christianity doesn't exactly say the old commandments are wrong, but it does say they're mostly irrelevant compared to "love each other." We have been forgiven. As long as we admit our mistakes and try to correct them, we're ok.

Leftist modern Protestants acknowledge that the writings of the bible, although they may have been divinely inspired, are not the word of God and were filtered through the time and the people writing them (much as believed by Reform Jews), and distinguish themselves from Evangelicals in that they/we tend to emphasize a relationship with the holy spirit rather than the notion of "salvation only through Christ" (which isn't something Christ pushed, particularly).

In terms of interfaith dialog, most of us respect Judaism, and follow a "judge me by my works" standard of whether somebody's a good person (instead of the aforementioned Evangelical wing's "salvation only through Christ," which incidentally means that even though I'm a Christian I'm not "saved" according to the Evangelicals). Thus we work in interfaith groups because we have a lot of overlap, and because Jesus was Jewish and if you're trying to understand what he said and how the early church developed, you need to know that context. We're pretty thumbs down on the whole "Jews killed Jesus!" notion, because Jews also supported Jesus and anyway it was destined by God so what else could happen.

(I'm not exactly explaining my personal views here; I'm explaining the mainline Christian attitude.)

We also, as protestants, believe in a personal relationship with God, without the intermediary of a priestly class, which actually means we can ignore anything and everything in the bible as long as it feels right to us. (Which, I know. But that's the thing. We are each a church of one. And we're not a chosen people; we believe God has this relationship with everyone, although some of them might not know it.)

Obviously, it's a really annoying thing to say to someone "you don't know it, but you're secretly Christian," but it's definitely something that's central to the liturgy. It's kind of this very practical, well, believe what you want to believe, you're a good person and God loves you no matter what. Because there's not a seperate Jewish god or Hindu God or atheist space where God is not. That's the Christian definition of God. Immortal, invisible, all seeing, all knowing, and everywhere.

Essentially, I would say our position on the shellfish thing is that if you want to do it and it brings you closer to god and your faith and makes you more aware of morality, great. But if you want to say that everybody needs to do it because of the Bible, that's silly.

Edited 2014-08-12 18:23 (UTC)

Also if it's not clear from what I've saying, there are MAJOR doctrinal differences, if you come down to it, between the protestant branches. There's a reason Methodists aren't Presbyterians aren't Episcopalian. Because of that whole "church of one" attitude, you may attend services at whatever church has the music you like, but if you wanted to become a minister, there are some pretty wide unbridgeable gaps over things like what baptism means, what communion means, what an afterlife looks like, whether free will exists, etc.

Regarding what Saira says about Christianity and the Law above, I don't know that the development of the early church matters at this point at all. We are a history abenegating faith if ever there was one. You can study study study and know the exact reasons each section of the bible was included, and all the political compromises that went into the liturgy, but it comes down to "do you believe this or not," not why it was originally put in there. You will frequently, in liberal Christian circles, hear the phrase "a living faith." Our faith may grow out of the bible, but is not contained in the Bible.

I really can't overstate the importance of "salvation" to Christianity, the centrality of the idea that the past is not important compared to the present. That's the reason there is a bigger split between mainline Christians and Evangelical Christians than there is between mainline Christians and Reform Jews, or mainline Christians and Buddhists. The evangelicals hate the mainstream Christians for not finding it important to be born again (and therefore brand new). The mainline Christians hate the Evangelicals for their backward-looking traditionalist moralities.

Edited 2014-08-12 19:25 (UTC)

Incidentally, I do find the argument by shrimp silly and unpersuasive. I think if you're making a religious argument in favor of homosexuality, you need to make a religious argument in favor of homosexuality, rather than "religion says silly things all the time!" That's just bad rhetoric. But not because undermining the Bible undermines Christianity. It's a sacred text in the way the Constitution is: changeable and elastic, and limited in its ability to define what it means to be American.

Edited 2014-08-12 19:33 (UTC)

I think if you're making a religious argument in favor of homosexuality, you need to make a religious argument in favor of homosexuality, rather than "religion says silly things all the time!"

