TYT: 'Noah' Hate Reveals The Disturbing Hypocrisy Of Religion

[WhoIsNumberNone]

"Noah director Darren Aronofsky on Tuesday responded to critics who have called his version of the biblical character an "environmental wacko."

Speaking to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, the director was asked if he believed that label to be accurate.

"It's in Genesis," he replied. "Noah is saving the animals; he's not out there saving innocent babies; he's saving the animals, he's saving creation.""* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.

[phantom power]

1. Aronofsky didn't realize he was sticking his fork in the tribal-politics electric socket?

Conservatives think they own the bible, and they also hate environmentalism. Why? Because liberals like it, and that's reason enough.

[markpkessinger]

5. "Conservatives think they own the Bible" -- indeed they do . . .

. . . that's why I had a real problem with the entire second half of the video, where they engaged in their (very ill-informed, I might add) critique of liberal Christianity. What the discussion boils down to is something like, "Yeah, liberal Christians are great people, but the fundamentalists have more integrity about their beliefs." They suggest that liberal Christians just "don't know" about the passages in the bible that they, the panelists, find objectionable. Uh, yeah, we do. But by insisting that the only way to take the Bible seriously is to apply a single interpretive framework to every word from Genesis through Revelation, they are buying into the same erroneous framing used by the fundamentalists. In other words, they are accepting that the fundamentalists 'own the bible.'

I got into this very recently in the comments to an article on Alternet. Two atheists were laying into a woman, a progressive Christian, essentially telling her how bankrupt her position was, and that they at least respected fundamentalists for taking the bible 'seriously.' I don't usually get into discussions like this because (a) I don't feel particularly defensive over criticisms of Christianity (many are quite valid and (b) many I probably even share. But I jumped in because they were obviously clueless as to their own prior assumptions and how those prior assumptions were getting in the way of understanding what the progressive Christian woman was trying to tell them. Here's what I wrote (note that 'Lolima' refers to the progressive Christian poster):

What I think you might be missing here, if I may interject, is that whether or not you realize it, your argument presupposes an uncritical acceptance the religious right's interpretive framework for the Bible, as well as its claim that the Bible is the sole source of authority for the Christian faith. Evangelical fundamentalists believe in both the literal truth as well as the plenary inspiration of Scripture: that is, they believe that the Bible is literally true, and that every word of it is equally literally true. Yes, I know, and I'm pretty sure Lolima knows, why the religious right believes what it believes. But I firmly dispute that the fundamentalist approach constitutes "taking the bible seriously," let alone the claim that it is the only way to take the bible 'seriously.'

Actually, I would argue the opposite. I would argue that giving equal weight to every word, every book and every passage of the bible, and applying the same standard of literal interpretation to each, represents a total failure to take the Bible seriously because it fails to consider how the Bible, as we know it, came to be. As I mentioned upthread, the canon of scripture -- that is, the Bible -- was not finalized until the 4th century C.E. But even apart from that, one cannot lift a passage from, say 2 Timothy (likely written in the late 60s C.E., that claims that "All scripture is inspired by God. . .", and honestly claim that it applies to the Bible as we know it, because many of the books of the New Testament had not yet been written.

Also, again as mentioned upthread, applying the same kind of interpretive framework to every book of the bible -- let alone applying a standard of literal meaning that would have been foreign to the writers and hearers of those texts at the time they were written --, is in any case a highly suspect approach in that it fails to take into account that the Bible is a collection of devotional and cultural texts written over a period of centuries, and comprised of many different literary forms. Some parts are allegory, some parts were listings of laws, some parts were poetry (some of it pretty saucy, at that!), and some were a kind of history (with the caveat that 'history' as understood in the 1st C. was a rather different thing from our modern, rationalist conception of history as a more or less objective, sequential record of events).

The whole conflict arises from the double-edged sword that was the Protestant reformation. That is, the great thing about the Protestant Reformation(s) was that it took the Bible out of the exclusive hands of the clergy and gave it to the average Joe, who could then read it for himself. And the bad thing about it was that it put the Bible in the hands of the average Joe, who then proceeded to do so, often with little grounding in interpretive context or education -- which yielded predictably mixed results. That is why, among some Eastern Orthodox Christians, there is a belief that the Bible should be read and interpreted only in the context of the worship of the gathered community, and should never be read or interpreted by an isolated individual. (Not sure I agree with that, but I get what they are trying to avoid.)

