426
Vatican calls gender fluidity and surrogacy threats to human dignity
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
426 points (95.5% liked)
World News
38147 readers
2341 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I mean, no update needed:
This passage uses a plural for God and refers to the image of God as male and female (likely a remnant of when it was a divine couple before the reforms, but still).
This "dominition over other living beings" thing is an antique mindset that caused so much damage to the environment.
True, but Genesis also says that humans were made to tend the Garden of Eden, so others argue, based on that and a few other passages, that humans are supposed to care for the Earth.
As usual, the Bible can be interpreted any way you want it to. You can use it to defend murder and use it to condemn murder. The same book.
Or it can be interpreted as the royal "we." Regardless, he's called "he" pretty much everywhere else afterwards.
The royal 'we' develops later on, likely in part because of the Bible.
And yes, there are references to 'he' or 'Father' but it's important to keep in mind (a) Hebrew is a binary gendered language with no neutral 'Parent' as an option, and (b) there's extensive evidence of revisionist misogyny in the Old Testament where you go from a woman prophet leading the Israelites to a "Queen Mother" being deposed and major religious reforms that include banning the worship of the women for their goddess who was evidenced as married to Yahweh before those reforms.
This is pretty academic in my opinion. Modern Jews and Christians view their god as a 'he' regardless of what it says in an archaic version of Hebrew.
It reminds me of the 'was there a real Jesus' debate. It doesn't matter beyond an academic discussion. The Jesus Christians worship was a literal god who performed miracles and came back from the dead. He was a fiction.
The academic matters.
Arguably more than the fiction.
Yes, it's true that many, many people believe very strongly in the fictions that arose around the realities that the academic cuts closer to.
But reality matters.
I'm sure we might agree that it would be absurd to say that the stories of Homer, because of how they are treasured by audiences in their own right, should invalidate the importance of better learning the historical realities on which they drew.
There was a history. That history is not what was canonized in the Torah. It was not what was canonized in the New Testament.
And at least to me, that history is much, much more interesting than the fantasies and propaganda which eroded it.
It will not change anyone's beliefs. Faith is belief in the face of evidence, not because of it. Telling believers that "actually, in Genesis, God is referred to as both male and female" will not matter one bit to them because that's not the god they believe in and it will never be the god they believe in.
It's not necessarily for them. They aren't the center of the universe, even if they believe it to be so.
Other people who care about evidence and history and reality might be interested in the fact that originally there was a claimed prophet and leader of the Israelites who was a woman named 'bee' around the time there was an apiary in Tel Rehov importing queen bees from Anatolia as the only honey production in "the land of milk and honey" where inside the apiary was one of the earliest four horned altars (later appearing as an Israelite altar feature) dedicated to a goddess for example.
I could care less if an Orthodox conservative religious person believes that's true or not. Archeology tells us unequivocally that the apiary and altar were true, and that's valuable context for untangling the folk history that was being reshaped by later hands.
Yes, that's what I was saying, it's academic.
And as I said, the academic matters.
It matters to other people interested in the academics. It has no significant impact on the world.
That simply isn't true. If a group of people make claims about history that are provably false, not just about supernatural stuff but about actual events which feed into their attitudes towards modernity, then the availability of accurate information about what really did or didn't happen is quite relevant to people that deconvert, or oppose that group and their positions, etc.
The idea that there's a dichotomy of either "believe in BS" or "don't care" cedes the claims over history to the fanatical.
Personally, I care about knowing my real ancestral history. I care about knowing my real cultural history. To me, the historical reality of the book of Joshua being anachronistic BS that flies in the face of the archeological reality of the Israelites cohabitating peacefully with Philistines and Canaanites has quite profound implications for a major modern world news topic, and recontextualizes phrases like Leviticus's "love thy neighbor as yourself" and "love the alien residing among you as yourself."
A historical reality of an early history of cohabitation with ethnically different neighbors as opposed to the claimed history of conquering those neighbors is relevant in opposing the dogmatic claims of justified oppression of others and in interpreting the tradition that history left behind. Even if it gets ignored by the 'faithful' it's a useful context for those standing in opposition to their claims and dogma.
What measurable effect has learning about the original translations of Biblical texts had on the world?
You're asking how discoveries in the past few decades have impacted millennia old traditions? Your evaluation may be a bit premature.
But as one example we've seen more progressive religious groups who learned 'Lucifer' was a mistranslation of Isaiah turn away from the Enochian interpretations of those passages and a distancing from the Milton-esque portrayal of sinister forces still present in things like American evangelical circles.
Analyses like Idan Dershowitz's of Leviticus's homosexuality bans that reveal it as a later addition to earlier laws have been a source of solace to many religious folk who felt at odds with a presumed Mosaic law.
Also -- a rigorous understanding of the underlying history of the text and its circumstances relies on far more than just 'translations.'
And there too, the work is still ongoing.
There's going to be serious upsets in what people think they know about the Old Testament period and history in the next few decades given emerging research trends - but just like how in medicine it takes 17 years from research to broad awareness in practice, it's going to take some time for discoveries in the past few years to snowball to broader awareness and perspective shifts.
Considering evangelicals and other Christian extremists are gaining power in many countries, I'm not sure that this is a good example.
I'm not sure what 'emerging research trends.' If you mean trends of fewer people going to churches or identifying themselves as religious, that doesn't mean they don't believe whatever translation of the Old Testament they happen to believe is anything but history.
They were saying the same thing during the Enlightenment. They were wrong then too.
No, more things like the increased number of Ashkenazi users of ancestry sites including ancient samples confused by their closest genetic match being 3,700 year old Minoan graves or Iron Age Anatolian samples in parallel to archeology finding increased prevalence of early Iron Age Aegean style pottery made with local clay in supposed Israelite ancestral sites or the discovery of previously unknown Anatolian trade lines around honey production and four horned altars.
A lot of the ancient Greek and Roman historians of antiquity are going to be vindicated a bit for unanimous assertions that have been dismissed by modern perspectives heavily influenced by anchoring and survivorship biases from our sources.
What are you even talking about?
Don't worry about it. It's just academic stuff.
It sounds like irrational stuff if you're tying how religious people are today and will be in the future to the genetic lineage of Ashkenazi Jews.
I'm not sure where you got that from, or why you keep being so hung up on "how religious people are today."
Me:
You:
Me:
You:
But I guess you answered my initial question. Learning about the original translations of Biblical texts have had no measurable effect on the world.
"What people think they know about the Old Testament period and history" is markedly different from "how religious people are today and in the future."
But with your last 'quote' there I think you said everything that needed to be said. Good luck with your opinions. I hope they work out for you.