Today's "Holy Crap" moment.

[theweaselking]

Turkey to revise the hadith

For those of you playing along at home, this is the approximate equivalent of going through the New Testament and taking out all the shit that they're sure Jesus didn't actually say. It's like excising Paul, here!

Comments

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Hm.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, this is gonna end well.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm fairly consistently a fan of Turkey. Dudes have been awesome back to when fucking CONSTANTINOPLE was the center of the universe, man.

Still wouldn't want to live there, but they've always had style.

And, hey, maybe the Christians will be embarassed enough to finally grow up and insert a *smidgen* of intellectual honesty into their own holy book.

No, actually, not even I can say that with a straight face.

[harald387.livejournal.com]

See, the headline didn't click as the name of the country the first time I read it; for a few moments I thought someone (as a joke) was having a bird pick out pieces of a holy text to remove.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

That might have been the most hopeful news I have heard all year, if I could have unblinking trust.

Right now, I don't.

And I don't know enough about the people actually handling this---their credidentials, their background---to comment intelligently on the chances of this succeeding.

But I guess what they come up with as revisions is going to be the criterion of that anyway.

[flemco.livejournal.com]

However, Turkey has a long-standing history of pissing off the neighbors.

This one? Yeah, this is gonna get some feathers ruffled.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Pissing off the neighbours *for awesome reasons*.

This is one of them, I think.

[frith]

An Islamic reformation. About bloody time. We might see a result in a century or so.

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

When you consider that Islam started about 5-6 centuries after Christianity, they're actually AHEAD of the powercurve.

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

Paul's a dick, end of story.

Cascading orthodoxies

[frith]

Ugh. How long until the Mormon Tabernacle Inquisition? Should I stock up on Pardons?

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

heh, not that all world religions follow the exact same detailed chain of events but like empire, they do seem to have a life curve.

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[dreamshade.livejournal.com]

I foresee a market in this Abridged Bible of yours.

"God made people, but they ate his fruit, so they had to go fuck around somewhere else."

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

I've generally seen the hadith as being a big part of the problem with Islam, other than its being an Abrahamic, monotheistic, religion (problems in decreasing order of problamaticity).

It's talked about a lot in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Years of Rice and Salt" books.

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

Yar, and then God sen his son down to Earth and he was, "Dude, chill out, give peace a chance, you care too much about yor stuff, just love one another, don't be dicks and all this stupid crap will go away.

That's right, I said it, Jesus is a hippie.

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[maskedretriever.livejournal.com]

"He had long hair, he didn't have a job, what more do you want?"
~Arnold Rimmer, Red Dwarf

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[atlasimpure.livejournal.com]

Non-union carpenter, what else?

[jackoutofthebox.livejournal.com]

Wasn't stringent enough, lets rewrite it. Just remember, it's Alaha's Holy words, we're just publicists.

[jerril]

The Hadith are not Allahs holy words. They're rumours and hearsay about what Mohamed said. The Koran is supposed to be the literal word of Allah.

They're sort of like the Christian Apocrypha, but taken far more seriously. Hmm. Judaism has a series of judgements by noted scholars that might be considered a closer equivalent, but I can't think of the name this morning.

[leighdb.livejournal.com]

Talmud.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good idea to me; much like Paul's epistles, Hadith has been misused quite extensively; the Koran, like the Gospels, can be similarly abused, but it's much less easy.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If you wanted to really get back to just Jesus, you'd have to reexamine all four Gospels, too, and dig out the inconsistent bits obviously added after the fact by embellishers.

In fact, you'd probably be best off simply starting from the Jefferson Bible and working from there if you really wanted to finally have a best-approximation of the actual facts.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

It's always hard to establish exactly what happened two thousand years ago; heck, just try to tell me exactly what you were doing at this time two thousand hours (a bit less than 12 weeks) ago!

As I understand current Catholic exegesis, the material which is most definitive is the Passion and the sayings of Jesus; much of the rest is likely based on actual events, but consists in large part of inspired narrative. Even within that limitation, there are some bits which are suspect; for instance, Jesus' and Pilate's conversations are, I suspect, largely conjectural, since they would probably have been held privately and not recorded.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Actually, reading through the Jefferson Bible, I find it rather revisionist: in contradiction to its source texts, it makes no mention of any miracles. Jefferson, shall we say, had a certain bias.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

As I said, best approximation.

But you can *clearly* see the lies mounting when you look at, say, the opening of Jesus' tomb. As the recounting gets further in time away and as the retellings mount, the number and type of people present at the empty tomb gets bigger and bigger.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. He took only what could be reasonably accepted as factual, which coincidentally was all the important stuff as far as he was concerned, and he left out all the stuff that made no sense.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

By or to him, anyway. I think he was wiser than his successors in keeping it private: it's a redaction of his personal beliefs, and isn't intended to be authoritative, as best I can tell.

Is it better to link Christ's teachings to his divine nature, or not? It may be easier to accept them in a non-miraculous context in our society, but that certainly isn't true in all societies. Neither case for the facts of the matter can be proven to a scientific standard, of course, so claiming that one position or the other is justified by its veracity is relevant only on an individual basis.

Me, I want people to follow Christ's teachings, and to be open to the reality of divine contact in a sense we speak about as supernatural. It seems to me that Jefferson's reading is easily presented as a refutation of the relevance of divinity (whether or not he intended such a claim), and that is a great impoverishment of the Gospel message as I understand it.

Re: Cascading orthodoxies

[telarus.livejournal.com]

And he got thrown on the cross because he leaked the secret of the Herb in the Anointing Oil, so the Temple priesst bitched to the landlord(Romans) about the heretic.