It is a feature of our time that people who are bone ignorant on complicated subjects feel free to pontificate upon them. Few subjects are more complex than the Bible and how the many books that it consists of were written by the inspired authors over more than a thousand years. In order to comment intelligently on that topic immense knowledge of the relevant ancient history is needed, a good command of the languages involved at the time of composition is a must, along with a strong familiarity as to the modes of composition in antiquity among the Jews and the Greeks and how they changed down through many centuries, and a thorough knowledge of the translations made of the original texts is absolutely crucial. These, and dozens of other academic disciplines, all come into play. However, none of this is necessary for moderns with electronic bully pulpits at their hands, ignorance in their heads and folly in their hearts. Dave Griffey at Daffey Thoughts gives us a prime example:
Salon contributor does the dumb thing
And reveals one of the creeping evils of the emergent Left. Of course we all know that Salon is akin to a supermarket tabloid, but without the charm. It’s a Left wing rag used to promote whatever Leftist trends happen to be all the rage while spewing hatred based on whatever religion, ethnicity or nationality is in vogue. Like most leftist rags.
Anyway, so one of its little elves tweeted this piece of fine scholarship and deep learning:
The whole was justified by this bit of stellar academic insight:
Yep. That Bible doesn’t make sense, it’s so not like the fine literary output of the 21st century. The best comeback comes from our own Nate Winchester:
That made me laugh. I mean, it’s so obviously true. Another language(s), on the other side of the world more than 2000 years ago. I won’t waste my time on that screed of incomprehensible ignorance about, well, almost anything to do with the subject at hand. The fact that the individual equates Evangelicals to Fundamentalists is all I need to know that we’re dealing with a person who is, purposefully or otherwise, as dumb as a hay rake about the topic they’re addressing. The rest of the post confirms that assessment.
The same thing the Salon contributor said, of course, could be applied to almost any literature not of the last few generations and not written in the English language. Pick a work from someone who lived thousands of years ago: Herodotus, Sophocles, Plutarch, why the list is endless. Pick the Quran. Pick the Bhagavad Gita. There is no end to literature, old and ancient, secular or religious, that doesn’t conform to the standards of today (which is a point in their favor in most cases).
Of course comedy ensues in the comments because almost anyone with an IQ higher than a fruit fly’s can see the obvious problem with such a stupid, vacant, brain dead analysis. Remember when liberalism promised a world of enlightenment and tolerance and curiosity about all the peoples from all of the world throughout all of the ages? Liberal broken promise #401,793,824,708,931,824,709.
But seriously, it speaks to a creeping, disturbing trend of unremitting evil emerging in our millennial age, especially among those to the Left of center.
That trend is the growing tendency for up and coming millennial-agers to have nothing but contempt and disdain for anything not produced since 1992. It involves a hatred of anyone and everything to do with anything not Now. This, mixed with the hatred of the Christian West and its bastard child America that is taught in our schools and popular culture, is producing a growing desire to see eradicated almost anything and anyone to do with that cultural heritage.
I’d like to think we will stop it in time. If not, then I at least hope that the enablers of this movement of death and destruction, of nihilism and ignorance, will realize what part they played in allowing it to happen.
Consider that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Elsa, the female antagonist, is at a Nazi rally in Berlin. Bad girl that she is, she still has a legitimate love for history, archaeology and the gift of learning. So it kills her to see the madness, to see the Nazis in the torchlight processional throwing precious books onto a blazing bonfire. A tear streams down her cheek as she realizes just who and what she has aligned with. I hope the enablers of this modern Leftist movement will have the same tears on their cheeks as one author, one artist, one composer, one thinker and one hero after another is burned to ashes from the Left’s increasing hatred of anything not Now.
+1 on Nate’s comment.
A lot of the stuff it would be kicked back for amounts to “badthink” for that matter.
And for freud’s sake, wanna take any bets that they totally missed that there’s a bunch of poetry in there?
Given that even after translation it scans and even sings, looks like the issue is in the reader rather than the books.
Thx, Foxfier.
I’ll just leave this here…
http://www.machall.com/view.php?date=2003-09-22
You know, a lot depends on the translation. If one goes to the KJV or Douay-Rheims, then one has poetry; others, not so much. And as far as plot or history goes, the Bible was not intended as a chronicle of history or a work of fiction–but it has many genres. And of course, who reads Salon? Or, should I say who in Salon reads?
The more you read the Bible, the more beautiful it is.
“That trend is the growing tendency for up and coming millennial-agers to have nothing but contempt and disdain for anything not produced since 1992.”
One recalls Lord Acton’s description of Turgot: “[H]e taught mankind to expect that the future would be unlike the past, that it would be better, and that the experience of ages may instruct and warn, but cannot guide or control. He is eminently a benefactor to historical study; but he forged a weapon charged with power to abolish the product of history and the existing order. By the hypothesis of progress, the new is always gaining on the old; history is the embodiment of imperfection, and escape from history became the watchword of the coming day. Condorcet, the master’s pupil, thought that the world might be emancipated by burning its records.”
Romans and Galatians, among other books of the New Testament, make many statements contrasting the ways of the flesh and the ways of the Spirit. It would seem that Salon is trying to impose an exegesis of the flesh on a plainly spiritual book. It’s no wonder that they are badly confused. They are trying to drive the proverbial round peg into a square hole.