Voices are being raised from every corner, but amongst the shouting, the message was lost. The attention was drawn, people are listening, yet they can’t hear what is being said. The noise escalates and we cannot help but to raise our coherent whispers to join the shouting of the world.
| — | Brave New World Aldous Huxley |
Bibles: If One Is Good, Two Must Be Better!
On one level, all Bibles are the same. With the exception of the “Wicked Bible”, a 1631 version of the King James Bible that left out the word “not” in the 7th commandment, every Bible tells the same stories.
On the other hand, every Bible version is different. Some versions try to translate word-for-word, which seems the right way to go, but these versions are often difficult to read, and usually miss many of the idioms and nuances of the original languages. Other versions use contemporary language to express the meaning of each verse (thought-for-thought rather than word-for-word), but critics see this as compromising the original words.
Catholic Bibles include some books that are considered apocryphal by other Christian groups and therefore not found in other Bibles.
To make things more complicated, some Bibles have made corrections to older translations based upon the recent archeological findings at Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls). Publishers of other Bible versions refuse include this new information.
Finally, there are Bibles that use “inclusive language” where appropriate- keeping male pronouns only where meaning would be changed otherwise. This modern practice is accepted by many religious folks, but is referred to as “feminazism” by some extremists.
Given the wealth of scholarship and honest faith evident in so many translations, I recommend having at least two Bibles. Reading these texts from two different Bibles makes study or meditation a whole new experience. Seeing the same text expressed in different words gives deeper meaning and understanding.
It works for me, anyhow!
Ok, but what’s this have to do with atheism?
Just as a wise man must pick out the seeds of wisdom from the hearsay of foolish people. And so, the general people too, must pick out the seeds of wisdom from different sorts of Bibles and religion. Nothing is perfect, but completely rejecting something without considering its virtues is a flaw. It leads to ignorance and hubris, an illusion that one is greater than who he really is. We are nothing but insignificant specs in the universe. But that does not mean we can piece together the truth for ourselves. But you mustn’t shove pieces away, something that a lot of zealous people too, including zealous atheists. That is the relevance.
Yet I still hear so much coldness even from the smartest of all people.
Why thank you! I don’t even know you!
The Tower of Babel: one of the seemingly sillier stories of the Bible. Our studies of the origin of language easily disprove it.
But the message behind this silly little story is so disturbing that it causes one to wonder what kind of mind could conceive it.
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
Gen 11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Gen 11:7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.To the Biblical literalist, what kind of message must this convey? Even the Biblical literalist cannot believe that God was seriously worried about mankind reaching the heavens.
So it comes down to a story about human cooperation; about human potential. And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.
Can’t have that, now, can we?
So it portrays human cooperation, human imagination, human POTENTIAL, as evil. Correction: not as an evil…nothing about the story states or even implies that what the people were doing was evil. But rather, that God, for whatever reason, did not want humanity living up to it’s potential.
And going back to the snake story. God lied about the effects of the fruit, while the serpent told the truth. Again, the story is about God becoming mad that humanity might actually learn something.
Eden and Babel never happened, but the message behind each is clear enough. Learning, knowledge, cooperation, and the realization human potential, are bad things, and a direct affront to God.
The message, and the effect, are so coherent and so clear that it would seem an affront to reason to imagine that these messages were not intentional. If taken literally, one could only imagine an evil God, bent on keeping humanity ignorant and at odds with one another.
But if we assume, as evidence supports, that there is no God, what does this suggest about the writers of these passages?
The men who wrote these passages were the elite: the powerful. They wanted to keep the population weak so that they could more easily maintain their power. They knew that things like knowledge, and cooperation, and the effrontery to reach one’s potential would be a challenge to their power. So they sought to suppress it.
< sighs>
It would be hard to imagine, let alone create, something with a more vile message than the one conveyed in these stories. They maintain their power by portraying as evil the very things that would give humanity the ability the recognize them as such. They were created in an ignorant, fearful time by petty, selfish, and greedy people wishing to keep all of the knowledge and power for themselves.
And yet, this is the most revered book on the planet.
We who have managed to free ourselves from the petty suppressions of the book’s authors have a long, hard battle ahead of us.
~ Steve
But you are taking the Bible out of context. The whole point of the Tower of Babel was that man was saying, “Let us build a tall tower to reach the heavens so that we may reach and be like gods and be with God.” God scattered the language because humans were being ignorant and letting their hubris get out of hand. As for the snake story, God merely said, “don’t eat from the fruit, or you will die.” And as promised, they did die after they ate the fruit (not directly after, but that’s when death entered their lives). In addition, a very common misconception is that the fruit of knowledge of good and evil gives you KNOWLEDGE. Actually, it gives you the knowledge of Good and Evil. By eating the fruit, you do that gain clarity and insight, you gain “evil” and the knowledge of that evil, because the act of eating the fruit delivered it into your soul. In fact, Paradise Lost portrays it so that Adam was a beautifully fluent speaker before eating the fruit. Afterwards, he started to become incoherent and angry, blaming his wife, Eve, for everything, rather than see even his own slightest faults.
Please don’t take out quotes in the Bible out of context. That’s how idiots came to the “God hates Fags” conclusion. I can guarantee you if I just take a partial quote out of the Bible, I can make it fit to any situation I want.
For the atheists and agnostics, assume that he exists.
We’ve seen countless times how innocent people get hurt while the guilty live on uncaught. A world-class piano player could get into an accident and lose her ability to play, while a person who has never used his or her hands for anything still can move their joints just fine. An Olympic athlete may wind up in a wheel chair, or a small child at a small age of 2 could have cancer.
So how do you reconcile this world? I want to hear your answers.
For detailed answers, please link me a post through my ask box.
