Message #16891

[mccoy]

Steve,  I agree that, from those passages, in comparison Gengis Khan sounds like a meek and pious conqueror, I remember the passage where Elijah was praised for having slaughtered a few hundred people. Yet Elijah was a great prophet, almost liberated, like Yogananda writes.

I believe there are a few aspects about that.

1) As you were musing, those scriptures are a fruit of the deep kali yuga
2) many passages are metaphorical and a deep knowledge of the social and historical context would be needed to grasp the hidden meaning
3) some passages have an esoterical meaning which just escapes most readers and surely escapes the Christian pastors. For example, St. Peter killed one couple of Christians because they lied about their possessions (they didn't want to share them as it was custom among the first Christian communities). Now, Jesus' foremost disciple Killing people for having told lies? That would just be preposterous. A grotesquerie of an holy scripture.Instead, we know from Yogananda that St. Peter was but a channel , an unconscious catalyst for Karma to work, those disciples were automatically punished for many previous bad actions, not just lies to St. Peter.

There are some Christian philosophers who are well aware of these contradictions and many times are able to elucidate the facts in a rational way.

Dawkins the strong atheist, who has criticized those weird passages of the bible, has been on his turn criticized for not knowing what he was speakng about. That is, Christian theologists have a rational explanation for most, or all the weird passages. Some of'em are  satisfactory, I don't know'em all.

And I concur that it would take a criminally insane mind to take those passages literally