I'm inside Paul's head now. I discovered while working on my previous post that Paul was rather stoned while writing this letter to the Romans. Now I don't have to slave over each verse trying to tease the meaning out of it. The meaning was all in Paul's altered imagination. I wonder if they had chips and guacamole in those days. Funny, reading all of this stuff for the first time in many years. The last time I read it, I was convinced that there was a message in there somewhere, and I pulled my hair out trying to understand. Now I get it: drugs.
- Chapter 4: Meditating on these concepts
- The calculus of righteousness (19)
- Abraham as biological father of the Jews and spiritual father of Jesusianismists (17)
- Faith and belief (15)
- Circumcision (9)
- Law (5), Promise (5)
- Chapter 5: More meditation
- Sin (12)
- Death (7)
- Grace (6)
- Gift [of reconciliation to God] (5)
- Justification (4)
- Verses 12 and 18: I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that these verses, and perhaps others like them, are where Jesusianismists get the idea that everyone is sinful from birth, regardless whether he/she actually gets around to committing a sin: "...sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men..." "...the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men..." This is one of those sickening foundation blocks of Jesusianism: everyone is bad, dirty, sinful, deserving punishment. Bullshit. Jesusianismists often say that if we ditch Yahweh, the world will be all pandemonium because no one will have any motivation to be good. Ignoring for now that in saying that, they admit that their only reason for being good is fear of Yahweh's punishment, I claim that people would tend to behave a lot better if they didn't think so badly of themselves. I think that a lot of the justification for less-than-desirable behavior is the idea that we don't expect enough from ourselves because we think of ourselves as shit.
- Verse 13: "...sin is not taken into account when there is no law." Paul, lay off the weed. You're forgetting Noah's flood, Lot's escape, Onan's...spill.
- Chapter 6: He keeps playing the word games, but I'm tired of counting words. I'll mention only verses that jump out at me.
- Verse 9: "...since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again..." So Lazarus is still lurking somewhere in Jerusalem, is that it? Not to mention the "many holy people" who came out of their graves in Matthew 27:52.
- Verse 23: "...the wages of sin is death..." I heard a comedienne years ago saying that because taxes are so high, the wage you end up with is just a tired feeling.
- Chapter 7
- Verse 7: Paul counts it as a good thing that the law taught him what sin was. I count the whole concept of sin as a blight on the human race and a huge impediment to our health as a species.
- Verse 13: Dude's out of his skull by this time: "...in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful." Sleep it off, brother. Put the pen down and go to bed.
- Verses 15 - 24: The bane of all Christian adolescents when they discover masturbation: "...what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do...nothing good lives in me...what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing...I see another law at work in the members (ha!) of my body, waging war against the law of my mind..." What a wretched teenager I am! If only he could have left out the part about members of the body, we could have interpreted his ramblings differently.
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