Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

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Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

DCP's entire approach in his review is just... well... oh, o.k., to be polite, I will say interesting. Why on earth does a length of a book determine if it is to be recommended?! And why not have Latter Day Saints read it, talk through it, digest it, and realize there are other brains in the universe looking at God than their own? Are Mormons so squeamishly weak testimony wise that they can't read someone else's interpretation of God without losing their crackers? Oh she doesn't have reverence for God's body like we do, so don't read her, even though we now have more evidence in our favor? What in tarnation kind of logic is that?! :lol:

So Peterson appears to me to have quickly read a lot of others' reviews in order to get his compass calibrated and brain in the right wave form so as to not lose his testimony, because.... GULP! This here be an atheist writer, and Uh-Oh! And, of course, it really is the rave book right now, so many fellow saints are definitely going to be "exposed" - OH MY! We have to hurry and contextualize this to keep our peoples safe from outside thoughts and views. They must remain in the boat.

This whole thing is ridiculous, this approach of fear. It is actually fear that makes Peterson not advize Mormons to get off their butts and learn another angle concerning the biblical God. It is weird how closed minded so many Mormon scholars are and how strongly they feel they have to guard the gates of the minds of fellow Mormons lest they actually learn something like how to recognize what critical thinking looks like and real scholarship without a biased angle to grind as they themselves do.

Is Peterson embarrassed that a mere woman, and an atheist one at that out-thunk him and found far more grand penis, and its uses for the male god, after all, it isn't just decoration ya know, in the Bible than Peterson ever has because she stuck with the actual Hebrew and its cultural meaning instead of trying to Mormonize it like Peterson and Mormons in general do? Yes, yes, why oh of course yes, God gave you minds to use, but don't do so on this book, we read it, believe us, it isn't the testimony quality of our stuff, so stick with us kids we're goin places... ayiyi.... keep em barefoot -n- dumb eh Peterson?
huckelberry
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by huckelberry »

Gee, Philo , I read Peterson's review and thought it was a pretty positive review.Yes he pointed out it is outside of some peoples interest but his comments sounded like positive recommendation to me.

I have some faint memory of him using observations about he Bible similar to those in this book for Mormon apologetic purpose. It sounded like he enjoyed this expansion.

It sounds like the book has more material about the cultural background context that the Bible grew out of. That Midianite, Canaanite source land for Biblical religion is not in the usual Mormon (or EV) picture.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Doctor CamNC4Me »

DrStakhanovite wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 5:11 am
The Master Reviewer beat you to it:
A Guy Who Totally Read The Book and Didn't Skim It wrote:
You give the man far too much credit. Who needs to skim a book when he can just google a review and then plagiarize it?

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

huckelberry wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 7:50 pm
Gee, Philo , I read Peterson's review and thought it was a pretty positive review.Yes he pointed out it is outside of some peoples interest but his comments sounded like positive recommendation to me.

I have some faint memory of him using observations about he Bible similar to those in this book for Mormon apologetic purpose. It sounded like he enjoyed this expansion.

It sounds like the book has more material about the cultural background context that the Bible grew out of. That Midianite, Canaanite source land for Biblical religion is not in the usual Mormon (or EV) picture.
Yes, I think it was decent. I probably am focusing on the trepidation for other Mormons, which, if they were being brought up right in the church would not happen, but there ya have it. This is excellent reading for all as far as I am concerned. It is real. It is down to earth, and its lack of faith promoting agenda is a feather in the author's cap. I think he did enjoy the expansion, that he has to dampen that for some Mormons is what I am miffed about. I mean to each his/her own I suppose. I am rather enjoying the book, though not getting as much reading done in it as I would like to.
dastardly stem
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

More form the book about God and his endorsement of rape (pgs 222-224):
Given his apparent familiarity with human faeces, the temple priests who ended up with a face full of filth should have counted themselves lucky that the sh!t God spread was merely animal excrement. A century or so earlier, in the book of Nahum, he had deployed faeces far fouler as a material and psychological weapon of warfare. Nahum may be a small text, but its three short chapters are bloated with the violence and brutality of Yahweh in his role as a divine warrior. Falsely claiming responsibility for the fall of the Assyrian city of Nineveh in 612 BCE, the deity describes his assault on it as a sexual attack on a woman–likely a thinly disguised manifestation of the goddess Ishtar, the city’s powerful patron. Wrenching her skirts over her head, he displays her genitalia to onlooking nations and says, ‘I will throw sh!t all over you, and disfigure you, and make you a spectacle’. Combined with graphic corporeal imagery, the excremental language he uses strongly suggests that this is not animal dung.[ 35]

