Weekly Response

We read some interesting things this week. One of the readings was about Marxism and its application to Christianity. I would never ever think something like Marxism and Christianity would be compatible in any way, shape, or form, and to be honest, even after reading the article that was assigned I am still not quite sure how they are compatible. This article went over my head for a lot of it, and I had a lot of trouble grasping what the author was talking about.

                Another article that was assigned this week dealt with post colonialism. This was a very interesting article to me. Before reading this, I had never really thought about how colonization may have affected our post reformation translations of the bible into common language and how we even still interpret it to this day. One thing that stands out in my memory from this reading was something they said about the King James Bible. The author said the King James Bible was almost as synonymous with colonization as the Union Jack, and that this translation is the closest thing to an epic that the British have. This statement made me think about how much a biblical translation can affect the meaning of the word. This author felt so strongly that colonization was so deeply rooted in the King James Bible that it had altered the word in its translations so much that it was no longer just the bible, but rather an English epic used for colonization.

                One thing that stood out as really interesting to me that we learned this week was how Ethiopia was never colonized by a European power. I found this interesting because when I personally think of Ethiopia, I think of a very poor nation with starving people or how someone may jokingly tell someone who is very skinny that they look Ethiopian. It was really interesting to me that in the 19^th century they were a powerful enough nation to resist colonization from Europe, which contradicts my modern views of Ethiopia. The more I thought about this though it led to deeper thoughts about how maybe their lack of colonization has potentially led to them being in the current state that they are in. I am not trying to sound extremely Eurocentric here, but it is just interesting to me to think about how maybe if they were colonized they could potentially be better off like a nation such as South Africa. I know South Africa has a vast amount of natural resources which leads to the wealth of it as a nation, but it is still just a thought that I found interesting to ponder. 

Economics and the Bible

This week’s reading was very interesting to me. It really made me consider a lot of different things. One thought I had while reading it was about how all of this was commanding the Israelites to not charge interest while lending money, but yet, we had discussed earlier in the class about how anti-Semitic views are rooted in how Jews were able to lend money and charge interest in medieval Europe. This was very confusing to me, and I was left wondering how they could be so hypocritical to their own teachings. Later in our in class discussion this was cleared up though, the commandments in the Hebrew bible only commanded the Israelites to not charge interest to members of THEIR tribe. Although this cleared up my confusion on why they charged interest, it did not change my stance on the hypocrisy of what they were doing. To be clear, I think charging interest is completely and totally fine in the modern world, but I cannot understand why someone would find it morally wrong to charge interest to their own people and turn around and do it to others. The hypocrisy behind this school of thought in the Hebrew bible is still confusing to me, and I do not understand why they would do something to God’s other people if they are not willing to do it to their own people.

                In class we had a discussion about the different biblical passages about debt forgiveness and if they were applicable to the real world today. We had said that if they were applied today they would be revolutionary and completely change the economic system. I agree that they would change the economic system, but I do not agree that it would be a good change. I think that if we were to set a timetable until peoples debts were forgiven that it would cause people to become lazy when it comes to paying their debts. I think if we put in a system like what the biblical verses suggest that people would just make their bare minimum payments until they were able to get their debts forgiven. This would be absolutely awful for the economic system and would completely destroy anyone’s willingness to lend money at all. Although the biblical verses are nice in theory and give out a good message about helping your neighbors and forgiveness, actually completely forgiving debts in the real world would destroy the economic system and not make anyone willing to lend money for anything.

Domestic Violence

This week’s readings over domestic violence really raised some serious thoughts in my mind. In no way, shape, or form would I ever condone domestic violence, and I was very shocked to realize that you can actually very easily interpret readings from the bible to be condoning of domestic violence. To me, this was just further proof of the moral inaccuracies in certain parts of the bible and reasons why you should never take any texts from the bible literally. If the bible is capable of condoning something as horrible as domestic violence when taken literally, how could anyone ever believe that you should take biblical texts literally? I, personally, believe the bible just offers us loose moral guidelines to live our lives by and is not something that you take literally and live your life solely based off the literal messages and teachings of the bible. If you were to do this, you could easily find yourself finding domestic violence acceptable or doing other things that many of us would find morally unacceptable due to the many conflicting messages within the bible. When I thought about how you can find biblical texts supportive of domestic violence, it made me think about how you could probably find a biblical message supportive of nearly any argument. I feel as if the bible is almost like statistics in many ways. It is often said that you can twist and manipulate statistics to support yourself in any argument. I, personally, see the bible to be very similar to this. You could find a text in the bible that you could twist the interpretation to support yourself in nearly any argument I feel like. If you can find biblical texts that support terrible things such as domestic violence and slavery as we have seen so far in this class, then what types of issues would you not be able to twist a biblical reading into being supportive of? I am no biblical scholar or expert and I have not thoroughly read much of the bible, but it would not surprise me at all if someone was able to find biblical passages that you could twist to support issues, such as abortion or gay marriage, that modern devout Christians would be appalled to support.