I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.For me, one of the great ironies of the Christian faith is that the faithful are told that pride is not becoming of a g-o-o-d Christian, yet the deity himself is overwhelmingly prideful. He doesn't lead by example!
~ King James version ~
If the sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility.
If he would lead them, he must follow behind.
~ from Verse 66 of the Tao Te Ching ~
On the other hand, the Taoist sage -- those most in touch with Tao -- DO lead by example. Humility is one of the three pillars and the snippet above is reiterated throughout the Tao Te Ching.
If you're interested in reading more from this experimental series, go to the Tao Bible Index page.
There was a devout son of an early Bishop of the Church in the mid-second century, Marcion, a very loyal follower of Paul and active in the church, who proposed that actually there were two Gods: the OT god of wrath and justice and law, and the post-Messiah god of love and mercy and the gospel.
ReplyDeleteOf course he was excommunicated (by his own father) as a heretic, but I find this notion rather appealing (it has a nice yin-yang element to it). Marcionite churches, whose Bible did not include the OT, but did include all of Paul's letters and a Gospel something like Luke, continued to exist for centuries after his death. I suspect that many Christians today still have this sense, despite being in orthodox traditions.
If there are two Christian Gods, did the nasty one create the loving one? Was it the other way around? If they both preexisted, what was the nice one doing while the nasty one wreaked so much havoc?
ReplyDeleteDo they both continue to exist? If not, did the nice one kill the mean one? Could it be that the mean one killed the nicer one and is now masquerading as the other in order to trick everyone?
Questions! Questions! Questions!
Although I know your "questions" are rhetorical, I think, here is a quick answer:
ReplyDelete"Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament."
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism
A lot of weird shit was going down before the Council of Nicaea (325 AD).