In behaving in this way, God was mimicking some of the more concrete ways in which human aggressors sought to disempower other people’s deities and their urban centres. According to the books of Kings, when King Jehu of Israel came to power, he not only tore down a temple of Baal in the city of Samaria, but permanently desecrated its holy ground by turning it into a public dung-heap.[ 36] It is a biblical story with an astonishing archaeological parallel. In 2016, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced an extraordinary discovery at late eighth-century BCE Lachish, one of the most important cities in the ancient kingdom of Judah, besieged and destroyed by the Assyrians in about 701 BCE. A shrine had been found inside the city’s six-chambered gateway, which served (like other city gates) as a ritual space in which political, judicial and civic matters were managed under the watchful eyes of the gods. Two large stone altars in the shrine had been desacralized, while, in its holiest heart, a toilet seat had been installed. It was a large block of stone, a sizable hole cut through its centre and bisected at the front by a deep aperture well suited for a dangling, urinating penis (fig. 27). Chemical tests suggest that neither the toilet seat nor the ground around it had been used for urination or defecation. This was a magical installation, manifesting the deliberate desecration of the shrine: the toilet not only invited impurity into its sacred space, but effectively replaced its altars–the gods’ own dining tables. It might as well have been daubed with the slogan, ‘Eat sh!t’. This was a high-status desecration. Only the more affluent or powerful of elites enjoyed the luxuries of a privy–a cesspit or basin, topped by a wooden frame or a bore-holed stone seat, in a small room or enclosure. Lachish’s gate shrine had been decommissioned at the command of someone with the wealth, authority and audacity to displace the city’s gods, among whom was a local version of Yahweh himself. The likely culprit is a king–either Sennacherib of Assyria, who destroyed the city shortly afterwards, or Jerusalem’s own Hezekiah (as the shrine’s excavators propose), who is thought to have imposed a short-lived economic measure during the Assyrian invasion to divert religious revenues to Jerusalem by closing competing sanctuaries in his kingdom.[ 37]
Stupid we can't quote the word sh!t from a text here. But whatever.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
dastardly stem
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

More for your reading pleasure on God and his enjoyment of excrement (pgs 226-228):
By the end of the sixth century BCE, Yahweh of Jerusalem had apparently decided he could no longer tolerate other deities. His scribes intensified their excremental excoriation of his divine competitors, moving from scatological attacks to full-on faecal defamation. The smears stain biblical texts of this period: deities other than Yahweh become known as gillulim–‘shitgods’. This deliberately derogatory designation is usually rendered ‘idols’ in English (from the Greek Bible’s eidola), but its more accurate translation reflects its derivation from a Hebrew term for excrement.[ 41] The Bible’s shitgods are repeatedly described as man-made abominations. They are merely material lumps–whether of wood, metal, or stone. They are not responsive divine beings, but inanimate objects. Their materiality condemns them: they are reduced in name and essence to the basest form of matter, so that shitgods are rendered the waste of this world, rather than the holy host of heaven. Scholars often suppose this intense attack on cult statues in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE reflects a rejection of the traditional theology of divine bodies in favour of an increasingly immaterial, body-free God. But this was not the case. Shitgods and other divine statues were inferior to Yahweh not because they had bodies, but because they were dysfunctional and disabled. They were ‘other gods made by human hands, objects of wood and stone that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell’,[ 42] unlike the able-bodied, responsive God of the Bible, who had seeing eyes, hearing ears, a consuming mouth and an inhaling nose.

But crap sticks. And the association of faeces with the ungodly or unholy would become ever more pervasive among some religious literati, who spent much of their time reflecting and expanding upon the traditions of the Torah and the Prophets. By the first century ce, a Palestinian Jewish group known as the Essenes was said to be so stringent in honouring God’s sacred time that they would avoid defecating on Shabbat. Any other day of the week, they would take themselves off to an isolated spot and carefully wrap their behinds in a garment while defecating, so that ‘they may not affront the divine rays of light’ of God’s sight.[ 43] In the scrolls of the sect living near the western shore of the Dead Sea, the idealized city of God was portrayed as a place in which human defecation would be prohibited; citizens would have to walk at least 2,000 cubits (just over a kilometre) to desert cesspits housed in purpose-built, roofed enclosures.[ 44] These attitudes were considered extreme by other Jewish groups, for whom defecation was unproblematic unless it directly risked soiling sacred space or diminishing ritual activities. Accordingly, it was later said that, below the courtyard of the Jerusalem temple, there was a private toilet, screened by a door, for the benefit of the priests–along with a mikveh for ritual cleansing, should they experience a ‘nocturnal emission’ while on night duty.[ 45]”
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Alphus and Omegus
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Philo Sofee wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:42 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Sat Nov 12, 2022 7:50 pm
Gee, Philo , I read Peterson's review and thought it was a pretty positive review.Yes he pointed out it is outside of some peoples interest but his comments sounded like positive recommendation to me.

