UTB - Rich men in heaven?

There is a well known concept in scripture, spoken by Jesus himself, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven.

Now this tends to give the Bible student pause, because it's not really a parable, but more of a statement. So people have tried to explain this away in sermons and studies and Sunday School lessons, as best they can. It's a hard one.

One explanation is that the eye of the needle is actually the name of one of the gates entering Jerusalem. It's a rather small gate, so that a camel must kneel to get through it. Now that carries a good lesson in itself, because it means that the rich man must also kneel to get into heaven. But there are a couple of problems with this interpretation. One problem is that I can find no reliable source that says that one of the gates is named the eye of the needle. The other is that it makes the "rich man" element irrelevant, because all of us must kneel in that sense - the sense that we must submit to Christ and become spiritually humble, whether rich or poor. We're all in the same boat, there. Oh, you could argue that rich men will find it harder to humble themselves and kneel, but it doesn't really wash. It has more to do with pride than with wealth. So I can't accept this idea.

Another explanation: Jesus was saying that it is impossible for rich men to get into heaven. There is one very large problem with this interpretation. And happily, this problem also leads to the correct understanding of the verse.

"Rich" is a relative term. I first understood this on a trip to Mexico back in my younger days. My friends and I came across a man sitting on a horse. His family was with him, and they were all living in a shelter in the forest (yeah, we were caving). The horse was not his; he worked on the land, and his employer provided the horse. He was very nice, and in our conversation with him he mentioned that we were "rich."

"Oh, we aren't rich," we replied, and he smiled and said "You're here, aren't you?" And he was right. If we could afford to travel in our leisure time and visit caves in Mexico, then by his standards, we were indeed quite rich.

I pondered this concept for days afterward, and realized that "rich" is completely relative, like hot or cold. Richer than who, poorer than who else? To me, the doctor or dentist is rich. To him, the politicians are rich. To them, the successful actors in Hollywood are rich. To them... and so on.

I was considered rich by anyone who could not afford a car less than five years old, because I had a car that new. That person in turn is considered rich by someone who can't even afford the used car. Next down the ladder is the person who can't even afford the gas for it if he had that car. Then you have the homeless. Though that guy, living in a cardboard box, thinks he's at the very bottom of the food chain, he might be considered rich in the eyes of the child in India who picks over the garbage heaps trying to find food to eat.

So... who is rich, in the objective, absolute sense?

Well... there are now, and there have been for many centuries, a group of people, a class of people, who are so rich that they can't spend their money, or give it away, in quantities large enough to make any difference in their lifestyles. They have international wealth, they own banks, they are banks. No, I'm not going to address conspiracy theories or the Bildergergers, or the secret Federal Reserve people. But you and I know that there are international bankers who control most governments in the world. They control elections all over the world. Not conspiratorially, necessarily... but they do.

It was once said that controlling armies is not as powerful as controlling purse strings. There is truth in that. Much truth. And those people have some mighty big purses.

These people own our politicians partly by making money available to them for campaigning, but mostly by controlling what is said in the mass media. They own the newspapers, they own the TV networks, they own it all. You've seen it: somebody who would take his oath of office seriously is made to look like a fool the minute he gets any traction with the voters. Totally incompetent morons are made to look dignified. Scandals are simply ignored. And each of those politicians knows that his career, his wealth, his "power" can disappear overnight if he fails to please the people who can make or break him.

These rich - let's say Rich™ in order to distinguish from the merely rich - these Rich™ men have kept the wars of the world going, so that those countries will have no choice but to borrow from them the money needed to buy weapons and finance their defense. They buy the weapons from who? The Rich™ of course. So money is made from war, by selling better and better weapons, and earning interest on the loans made to buy those weapons. The research for designing those new weapons? We pay for it. People die, and die, and die - and poverty is kept as the natural state of things - in order to make the Rich™ richer.

They pour nasties into the rivers and spew poisons into the air to make themselves more money, then they tell you to vote for their political party - either one - to put a stop to it. When you do, nothing stops. They provoke hatred for the USA by setting a foreign policy in place that interferes with other nations and peoples, keeps vicious dictators and regimes in place, violates our own Constitution, and all to force a situation where they have a better environment to do "business" - and they leave us to pay for it in blood and a bloated military budget. They give us two parties to choose from, one promising war, the other peace, but what we get is what they want, every time. They don't just own the banks, they own us.

With every day that goes by, our system of limited self government becomes less limited and more out of reach of our control. The Constitutional Republic that was originally given to us by God becomes more godless with every legislative session.

In return we get jobs. We get taxes. We get enough to keep us satisfied, so we won't rise up. We stay asleep.

