Frank 013 wrote: at the time the biblical scripture was written... the vast majority of people believed that heaven was a physical place that one could go to. Also the idea of an actual heaven is the most literal reading, you are free to divert from that idea as much as you wish, I just do not think that many people are going to follow suit. OK, so that approach is more sensible but when has sensibility been a prerequisite for religious text? As I mentioned before other religions such as Islam which is not much more that war cult would never fall in line with such a translation. Furthermore Christian fundamentalists would not accept it either.
Well, as Einstein said when 100 scientists criticised him, it would only take one who was right. My question here is about the essential meaning intended by Jesus, not how he was misinterpreted by an ignorant populace. There seems to me to be a deeper hidden meaning which actually makes sense, so even if it is unpopular the truth should out. The ideas in the gospels have a deep coherence which suggests a strong intuitive genius on Jesus' part. He could not have known for certain if the world was flat, or even if Mr Pitchfork was actually floating on his lava lake a mile below the ground tormenting evildoers. We now know these old myths are false, but that is no excuse to toss the baby out with the bathwater. Jesus said in the parable of the wheat and tares that divine judgement would eventually separate the inter-mixed good and evil. My view of this teaching is that when a popular error, such as belief in a physical heaven, has become a dogma, that is a perversion of the truth which needs to be discarded in the way Jesus predicted crops and weeds could be separated. It is hypocritical for the church to say "God is Truth" while clinging to a literal reading they know to be false. The afterlife is a comforting story, but it totally lacks any evidentiary or ethical basis. By contrast, there is a compelling ethical basis in the vision of a transformed world, so it is worth exploring how that may be what Jesus actually meant by sayings such as 'thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.'
When did the holy spirit commit rape? The way I interpret the trinity is that the father is the local area of the cosmos, the son is Jesus, the man most fully attuned to cosmic energies on our planet, and the spirit is the reverberation between the cosmos and human attunement to it. This is a purely natural pantheist view, which I suggest is compatible with the essential ideas of the Bible and with modern science. So blaspheming against the spirit is saying that humanity cannot be attuned to the cosmos. I can see why JC thought that would be unforgiveable, even though it is widespread now via the evangelicalist heresy.Well if a person does not believe in such a thing as the ridiculous, wife raping, Holy Spirit then blaspheming it is just a matter of taking an honest look at it.
Utterly absent? Maybe, unless you read the whole bible and take all the stories as face value, instead of cherry picking specific passages and claiming that the others that do not agree with your interpretation are false additions or meant to be interpreted in a different way. [The parable of Dives and Lazarus at Luke 16:19] and others like it abound throughout the bible. It is clear (at least to me) that the writers of the biblical text were ignorant to the extreme about earthly and heavenly reality. I see no reason to turn to such ignorance and try to add enlightenment to it, or glean enlightenment from it. In matters of enlightenment, spirituality and society I prefer to look forward not back. Later
The true meaning of Dives and Lazarus is that Christ takes a preferential option for the poor, and that poverty attunes people to reality while wealth causes a selfish divorce from the real world through the ability to invent an imaginary lie. This is a big reason why the USA is so loathed around the world, that in Paul's terms in Romans 1, they worship the creature rather than the creator. Poor people are forced to rely on the creator because they have no choice, and this gives their lives more authenticity, even if bad education and religious dogma conspire to make them also believe many things that are not true. Jesus chose to give poor people the dream of heaven as an allegorical comfort and a vindication. That does not mean he literally believed it, any more than in his other parables he believed that stories such as the merchant finding the pearl of great price had actually happened. Parables are vignettes designed to convey a message, not scientific hypotheses.
Given that the Bible says the final prophetic analysis of the messianic message will involve discarding a vast quantity of dross to find the gold within (Malachi 3:2), I think it is necessary to re-assess this book to find what is useful for the modern world, and to trenchantly oppose those interpretations that are wrong and useless. It is all about finding an evolutionary path for humanity