I have some faint memory of him using observations about he Bible similar to those in this book for Mormon apologetic purpose. It sounded like he enjoyed this expansion.

It sounds like the book has more material about the cultural background context that the Bible grew out of. That Midianite, Canaanite source land for Biblical religion is not in the usual Mormon (or EV) picture.
Yes, I think it was decent. I probably am focusing on the trepidation for other Mormons, which, if they were being brought up right in the church would not happen, but there ya have it. This is excellent reading for all as far as I am concerned. It is real. It is down to earth, and its lack of faith promoting agenda is a feather in the author's cap. I think he did enjoy the expansion, that he has to dampen that for some Mormons is what I am miffed about. I mean to each his/her own I suppose. I am rather enjoying the book, though not getting as much reading done in it as I would like to.
The history of Judaism is truly the Achilles' Heel of Christianity. The archaeology and the textual analysis have proven overwhelmingly that Judaism is nothing more than a pagan faith which became henotheistic and then monotheistic. I've not read this book, but I have been looking forward to it after hearing about it while it was in pre-publication. I'm glad to hear that she really is taking a more holistic approach that isn't trying to whitewash the evolution of monotheism the way that Karen Armstrong generally does.

Literate Catholicism and Protestantism have responded as this information has emerged over the last 100 years or so by modulating their beliefs. Most no longer believe in literalist interpretations as a result. Fundamentalist Christianities have decided to clasp their hands over their ears and rage at scholarship as evil and Satanic.

Mormonism's position as a Christianity deeply inflected by 19th-century scientific knowledge has made it slightly better placed to accept these facts via the ersatz historicist method developed by Hugh Nibley from the "further light and knowledge" doctrine. All things can be spun to "prove" that Mormonism is true if you just strip them of their actual context. Thus, knowledge that YHVH was originally a corporeal deity who copulated and existed within a pantheon can be presented as "proof" that Elohim is actually corporeal, even though the gods described could not be more different in their origins (Elohim, the former human who existed in a universe an infinity ago, versus El, the Zeus knock-off).

But the problem with ersatz historicism, and of the larger tradition of neo-fundamentalism, is that it's intellectually dangerous. Only intelligent people who are severely deluded like John Gee or Dan Peterson can pull it off. That's why Peterson cannot recommend Stavrakopoulou's work to fellow members. As your own experience has shown, Philo, Mormonism's infantile historical claims sublimate instantly under the blinding light of informed atheism.

Most Mormons lack the intelligence or the delusion to continue believing when exposed to atheistic thought. The point of Peterson's review is to proclaim his superior intelligence and signal his superior virtue. He was able to duel with the Devil himself and come away with his testimony. Praise to the man!
Last edited by Alphus and Omegus on Mon Nov 21, 2022 4:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
huckelberry
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by huckelberry »

dastardly stem wrote:
Fri Nov 18, 2022 4:40 pm
More form the book about God and his endorsement of rape (pgs 222-224):
Given his apparent familiarity with human faeces, the temple priests who ended up with a face full of filth should have counted themselves lucky that the sh!t God spread was merely animal excrement. A century or so earlier, in the book of Nahum, he had deployed faeces far fouler as a material and psychological weapon of warfare. Nahum may be a small text, but its three short chapters are bloated with the violence and brutality of Yahweh in his role as a divine warrior. Falsely claiming responsibility for the fall of the Assyrian city of Nineveh in 612 BCE, the deity describes his assault on it as a sexual attack on a woman–likely a thinly disguised manifestation of the goddess Ishtar, the city’s powerful patron. Wrenching her skirts over her head, he displays her genitalia to onlooking nations and says, ‘I will throw sh!t all over you, and disfigure you, and make you a spectacle’. Combined with graphic corporeal imagery, the excremental language he uses strongly suggests that this is not animal dung.[ 35]

