Interpretation

When discussing the story if Abraham's sacrifice of his son to God. The question was brought to the table, what is the lesson being taught in this story, what do we take from this story. I found it interesting the different ways that people interpreted. Some people say, and what is general taught from a religious point of view is that, We are supposed to fear God and faith in him. God was testing his faith and fear in him. Through Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his only so by his wife, he demonstrates all faith and trust in God. What another person took from this story is that God is "fickle" and "childish." They thought of it as showing that God is terrible for basically torturing Abraham and putting him through such a thing. I am not trying to discuss which interpretation is correct. I am just using this as an example to show that there are so many different ways that the texts that our society is founded on can be interpreted. People always want to say what is right and what is wrong, but who is to say that? Nobody really knows. You will find that many Christians do this. We hear what the preacher says and we take what he say as the word of God rather than looking for ourselves what the God is trying to say.

The story of Ham and the decedents of Ham, Canaan were curses and to be slaves. Can you believe that this was the text that was used to justify slavery? Homosexuality is not really accepted in most if not all denominations of Christianity. Some churches justify this through the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Can you believe that? I don't see the correlation. Often time one story can be interpreted in multiple ways. But what we do is we force ourselves to take a single view and to believe in only one thing. I don't know where I am really going with this. I guess I am just very aware and interested in how different interpretations mold our values and our actions.

This leads me to think about what the time frame has to do with the interpretations of texts. For example, many people mentioned the role of women in the bible as incubators, and the ones to blame for sin. I think that it is interpreted like this is because of women's actual role in society at the time. There was a need for justification of why women were below men at the time ( and still are). So they used religion as a vehicle to justify this and they interpreted the bible to cast down women to mere incubators!

Again I am not sure where I am going with this but I hope you understand what I am talking about.