I don't think the people who argue by shrimp are trying to make a religious argument in favor of homosexuality; I think they are trying to make an argument—of whatever nature—against employing religion against homosexuality. A religious argument in favor of homosexuality would look quite different; I am sure they exist; I'd love to be pointed toward one. (Just don't point me toward one that affirms male homosexuality at the expense of women, because I've read the secular versions and they aren't helping.)

This is what I most often hear, in one variation or another:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shore/the-best-case-for-the-bible-not-condemning-homosexuality_b_1396345.html

Which basically boils down to "the Bible has little to say about homosexuality and an awful lot to say about being compassionate, so cut it out, jerks."

If you're really curious for something in depth, I can ask the minister of my church, who is gay and whose husband is also a minister. The Massachusetts Episcopal diocese has been a real front runner in ordination of gays and women, and I'm sure there are a lot of canonical arguments that are way above what you hear from the laity. Here's the summary I could find on my own:

http://www.integrityusa.org/archive/FAQs/index.htm

Edited 2014-08-12 20:29 (UTC)

"the Bible has little to say about homosexuality and an awful lot to say about being compassionate, so cut it out, jerks."

That strikes me as eminently practical. The point about the accepted degrees of sin in all cases but homosexuality is especially interesting to me. There's some argument-by-shrimp—"Clearly, we no longer follow any such laws"—but it's not the whole of the argument.

If you're really curious for something in depth, I can ask the minister of my church, who is gay and whose husband is also a minister.

I am curious; I feel I hear much more about the condemnatory side of this debate than the welcoming.

sairaali mentions Radical Love, upthread.

Here's what I wrote to the pastor of my church:

"I have a friend (who is queer and Jewish) who has been feeling upset lately because of some hateful things some Evangelical Christians have been saying. Knowing that the Episcopal church, particularly in New England, is very much on the side of gay rights, she wanted to know why we support the full rights and humanity of gay people even though some other branches of Christianity don't.

The best I could say was roughly "because human beings!" I said that Jesus was very clear about loving each other and that nothing else comes close to that in importance, and also that by our traditions we aren't bible-bound - that we are a living faith of which scripture is just one pillar, that we are guided by the holy spirit. I knew enough to be able to link to Integrity USA's FAQ. But is there another resource you can think of that I should point her to?"

His response:

"Excellent that you referred her to Integrity. I’m not aware of another official source to which you could refer her, though surely resolutions passed at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church demonstrate a historic movement (from the early 1970s) toward full inclusion. The theological principles which undergird full inclusion of LGBTQ folk centers on the incarnation and the trinity. The former is all about Jesus’s humanity and divinity, and Anglicanism has long held a very high regard for humanity in all its expressions (e.g. “because human beings). The latter is all about relationships—and just as there’s diversity in God’s own self, there is diversity among God’s people."

(The Integrity link above does detail some of these resolutions.)

Also if it's not clear from what I've saying, there are MAJOR doctrinal differences, if you come down to it, between the protestant branches. There's a reason Methodists aren't Presbyterians aren't Episcopalian.

I am aware of this fact. I am not Christian, but I have been unavoidably exposed to different denominations throughout my life; I have some idea of what differentiates a number of them, which is not the same as a personal experience of their faith or a detailed knowledge of their theology, hence my original question. You are religiously mansplaining at me.

What tradition were you raised in—or, if different, which do you live by?

Regarding what Saira says about Christianity and the Law above, I don't know that the development of the early church matters at this point at all.

Then your previous comment, about needing to know context—?

That's the reason there is a bigger split between mainline Christians and Evangelical Christians than there is between mainline Christians and Reform Jews, or mainline Christians and Buddhists.

I feel this statement is inaccurate and eliding, but I would like a better knowledge of Buddhism before I argue it with you. I cannot tell in any case if you are intending to be provocative.

Edited 2014-08-12 19:49 (UTC)

You are religiously mansplaining at me.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I have no knowledge of what you know and don't know, and was attempting to say I don't speak for everyone. I grew up Presbyterian but also sometimes attended Methodist churches and eventually converted to Episcopalianism, but am atheist (in the sense that I don't believe in a theistic God) while still self-defining as Christian (because it is a way for me to express wonder at the universe). Within each of these traditions, I have gravitated toward more politically liberal churches (ones which were part of the civil rights struggle, or which were female-led, or which had significant gay membership).

