See, what I find fun about wrestling with religious texts is not giving them any slack - is saying, okay, yes, product of time and culture and so forth, but we still have to deal with this story. My favorite example here is the whole bit in Genesis about how, pre-Flood, the Lord wants us to be vegetarians, and only afterwards does He relent on eating meat. Does that suggest that it's more virtuous to be a vegetarian, and that eating meat is not really the preferred option? I don't like that idea - because I like meat - but it does make me uncomfortable. The temptation is to just ignore that section or to say "don't worry, superseded by later rules!", but it's right there in the text.
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orichalcum.livejournal.com at 08:05pm on 11/03/2009![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
See, what I find fun about wrestling with religious texts is not giving them any slack - is saying, okay, yes, product of time and culture and so forth, but we still have to deal with this story. My favorite example here is the whole bit in Genesis about how, pre-Flood, the Lord wants us to be vegetarians, and only afterwards does He relent on eating meat. Does that suggest that it's more virtuous to be a vegetarian, and that eating meat is not really the preferred option? I don't like that idea - because I like meat - but it does make me uncomfortable. The temptation is to just ignore that section or to say "don't worry, superseded by later rules!", but it's right there in the text.