Literary Discussions

By the way I think that Lura makes the excellent point that life 2000 years ago is very different from life today and ALSO, that some of the scriptural verses written 2000 years ago to address life then were the subjective opinions or "rhetoric" of individual authors and NOT necessarily the Holy Spirit using prophets and scribes like a sock puppet.  One of the four Gospels commences with words something like "Wherefore as others have written of these events I thought it proper that I too should write..."   now I will have to google on the exact source... but such words certainly sound like the subjective opinions of an individual author and not a proclamation of the Holy Spirit channeled in a state of trance.  And there are other verses which in my mind illustrate the subjective opinions of the individual author.

Aha! http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+1&version=NIV

Luke 1

Introduction

 1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled[a] among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. 

David  I must study your posts.  If I were to see a person with all the symptoms of cancer and I were to say "I think you have cancer" I would not be attacking them even though they might see my words an attack; I am simply offering a diagnosis. I see the American political system afflicted with a spiritual cancer which prevents decent atheists, agnostics, Mormons, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus and others from running for president. I see people like Newt Gingrich, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen and a host of others as demonic for a variety of reasons.  I see Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a host of others as worthy for a variety of different reasons/qualities.  You David, strike me as a person SO learned and SO politically correct that you run the risk of writing much and saying little, but perhaps I am mistaken in this and I shall reread this thread with care.