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How literally should the Bible be interpreted?

O

Oberon

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Like say, if they moved in next to a tribe called the Rotisserons, who ate mutton with gravy but also happened to worship idols, they'd make a point of not eating mutton with gravy to show they were different to the Rotisserons.

However, no one would deny that the Rotisserons made a valuable contribution to modern culture, in the form of Rotisserie Lamb.

Mmmm. :D
 

Varelse

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They had a big thing about making themselves stand out as different to the other tribes and peoples around them, so sought to define themselves by these convoluted laws and customs and whatever that distinguished them from others. And the purity complex thing too, they believed doing these things made them 'purer' or kept them pure.

Like say, if they moved in next to a tribe called the Rotisserons, who ate mutton with gravy but also happened to worship idols, they'd make a point of not eating mutton with gravy to show they were different to the Rotisserons.

(IMO of course)
:rofl1: You have a point. Of course, how effective this policy was would be a whole 'nother argument.
 
O

Oberon

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:rofl1: You have a point. Of course, how effective this policy was would be a whole 'nother argument.

The policy was highly effective in a sense: There are still people who can be identified as ethnic, cultural, and religious Jews.

Despite a history fraught with disaster, persecution, and dispersion, Jews have maintained a distinct ethnicity and cultural identity for an incredibly long time. The only other people groups who have been able to sustain an identity and a culture for so long have done so mostly by way of isolation (Australian Aborigines, for example).

You can still find a Jew, but you can't find an Akkadian or a Hittite or an Etruscan, or even a Lombard or a Mercian or a Frank for that matter. All these other groups were assimilated into others and lost their identities.
 

substitute

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Heh, yeah... well I just don't buy the whole "chosen people" thing. Y'know, I can't go with that. I think it's far more Jewish wishful thinking or delusions of grandeur, or as I say, a convenient justification for them being exempt from the same standards that others are expected to show towards them, and for obliterating people and war crimes etc.

I can't go along with the idea that the loving God we met in Jesus Christ is the kind of god who would create an entire species, and then abandon the vast majority of it to its fate whilst concentrating on this one particular race, purely because one of their ancestors happened to be a nice guy. It's just that human tendency to want to "own" The Truth, y'know they had a good thing going there, "we have The Truth because we're the chosen people! bow before us and let us conquer you or take you as slaves, none of your arguments or objections are valid!"

Personally I can't see any valid argument, except those of the Jews themselves in the various passages of the Bible, for God not having 'bothered' with the rest of humanity just as much as with the Jews. If you think that at the same time as the Jews were sacking Jericho and when King David was having it away with that chick he liked after having her husband conveniently disposed of, there were Hindus in India who had a fully developed spirituality based on non-violence and disciplined meditation and y'know, all that stuff... well, it just makes me think really, that God showed himself to other peoples in other ways too.

Lao Tzu's ideas of leadership and how to rule wisely and benevolently strike me as being much more in line with what Jesus taught than anything in the Old Testament.

Oberon - would you say that was a good thing though? what's better - to change and update your identity by way of trading and absorbing ideas from others, or keeping it rigidly 'pure' for the sheer hell of it, even though there are other people with some better ideas?

You may now begin chanting "Burn the heretic!" :D

edit - by the way, there's no such thing as a 'pure' race. Etruscans? Well, who were they before they were Etruscans? How did they get there? Did they just evolve independently from different apes? Did they just appear in their part of the world randomly? Did any people or tribe or race 'just appear'? Of course not. They came from somewhere, and who they were and what tribes or now-vanished races they were a mixture of before they became known in their earliest form that we know about, is anyone's guess. Likewise, Abraham himself would've been a cocktail of all the different breeds/brands of homo sapiens that had evolved by his time.

All of us are just overgrown chimpanzees ffs, and what our distant ancestors in pre-history got up to and where they moved to and from and how they mixed with each other will always be a mystery.
 
