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lemme put it this way. my church building has big giant windows, a small walled garden, and several of the members are serious alpinists. to the people i know, nature is extremely important, but for the act of a church service or the sacrament of coffee hour, you set aside a little indoor space that everyone can use comfortably.
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Mar 31, 2024 21:47
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Pellisworth posted:iirc you're in a more evangelical / low church group so I'm sure the pastor would be more than happy to do something more private with a small group or w/e. it doesnt have to be a big stuffy ritual in front of the whole congregation. tho theres nothing wrong with that either! yeah this is just my own mental at work. big ceremonies and religious attention really bother me. i still carry around a lot of baggage from my birth congregation i think.
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Mar 31, 2024 21:48
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i mean i went to church camp in the forest/mountains every summer so we thought nature was pretty cool. there's not an awful lot of scripture directly on nature-y or environmental stuff. one of the go-to verses is in Genesis and it can also be interpreted as God wanting humans to exploit nature as we see fit (have dominion over), I've seen that used to argue that fossil fuels are good, actually. re: worldliness, I usually think about that in terms of acquiring worldly wealth and power which we're not supposed to do. afaik the world being fallen and christians set apart and not of this fallen world is more of a like, jehovah's witness thing. or a group that has a strong apocalyptic focus, "the Second Coming is any day now and we need to prepare" as a big emphasis. it's not something I think of as being a major part of more mainstream denoms? i could well be wrong. if we shouldn't hoard worldly wealth, that makes a good environmental argument about conservation and responsible use of resources I think. edit: you asked about nature and not specifically environmentalism but that's where my brain usually goes. Pellisworth fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 21:51
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Pellisworth posted:one of the go-to verses is in Genesis and it can also be interpreted as God wanting humans to exploit nature as we see fit (have dominion over), I've seen that used to argue that fossil fuels are good, actually. Aw hell yeah that's the bit people use to tell me I need to stop being vegetarian! A classic! And I didn't know the "fallen world" thing was particular to just a couple of them, interesting
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Mar 31, 2024 21:53
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Killingyouguy! posted:How do the different Christian denominations approach how one should feel about nature?
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Mar 31, 2024 21:54
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stewardship means consumption to exhaustion, and thats the most important takeaway of the imminence of the world to come
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Mar 31, 2024 21:54
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While a more approachable environmentalism is definitely one of the benefits I see to religious belief, I was more thinking about the baptism discussion and a documentary from the 70s on the Jesus Movement I watched where the longhaired Jesus people were doing a group baptism in the local lake and I was like "man, that fucks, why isn't there more of that" but like maybe the reason it appeals to me is my natural inclination towards pagan-lite nature worship poo poo so it's Wrong for documented reasons
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Mar 31, 2024 22:06
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:I would imagine for some people this participates in bias toward reading the Old Testament with some of the attitudes you have encountered, Fishbot. I took some time to think this over - thinking on Saturday, writing this very long post today. The ideas are still somewhat half-baked. I don't think the attitudes you describe are informed by antisemitism. I've been lightly posting/lurking this thread for a while and I've never seen anything I'd call remotely antisemitic. I think the phenomenon that's striking to me and, I think, some other Jewish posters, is just gentle Christian supersessionism, which I'd define as the idea that there is a limitation or incompleteness in Jewish thought and practice which is resolved by the Christian revelation. I think a really good example of it is this synopsis of a sitcom episode that a Christian user shared to explain their thinking toward the "Old Testament." I actually found the way this user describes and praises this story to be very frustrating, but also very helpful in working out why it's so frustrating. Bar Ran Dun posted:There’s a real excellent episode S4 E22 of northern exposure, Kaddish for Uncle Manny. It marks the turning point in the show where Joel transitions from outsider to community member. His uncle dies and the community attempts to gather the necessary Jews for him to sit shiva and say the Kaddish. As they near ten he rejects this and decides that the meaning is to be in community. The episode ends with him saying Kaddish with the collected community who are each remembering those they’ve lost in the manner of thier own traditions. The story here is, if I'm reading it right, a Jewish guy dropping his quest to pray in a legally-defined minyan (10+ Jewish men) because he's decided that the true meaning of praying in a minyan is about joining with the people who mean community to him. And for him that doesn't mean 9 other Jewish men he's never met before, it means the people