The moral code of the Old Testament seems limited to "God kills bad guys and fucks over good guys." The book of Job, for instance, is a long spiel about how God is really damn mighty and you had better bow.
I fail to see the complexity; even granted there IS complexity, does that make it even remotely palatable?
Your definition of religion seems to differ from the discussions I have read on the subject, if you do not think it includes moral codes.
i'm not interested in obeying the modern moral zeitgeist...
But you do obey it. If anything, you are on the forward-moving fringe of it; pro-feminism, pro-choice, pro-freedom of thought, Green-voting, etc.
i don't just throw out everything old or outdated.
I didn't advocate that: just throwing out outdated morality. Morality that oppresses sexuality, that condemns homosexuality, that despises intellectualism. These are outdated and should be discarded.
The only parts of the Biblical morality not outdated are the universal parts- things that other holy texts speak of, things that are (probably) hard-wired into humanity. Compassion for others, not lying, stealing, etcetera.
Discard the rest, and what is the purpose of the Bible except as an historical, mythographical and anthropological tool?
[Christianity] is more like a relationship with god, mediated through the church, my friend.
And God is defined as He is depicted in the Bible, but if you are not using the Bible to define God (because the Biblical god is malevolent), then how do you define God? If you make him up, if you draw from other sources, then this is not really Christianity.
It still effectively is, of course, because of the central position of Christ. But it would be so different from the current image of the religion that it might as well be something else entirely.
Christianity -as currently extant- relies heavily on the Bible. Why, given that the moral picture of God contained within is at such odds with the picture contained in your heart and words?
you seem to think that once things have been superseded, they are useless.
Not necessarily. Certain things are useless- the old 'science' of astrology is useless for predicting the future, for instance. But astrology is valuable to understand for appreciating the medieval (or Assyrian or whatever) mindset. So it is useless for what it was once used for, but is it useless in a total sense? No.
So for these reasons, studying the Bible is terribly useful. It helps us understand bronze-age Judea. It helps us understand the late Empire, the entire medieval period and a great deal of modern literature. It helps us understand the development of ethics and morality, even. But as a guidebook on how to live? Utterly useless. A summary, picking out the good and useful bits, that could be handy. Ethics courses still often include parts of the Bible for such reasons.
no subject
I fail to see the complexity; even granted there IS complexity, does that make it even remotely palatable?
Your definition of religion seems to differ from the discussions I have read on the subject, if you do not think it includes moral codes.
i'm not interested in obeying the modern moral zeitgeist...
But you do obey it. If anything, you are on the forward-moving fringe of it; pro-feminism, pro-choice, pro-freedom of thought, Green-voting, etc.
I didn't advocate that: just throwing out outdated morality. Morality that oppresses sexuality, that condemns homosexuality, that despises intellectualism. These are outdated and should be discarded.
The only parts of the Biblical morality not outdated are the universal parts- things that other holy texts speak of, things that are (probably) hard-wired into humanity. Compassion for others, not lying, stealing, etcetera.
Discard the rest, and what is the purpose of the Bible except as an historical, mythographical and anthropological tool?
And God is defined as He is depicted in the Bible, but if you are not using the Bible to define God (because the Biblical god is malevolent), then how do you define God? If you make him up, if you draw from other sources, then this is not really Christianity.
It still effectively is, of course, because of the central position of Christ. But it would be so different from the current image of the religion that it might as well be something else entirely.
Christianity -as currently extant- relies heavily on the Bible. Why, given that the moral picture of God contained within is at such odds with the picture contained in your heart and words?
Not necessarily. Certain things are useless- the old 'science' of astrology is useless for predicting the future, for instance. But astrology is valuable to understand for appreciating the medieval (or Assyrian or whatever) mindset. So it is useless for what it was once used for, but is it useless in a total sense? No.
So for these reasons, studying the Bible is terribly useful. It helps us understand bronze-age Judea. It helps us understand the late Empire, the entire medieval period and a great deal of modern literature. It helps us understand the development of ethics and morality, even. But as a guidebook on how to live? Utterly useless. A summary, picking out the good and useful bits, that could be handy. Ethics courses still often include parts of the Bible for such reasons.