Wow, Luke 14 has very few notes; this could be another short one, especially since I'm skipping the note on verse 11, as I somewhat explained a few days ago.
The question of Has there ever been a just person? was one I answered in the second-to last paragraph here, where I said that the verse in Ecclesiastes is probably hyperbolic in nature. The question of Is death final? is one I dealt with back in chapter 7.
Verse 26 is definitely hyperbolic, though. Jesus is not really asking people to hate their families, but is saying that the love we have for Jesus should be so strong that the love we have for other people and things should seem like hate in comparison. Similarly in verse 33, it's understood that what Jesus is asking is not that you get rid of everything, but that you take everything in your life and dedicate it to Jesus. That's my understanding, anyway.
So long as this was so short, let me take a moment to comment on another page that is linked to in this chapter, What the Bible says about family values. I suppose I can't fault the SAB entirely for the way that particular page is structured, because the purpose of the SAB is to show the Bible to be a bad book. But sometimes I wonder if the SAB could still be a good website and present a balanced account of what the Bible really has to offer. That page has a grand total of six verses about "family values", but I assure you that the Bible has more to say about family values than just six verses. I mean, you could go back to Genesis 2:24 where we learn "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." as perhaps the first bit of "family values" the Bible imparts, but obviously we're cherry-picking only the dysfunctional "family values". You could go to a verse like Ephesians 5:22, "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." in order to discuss the feminist aspects of the way the Bible structures families, (Note that Eph. 5:22 is marked with the "family values" icon, but doesn't appear on the page.) and it could be compared to 1Corinthians 7:4, which notes, "The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife." I mean, isn't that family values as well?
There's a lot more I could say, as the Bible is really full of stuff that could be termed "family values", and a lot of it is, I think, good in a way that even atheists could agree with. I guess what I'm really saying is that I wish the SAB could sometimes be a little less biased. If the Bible is as bad as it's being made out to be, then even an unbiased look at its content should readily show that, don't you think?
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