who comfort and challenge him as he lives and works with them - the ensemble cast of the TV show. From a legalistically ritualistic perspective, that story is not a man learning a valuable lesson, it's a man making a sad mistake. In its setup it's pretty comparable to a Hasidic story which became very popular in the early days of covid, as observant Jews figured out that quarantine restrictions would prevent them from gathering together to fulfill beautiful commandments like praying in a minyan or conducting the Passover Seder. The story goes like this: Zusha and his brother Elimelech are in jail (early-generation Hasidic gurus were constantly locked up). Elimelech is inconsolable: they're stuck in this cell and they have to use a bucket in the corner as their toilet. This means they can't say their daily prayers! Jewish law is clear that the daily prayers aren't conducted in a room contaminated with human waste because of the holy names involved. And Zusha comforts him with an innovative, inspiring teaching: quote:“But you are connecting to G-d,” insisted R. Zusha. “The same G-d who commanded you to pray each morning, also commanded you to abstain from prayer under such circumstances. In a location such as this, you connect to G-d by the absence of prayer.” Soon everyone starts dancing which is normal in Hasidic stories: if we truly understood how blessed we are with opportunities to connect to God by doing mitzvahs, we'd almost always be dancing. The story ends on a punchline: the guards are furious at the prisoners experiencing spiritual joy, figure out it has something to do with the bucket, and punish the prisoners by removing it from the cell - enabling them to pray the scheduled prayers. I think in a Christian version of the story, they don't let the toilet-bucket stop them from saying the prayers they want to say - in fact I think the Christian ending to the story is basically the sequence in Northern Exposure, which, if I understand it right, is the protagonist having an epiphany along the lines of: quote:The reason we say kaddish with a minyan is that mourning is the work of an entire community, and maybe in ancient times the presence of the community was defined by 10 Jewish men, but for me today, it's defined by the diverse community of mostly-non-Jews that I've found here. The protagonist cracks open the ritual law to find its real value, the spiritual truth. And in light of the truth, continued adherence to the particular text of the ritual law is unnecessary - what matters is applying the truth. This is, correct me if I'm wrong, a normal Christian approach to Jewish law, and it runs roughly parallel to the idea that the Hebrew Bible can and should be read as foreshadowing the life and work of Jesus. To borrow a Buddhist analogy, in the Christian understanding, so much of Judaism is a finger pointing at the moon that is Jesus and his lifestyle of pious compassion. Once you can see the moon, there's really no need to keep looking at the finger - or to keep pointing. So the Christian version of the toilet-bucket story might end with a similar epiphany: quote:God gave us the law against praying with holy names in a contaminated environment to prepare us to learn from Jesus that when we pray, we are in every sense joined by him, by the presence of God. But that's exactly why we should pray now, using whatever names for God that describe the connection we crave. Jesus loves us and wants to join us, he will not be offended by the smell we are unable to control - he will suffer through it with us and it will bring the three of us closer. A ritualist-legalist response: of course there is a whole universe of spiritual truth in every commandment, it's one reason that we should leap at the chance to do pursue its fulfillment, to explore it and be faithful to it. Because we can never discover "the true spiritual meaning" of anything - there's always another dimension, another layer, of new questions and new lessons. But more importantly, there's more to mitzvahs than metaphor. As the toilet-bucket story alludes, every commandment God invites us to fulfill is, individually, a whole new type of relationship made possible by God's love of detail, by His eagerness to invest more and more holy meaning into every point and moment - and to give us the honor of helping make it happen! What if Zusha and Elimelech had conducted the daily prayers anyway, choosing to set aside the laws surrounding the use of holy names the same way the Northern Exposure protagonist chooses to set aside the legal definition of a minyan? When we break a commandment or turn down an invitation to complete one, even if it comforts us or gives a sensation of closeness to God, it has a negative effect on the relationship characterized by that mitzvah, it's creating distance there. So that's what's sad about this Northern Exposure episode. From this perspective, which has dominated Rabbinic Judaism since its inception, and which afaik is also the lens through which Muslims generally approach Sharia, OP's claim that their interpretation of the Northern Exposure story signifies "the core of an honest monotheism" is appears to be not only profoundly incorrect but actually very offensive. If rejecting the text of a law you believe to come from God is honesty, then refusing to reject it is what, dishonesty? Ignorance? Delusion? [these spoilered paragraphs are a sort of tangential derail about community belongingness, not necessary to the broader post] It's disconcerting to see this particular episode, where the protagonist learns to compromise on a ritual commitment, described as the point where the protagonist "transitions from outsider to community member." The plain reading is that at least one element of his Jewish-religious commitment was a problem that had to be overcome in the course of his assimilation into the community. That's grim, but it's also by design - a lot of Jewish law is designed to