My comment about "bigger split" is not around a difference of doctrine but in the nature of "who do we sit around and complain about." The vast majority of people at my church would rather, from what I can tell from how they behave and what they say, hang out with mainstream jews or buddhists than with Evangelicals, and are generally more admiring of those faiths than they are of, for instance, Catholicism. It's kind of this attitude of "here are people who see the truth through a different lens" (Judaism, Buddhism) versus "here are people who are saying offensive nonsense (Evangelicals).

Similarly, speaking of the development of the early church, what I'm saying is it doesn't affect my faith at all and if I asked most people who identify as Christian whether they cared about, like, the text of the Edict of Nantes, they wouldn't. Or they might know about what stuff came from Mithraic cults instead of probably the teachings of Jesus, but they're not going to take it any less seriously for knowing it. Christianity is not, in my experience, a law-bound religion, and that's not a radical thing to say.

I hope you will apologise for the mansplaining comment, by which I mean the literal words I said: this is something I hope. Not because you're obligated to but because it would mean something to me.

I am not a man and was not assuming superior knowledge based on gender but because you asked for a liberal Christian to talk about liberal Christianity from a personal perspective, such that it's very reasonable for me to be uncertain of what you know.

From my perspective, I thought it would be very rude of me to assume "well everybody knows lots about Christianity and know about each of the sects and diocesian disputes within those sects! It's the only normal valid background to have!"

It may not have read that way to you, but I was trying very hard to reach out in friendship and helpfulness during what is a not-good time for me.

Edited 2014-08-12 22:38 (UTC)

It may not have read that way to you, but I was trying very hard to reach out in friendship and helpfulness during what is a not-good time for me.

I am very sorry that things are not going well for you. I did not intend to imply that everything you said in this post was without value or already known to me—I would not have asked for a liberal Christian viewpoint if I were able to supply one myself and I do not discount your experience of the religion within which you live. It was the assumption specifically that I had no idea that there were different kinds of Christianity that made me feel talked down to. I think of that as a very basic religious fact, patent from daily experience in this country and any amount of history. Even if I cannot myself describe the theological reasons that Methodists aren't Presbyterians aren't Episcopalians, I am aware that they differ from one another and that the reasons for it exist. It seemed already implicit in the conversation that I wasn't asking, "Hey, so why do all you Christians think . . ." Hence the feeling of being told, as if I'd never heard of it, something I had already made clear I knew: hence "mansplaining." I do not believe you were talking out of a gender-based assumption of stupidity on my part. I don't have a better term for being told things I know and take for granted from context that other people know I know. It surprised me.

From my perspective, I'm not trying to say "you don't realize they're different." What I was tryiing to point to is the distinction between the ministerial experience of Christianity and the laity. Ministers and people who mount doctrinal defenses are drilling down into the details of whether a given branch embraces, for instance, Calvinism, and if so, in what way. These are relevant to doctrinal defenses of homosexuality.

However, those distinctions are not directly relevant to a lot of churchgoers. A lot of people choose their church based on whether the choir is good, whether they like the hymnal, and whether they like the specific preacher. Most christians do not stay in one denomination their whole life; I'd say staying in one denomination is pretty uncommon. They couldn't tell you what their given denomination thinks of various heresies, only what they think Jesus would want. And it's the body of the church that tends to pressure the higher ups to change how they're reading the bible. It's very analogous to representative democracy, and how people moving from one state to another state then vote in that state.

Meanwhile, again very much like state politics, there are severe divisions even within churches. For instance, there are major splits in the Episcopal church right now over homosexuality and over the ordination of women. The lefty American churches have broken with the Church of England. the righty American churches have broken with the American bishopric and some of them now report to a bishop in Africa. There's a similar split between Scottish Rite Presbyterians and non-Scottish-Rite Presbyterians. I think it's only recently that the Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists/Anabaptists reconciled, although I think some of the Southern Baptist churches switched to being Pentacostal. (I could be wrong; I'm not as up on the status of Baptists.)

As a churchgoer, those splits only sort of influence me, because if I was going to a church that ended up on the wrong side, I'd just swap churches, like you swap candidates. What I'm trying to get at about Evangelical christianity being really by the book -- it's weird. It's not my experience of Christianity, which is almost alarmingly a la carte.

