“The opposite of Google Glass is announcing a decision via smoke color.”
“As a Christian nation, shouldn’t we keep the death penalty? Because without the death penalty, we wouldn’t have a religion.”
Stephen Colbert
“Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers-by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system-to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.”
Adam Gopnik on Elaine Pagels’ Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation | New Yorker
“Dan Savage is not “insisting that the Bible be interpreted selectively,” he is pointing out that it already is, in literally every single case, interpreted selectively. Unless you are stoning adulterers, you are interpreting the Bible selectively. By this definition, all such communities have “abandoned their faith.” His question was: why must the verse condemning gay people in Leviticus be followed to the letter, while almost none of the other ones are?”
“Male privilege has been with us for — how long? Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? Contraception, in the mere blink of an eye in historical terms, toppled the core rationale that justified that entire system. And now, every aspect of human society is frantically racing to catch up with that stunning fact. Everything will have to change in response to this — families, business, religion, politics, economics…everything.”