reinforce a feeling of community when the practicioner is among Jews and exile when the practicioner is among non-Jews. For traditionally ritualistic Jews who live alongside plenty of non-Jews, this is a source of profound tension - I want to celebrate my friend's birthday with him, but he scheduled the party on a Friday night! What do I do? Again it's not at all limited to Judaism - quite a few Muslims have expressed to me that when practicing Ramadan, they feel more aligned with other Muslims, but less aligned with their non-Muslim friends and colleagues. And when they don't practice Ramadan, it's the reverse! The quoted analysis of the Northern Exposure episode doesn't seem to see that tension. It seems to engage the protagonist's choice to forego a legal minyan as a beautiful epiphany without any dimension of loss or heartbreak. In the end it makes me wonder - when, and this should be many years from now, I'm mourning one of my parents, I'll say kaddish only if I have a legal minyan. Even if I were surrounded by my many non-Jewish-man friends like the Northern Exposure protagonist, and they were eager to say kaddish with me, I'd like to think I'd respect the laws of what does and doesn't constitute a minyan. Would this be misinterpreted, based on a superficial equation of the minyan to "community", to mean I'm not really engaging the non-Jewish-man people I love as my community? I've actually encountered a lot of people dealing with the same problem as the Northern Exposure protagonist. I was in a lot of Jewish mourning circles over Zoom during covid. Some are still going and I pop in sometimes - I should do it more. In all of them, we read liturgy and poetry, talk about the dead and how we miss them, discuss how to honor them. In some circles, participants say kaddish, considering Zoom to count as a minyan; in others, they don't. I prefer the ones that don't - like Zusha and Elimelech, and unlike the Northern Exposure protagonist, we choose to respect the ritual by choosing not to perform it when our context didn't allow us to do it true to the legal script. Returning to the discussion of supersessionism - Christianity is not at all unique in having a supersessionist tendency. David Novak has a thoughtful article in First Things about different varieties of supersessionism, and how Judaism has its own parallel supersessionism: quote:Jewish hard supersessionists ... identify Christianity with the pagan or idolatrous practices that Judaism overcame. At the Passover seder, when Jews celebrate our call to covenantal status, we assert, “Our ancestors were originally idolaters, Terah the father of Abraham, etc.” In other words, for Jewish hard supersessionists, Christianity is not progressive in relation to its Jewish origin. Instead, Christianity regresses to the pagan or idolatrous past that Judaism has superseded. Here the key difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Jews generally aren't encouraged to become better Jews by contemplating Christian texts or practices while Christians are often encouraged to become better Christians by contemplating Jewish texts and practices: quote:Christians cannot deny their origin in Judaism however much they might claim to have superseded Judaism. By contrast, Jews can ignore Christianity, treating it as a regrettable and theologically regressive offshoot of Judaism. Proof of this is how little Christianity was taken into consideration by Jews living under Islam in earlier centuries. The sum of all this is that, in the normal course of study and practice, a Christian will regularly take time to think and talk about the ways in which Judaism specifically is lacking or limiting, and a Jew will probably not take time to think or talk about the ways in which Christianity specifically is lacking or limiting. And the way this is practically realized in this thread is that you have Christians openly/implicitly describing what they find lacking/limiting in Judaism, or the "Old Testament", much more than you have Jews talking that way about Christianity or the Gospels, or Buddhists talking that way about Islam or the Quran etc. That's not a bug but a feature - the whole point of threads like this one is to connect people of different backgrounds, different traditions, different forms of faith. The connection is more intimate when we share more of what's internal to our hearts, to our religions. And intimate contact between people who see the world very differently means people encountering potentially offensive ideas about what's sacred to them - this can be a very educational form of contact. More importantly I hope the Christians in the thread are enjoying a beautiful Easter and that we are all enjoying a good weekend. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 22:07
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Killingyouguy! posted:While a more approachable environmentalism is definitely one of the benefits I see to religious belief, I was more thinking about the baptism discussion and a documentary from the 70s on the Jesus Movement I watched where the longhaired Jesus people were doing a group baptism in the local lake and I was like "man, that fucks, why isn't there more of that" but like maybe the reason it appeals to me is my natural inclination towards pagan-lite nature worship poo poo so it's Wrong for documented reasons nah you can still do outdoor baptism. it's just a little less convenient and you can't always have the whole gang there and live stream it. infant baptism also of course makes a lot more sense indoors.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:09
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Killingyouguy! posted:I would hear sometimes about going outside and "appreciating gods creation". But also the world is "fallen" and Christians aren't "of the world" and should not be "worldly" I guess? Bonhoeffer is a big goto: “Yes to God’s Earth.” Basically existing in God’s creation is good even while waiting for the Nazi’s to execute one.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:20
