Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

My Jesus, Your Jesus, Fight Club!!!

Jesus Kristos, pre-fabulist age prophet and all-round nice guy

I was reading this poignant post by Tym which was disguised as an exercise in divine comedy and felt the stirrings of the good Catholic inside me.

Now I know many of you are not Catholics. The number of Singaporeans and Malaysians who have joined the ranks of protestant churches in the recent years have swelled their ranks. So don’t be offended when I tell you this.

Here’s a true story. A colleague (a protestant) came to me for advice. She wanted to get a tattoo and her church friends had told her that the bible says tattoos are wrong. So since Cowboy Caleb hath stupendous knowledge of the bible, I was asked to confirm this rumour, which I did. And I also informed her that since she was so keen on the arcane book of Leviticus, she had to abstain from pork as well since the bible also forbids it. And sharks fin soup as well. All forbidden. Time to change your diet in addition to forgetting about getting a tattoo.

If I was the Pope, I would decree that all bibles be reprinted with the New Testament at the beginning, and the Old Testament at the end. That would raise IQ’s all over the world overnight. In fact, I would make the Old Testament optional.

But it’s ok because my Jesus forgives your Jesus.

While I agree that some parts of the Old Testament (especially the Law) are no longer relevant to Christians (Catholic and Protestant alike), I don’t think the OT can be made optional at all, or that it should be put behind NT. The key to understanding a great deal of NT language and metaphor depends highly on understanding the OT context in which it is written.

so where to the deuterocanonical books go?

where do, i mean

Why couldn’t they have used a picture of James Caviezel for Jesus on the banner? That would make it so much more attractive… I would even have put one up on my site.

Hehe that reminds me of a conversation I had recently with some friends about how we should start a revolutionary new kind of bible where the books are arranged alphabetically so all the newbies don’t have to scramble around looking for Malachi or Isaiah.

i had this discussion with Arihole oon MSN one night, and I said the difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics read the Bible for the morals and teaching behind the story. Protestants, actually read the bible and try to interprate every single word.

Thing they forget to realize is that although the bible is gods words, it has come through and thuse been skewed by the hands and minds of men. It’s just like when you are a history of student, and you are taught never to take a third persepective account of an event as fully accurate.

oh yeah, and some monks even have tattoos! Please lah, at the time odf jesus, they did not even know about tattos! Tattoos came from the pacific polynesians and it was only with the western world first contact with them in the lade 10th centuary did they find out what it was. The things some people come up with just blows me away, ignorance, leads to stupidity and misunderstandings, which in turn leads to conflicts.

ketsugi > half the population of a church doesnt even know what a metaphor is.

calm one > Dude, protestant bibles do not usually have the book of deuteronomy. Does that answer your question?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterocanonical_books

PP > lady, lusting after J. Christ is generally socially unacceptable behavior.

Jelly girl > alamak. Try google lah.

makanguru > Well it really depends on the church right? Some lame ass churches use bibles as a crutch. Methodist’s in particular are pretty good at weeding out nonsense. And where got monk got tattoo one? I’ve never met one before and I’ve met many monks. Maybe they were sailors before taking up holy vows.

Got i got to meet a couple of francisans int he US, and they had the Tau cross tattoed on them. i mean all a tattoo shows is a reflection of yourself. A tattoo is what ever you want it to be. It is not evil, and does not mean that if you have a tattoo you are some ah long or ah beng.

I have 2 tats, and I love them. I ain’t a baptised Catholic, but i was brought up as one. No priest, monk or religous person who has known me has ever told me off for having a tattoo. A tattoo does not make a man, a man makes a tattoo.

wrong is wrong, right is right. whatever the bible says i’d never have tattoo lol.

and yes Protestant doesn’t have deuteronomy

Read before that long ago, some Europeans had refused to eat the potatoes and tomatoes that the Spanish conquistadors brought back from the New World because they were not mentioned in the Bible.

dude, protestants call them ‘apocryphal books’, catholics call them ‘deutero-canonical books’. so where do those books go in your catholic bible if you became pope? you see, 2 maccabbees is important for the doctrine of purgatory, if i remember correctly ;)

caleb>

would you happen to refer to half the population of a catholic church or protestant church or just churches in general?

caleb & echa>
Calm one was asking where would the Deuterocanonical books go (explained in the link you provided), and not the book of deuteronomy which is found in both set of bibles (the fifth book).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_of_the_Bible

hope that clarifies.

makanguru> makes us all wonder whether language unite or divide people?

just curious, caleb, I wonder why would anyone (not just Christians/Catholics/Protestants) be offended abt you telling a true story? But hey, you might be right, there mite be ppl offended out there. We never know yah.

If I become the pope, everybody reads Isaac Asimov.

Makan guru, tattoos were around during the time of Jesus.

This points towards a history of tattoos among the Jews and Christians, although I believe Judaism generally frowns upon tattoos.

totally unreligious, I kinda dig the “..forgives the pettiness of your Jesus” one. I think that basically expresses all things I don’t like about general churches in just one sentence. Genial !!

In the age to come, how many church will there be in the Kingdom of God? One. However much Protestants dislike Catholics and vice versa (this is true, a lot of Catholics parents disallowed their children to marry a Protestant), one must learn to not only tolerate, but get along well with them. Lest one has to face his adversary forever in his eternal life.

Something interesting: You know, when we look at the world, people actually do adopt the principles of Jesus Christ (unknowingly) in their businesses, etc, and become very successful. In the church, however, the Word is being taught as metaphors, we learned the moral of the story, but how many of us really applied those principles to our daily lives? I don’t know, but I expect few. eg. which one of us want to be like a servant, we usually want to be served…

Just my two-cent =)

[…] . So Caleb, Catholic by birth and more insightful and prolific than me, has posted about the fight club he chooses to root for. Which led […]

Cowboy, you can’t google in church!

“Europeans rediscovered tattooing during the exploration of the South Pacific under Captain James Cook in the 1770s, and sailors were particularly identified with tattoos in European culture until after World War I.” - According to Wikipedia

Can the instituition overwrite the faith? that’s my question, really.

So if catholics say cannot tattoo, but protestant can how?

Do they fight?

But Jesus was no European. And there were over a thousand years between the time of Jesus and 1770, and thousands of years between Leviticus and then. Time enough for tattooing to be learned, forgotten and relearned in the “civilised” world.