Seymour Flops
Diamond Member
What follows applies whether you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, that the Bible stories are allegory, or that the Bible is pure fiction, swallowed by gullible Europeans. It is about the West's religion and how it influenced the way in which westerners view the idea of work.
The Bible's first mention of work is by God, who created the Heavens, Earth, and all else in six days, and then rested.
Adam and Eve were created and lived in a paradise in which they did not have to work. When they broke the rules, part of the consequences was that humanity would be expelled from that place of easy abundance and would be forced to work by hunger and by need. The purpose of work is to perform an activity that is either not preferred or is les preferred than others in order to change the nature of one's reality. In Eden, nothing in their reality needed to be changed. They had everything they needed, they wanted nothing, and the did no work for any of it. Upon the expulsion, the natural world was a place that was quite hostile to the human desire to survive, since they must survive by eating daily and taking shelter from the elements. By working, humans transformed that hostile place into a livable habitat.
If the Bible is an allegory, then the pre-human animals who lived by instinct were the Adam and Eves, never working, because they did not know what work was. Like Adam and Eve, food was in easy supply, thanks to prehensile limbs and tails, ability to smell prey, etc. Animals hunt and gather, but they do it as an instinct. Animals never take breaks from their tasks, because they don't understand them to be tasks. To torture the allegory further, by learning to use tools, to cook food, or preserve it and especially by learning to plant food instead of gathering edible parts of wild plants, they doomed themselves as evolved humans to be workers, maybe forever, but definitely for the foreseeable future.
Yet, the Jews have always been a very hard-working and well-educated race. During the centuries in which they had no homeland, they avoided agricultural work, choosing trades and professions instead. Hard to blame them with farmland being so easily confiscated by the newest anti-Jewish government. Why did the Jews decide that work was to their own benefit, when the Bible clearly presents it as a punishment?
Jesus himself never praised a person for being hard-working, as far as I know and I don't know it all. He praised faith in God and in himself. He asked his disciples to come and be fishers of men. Before that, they were fishers of fish, who earned a living for themselves by providing sustenance to those they traded with. Jesus was dismissive of the idea of fishers, wine makers, bakers and farmers as vital to providing human needs. He simply miracled food into great abundance on an as-needed basis, with a bit of condescension towards people who worried over minor things like eating.
Early Christians "worked" hard, but always under one form or another of a master's lash. Slavery, Feudalism, debt bondage, and other means by which humans are forced to toil to enrich anyone but themselves, were the standard lives of medieval Europeans. The church offered comfort in the form of a better (after) life to come. In my opinion, the work done by slaves and serfs should not be called "work," but by another word. I would use the word "toil," but it would need to denote forced labor, not working to produce so that the worker can consume.
More to come, but feel free to comment on what I've said so far.
The Bible's first mention of work is by God, who created the Heavens, Earth, and all else in six days, and then rested.
Adam and Eve were created and lived in a paradise in which they did not have to work. When they broke the rules, part of the consequences was that humanity would be expelled from that place of easy abundance and would be forced to work by hunger and by need. The purpose of work is to perform an activity that is either not preferred or is les preferred than others in order to change the nature of one's reality. In Eden, nothing in their reality needed to be changed. They had everything they needed, they wanted nothing, and the did no work for any of it. Upon the expulsion, the natural world was a place that was quite hostile to the human desire to survive, since they must survive by eating daily and taking shelter from the elements. By working, humans transformed that hostile place into a livable habitat.
If the Bible is an allegory, then the pre-human animals who lived by instinct were the Adam and Eves, never working, because they did not know what work was. Like Adam and Eve, food was in easy supply, thanks to prehensile limbs and tails, ability to smell prey, etc. Animals hunt and gather, but they do it as an instinct. Animals never take breaks from their tasks, because they don't understand them to be tasks. To torture the allegory further, by learning to use tools, to cook food, or preserve it and especially by learning to plant food instead of gathering edible parts of wild plants, they doomed themselves as evolved humans to be workers, maybe forever, but definitely for the foreseeable future.
Yet, the Jews have always been a very hard-working and well-educated race. During the centuries in which they had no homeland, they avoided agricultural work, choosing trades and professions instead. Hard to blame them with farmland being so easily confiscated by the newest anti-Jewish government. Why did the Jews decide that work was to their own benefit, when the Bible clearly presents it as a punishment?
Jesus himself never praised a person for being hard-working, as far as I know and I don't know it all. He praised faith in God and in himself. He asked his disciples to come and be fishers of men. Before that, they were fishers of fish, who earned a living for themselves by providing sustenance to those they traded with. Jesus was dismissive of the idea of fishers, wine makers, bakers and farmers as vital to providing human needs. He simply miracled food into great abundance on an as-needed basis, with a bit of condescension towards people who worried over minor things like eating.
Early Christians "worked" hard, but always under one form or another of a master's lash. Slavery, Feudalism, debt bondage, and other means by which humans are forced to toil to enrich anyone but themselves, were the standard lives of medieval Europeans. The church offered comfort in the form of a better (after) life to come. In my opinion, the work done by slaves and serfs should not be called "work," but by another word. I would use the word "toil," but it would need to denote forced labor, not working to produce so that the worker can consume.
More to come, but feel free to comment on what I've said so far.
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