I'm not saying all this to inspire you to rise up, or vote differently. You won't anyway. I'm saying it to lead to this: if you were God, filled with love and mercy for your children, and you were now about to hand out justice with that mercy... would you let the Rich™ into heaven?

It is, indeed, harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

UtB: the warning - flee if you will

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I couldn't decide whether to create a whole new blog for it or not. I've decided to blend it in with this one, and leave it to you, the reader to skip the posts with this topic.

The danger is that some of you may be so intolerant as to abandon this entire blog (or me personally) for taking a direction that offends you. So I'm going to trust you to be at least open minded enough to stay with me, but to just avoid the posts with UtB in the headline.

So from time to time, I will take that risk, and if you leave me, that's OK. I won't leave you... I will still read your posts as I have before.

So... the topic is Understanding the Bible, or UtB. Now, if you are intractably opposed to Christianity, monotheism, Biblical literalism or any branch of Gospel doctrine - read no further in this post, but please read the other posts just to make me feel good. If you believe that Fundamentalists are a scourge unto the earth - though I am personally not a fundamentalist in the normally understood sense - then you can stick around if you want to, but you've been warned.

Not that you have to share my beliefs to be reading this. But it would help if you are at least sort of agnostic. Or maybe firmly in the camp of atheism, but tolerant of others' spirituality. Thing is, you won't get squat out of any of this if you don't at least have some curiosity about what's actually in the Bible, other than the stuff they tell you in Sunday School.

Bottom line: don't give me any grief about what I say here if it's just "You Christians are idiots, and only fools can fall for that crap." If you want to point out something I missed in my reasoning, sure, go for it. But I'm not doing this so I can argue with you.

My guidelines for understanding scripture are fairly simple.

I start with the assumption that all scripture is true in its originally written context, either literally or metaphorically. By that, I mean that scribal errors happen, and holes in the papyrus happen, and translation is often woefully inadequate. Here are some examples:

• Scribal errors: There are two history books in the Old Testament which Chronicle the history of some Kings of Israel, covering the same information. The numbers do not exactly agree. It is as if the equivalent of a decimal point had been shifted. But to me, the exact number of men in an army is not all that important.
  
• Holes: There is a letter in the New Testament in which a sentence makes no sense at all in its context (1 Peter 3:19). The narrative seems to jump to a bizarre utterance and then go back to the topic at hand. Reading it literally, the writer, in the middle of discussing something normally and intelligently, suddenly suggests that Jesus went to hell to preach to the dead and give them another chance (in conflict with the plain meaning of other passages), in a way that jars the reader if he's paying any attention to what he's reading. But if two adjacent words in the original language were to have added a letter to the end of one word, and another letter to the beginning of the next word, it would suddenly make sense, and the flow of the narrative would be normal. This suggests to me that there was a hole in the paper.
• Translation inadequacies: The English word "love," tragically for our understanding, is forced to take on duties for the Greek words philos, eros, and agape, which mean respectively "close, loving friendship" and "sexual or romantic love," and "sacrificial unconditional love." Most of the New Testament is translated from Greek, which is an astoundingly rich language, with many terms that simply do not translate easily. This comes into play when trying to choke down the Revelation of the Apocalypse, as an example.
  

I also make the radical assumption that since the Word of God is truth, either metaphorically or literally, that when I see a contradiction between two passages in the Bible, it is because I don't yet understand one or both of the passages.

I also make the assumption that my five senses, as flawed as they are, are given to me as a set of tools to make sense of the world. If what I experience in my world conflicts with the Word of God, then I have misunderstood the word of God, and I reconsider what I thought was the truth in it. Note that I do not reject the word itself - I reject my flawed understanding of it.

These assumptions have served me well. Remember that logic is a tool, and requires that you begin with some assumptions that you consider to be reliable. If your assumptions prove false, then logic requires that you abandon them rather than following a chain of reason based on bad data.

And it's OK to make leaps of logic, and consider theories that you cannot prove, and follow them to a conclusion of some kind. The important thing to remember is that if you base your conclusions on them, they are not necessarily true either. You have to keep in mind which things are assumed, which are proven, and which are merely hypothetical. This is not always easy to do. What is possible, what is proven, what is likely, what is unlikely? Confuse these and your logic will take you to nonsense. (Nonsense can be fun, and often is, but you can't plan your life around it, and you can't find truth in it. If you do find truth in nonsense, then it isn't really nonsense by definition).

So bear with me, don't worry about agreeing with me, and feel free to contradict me as long as you're respectful about it.

The first installment of UtB may not follow immediately. That will give you time to insulate yourselves against the horrors of anything I might say.