Finally, many Christians do not accept the Bible as the sole source of authority. In my own tradition (Anglican/Episcopalian), we look to Scripture, yes, but also to tradition, reason and collective experience. And tradition and reason are applied to our interpretation of the Bible. For example, somewhere upthread someone cited a passage from Luke that says that if a person does not hate his father and mother, he cannot be Jesus' disciple. But there is at no time in the history of the Church any tradition of interpreting that passage as being a literal call to hate one's parents. And that tradition of interpretation is itself a source of authority that must be considered. And applying a bit of reason, the conclusion is that it is a bit of hyperbole employed to make a point about the potential cost of discipleship, and about one's priorities.

Here's a link to the thread: http://disqus.com/home/#discussion/alternet/why_does_the_religious_right_think_the_bible_should_trump_america039s_laws/comment-1294466442

[joe_stampingbull]

2. Earth and religion: which is more important?

You can live without religion but you can't live without the Earth.

[Blue Owl]

3. The Last Temptation of Noah

n/t

[The CCC]

4. YT: 'Noah' Hate Reveals The Disturbing Hypocrisy Of Religion View profile

Atheism particularly of the 20th Century AD is such a shining example liberal action.

BTW. It was Christians in the 19th Century AD that got rid of slavery in the US.

[The Magistrate]

6. And Christians Who Fought Tooth And Nail To Maintain Slavery, Sir: What Is Your Point?

"Enquiring minds want to know!"

[Peace Patriot]

7. Bill Cosby did the best bit on Noah ever done.

This ancient tale, which dates to the 17th Century BC--a Sumerian story* that the Noah story nearly replicates in every detail--is best left to talented comedians to re-tell once again. (Cosby is brilliant at it.) If there is anything that makes a joke of the Bible it is the Noah story--God as a plagiarist! It's just stupid to treat the Noah story as history and to make a movie out of it, to mislead millions of people that this was a REAL event in the founding of the Judeo-Christian male-worshiping religion.

The "greening" of Noah is irrelevant. It's a FALSE story concocted by the old men who wrote the Bible, who had copied it from a much more ancient source, and who were trying to drag their wives and daughters away from Goddess worship into worshiping MEN.

Only a male 'god'--and a fake--would kill everybody except Noah and his family. The ORIGINAL story is obviously the result of some traumatic weather suffered by VERY ANCIENT people who attributed the Flood to the god Enki. Should we therefore be worshiping Enki and sacrificing oxen and sheep to solve global warming?

This is so absurd--taking this story literally and making a movie out of it!

As for God torturing "His Son" to death, and some Christians getting off on the torture to this very day (that abomination of a movie, "The Passion of Christ&quot --it's not only weird--as Cenk Uygur points out--I have often thought that the crucial error in Christianity occurred when the crucifix replaced the fish as its symbol. From that--change of focus from life (the fish) to torture and murder (the cross)--we get witchburnings and bloody crusades and other horrors that surely Jesus ("love thy neighbor&quot did not intend.

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*"The tale of Ziusudra is known from a single fragmentary tablet written in Sumerian, datable by its script to the 17th century BC (Old Babylonian Empire), and published in 1914 by Arno Poebel.[11] The first part deals with the creation of man and the animals and the founding of the first cities Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larsa, Sippar, and Shuruppak. After a missing section in the tablet, we learn that the gods have decided to send a flood to destroy mankind. The god Enki (lord of the underworld sea of fresh water and Sumerian equivalent of Babylonian god Ea) warns Ziusudra, the ruler of Shuruppak, to build a large boat; the passage describing the directions for the boat is also lost. When the tablet resumes, it is describing the flood. A terrible storm raged for seven days, "the huge boat had been tossed about on the great waters," then Utu (Sun) appears and Ziusudra opens a window, prostrates himself, and sacrifices an ox and a sheep. After another break, the text resumes, the flood is apparently over, and Ziusudra is prostrating himself before An (Sky) and Enlil (Lordbreath), who give him "breath eternal" and take him to dwell in Dilmun. The remainder of the poem is lost. (text of Ziusudra epic)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziusudra#Sumerian_flood_myth
(My emphasis in boldface.) (See original for footnotes and links.)