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I don't want to.

But I might have!

King David wasn't a Christian.

It doesn't honestly matter. What constitutes a "Christian" is nebulous in the first place. As goes the tradition though, unless you're Marcion, it's part of the theology, part of the historical development of the theology of Evil, and your assertion of what it means is simply so horribly simple that it can be neither correct nor incorrect; it can, however, be harmful in that someone actually believes you.



You missed the point entirely.

Edited, Dec 8th 2009 8:39pm by Pensive

Your point being?

How else are you going to win elections?

What's the difference between Pensive and a dodecahedron?

SpoilerPensive's got more points.

And yet my goals are not nearly as futile.

Of course not. You have a good 80 years or so on average to reach that level of futility. We can't all be ahead of the curve.



Christ was not a christian either. Obviously, he had no impact on Christian theology.

Christ, shut up.

I don't really care about your interpretation of the psalm. Your implications of what it means though are quite frankly infantile.

Edited, Dec 8th 2009 9:01pm by Pensive

No, it was "people invoking Psalm 109 to, essentially, wish for Obama's death are hypocrites".

Which is true for other reasons, assuming those people are in fact Christian, but entirely besides the point otherwise.

No more than Muslims or Jews. Or any religion really.

Except I wasn't talking at all about Christian theology. You invented that all on your own. I was speaking purely about why there's some odd seeming syntax when David switches from talking about the crimes against him, to asking God to punish someone. And that is purely about how the ancient Hebrews viewed God's actions in the world.


It's not about what I or you believe today. It's about what the person writing that passage believed.



What implication? That's what it means. Call it infantile if you want, but King David was asking God to allow an enemy who's followers were speaking lies about him (or who was speaking lies which others were repeating) to be judged and executed. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either the passage, or it's application to anything going on today. I'm simply pointing out what the passage means.


For someone who's so literal about most things, you sure do allow your own personal opinions to cloud your judgment sometimes.

I'm not literal about things and I don't advocate pedantry other than in jest. Valuing precision and clarity is not the same as failing to appreciate abstract or symbolic crap; it is a precondition for doing those things in any meaningful sense.



You have commented on a passage from a book which is not to be taken like that. Attempting to figure out religious significance from the book means employing a large range of techniques for understanding it, including the sources of the passages, the speaker, the theology implied, the theological discussion which resulted from it both historically and now, and the position of your passage in the narrative in taking the story as a whole, and the ultimate choice of why it was canonized as opposed to excluded. The entire hermeneutic you are employing is not wrong; it is too simple to even be that.

And you say I'm being literal about things..