I have no knowledge of what you know and don't know, and was attempting to say I don't speak for everyone.

See ~~below~~ above, which I answered first because that's what I saw first when I got back to LJ. I appreciate the attempt not to talk over my head, but it backfired and left me feeling that because I was asking for information in a specific field, you assumed I was wholly ignorant of the field in question.

My comment about "bigger split" is not around a difference of doctrine but in the nature of "who do we sit around and complain about."

Understood. Bracketed between comments about the importance of salvation and the conflict over regeneration, it looked like a doctrinal statement and left me wondering seriously if it was some kind of devil's advocate argument or whether you meant it as a straightforward equivalence of religions. You had just described Protestant Christianity as a "church of one," with the individual choosing which portions of their tradition are meaningful to them and which they feel no compunction to observe. Reform Judaism emphasizes personal autonomy over the binding nature of halakha and mitzvot; each person is encouraged to interpret Jewish law and custom for themselves, holding to or discarding observances as appropriate or necessary. You could very honestly have been telling me that you thought Reform Jewish beliefs and practices were more like the beliefs and practices of non-evangelical Christians than those of non-evangelical Christians were like those of evangelicals, with the same going for Buddhism, in which case I disagreed: and would have felt comfortable explaining why I disagreed in terms of Judaism, but I knew I didn't have enough background in Buddhism to argue point-by-point if you meant it.

Edited 2014-08-13 01:18 (UTC)

the writings of the bible, although they may have been divinely inspired, are not the word of God and were filtered through the time and the people writing them (much as believed by Reform Jews)

Nor do Conservative Jews uncritically accept the Torah as the very words dictated by God to Moses at Mount Sinai—as far as I know, that position is held only by Orthodox Judaism and is the source of much of the refusal to accept non-Orthodox practices as validly Jewish. Certainly everyone I knew who studied at JTS got some training in historical criticism. Reconstructionist Judaism views halakha as a set of folkways rather than binding laws, so there's no question of literal divine revelation. I am actually much less clear on the official position of Reform Judaism, except I agree I would be surprised if they thought an actual set of six-thousand-year-old, Tetragrammaton-written tablets had been dropped into anybody's arms.

(I'm not exactly explaining my personal views here; I'm explaining the mainline Christian attitude.)

I understand the difference. The mainline attitude is not one that's congenial to me: I have a hard time believing the "respect" part when it's embedded in "We respect your religion, but you should really notice one of these days it's totally irrelevant and outdated and has no point." I understand that for a proselytizing religion, genuine acceptance of other coexisting faiths may miss the point, but it's the same double vision as "We love you no matter who you are, but we really think you'd be happier if you were straight."

Obviously, it's a really annoying thing to say to someone "you don't know it, but you're secretly Christian," but it's definitely something that's central to the liturgy.
Because there's not a seperate Jewish god or Hindu God or atheist space where God is not. That's the Christian definition of God.

Yes; I was allergic to that formulation when I encountered it in the example of the Calormene Emeth in The Last Battle ("All the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me . . . for he and I are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him") and it hasn't become any more acceptable to me in the years since. It's not inclusion, it's assimilation. "In the long run, of course, all good men everywhere are allies of Spain. No good man can not be, and no man who is not can be good."

But if you want to say that everybody needs to do it because of the Bible, that's silly.

Just to make sure we're not arguing a point past each other, I don't believe any branch of Judaism lives by the expectation that non-Jews will observe Jewish customs or commandments. If they elect to, I think the results are Jews for Jesus and quite a lot of people being sad.

Just to make sure we're not arguing a point past each other, I don't believe any branch of Judaism lives by the expectation that non-Jews will observe Jewish customs or commandments. If they elect to, I think the results are Jews for Jesus and quite a lot of people being sad.

Yep, I'm pretty clear about that. I'm not sure the people holding the signs have thought that far or have a clear sense of what anybody much else believes. (For instance, I know more about concordances with Reform than Conservative tradition just because I've dated more of one than the other, although in both cases I mostly know enough not to be a jerk rather than enough to know the details of what's going on.)

