Date: Sun, 05 Oct 1997 08:44:46 +0100
From: Carsten Agger <agger-AT-faklen.dk>
Subject: Re: PKF: (Re-) Introducing myself


David Geelan wrote:

> Part of your last message may have had us at cross-purposes, however.
> The organisation of which I am a member, to which I referred, is not my
> university but the Christian church.

    OK, then I get it!

> I got the impression - and I may
> have assumed to much - that your group is as much against Christian
> absolutism as any other kind, possibly more, and that was what I was
> speaking of (perhaps not very clearly!), when I said:
>

    No, you're perfectly right. First of all, I do not consider myselfa
Christian, and furthermore the people behind our magazine believe
that the role of the Church should be diminished since it normally
does not tend towards improving tolerance or openness. (This is,
of course, especially true of the right wing or fundamentalist
parts of the Church). Obviously, we are not *more* opposed
to christian absolutism that other kinds - we would also reject
statements denigrating Christians as we do statements denigrating
Muslims - only the latter is infinitely more common nowadays 
than the latter, as the incident I reported shows.
    So in that sense you are right. This does not, of course, mean that
we are opposed to Christians in general - but perhaps that the days
of the Christian faith as the foundation of our culture should end
altogether -

that is, we should abandon not only the faith in itself (this has
largely
happened - today's Western society is almost completely secularized),
but also the ethics derived from it; on the other hand, much of the
nice points many people like about the New Testament, like Paul's
eulogy of love, or the admonishments of speaking your mind, loving
your neighbour etc. are not exclusively Christian but typical of the
cultures in that era.


> And no, I don't think my perspective is Berkeleyian, although there may
> be similarities. See my discussions in this group before about 'two
> forms of scepticism' - my scepticism is of the form: "there is an
> external (and in the case of God, an Ultimate) reality, but we have no
> direct access to it." (Perhaps 'constructivism' is the best name for
> this perspective.) Practically, this has exactly the same consequences
> as if there were no external reality.

Yes, now I see why we seem to agree so much, epistemologically:this is
almost
exactly my own position (as you may have gathered).
    But I think the notion of God is more difficult. If we admit the
existence
of a God, and base that on a definite religion, then we may have to look
at other religions in other cultures and find that they *also* have
gods. Are their gods imaginary while ours is real? Why should it be so?
It would be like me telling my neighbour that my dog barks, when
strangers pass by. If my neighbour then remarks that his own does the
same, he would hardly expect me to retort that I do not believe in
his imaginary dog, since I know there is only one dog?
    If we accept that Jesus was the son of God, then we must *also*
accept that similar claims in other religions had the same validity.
    But then these gods become defined (as Feyerabend said about the
Greek
gods) in a definite culture, in the reality constituted by a definite
culture,
so that the Israelites may have their Yahweh and the Philistines their
dagon, but not before the two people meet would dagon exist in any
meaningful sense of the word for the Israelites.
    We must remember that most Christian translations of the Bible are
"patched", so that various phrases and nouns which are actually names
of various Gods are made eponyms of Yahweh, which makes the Old
Testament appear to be set in a monotheistic setting, while the culture
of the time was actually very polyteistic (the Israelites were
henotheists,
but probably not until late. It is known that several gods were
worshipped
in the temple of Jerusalem).
    Since this is interesting to me, I might mention a few examples of
"patches" in most Christian translations. Since I don't have an English
translations, the following refer to errors/deliberate patches in the
Danish
translation:
    Gen 31, 13: "I am the god of Betel", in the Danish translation.
    And yet the correct translation is "I am the god Betel", where
this Betel is a well attested god from the area.
    Gen 14, 18: Danish translation: "[Melchisedek] was a priest of
God the Highest". But in the original, God The Highest is "El
Elyon", the name of a *different*god worshipped in Jerusalem
before the Exile and thus *not* identical to Yahweh.
    Deut. 32, 8-9 "When the highest reparted the peoples, he fixed
the areas of the peoples according to the number of the Sons of God..."
    (Danish transl., maltreated in English by me ;)
    But once again, "The Highest" is *not* an eponym of Yahweh,
it is *Elyon*, a different Cana'anean God which in this context is
*superior* to Yahweh.
    Yesaya 14, 13: "I raise my throne over the stars of God..."
    This expression, however, is taken from Cana'anean mythology
and does not refer to God, but to the Cana'anean god El.

So for a large part, the very "monotheistic" interpretation of the
Old Testament, and the many "christological" exegeses made by
theologians, are actually due to patches, to a consequent bias
in the translation process; actually, one major issue for our magazine
has been the documentation of these errors of translation in the
most recent Danish Bible and a demand for a translation in accordance
with the results of Semitic philology - but I suspect we still have to
wait a couple of years for that...
    (Need I say it - our magazine is *quite* unpopular with
the Danish Church, especially the more fundamentalist section ...;)

    Regards,
        carsten



>
>
> Regards,
>
> David
> --
> David R. Geelan, Science & Maths Education Centre, Curtin University
> GPO Box U1987, Perth, WA, 6107. Ph: +618 9266 3594 Fax: +618 9266 2503
> Home Page: http://alpha7.curtin.edu.au/~pgeelandr/bravus.htm
> Perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4:18
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