A big problem with trying to pull wisdom out of the bible and similar is that there is a whole pile of cultural context that is either gone, or requires large amounts of study to discover.
Like someone a thousand years from now who has somehow dug up an old blog post that strongly asserts that “The Cake is a Lie!” you’re missing a massive portion of the story. And you can justify almost anything you want to just by filling in the missing bits differently.
And this is before you even get into the biblical religions having all gone through historical phases where they deliberately filled in the cultural bits incorrectly for political reasons.
The best thing I’ve found to do with it is set God = Truth, and remember that someone’s story being included isn’t an assertion that they had everything right. There’s plenty of satire in there too. Most of it exceedingly subtle. Something about criticizing the powerful being a potential death sentence so they had to make it look like praise. But if you actually lay out the statements and evaluate them as a whole instead of individually it paints a different picture.
Like when you suddenly realise that they’re praising Solomon as being a great king by describing the grand temple and palace he built, but if you pay attention to the descriptions of each it seems that he not only built the palace out of grander, more expensive materials, he built it as a mirror of the temple with his throne room in place of the holy of holies… And suddenly the description of the man’s character takes on an entirely different tone if you know anything about what the relationship between God and the King was supposed to be.
And yet various branches of bible-based religions spent hundreds of years using Solomon as part of their description of a “Godly King”. Because it fit their political narrative and kept the peasants in line.
In short, Biblical stories are like any other repository of folk wisdom. The only way to find the truth in there is if truth is what you’re actually looking for and you don’t stop until it makes coherent sense. And this whole site is dedicated to showing all the ways in which human beings generally aren’t actually looking for the truth… So… Good luck?
A big problem with trying to pull wisdom out of the bible and similar is that there is a whole pile of cultural context that is either gone, or requires large amounts of study to discover.
Like someone a thousand years from now who has somehow dug up an old blog post that strongly asserts that “The Cake is a Lie!” you’re missing a massive portion of the story. And you can justify almost anything you want to just by filling in the missing bits differently.
And this is before you even get into the biblical religions having all gone through historical phases where they deliberately filled in the cultural bits incorrectly for political reasons.
The best thing I’ve found to do with it is set God = Truth, and remember that someone’s story being included isn’t an assertion that they had everything right. There’s plenty of satire in there too. Most of it exceedingly subtle. Something about criticizing the powerful being a potential death sentence so they had to make it look like praise. But if you actually lay out the statements and evaluate them as a whole instead of individually it paints a different picture.
Like when you suddenly realise that they’re praising Solomon as being a great king by describing the grand temple and palace he built, but if you pay attention to the descriptions of each it seems that he not only built the palace out of grander, more expensive materials, he built it as a mirror of the temple with his throne room in place of the holy of holies… And suddenly the description of the man’s character takes on an entirely different tone if you know anything about what the relationship between God and the King was supposed to be.
And yet various branches of bible-based religions spent hundreds of years using Solomon as part of their description of a “Godly King”. Because it fit their political narrative and kept the peasants in line.
In short, Biblical stories are like any other repository of folk wisdom. The only way to find the truth in there is if truth is what you’re actually looking for and you don’t stop until it makes coherent sense. And this whole site is dedicated to showing all the ways in which human beings generally aren’t actually looking for the truth… So… Good luck?