Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

An excellent book that I'm rereading is Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally, by Marcus J. Borg.

The book is basically a response to fundamentalist Christians. He sees the Bible not as "literal-factual," but as "historical-metaphorical." I was in the fundamentalist Christian movement when I was a teenager and it made sense to me then. But what I didn't know was that much of one's belief has to do with what presuppositions you start with.

As a fundamentalist, we started off with the presupposition that the Bible is basically dictated from God, therefore it can by definition contain no errors in it. I just found that couldn't stand up against what was thrown at it.

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COVID, Again

It seems like society is getting its comeuppance. There has been a sharp increase recently in COVID cases. The omicron variant is the culprit. I am still shocked at how a worldwide health issue has become intertwined with politics. It does show the power of propaganda and the ease in which Americans succumb to it.

This will be an interesting chapter in history.

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Great Writing

I've written a few times about stellar writing. Here is a short selection, which I may have already written on my blog, I really love by Thomas Cahill. It's from his book Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

The Axial Age was over. It had lasted three hundred years--from the late seventh century B.C. to the late fourth--a very long time. In Confucian China, it had seen the burgeoning of reasonableness and courtly moderation, as well as the mystical depths uncovered by the Tao of Lao-Tsu. In India, the great age had produced the ineffable example of Gautama Buddha, reforming the chaos of more ancient systems and revealing the steps to personal peace. In Iran, the priest Zarathustra had spoken to the Persians, who carried the fire ceremony and the Zoroastrian vision of a cosmic battle between good and evil beyond the borders of Mesopotamia, situated between the legendary Tigris and Euphrates in the fertile delta where civilization had first shown itself. Just west of Mesopotamia, in the tiny, unstable kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Hebrew prophets rose, giving to the bizarre monotheism of their singular people an ethical foundation so profound that the Jews could never entirely forsake it.

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Drawing

I have continued to draw gag cartoons, send them off to magazines, and get consistently rejected. Has it got me down? Yes. Though it will not stop me from continuing. 

It does help to read about cartoonists who didn't give up even after years of rejection. I hope I am in that category.

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