Al Patrick wrote:
Larry Ozarow wrote:

Al Patrick wrote:

Do you know where the Medical Deists (MD's) got their symbol? I'll
give you a hint. Numbers 21 and II Kings 18 and it represented Jesus
Christ the healer, who also suffered and died for us. It seems to me
the medical industry is very much attempting to play God.


It's actually the caduceus, the staff of Hermes, which
is a more aesthetically pleasing version of the staff
of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. The scripture
you refer to mentions a healing staff of Moses and doesn't
really have anything to do with to Jesus at all, since he hadn't made
much of an appearance during the period covered by Numbers
or II Kings.


Read it carefully, THEN decide. Also, ever heard of 'types' and/or
'antitypes'?

Recall, Al, that I am one of them serpent people, so I'm not so
familiar with Christian hermeneutics. So I read up a little on
it on the web after your post.

It seems to me that the use of types and antitypes is an analytic
technique. The type can be seen as foreshadowing or even representing
the antitype (assuming of course that you believe in the Christian
bible), but it doesn't necessarily become it. In comparing the two
things you can uncover some new understanding about both.

The authors of Numbers and Kings were really really really writing about
the staff of Moses. Jesus was a long time in the future, and given what
happened during Jesus' life these particular guys would probably not
put much stock in him, anyway.
If you play the game and say that God
wrote or dictated or inspired the whole thing then you can pretend
that all the good guys in the Hebrew bible are really Jesus, and
everything raised up is really Jesus on the cross, and the ark is
really the Church and on and on, but that
reduces the whole thing to be an act of decryption, and it starts
to look like human history really is a lot like something in "The Sirens
of Titan."

All this is not relevant to your original post, since the caduceus
was specifically chosen from Greek mythology, unless you want to
appropriate all of western civilization using types and antitypes as well.