Really what I was surprised by a bit in the article where it seemed to me the writer was shocked that one faith wasn't being respectful of the traditions of another faith, when that seems like something that's a part of faith, if you think it's true that there's one god and you know what that god thinks. It would be kind of like me saying I respect someone else's position that evolution didn't happen. I don't think that's true; we're not going to compromise on it. I might not fight about it because I might not care whether someone believes in evolution, but I'm not going to say "hmmm, guess maybe they didn't evolve."

And yeah, is is a lot like "well, I think you're secretly straight." (In fact it is hard for me to shake my feeling that people are sexually fluid, whatever they might say, but I know that this is unreasonable and not relevant most of the time, and the only reason for me to try to persuade someone to that view is if I were trying to sleep with them, in which case I ought to take no for an answer.) There's a real limit to interfaith dialog; there might be stuff the religions agree on, but there's a ton of stuff they disagree on, and that stuff is not going to move.

the writings of the bible, although they may have been divinely inspired, are not the word of God and were filtered through the time and the people writing them (much as believed by Reform Jews)

I'm making a distinction here not between Christianity and Judaism, but between contemporary mainline Protestantism and the more fundamentalist branches of Evangelical Protestantism, which do hold every word as sacred and exact (although not so much so as to require reading it in the original languages, presumably because the translations were also divinely guided).

Edited 2014-08-12 20:13 (UTC)

The first Outlander episode is available for free on Youtube, but one has to log in (to declare adulthood) to watch it. I wonder if in fact the licky scene is the reason for the rating, rather than the bed-squeaking scenes (or in addition to, I suppose).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlTvwLb2v9Q

Edited 2014-08-12 20:32 (UTC)

The first Outlander episode is available for free on Youtube, but one has to log in (to declare adulthood) to watch it. I wonder if in fact the licky scene is the reason for the rating, rather than the bed-squeaking scenes (or in addition to, I suppose).

I wouldn't be surprised.

Thank you! I had no idea it was online.

I suspect we're meant to get hooked and rush to subscribe to the Starz network.

I suspect we're meant to get hooked and rush to subscribe to the Starz network.

That's probably not going to happen in my case, but I will totally watch a free pilot. My day has been entirely composed of waiting for a bed to arrive that so far has not, so sex and time travel has to be more fun.

I only hope you have all of a bed now.

1. *Do you like Euripides?*

I'm afraid this reminds me of the friend who used to chant "Euripedes, Eu-pay-for-des!" whilst pointing at his jeans after a certain level of cider. Please don't stab me.

4. *I faintly feel ashlyme was responsible.*

I'm okay holding my hand up to that. *hugs* from the Midland Levels.

I only hope you have all of a bed now.

We have a bed! I posted a ridiculous pulp cover to celebrate!

I'm afraid this reminds me of the friend who used to chant "Euripedes, Eu-pay-for-des!" whilst pointing at his jeans after a certain level of cider. Please don't stab me.

You can make it worse if the second name is "Eumenides" . . .

*hugs* from the Midland Levels.

*hugs*

Thank you. It has been an exhausting day.

0. [aka, next post] Yay that you finally have a real, designedforthepurpose frame! ANd that it does facilitate sleep!

1. Tempting. It's gonna be tempting - if I don't unexpectedly get called in to work - to make a whirlwind trip to Boston Monday.

2. I will maybe say something intelligent about this tomorrow, when I am not hitting "post" by mistake for "reply" and do not have to be back at work in 9.5 hours.

Meantime, http://www.bricktestament.com/the_law/what_not_to_eat/lv11_03.html

5. Deargod, they're making The Books of Scotsmen into a tv show?
...I guess that kinda makes sense, actually.
Yes, there are sex scenes. And then there is self-administered slash.

Yay that you finally have a real, designedforthepurpose frame! ANd that it does facilitate sleep!

It does! It did last night! I'm really looking forward to repeating the experiment again tonight)!

Tempting. It's gonna be tempting - if I don't unexpectedly get called in to work - to make a whirlwind trip to Boston Monday.

Prrrt. Keep me posted if you do.

I will maybe say something intelligent about this tomorrow, when I am not hitting "post" by mistake for "reply" and do not have to be back at work in 9.5 hours.

Awesome; I look forward.

Meantime

"Blech! I didn't order the hyrax!"

(Nice use of Dracula there, too. Hee.)

You've every cause to doubt me

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