In behaving in this way, God was mimicking some of the more concrete ways in which human aggressors sought to disempower other people’s deities and their urban centres. According to the books of Kings, when King Jehu of Israel came to power, he not only tore down a temple of Baal in the city of Samaria, but permanently desecrated its holy ground by turning it into a public dung-heap.[ 36] It is a biblical story with an astonishing archaeological parallel. In 2016, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced an extraordinary discovery at late eighth-century BCE Lachish, one of the most important cities in the ancient kingdom of Judah, besieged and destroyed by the Assyrians in about 701 BCE. A shrine had been found inside the city’s six-chambered gateway, which served (like other city gates) as a ritual space in which political, judicial and civic matters were managed under the watchful eyes of the gods. Two large stone altars in the shrine had been desacralized, while, in its holiest heart, a toilet seat had been installed. It was a large block of stone, a sizable hole cut through its centre and bisected at the front by a deep aperture well suited for a dangling, urinating penis (fig. 27). Chemical tests suggest that neither the toilet seat nor the ground around it had been used for urination or defecation. This was a magical installation, manifesting the deliberate desecration of the shrine: the toilet not only invited impurity into its sacred space, but effectively replaced its altars–the gods’ own dining tables. It might as well have been daubed with the slogan, ‘Eat sh!t’. This was a high-status desecration. Only the more affluent or powerful of elites enjoyed the luxuries of a privy–a cesspit or basin, topped by a wooden frame or a bore-holed stone seat, in a small room or enclosure. Lachish’s gate shrine had been decommissioned at the command of someone with the wealth, authority and audacity to displace the city’s gods, among whom was a local version of Yahweh himself. The likely culprit is a king–either Sennacherib of Assyria, who destroyed the city shortly afterwards, or Jerusalem’s own Hezekiah (as the shrine’s excavators propose), who is thought to have imposed a short-lived economic measure during the Assyrian invasion to divert religious revenues to Jerusalem by closing competing sanctuaries in his kingdom.[ 37]
Stupid we can't quote the word sh!t from a text here. But whatever.
Stem, that it is interesting detail about Lachish. I might say someone had a sense of humor. Or I could say that was impolite.

Reading Nahum I get the impression that he did not like Nineveh found it a threat and was glad to see it overthrown. There were realistic reasons for such an attitude. It was not a religious disagreement. It is also clear that the overthrow was by armies ,chariots swords etc. No personal appearance by Israel's god as a sixty foot tall rapist. It is clear that imaginary imagery is involved. In this imagery there in no rape . Well there is violence, after all the overthrow of an imperial city is being discussed.
Nahum3
Woe to the city of blood,
    full of lies,
full of plunder,
    never without victims!

The crack of whips,
    the clatter of wheels,
galloping horses
    and jolting chariots!

Charging cavalry,
    flashing swords
    and glittering spears!
Many casualties,
    piles of dead,
bodies without number,
    people stumbling over the corpses—

all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute,
    alluring, the mistress of sorceries,
who enslaved nations by her prostitution
    and peoples by her witchcraft.


“I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty.
    “I will lift your skirts over your face.
I will show the nations your nakedness
    and the kingdoms your shame.

I will pelt you with filth,
Philo Sofee
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by Philo Sofee »

Huckleberry quoting Nahum
I will pelt you with filth,
He's gonna throw sh*t balls at em, not spit balls. :lol:
dastardly stem
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Re: Francesca Stavrakopoulou - Book - "God An Anatomy"

Post by dastardly stem »

huckelberry wrote:
Sat Nov 19, 2022 8:11 pm
dastardly stem wrote:
Fri Nov 18, 2022 4:40 pm
More form the book about God and his endorsement of rape (pgs 222-224):



Stupid we can't quote the word sh!t from a text here. But whatever.
Stem, that it is interesting detail about Lachish. I might say someone had a sense of humor. Or I could say that was impolite.

Reading Nahum I get the impression that he did not like Nineveh found it a threat and was glad to see it overthrown. There were realistic reasons for such an attitude. It was not a religious disagreement. It is also clear that the overthrow was by armies ,chariots swords etc. No personal appearance by Israel's god as a sixty foot tall rapist. It is clear that imaginary imagery is involved. In this imagery there in no rape . Well there is violence, after all the overthrow of an imperial city is being discussed.
Nahum3
Woe to the city of blood,
    full of lies,
full of plunder,
    never without victims!

The crack of whips,
    the clatter of wheels,
galloping horses
    and jolting chariots!

Charging cavalry,
    flashing swords
    and glittering spears!
Many casualties,
    piles of dead,
bodies without number,
    people stumbling over the corpses—

all because of the wanton lust of a prostitute,
    alluring, the mistress of sorceries,
who enslaved nations by her prostitution
    and peoples by her witchcraft.


“I am against you,” declares the Lord Almighty.
    “I will lift your skirts over your face.
I will show the nations your nakedness
    and the kingdoms your shame.

I will pelt you with filth,
The point isn’t penetration per se. It’s god using rape imagery as a viable metaphor. That would be none other than the promotion and support of rape, as I see it. God in the Bible, both old and new, is just very awful. I’m very glad believers of our day do not take that character seriously, at least. But I also don’t get why believers are denying that he’s awful. They should without question denounce him and promote a different god with different teachings instead of promote this Bible character and say he is only about nice things. He’s not.
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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