No, DL. I truly believe it is a bad idea to follow personalities. I read very widely and have since I learned to read. Most of the people you refer to are men, and ime, most of them have at least some beliefs that collide with mine.
Can you link me to something written? I can't currently watch videos and don't like them much anyway.
Apologies, I cannot do better than your own use of google.
Bill does have transcripts though. This site does not work well for me but might be ok for your system.
www.hiddenmeanings.com
Regards
DL
I can use the site. It is terribly organised and every third or fourth thing you look at is a beggar's bowl asking for monetary support
What attracts you to this person's views? I haven't looked at a lot of it, but it appears to be a collection of New Age truisms and photos cadged from all over the internet. Much of it is very trite, and some of it sounds distressingly like the material used by Divine Light Mission (afterwards Elan Vital), an exploitive Indian cult that swept North America and Britain in the 70s. What am I missing, that you see?
His esoteric views and how he interprets scriptures from that esoteric and allegorical POV.
Not all of them but most of the ones that I have seen him speak about on you tube. A pity you cannot view those.
Regards
DL
Okay.
No, DL. I truly believe it is a bad idea to follow personalities. I read very widely and have since I learned to read. Most of the people you refer to are men, and ime, most of them have at least some beliefs that collide with mine.
Can you link me to something written? I can't currently watch videos and don't like them much anyway.
Apologies, I cannot do better than your own use of google.
Bill does have transcripts though. This site does not work well for me but might be ok for your system.
www.hiddenmeanings.com
Regards
DL
I can use the site. It is terribly organised and every third or fourth thing you look at is a beggar's bowl asking for monetary support
What attracts you to this person's views? I haven't looked at a lot of it, but it appears to be a collection of New Age truisms and photos cadged from all over the internet. Much of it is very trite, and some of it sounds distressingly like the material used by Divine Light Mission (afterwards Elan Vital), an exploitive Indian cult that swept North America and Britain in the 70s. What am I missing, that you see?
His esoteric views and how he interprets scriptures from that esoteric and allegorical POV.
Not all of them but most of the ones that I have seen him speak about on you tube. A pity you cannot view those.
Regards
DL
Okay, I've managed to skim several videos. I think his interpretations are no worse than many others. I'd prefer he was a bit more etymologically rigorous and didn't wander off into what I consider forced numerology.
I do understand how his views might appeal to someone who starts out with a view of the Bible as inerrantly historic when the allegory is not blatantly obvious.
But I don't think the Bible is entirely allegorical or entirely about spirituality. There are bits of history, bits of legend, campfire folklore, songs, stories taken from other cultures, tragedy, politics, humour, cultural information, and a lot of very human stories mixed in with the set of spiritual memes that permeate the whole. Very much what one would expect from a cobbled together collection of very old texts.
Consider the story of Absalom, banished from the king's city and anxious to get back there and be in the king's good books again. He can't go there himself, so he pesters his brother, a farmer busy with harvest, to go and petition for him. His brother puts it off until Absalom is so frustrated that he sets his brother's fields on fire. His brother comes to him from his burning crops and asks what he did that for. At which point Absalom repeats his request and his brother heads out to do it.
Now I could do a Donahue on that story and make it all about spirituality, how we put off important spiritual acts in favour of petty earthly concerns and so on.
But I think this is a small story fragment in the midst of a jumbled very old political story that is meant to be
humourous, to describe a relationship between brothers. Consider being told this story, and the storyteller acting out Absalom's frustrated pacing, his setting the fires, the exasperation of his brother and his capitulation to his crazy brother Absalom's political ambitions. It would be
funny.
Because there have always been storytellers, in every age and every culture. And while stories may be co-opted by priests and preachers, the storytellers' purposes were probably much more directed by their human nature rather than their urge to present unfathomable spiritual messages full of numerical puzzles and word derivations.
Also, Donahue is completely wrong about the derivation of Yeshua; he could have looked it up and discovered its etymological origins in ten minutes and left the Greeks out of it after that.