O

Oberon

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Eh. People are people, with all the same warts and virtues. If God wanted to save Mankind through sending a Christ, he'd have to start somewhere. The Jews would have made as good and bad a place to start as any.

In those terms, being "God's chosen people" is no particular credit.

Christ himself said he was on the scene for everyone's benefit, and acted consistently with that idea. At the same time, he never denied his Jewishness (though many times he was well and truly pissed with the Jewish religious establishment).
 

substitute

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Eh. People are people, with all the same warts and virtues. If God wanted to save Mankind through sending a Christ, he'd have to start somewhere. The Jews would have made as good and bad a place to start as any.

In those terms, being "God's chosen people" is no particular credit.

Christ himself said he was on the scene for everyone's benefit, and acted consistently with that idea. At the same time, he never denied his Jewishness (though many times he was well and truly pissed with the Jewish religious establishment).

Yeah but I see no reason to believe that that was the ONLY time God walked the earth or spoke directly to human beings, just cos it was the first time the Jews noticed it.

And of course, if Jesus was starting there then he would present himself in such a way that would translate well into the terms the people around him could understand. You can see him doing that throughout the Gospels, harnessing local beliefs and customs to make his points. Take the guy near the pool at Bethsaida - it's this superstitious idea that bathing in this water will heal you, it's a local superstition, but he doesn't judge them for it or tell them off, he just uses it as an opportunity to make a point. If he'd been in China or India or Australia or Scandinavia, he'd have used whatever their local belief system was for the same purpose, IMO.

I don't see any reason to see the Jewish context as any more sacred, valid or holy when all it was, was a hook that God used to hang his thoughts on. If even a lowly chimpanzee like me can find many different ways of saying the same thing to different people according to their worldviews and stuff, then I'm sure God would have no trouble doing the same thing, only better.
 
O

Oberon

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edit - by the way, there's no such thing as a 'pure' race. Etruscans? Well, who were they before they were Etruscans? How did they get there? Did they just evolve independently from different apes? Did they just appear in their part of the world randomly? Did any people or tribe or race 'just appear'? Of course not. They came from somewhere, and who they were and what tribes or now-vanished races they were a mixture of before they became known in their earliest form that we know about, is anyone's guess. Likewise, Abraham himself would've been a cocktail of all the different breeds/brands of homo sapiens that had evolved by his time.

That's true of the genes, but not true of the culture, nor of the religion. It's not hard to keep a genetic line going for a hundred generations... but a cultural identity? That's quite another matter.

All of us are just overgrown chimpanzees ffs...

Well, some of us more so than others... :D

...and what our distant ancestors in pre-history got up to and where they moved to and from and how they mixed with each other will always be a mystery.

And a fascinating one at that.

Incidentally, I don't think these matters will always be a mystery. If you believe in an afterlife, it's not ridiculous to suppose that much we consider mysterious in this life will be revealed in the next.

On the other hand, if you don't believe in an afterlife, none of it much matters anyway... or, at least, its significance requires a massive re-evaluation.
 
O

Oberon

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Yeah but I see no reason to believe that that was the ONLY time God walked the earth or spoke directly to human beings, just cos it was the first time the Jews noticed it.

Rest assured, that's one of those mysteries I'll be eager to see the answer to one day. ;)

To me, the real question is not "Are religious traditions other than the Jewish one valid?" but rather "Is the Jewish religious tradition valid?" Xenophobia isn't a Jewish exclusive by any means.
 

substitute

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Well yeah obviously, I meant it'll always be a mystery to us here and now. Though naturally I suppose science might come up with a way of figuring it all out eventually, but the point is that until then nobody living knows these things, so basing entire philosophies on it seems a trifle absurd to me.

Cultural identity... hm, I don't know of many Jews living in London who still live just as in the Old Testament. They have changed - their culture hasn't stayed the same at all throughout history, even just through Biblical times you can see it changing and evolving, and you can see them borrowing ideas from other races around them at the time. They go from the Covenant God, the God of Liberation to the God of Hosts (convenient transformation, dontcha think, for a race that's getting into wars a lot?), then later in Isaiah and Hosea he's changed character completely again. And their culture has too. About the only thing that's stayed completely consistent is the monotheism - despite the beliefs about God's nature having changed - and the name.

