“I think irony and sarcasm is a prophetic function that is greatly overlooked in scripture…”

From here.

(in case it’s not evident… these “misquotes” i’ve been doing, aren’t actually misquotes. They are simply taking brilliant one liners and pulling them out of context.)

The only TV show I’ve really “gotten into” in recent history is Lost. When the season 1 DVD set came out, my parents bought it and lent it to me. I watched the whole thing. The story is compelling, the characters are amazing, everything one could want in a good show.

When season 2 was over, I borrowed a friend’s Tivo archives and watched it, then braced for the long wait for season 3 to be over. Season 3 begins tonight.

It’s going to take a lot for me to not re-structure my schedule and clear out Wednesdays 8-9pm to watch it. However, judging from the last two seasons, I’m not sure I’d be able to take the suspense of waiting week-to-week between episodes. Besides, I really do have far more important things to do with my time than watch TV.

Anyway, that was random. Back to Dave’s debate…

In my last post, Dave left a comment with the following question:

My methodist church has always been fairly liberal. Please explain the comment about female bishops? Does it really hurt your opion of methodism so much that methodists (who DO preach jesus is our savior, love your neighbor, and more) DON’T believe the bible is literall truth, and most of the man/woman rolls described therein are cultural and not neccessarily the way god wishes us to act??? I KNOW there are many “laws” described in that you consider as such… or did a few years ago anyway.

In short: “Hurting” my opinion of the Methodist Church? The Methodist church seems to vary widely from congregation to congregation with respect to theological and doctrinal soundness. I know Methodists who roll their eyes every time the all-too-liberal “leaders” in the church make some proclomation that is way outside of biblical boundaries. The same thing happens in most every other mainline denomination. Very notably in the Episcopalian church, less notably, though no less frequently, in the Lutheran church.

If the Bible is not literal truth then WHAT THE HECK are we doing with it? I would rather base a life on Tolkien’s writings than the Bible if the bible were not truth. In fact there are MANY other writings I would rather base my spirituallity on than the Bible, IF the Bible were not literal truth. I simply don’t have that option.

As for the cultural-ness of gender roles found in the Bible, the roles are consistent throughout the entire text, which covers roughly 6000-10,000 years of history (depending on how you shake it…) in several cultures and socio-political contexts.

I have a hard time seeing those roles as culturally driven.

The “Laws” you speak of are a different matter entirely than the gender roles. That’s a different post.