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    RonPrice  78, Male, Canada - 60 entries
21
Jul 2012
4:59 AM AEST
   

THE OLD TESTAMENT and ME

Note: I have tired to edit-out all the capitalization, but could not figure-out how to do it.-Ron
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The Hebrew Bible, called The Old Testament by Christians, is an extraordinarily difficult sequence of books.1 This difficulty, too easily underestimated, is greater now than it ever was, partly because no contemporary reader, however specialized, shares in the psychology of the original readers and writers of The Bible. The first millennium in which anyone read any of the words in any of the books from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ or, perhaps more accurately, 600 B.C. to 400 A.D.2

My first memories of The Old Testament come from Bible readings in grade six when I was 11 and my mother reading passages from little booklets from the Unity School of Christianity as early as the mid-1950s. �Although some of the quotations had a broad ethical appeal to me even as a boy in my late childhood and early teens, I found the stories abstruse and distant: goats, sheep, tribes, and curious names like Balthazar and Nebuchadnezzar. They all occupied another universe far removed from my little town of 5000 in Ontario in that post-WW2 world of the 1950s. This distance existed then, as it does now, nearly 60 years later.

My individual understanding of The Bible, my biblical interpretations, rely primarily at the age of nearly 70 on my experience of nearly 60 years of intimate association with the Baha’i Faith. My interpretations and those of the Baha’i teachings are provocative, if nothing else.� But I have always found there to be a vast distance from the psychic universe of the biblical writers beginning as early as, say, 900 B.C.2 and the contemporary society that is my world. I know I have lots of company; indeed I rarely meet anyone who actually reads The Old Testament any more.


However abstruse the language of biblical prophecy and eschatology, the prophets of The Old Testament, I believe, were given a foreknowledge of the events of our times in their visions, visions which I’m sure they hardly understood themselves.� �Still, there lies a sure presentation of the times we are living-through, as long as one does not take those prophecies literally.

Yahweh's choice of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants as part of the Chosen People story was a permanent decision, intended to prevail into a time without boundaries, into our time.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” in The New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’s THE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God, and 2the final editor, or redactor, after the return from the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BC, put all the books of The Old Testament into something like their present form.3


When this review appeared in1

The New York TimesI had just

arrived in Australia’s Northern

Territory & the heat of summer

was just beginning to make me

run for cover to air-conditioning �

in my office, my home & the cool

air of the car....The Old Testament �

was on my universe’s far-periphery.

There it had always been in heat and

cold since those first stories when I

was in grade six in that little town in

Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe where

everyone I knew was Catholic or Jew

or Protestant, or nothing; yes, mostly

nothing and there they have remained

with that Old Testament far removed

from everyone’s everyday life. Still…

I have time now to try to get into it in

this the evening of my life; �however

complex and abstruse it may be, I want

to make-up for the decades when it had

to remain far out on my life’s periphery.


1Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” inThe New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’sTHE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God.
3 See Frank Kermode, “God Speaks Through His Women,” in The New York Times, 23 September 1990: a review of Harold Bloom’s The Book of J.

Ron Price

5 July 2012




1 comment(s) - 05:03 AM - 07/21/2012
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    kiya  33, Female, Canada - 21 entries
16
Apr 2010
12:47 PM EDT
   

why follow what people say is right...

who knows if they're even right...
everything here
is what's in my head...
I would say this
and people won't agree
but I sometimes think that...

people only believe
to better themselves.
Not because it is real
not because they believe
but because they fear

i don't see the purpose of going to church
when right after, you gossip about others
i don't see why you have to announce to everyone
that mr. and mrs. someone donated the highest amount

whether He's there or not
can't you talk to him alone?
in your own room,
or while your walking,
and not HAVE to go to some building built by humans
who call it holy whatever...

all i'm saying is that..
happiness is something we make,
whether there's a God or not...
we are the one's living our lives..

We should still do good
without thinking of the reward...
Whether there's a heaven or not...
We can be better if we want to.

i might have sounded preachy...
but it's true...
i'm not saying that you should pray at night
all i'm saying is don't be a hypocrite...

If you don't believe in God--noone should force you to
if you don't want to go to church---noone should tell you to
and if don't have a religion---who says that you have to have one?
but if you do? as long as you truly believe in it, then i guess you aren't a hypocrite...

i don't know if there's a god or not...but while i live my life, all i know is that there's karma...that you still should try to be a good person no matter what...
do you good did for the day...that's all

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    sahuoy  59, Male, Illinois, USA - 44 entries
23
Nov 2013
6:39 PM CDT
   

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty." - Mother Teresa
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    sahuoy  59, Male, Illinois, USA - 44 entries
23
Nov 2013
6:41 PM CDT
   

"The worst thing you can try to do is cling to something that is gone, or to recreate it." - Johnette Napolitano
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    sahuoy  59, Male, Illinois, USA - 44 entries
23
Nov 2013
6:44 PM CDT
   

"It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him." - John Steinbeck. A self determining philosophy guided by ethics, morality and greater powers as prioritized by a less than a wanna be godly/god-like, mortal man.
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    sahuoy  59, Male, Illinois, USA - 44 entries
23
Nov 2013
6:48 PM CDT
   

What person do I admire the most and why? Do I see these qualities within myself? Mankind viewed by mirrors or peers may be a god, godly or god-like but nature, (Religion/God), will always have the last laugh. Amen.-Gary Youhas
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    sahuoy  59, Male, Illinois, USA - 44 entries
23
Nov 2013
6:52 PM CDT
   

I Wish...

"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" - Abraham Lincoln
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    evaDeva  58, Female, Arizona, USA - 3 entries
21
Jul 2015
11:38 AM MST
   

There is no religion in heaven.
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