It doesn’t matter if the facts are wrong, because the message brought forth from those facts is right? That’s a big pile of s…and to build a house on.
Heh, the timeless religious and philosophical spirit of the Bible is not really affected by the “facts” described therein. Those are, if you will, merely local colour.
How is the Golden Rule any more right or wrong, if the drafters of it had no knowledge of modern biology or physics?
(Anyone debating whether the Bible was written by God may safely ignore this post.)
Other New Testament event depictions also differ significantly, e.g. the discovery of the Empty Tomb.
I’m no Biblical scholar and won’t provide a cite, but I’ve read that these discrepancies argue that the events are based on fact!
Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable, while liars can agree on a common story.
A stopped clock is right twice a day too. Let’s use it as a guide in our daily lives.
Am I alone in noticing that the bible is also rather…ambiguous about what its message is? You can cherry-pick damn near anything out of it. How does one justify saying that its “timeless religious and philosophical spirit” is any one specific thing?
I have.
Living in Oklahoma, surrounded by Southern Baptists, Free Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, various other flavors of Baptist, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, and assorted other sects - I have met many people that fall into the categories discussed above.
I have had someone tell me (more than once, different people) that their version of the Bible has been compared to original documents and it matches “letter for letter, comma for comma”. Good trick, that.
Many of these people are, in fact, discouraged from reading the Bible. They go to Bible Study, where they read the approved books discussing the approved parts of the Bible that their church wants them to know about.
They do not know that there are different accounts of Creation in Genesis. They do not know that there are different accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection in the Gospels. They do not know that there are different versions of the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy. They don’t explain these as metaphorical or anything - they flatly don’t know these contradictions exist.
Many, many, many Christians are vastly ignorant of their own religion and holy book.
And many of those (at least in my neck of the woods) do insist that they Bible is to be taken literally. Except when they don’t want to. But no one else is allowed to not take it literally, especially when they do want to.
And that’s exactly why atheists sometimes become obnoxiously literal in reading the Bible.
::whimper::
Yeah. The part I like is that they actually use those words. I don’t know where this is coming from, but somebody out there is teaching it to a bunch of people.
Your use of the word “believer” is quite correct. The way it actually seems to play out is that each believer accepts or rejects sections of the Bible based on belief - though the more rational of the set reject based on evidence also. Now if the answer is that there is no answer; that each person accepts or rejects parts of the Bible based on personal belief and that no one does it any better than anyone else, no problem. Of course that makes them the 10 Suggestions, doesn’t it, and asking anyone to obey any but the most obvious of rules is futile.
I went to Hebrew School for 5 years and I’m well aware of the Hillel story, and it is cute, but it hardly explains the flood or the plagues. Much of the Torah is a very detailed guide to life, including a guide to things not built until centuries after it was supposedly written. In any case I doubt the Talmud would be quite so long if Hillel was correct.
It is certainly possible, in fact plausible, that the words of the Bible are strongly dependent on the political and religious goals of the people who wrote it. But it is odd to base your life either on the desire of the priestly class to centralize spiritual power in Jerusalem, or from the word of the early Christians who were feeling their way to doctrine while trying to sell their movement to Romans and Jews. I fail to see anything you wrote that would make me not want to junk the whole thing and start from scratch.
So why give the Bible any more respect than the works of Plato or Kant or Spinoza? Why isn’t the Bible off on the philosophy shelf and read by sophomore philosophy students and a small coterie of fans? Clearly the answer is because many if not most in this country consider it divinely inspired and therefore worthy of special treatment.
Not liars living many years and hundreds of miles apart (without email) or, more accurately I suspect) people at the beginning and end of a game of telephone.
Very good trick, since punctuation was invented during the Middle Ages. (Cite.) They should take a peek at the Torah or any Hebrew prayer book some time - nary a comma to be found.
I guess that goes along with God writing in English.
I give the Bible much more respect than Kant. But that’s because of my blistering contempt for Immanuel.
I Kant help that, and figure he’s not getting his ideas across. We clearly need an Immanuel transmission.
Immanuel Kant? A real pissant? Very rarely stable?
I’m a little busy. I’m going to need you to unleash the mutant bees on yourself.
You completely, utterly, miss the point. You couldn’t miss the point more. You set whole new records in point missing.
I am not blind to the fact that the bible is a hodgepodge of allegorical stories made up by goat herders a few thousand years ago, and would have been understood as such at the time. On the contrary, that’s the point that atheists - or at least this one - are making.
The bible only makes sense as a hodgepodge of allegorical stories made up by goat herders a few thousand years ago. It does not make sense as anything else.
The problems start when some Christians attempt to suggest their old book is some sort of clear guidance from a god. Taking this to its logical conclusion by attempting to obtain clear literal guidance from the book is mockery. It does not derive from a failure to understand that reading a hodgepodge of allegorical stories made up by goat herders a few thousand years ago literally is inappropriate.
Your evidence tends to be rather wacky, it should be noted.
But let’s look at CurtC’s example of talking animals. Sure, to modern day eyes, talking animals look ludicrous. But then you go and study Shinto or Native American religion and I’ll darned if it doesn’t seem pretty likely that they honestly believed that some animals were spiritual and wise creatures who could talk to each other. Not all of them, perhaps, but some.
You have to remember that ancient peoples really did perform human sacrifices to placate the Big God living in the Volcano. That’s not just something someone made up to make fun of indigenous peoples. Committing murder to placate something that quite demonstrably has less intelligence than an animal is rather decent evidence that ancient people believed wacky shit. Heck, modern day humans believe some really wacky shit.
Ultimately, there’s no particular reason to think that the ancients didn’t believe what they were writing down. Meeting indigenous tribes, we’ve had plenty of experience of people taking that sorts of silly stuff as deathly serious. Why assume that a bunch of people who felt that it was entirely reasonable for the Creator of the Universe to really care about how much flesh you had on your willy didn’t also believe in something wacky like intelligent animals.
Hell of a good trick since there are no original documents. All we have are copies of copies of copies, none of which match.
Immanuel Kant? I say, yes, he kan.
Great post.