Damn, you beat me to this bit of snark. OTOH, you’ve inspired me to attempt to break the internet.
Beavis: Hey, Butt-head, this book kicks ass. There’s this talking snake, and a naked chick, and then this dude puts a leaf on his schlong.
Butt-head: Cool.
-Beavis and Butthead Do America
Of course God didn’t literally write the bible. God has secretaries like any other busy executive. Their brains work as his dictaphone.
The real brilliance of the bible is that you can use it to justify, or condemn, anything and everything under the sun. And since everybody is in the business of supporting or condemning, that makes it a very marketable property.
On a more serious note. Let’s consider one of the most fundamental an unequivocal statements in the bible: THOU SHALT NOT KILL
If we take this absolutely literally, at the very least we should all be vegetarians, or restricted to being carrion eaters. Road kill, anyone? Honestly, I haven’t heard that claim, but it is in fact a reasonable literal interpretation.
So let’s assume, as most do, that it applies to humans killing humans. It seems pretty straightforward, and there are religious groups that take this interpretation very seriously. Many Quakers refuse military service, or serve only in non-combat roles. And many more religious groups oppose the death penalty, because in their opinion it directly contravenes one of the Commandments.
Killing in self-defense, or in defense of family? I think many of these same religions would be okay with that one, but not all. And there’s the possibly conflicting “turn the other cheek” meme.
OTOH, I have heard it said that from the “original” text and language of the bible, a more accurate translation would be “Thou Shall Not Murder”. That may be, I certainly don’t know languages well enough to say. And frankly, I didn’t know the “original” text was still around to be read. Neither state-sanctioned execution nor killing the enemy in war is murder because some civil authority has authorized it, i.e., enough of the right people say it’s okay.
So here we have one of God’s fundamental laws, maybe THE top law, and people STILL can’t agree on what it means. It can apparently be overridden by majority vote, OR it actually doesn’t mean what the words say, because somebody got the translation wrong.
And what THAT tells me is that the bible is completely unreliable as a guide for much of anything, and was certainly not divinely inspired or written with a God having any editorial control. People interpret the bible for only two reasons – to justify what they want to do, or to dispute what someone else wants to to that they don’t agree with. Atheists who do this are clearly in the latter category.
I’m wondering…if "Thou shalt not KILL was a “mistranslation”, how much of the rest was as well?
If one takes the Bible to be the word of God, they are really taking the word of another human. It is a matter of what one wants, or who, to believe. We can prove it was written by humans,called the word of God by humans,said it was inspired, by humans. So as I have written before it is just a human book, just like the Koran and the proof of either, is who, or what one wants to believe.
The Bible or the Koran or other writings that humans have declared to be holy is a matter of belief not fact. It may help many to be a better person and it also has made an excuse to think others are wrong. A matter of how one wants to see it. There are some morals to be learned like in Aesops fables, and some writings difficult to think a Loving God would back such things.
Well, I’m not asking anyone to be a believer - considering I’m not one myself.
But I disagree with the all-or-nothing notion that one must either be a biblical literalist or junk the whole thing - to my mind, that’s a straw-man type argument, and not a very clever or convincing one. It is entirely possible to belive in some sort of intermediate position, where one is of the opinion that the work as a whole has some sort of “message” (as summarized by Hillel for example) when taken as a whole, without being accurate as to the facts portrayed therein; for example, it is perfectly possible for a believer to be very well versed in biblical studies and to know of the contradictions therein (such as the two accounts of creation) and yet believe that, while not literally true, they convey some sort of metaphorical truth - not as to the literal creation of the world in 6 K years, but as to the relationship between creator and creation, the nature of knowledge and of good and evil, etc.
Moreover, that these truths, while no two people are going to agree on their totality, are not unbounded by the text. The text imposes structures and limitations.
The problem with the “argument-by-reducto-ad-literalum” (to coin a pig latin phrase) is that it assumes believers are dumb, and unwilling to accept facts. Many are of course, but not all.
Well, one good reason is just because the Bible has been seriously influential in Western society for so very long, that you can’t really understand our culture without reference to it. It has been vastly more influential than Plato, Kant or Spinoza. Thus, it ought to be read by more folks than a small coterie of fans - indeed, read by anybody who is seriously interested in our history, thought, politics, literature, etc. - even if they are of the opinion, as I am, that the text is a collection of chronicles, laws and poetry from an extinct Iron Age culture, nothing more.
Also, I’m not from your country.
Probably to make a point during an argument. “Fundies” tend to take quite a bit of it literally and “hyper literally” and demand that others do the same(when it suits them). However when that doesn’t suit them or when it brings up inconvenient issues, they flip flop on that literalism. It’s hypocrisy, and I guess the atheists and the “nonliteral” christians love to point that out. Many people normally would not care what the Fundies believe and would happily let them live/believe however they want. However, the Fundies tend to demand that it’s their way or the highway. So, whatever beating they get from others, is deserved.
Don’t tell me in one breath that the Bible is the literal and unalterable word of God, and I’m gonna burn in hell for not following your rules, and then when I show you many you don’t follow, they don;t apply.
In short, believe what you want and stay the hell out of our business. People go hyperliteral on you? They merely stole your tactic. Deal with it.
