Mind Food

My new bible shipped today, so that’s on the way. If nothing else it’s a nice hardcover book 📚 coming in a nice package 📦. Savor the unpacking process like Christmas Day. Then open to the apostolic letters to try to find the heading “Not Philosophy but Christ.” In that section is where Paul claims that even philosophy is a carnal pleasure…. which doesn’t ring true to me. If Plato for instance were carnal then why did he write so much about the spirit world? Furthermore, remember that Plato lived and wrote roughly four hundred fifty years before Christ was born. Still further, one of the apostles borrowed a Platonic notion regarding the ideal world in his epistle. I remember running across it once or twice. The important thing to know about the Bible is that it wasn’t written down in a vacuum. It had influences from classical antiquity, and that’s why we have so many ancient tales of martyrs, virgin births, the arraignment and revenge of deities (compare Jesus Christ to Dionysus in Euripides), and a lot of common themes suggesting continuity of all human history and mythology that was written down. Campbell has already observed the fact. The Bible was surrounded by a whole vast record left by humankind. Moreover, it was arbitrary how the Church picked certain books of the Bible for inclusion. What they judged to be not divinely inspired they rejected. But those clergymen were human beings… This sort of “relativism” is the truth. The common thread for all of it is humanity, nothing greater or lesser. How can any one vision of God or the gods come forward as the only one? Any thinking layperson can ask this question, and she would be right…

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