Blogs May 12, 2013 at 6:00 am

Comments

1
Occupy Jerusalem.
2
One must not squander his masters money and invest in Boeing.
3
haha, trying to make sense of the strange mythologies of the christian bible!
4
Um, I' not sure that's really in the bible...
5
@4 Ah, but it is... https://net.bible.org/#!bible/Luke+19:23

It is the closing quotes from the Parable of the 10 Minas, which is a retelling of the Parable of Talents from Matthew 25:14.
6
What a greedy and selfish bastard. In the finest of Christian traditions, of course.
7
@4: yeah right, next you'll be telling me that there are dragons and giants in the bible too...
8
And the servants earning but only 2/3 of the best servant, they too, the king ordered to hand over their gold to the better earner.

And, days passed. The best earner with so much of the king's riches became slothful and careless and lost much of the king's wealth, and had stolen as much too.

The servants shouted 'Eye for eye! Off with his hands! Off with his head!'

The king then ordered his other servants again to give their riches to the one who had once been best but was now far worst.

And, to the servants' protests the king did respond, 'Yay, too big to fail. Trickle down. Blah blah blah. Look over there, a squirrel!!'.

9
Which explains how hedge fund managers wind up with hundreds of million dollars they can throw away on buying a failing basketball team!
10
This parable vexes me (and I often suspect it was not authentic but added in by some unscrupulous folks).

It does work as a metaphor..don't hide your talents under a bushel. But yet, I keep wondering what real world investment was available that someone could decuple their money so quickly.

And what if the investment went bad and it was leveraged and now the King was in the whole to some hedge fund managers?
11
I once saw a Republican (I think it was Rand Paul, but don't make me swear it) being interviewed, and he argued that Christianity was all about accumulation of wealth. He said, "Most of the parables are in favor of getting rich," and he cited the parable of the talents.

I guess he overlooked the parable of the widow's mite, or Jesus saying that it is harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the needle's eye, or Jesus saying "Sell all you have and follow me."
12
Is this a biblical variation of "If you want it done now, ask the busiest worker you can find"?

Or is it more like the "Deposit this check for $148,000 in your bank, use the proceeds to pay a few start-up expenses for the new unicorn ranch, and the rest is all yours" scam?
13
I thought Romney followed the Book of Mormon, not the New Testament.
14
Brian 19:23-27
"There shall in that time be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia-work base, that has an attachment. At that time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock."
15
Capitalism in action.
16
I googled this up in the hopes that the consensus would be that Jesus was condemning this type of behavior and that the king was a bad guy . . . but most of the interpretations out there seem to hold that the king is Jesus at the second coming, the subjects who hate him are nonbelievers, and the money is faithfulness or something.

Note to self: if ever start a religion and use parables, also follow up the parables by saying for the record what the fuck they mean.
17
Now go give your money to the church like good sheeple. Your child molesting religious leaders need to lease new Cadillacs and guns before Obama takes them all.
18
These passages come as part of a long chain of parables, and after he tells a rich man that he must sell everything in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. If you read them all, it is clear (at least to me) that Jesus is trying to say: "It's not what you expect." He's trying to shake us up, to make us examine our assumptions and question the currency of the realm, be it wealth, power, wisdom, wariness, status, righteousness, cows, pigs, or whatever you hold sacred. I'd say that's a pretty good message, and pretty hard to swallow even if it's spelled out. Cause, you know, we all have our sacred cows. I mean, everyone but the readers of Slog, of course.
19
The Republican Party does predate the American Revolution....
20
Proto-Republican?
22
@16 Nooooo! You can't do that. To officially explain the parables is to kill them, render them inert. For parables are alive, and can be reinterpreted for generations, lending life to religion.

Not to point fingers, but some denominations are completely dead and fossilized.
23
I'd be more outraged by Goldy pulling questionable quotes from the bible without context if I hadn't spent the better part of 2012 arguing with religious zealots who insisted that one or two particular words in the bible justified their attempt to deny an entire minority population equal rights. Fuck em.
24
@18 thanks for this intelligent contribution. You're right that the gospels ask us to question many things... except Jesus. Doubting Thomas is often held up as an illustration of the immorality of needing evidence to believe in the Christ. With such a critical caveat, the principal you describe is really just a repackaging of the old meme of "no other gods except me". What good is skepticism if you're forbidden to apply it to the one thing that (in this paradigm) really matters?
25
#24, and thank you for a very intelligent response. It's a pleasure. As a believer (and a reader of Slog*) I read the Thomas story as showing that someone who doubted was still loved and accepted - by the main man. Clearly the others wanted to judge him unworthy. This would set the pattern for the following two centuries, and counting. But I say, skept away!

*clearly a liberal believer.

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