I didn’t read any of this thread except the OP. I’m not going to bother. Why? This pot has been stirred too often in the past, and this is all the time I choose to waste in yet another re-re-re-reiteration of the same old stuff.
The reason I don’t think it was written by or inspired by God is that God is mythical, and thus unable to write or inspire.
However, that being said - the fact that humans cannot all agree on what the text means, is not the fault of the alleged divinity that inspired the text - but one of humans.
I disagree that the text can be twisted to mean literally anything. Texts have meanings. They may not be completely obvious, or spell out every eventuality - but that does not mean that they are wholly open-ended and meaningless. There is a middle ground between “all details carefully eludicated” and “meaningless”.
Take “thou shalt not kill”. This term is certainly subject to lots of interpretation. It may mean “thou shalt not murder” - which seems sensible enough. Of course, the definition of “murder” is subject to lots of elaboration - just as it is in our law codes today. But no-one in their right minds would state that, because the term is subject to lots of elaboration (does the term include manslaughter? what about negligent homicide? These are not “murder” in our code) that the term is wide-open and meaningless.
Lawyers face such issues of meaning every single day, and still believe that laws have meaning.
And some people don’t give a damn if they ever wake up or not, they just want the “thumpers” to STFU and mind their own business,
Good for you. Seriously. I wish that was the case for so many high-profile ministers pushing their flocks to change public policy because of their own dubious bible interpretation.
Yes of course, since we both apparently agree that the bible is of solely human origin. Again, if there was a general consensus about this, we wouldn’t have this big culture war going on for… ever? Well, hundreds of years at least.
I partly agree, in that no single passage is subject to any and all interpretations. But there are so many passages to cherry pick from. If every person interprets the bible in their own way (and they do, of course, except for those who have subjugated their own vision for some spiritual leader’s), then they can all find what they’re looking for in it, even if the things they are looking for are directly contradictory or mutually exclusive. And they will be be given confidence that the bible “supports” their viewpoint.
All well and good, except that so many seem to believe that the bible IS law, and not a series of fables designed to teach… whatever. I’m sure you can draw any number of lessons out Grimm’s Fairy Tales that aren’t explicitly written out, but then again no one I know of is urging their friends and and families to vote out an officeholder because he or she doesn’t understand one of the fairy tales.
Well, there are two different issues being argued here:
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on the intepretation of bible as text; and
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on the social and political impact some believers wish the bible to have.
The message I’m getting is that some Atheists are using certain arguments grouped loosley under issue 1 because some Believers are pushing issue 2.
We are obviously both on the same side on issue 2.
It is perfectly understandable for persons facing believers determined to force their belief upon them, to attack the source of that belief. However, that does not make their attacks on the text into good and logical arguments, if they are not otherwise.
It is the equivalent of someone arguing that Aesop’s Fables are obviously silly because they contain talking animals, and animals do not talk. That argument isn’t very persuasive, quite independently of the social and political use someone is attempting to make of Aesop’s Fables. Whether or not aminals can talk is essentially irrelevant to the points being made in the fables.
Why don’t you go to your local church and tell the people that the Bible is nothing but a bunch of fables, but you find them useful. I think I know what the reaction would be at a majority of them.
There are some fantastic claims in the Bible which for which a literal interpretation is crucial and non-negotiable. For instance, a literal resurrection of Christ is absolutely essential to Christian theology. Without that, there is no Christianity. That’s not a claim that defenders can posit an allegorical interpretation for, and it’s a claim that has no more inherent plausibility than the talking donkey in the Balaam story.
In the last church I attended regularly, most of the people would probably agree with that statement at least for the most part, including the pastor who made me want to go there in the first place.
(First United Methodist, Washington Terrace, Ut)
That is why I rarely use the word “all”.
I know of at least two UCC (United Churches of Christ) denominations where the Bible-is-fables doctrine is spoken of openly. I won’t say everyone agrees with it, but only because in at least one case there is little-to-no pressure to be orthodox. But the pastor I am thinking of once gave a sermon entitled “When God Is Wrong” in which she deconstructed why a particular Old Testament narrative was frankly full of crap (her point was that it is, in her view, dangerous to read the Bible without critically analyzing it); and she once, during the Advent season, referred to the matter of whether Mary was a literal virgin as silly and insulting, because there is nothing magical about the hymen.
You need not go even that far. The bible - all of it - is premised on the literal existence of a god, which is surely no more plausible than a talking donkey (and indeed a good deal less).
However, that has exactly zero to do with the argument at hand, which is about using a hyper-literalist interpretation to attack the bible as text.
That sort of attack is silly and ineffective, no matter whether you happen to believe a god exists or not.
My general thrust is that atheists, who generally couldn’t care less about the bible, are digging through it in an attempt to refute those who hold up the bible and claim it as a universal moral compass and the underpinning of all "correct: human law and behavior.
I don’t get your Aesop analogy. The attacks on the Bible, as a, er bible for behavior, are based on inconsistencies within the text itself. People can, and do, draw contradictory conclusions from the same or different portions of text, and then go to war over it.
If I had to make an Aesop analogy, it would be something like this. (And forgive me, I can’t remember a damn thing about the contents of any of the fables so I will make this generic.)
Preacher 1: Fable one teaches us to trust our friends.
Preacher 2: :sniff: Fable 2 teaches us to trust no one. So fuck you, you infidel bastard!