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Killingyouguy! posted:And I didn't know the "fallen world" thing was particular to just a couple of them, interesting i might gently caress this up but in my understanding there are two things going on with "fallen world" first you have the Fall of Adam and Eve. so in that sense, we live in a fallen world where sin and evil exist, it's not the paradise God created or to where we'll return. this is a thing in pretty much all of Christianity but some groups will emphasize it more or less related to but separate from that is the apocalyptic emphasis on the present day being particularly "fallen" and sinful which is why we know the Rapture is any day now. this is mostly a thing in some evangelical, pentecostal denoms and it's huge for JW. the world today is so wicked and evil that we're either in the Tribulation or about to be and Jesus will return any day to punish the wicked and take the rest of us to paradise etc. part of this is believing that Christians must be a group "set apart" and separate in their righteousness since the world is full of evil and demons are everywhere looking to tempt you. again this is a big JW thing.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:22
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Killingyouguy! posted:I would hear sometimes about going outside and "appreciating gods creation". But also the world is "fallen" and Christians aren't "of the world" and should not be "worldly" I guess? Nature isn't really part of that. The Bible talks frequently about the "desert" or the "wilderness" (they might even translate the same word--I forget), which is where people typically go when they want to--or have to--spend time alone with God. Monastics do the same thing. Some of them literally go to the desert, and some just to someplace deserted, like a forest, mountain, or island, and start spending all their time in prayer, growing their own food, and befriending bears and such.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:25
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Killingyouguy! posted:While a more approachable environmentalism is definitely one of the benefits I see to religious belief, I was more thinking about the baptism discussion and a documentary from the 70s on the Jesus Movement I watched where the longhaired Jesus people were doing a group baptism in the local lake and I was like "man, that fucks, why isn't there more of that" but like maybe the reason it appeals to me is my natural inclination towards pagan-lite nature worship poo poo so it's Wrong for documented reasons They still do this in the mountains, especially in Appalachia.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:33
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Keromaru5 posted:The Bible talks frequently about the "desert" or the "wilderness" (they might even translate the same word--I forget), Yeah "midbar" is sometimes used to mean an arid desert and sometimes used to mean fertile wilderness - the point is that it's land unsettled/untamed by human beings. Here's an interesting blog post about the Hebrew word, which explains that the distinction between the English words "desert" and "wilderness" is relatively newfangled: quote:I wrote that midbar מדבר in English is "desert". But another common translation is "wilderness." Which is correct?
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Mar 31, 2024 22:41
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Civilized Fishbot posted:I took some time to think this over - thinking on Saturday, writing this very long post today. The ideas are still somewhat half-baked. i appreciated the effortpost. this is good stuff to think about, and i'll try to remember this if/when im in dialogue with jewish folks. or really just any other religious/spiritual tradition thanks you too. i got to see the parents and eat good food, didn't get to go to church because a big storm moved in but that's okay.
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Mar 31, 2024 22:57
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Civilized Fishbot posted:It's disconcerting to see this particular episode, where the protagonist learns to compromise on a ritual commitment, described as the point where the protagonist "transitions from outsider to community member." The larger context is an ongoing conversation in the show about the nature of tribes and syncretism. It’s not particularly Christian, fwiw. The stand in traditional American Christian character Maurice is a openly bigoted homophobe, that the show consistently critiques. It in very large part is about what is lacking in traditional American Christianity. That’s a huge ongoing theme of the show. They also very very much critique Maggie’s family (which is inconsistently Irish Catholic and WASP) in a similar way. There’s also some context missing. Joel’s religious dialogue is with the Alaskan Native American tribes not with Christianity. There are several preceding episodes about Russian Jews ending up in Alaska, even in the episode I brought up the ritualist-legalist view point you’re giving comes up explicitly with one of the Jews collected for the minyan (a British oil and gas worker) who talks about the minyan they had to collect for his sisters death while he was in an African (? I can’t remember the country it might have been Middle Eastern) country. Following episodes also have him wrestling with: perhaps I’m losing who I am. Joel swings very much back in the other direction back towards the ritualist-legalist jewish, and cultural New Yorker subsequently. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: My own view point is Christian. The shows view point is very much… not. If it’s rooted particularly in anything, it’s Joseph Campbell.
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Mar 31, 2024 23:12
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Pellisworth posted:i appreciated the effortpost. this is good stuff to think about, and i'll try to remember this if/when im in dialogue with jewish folks. I will also do this!
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Mar 31, 2024 23:16
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Thank you for sharing, Fishbot. It's tangential but I think there is a strong cultural current of 'ritual is dumb and for jerks' in various forms, which I don't think is necessarily a "Christian" idea in itself, even if it may have come from Christian thinking. Of course, observances and the like have varied historically for a very long time.
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Mar 31, 2024 23:30
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Worthleast posted:Christ is risen! Alleluia edit: I got baptized. Chrism oil takes forever to wash outta your fuckin hair. Smells nice though. Afterward I sat up with a very old friend (who joined me for the baptism rite) and drank brandy until 3 am talking about old times and consoling her over some worries of hers. I dunno if getting kinda ripped is necessarily a sin but I'm chalking this one up to being a cool dude for an old friend I love very much. It's cool to do communion now! NomChompsky fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Mar 31, 2024 |
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Mar 31, 2024 23:52
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Yeah "midbar" is sometimes used to mean an arid desert and sometimes used to mean fertile wilderness - the point is that it's land unsettled/untamed by human beings. Here's an interesting blog post about the Hebrew word, which explains that the distinction between the English words "desert" and "wilderness" is relatively newfangled: Makes sense. The distinction also doesn't seem to be there in Greek or Russian. We even get our word "hermit" from the Greek word for "desert."
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Apr 1, 2024 00:10
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I also appreciated the effort post, thank you Fishbot. For what it might be worth, it was the last sentence of BRD's post that I found particularly touching, not the sitcom story as it was relayed itself.quote:I also feel it’s the real core of an honest monotheism. Accepting All in One means accepting the diversity and differences in all the stories we each participate within. I do tend to experience a sort of, world full of background reminders of Christianity being the "default" for a lot of mental models of religion throughout discourse -- I know it's not really the same as the problem of supersessionism but that was why I liked the sentiment for what I read it as, a Christian observing they felt the heart of their religious belief included a need for diversity and validation of other faiths' mythological traditions. I found that lovely, a bit more monolatrous than monotheistic maybe, but well LITERALLY A BIRD fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 00:21
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NomChompsky posted:Alleluia Congratulations 
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Apr 1, 2024 00:23
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Congratulations
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Apr 1, 2024 00:37
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:Congratulations
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Apr 1, 2024 01:48
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Many thanks folks.
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Apr 1, 2024 03:48
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I'm just amazed at realising that the Greek letters Omicron and Omega are just big O and little O.
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Apr 1, 2024 09:10
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Ohtori Akio posted:stewardship means consumption to exhaustion, and thats the most important takeaway of the imminence of the world to come Civilized Fishbot posted:I took some time to think this over - thinking on Saturday, writing this very long post today. The ideas are still somewhat half-baked.
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Apr 1, 2024 09:21
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Orbs posted:Wait, this seems to be saying it's the job of Christians to consume the land to the point of exhaustion? I hope I'm misinterpreting you. I am physically shook whenever I see a brook, a forest, even a single tree. All these "natural" features where a clean beautiful parking lot could be.
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Apr 1, 2024 11:58
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Prurient Squid posted:I'm just amazed at realising that the Greek letters Omicron and Omega are just big O and little O. 
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Apr 1, 2024 12:47
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Gaius Marius posted:I am physically shook whenever I see a brook, a forest, even a single tree. All these "natural" features where a clean beautiful parking lot could be. 
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Apr 1, 2024 13:02
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Orbs posted:Wait, this seems to be saying it's the job of Christians to consume the land to the point of exhaustion? I hope I'm misinterpreting you. Yes and no. The usual read of the part in question is that people are responsible for the nature. That includes the permission to use what is available while simultaneously nurturing and protecting it. Like a steward taking care of their employer's lands. Some people are not so big on responsibility and more into making as much money as possible so you can guess how they read it.
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Apr 1, 2024 13:07
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Valiantman posted:Yes and no.
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Apr 1, 2024 13:24
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I've put in a total of five hours into reading The Enneads and I still haven't gotten to the text.
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Apr 1, 2024 13:27
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Orbs posted:edit- Nevermind, I can already tell this subject is going to make me incredibly angry. Forget I said anything. I just wanted to clarify that I know of no church that would teach exploitation of nature as a good thing. I checked what the New International Version has and it says that God set Adam into the Garden of Eden to "work and care" for it. The Finnish translation uses an agricultural catch-all term (farm or till or cultivate etc.) and a word that means keeping something safe. Some people just go "See, we are above the rest of the nature! We can do what we want!". Valiantman fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 13:41
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Quote is not edit
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Apr 1, 2024 13:44
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On the topic of worship in nature, I think the concept maps of "areas actively used by humans" vs. "areas not actively used by humans" were quite different when most of the major holy books across many religions were written. You also probably want covered areas for the congregation, however constituted, to be in, because in most places it gets some combination of too bright/too cold/too rainy at certain points. Also, the clergy has to live somewhere, so you're already on the hook for a physical plant. There are of course people who cite Genesis as a reason why we can just do all the environmental damage we want, since either it's completely impossible or any transient bugs or trees we wipe out will be rectified when Jesus gets back. (Naturally, he will not smite those who paved over His favorite beetles: after all, they are saved.) While I don't know if it's actually in the bible as such, there is the saying "The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose." Similar case, I imagine
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Apr 1, 2024 16:32
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For some reason Judaism has one million tree holidays
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Apr 1, 2024 16:41
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The real Jewish agenda: trees
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Apr 1, 2024 16:46
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Thank you for the thoughtful replies to my effortpost :-&) I'll keep thinking about it and your replies - I think Zizek's ideas about Christianity may be a big part of how I'm understanding it, which might be philosophically valuable but on a sociological level I don't think Zizek really reflects any Christian mainstream.Neon Noodle posted:For some reason Judaism has one million tree holidays Some of these strike as real stretches tbh. Tu Bshvat and Sukkos definitely, they're explicitly about agriculture and bountiful harvests. Tu Bshvat is the New Year for Trees, and during Sukkos we're waving around parts of trees. But Simchat Torah and Shabbos, I dunno - I'm sure there's a lot of wonderful teachings about how they're like trees, or Torah is like a tree, or people are like trees etc, but I would never think to talk about trees if I had to describe them in 10 sentences or even 10 pages. On the other hand, Tu B'Av (the 15th of Av) should be "YES" without a question mark. Today it's usually celebrated as a sort of hokey Valentine's Day ripoff but the Talmud gives if an extremely cool name and background: quote:It is Rabba and Rav Yosef who both say: The fifteenth of Av was the day on which they stopped chopping down trees for the arrangement of wood that burned on the altar, as it is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Eliezer the Great says: From the fifteenth of Av onward, the strength of the sun grows weaker, and from this date they would not cut additional wood for the arrangement, as they would not be properly dry, and they would therefore be unfit for use in the Temple. "The Day of the Breaking of the Scythe." How cool is that? The way the trees celebrate (or we celebrate on behalf of the trees) when woodcutting stops reminds me of more great Jewish tree lore: trees are only vulnerable to logging because of their hubris and because they can't stop contributing to the weapons that bring each other down. People are charged to do better than that. quote:The main creation of the third day was the realm of plants, the terrestrial plants as well as the plants of Paradise. First of all the cedars of Lebanon and the other great trees were made. In their pride at having been put first, they shot up high in the air. They considered themselves the favored among plants. Then God spake, "I hate arrogance and pride, for I alone am exalted, and none beside," and He created the iron on the same day, the substance with which trees are felled down. The trees began to weep, and when God asked the reason of their tears, they said: "We cry because Thou hast created the iron to uproot us therewith. All the while we had thought ourselves the highest of the earth, and now the iron, our destroyer, has been called into existence." God replied: "You yourselves will furnish the axe with a handle. Without your assistance the iron will not be able to do aught against you." Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 17:24
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Orbs posted:Wait, this seems to be saying it's the job of Christians to consume the land to the point of exhaustion? I hope I'm misinterpreting you. The quoted post used sarcasm.
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Apr 1, 2024 17:43
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