Just because they've got a bunch of written documents (of doubtful authenticity) that record this transformation/progression, which they claim hasn't changed, and their attitude towards its sacredness remains... well, I dunno. I don't see that as any reason to believe that they're any more culturally consistent than say, the French, whose history and evolution as a nation is documented from before Caesar's invasions all the way to the present day. We've called ourselves French and spoken various versions of the same language, subscribed to the same religion (officially) and lived in roughly the same part of the world for over 1500 years, but those are just pivots around which everything constantly revolves and changes. The ideology and worldview of a modern Frenchman would be unthinkably different to one of his own ancestors even just two centuries ago, let alone back in Joan of Arc's time. Yet it's still considered their common heritage.

But yeah... xenophobia is a human thing, comes in all shapes, sizes, colours and creeds!!
 
O

Oberon

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I don't see that as any reason to believe that they're any more culturally consistent than say, the French, whose history and evolution as a nation is documented from before Caesar's invasions all the way to the present day. We've called ourselves French and spoken various versions of the same language, subscribed to the same religion (officially) and lived in roughly the same part of the world for over 1500 years, but those are just pivots around which everything constantly revolves and changes. The ideology and worldview of a modern Frenchman would be unthinkably different to one of his own ancestors even just two centuries ago, let alone back in Joan of Arc's time. Yet it's still considered their common heritage.

...and the survival of this cultural identity quite probably can be credited to French xenophobia. :D
 

substitute

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...and the survival of this cultural identity quite probably can be credited to French xenophobia. :D

Yeah, but y'know, just having a cultural identity as 'French' or 'Jewish' is one thing, but what you think that identity means, what it means to you and for you, that totally changes throughout different times. As I say... what a Jew thought about being Jewish and believed their obligations were as a Jew 2000 years ago is totally different to a modern Jew. Just like a medieval Frenchman would've considered being a Roman Catholic a prerequisite for being French, whilst today there are many millions of atheists who consider themselves every bit as French as Joan of Arc.

So I don't think xenophobia does conserve cultural identities as they are. They just conserve the notion of them existing, or the name of them, and perhaps loosely the home turf. But a quick look at all the Americans who call themselves 'Irish' and 'Italian' without ever having been anywhere near Italy or Ireland in several generations, shows that cultural identities can even survive a change of homeland, so that again makes the Jews' "achievement" seem a bit less 'special'.

TBH I think it's opposition that conserves cultural identities "as they were in the time of our fathers" sorta thing. "Italian" communities within the New World tend to behave in such a way and subscribe to values that, in Italy itself, are considered archaic and nowadays pretty rare. In the New World, the Italian immigrants felt their Italian-ness was threatened by the distance from Italy and/or the presence of people from other nations in close proximity, whilst in Italy itself the culture was considered 'safe and secure' as the dominant and official culture, and so the motivation to really pickle it and resist any change was far weaker.
 
O

Oberon

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So I don't think xenophobia does conserve cultural identities as they are. They just conserve the notion of them existing, or the name of them, and perhaps loosely the home turf.

Truly, I don't think anything preserves cultural identities as they are.

And Jewry is incredibly diverse. While I agree that most Jews share almost nothing in terms of worldview with their ancestors 2,000 years ago, there are a few who share some common ground, maybe a lot of common ground, because they've deliberately sought out that tradition.

Just preserving the name is an achievement... if I may be frank with you.

But then, you're already being a Frank with me, aren't you? :D
 

substitute

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Yeah I'm not denying there are some awesome things about Jews. I've got no big beef with them. I'm just saying, y'know, they're no better (and no worse) than anyone else, (edit - and those achievements you mention, whilst pretty cool, are not unique) that's all, and I don't think they ever were, either in human eyes or God's eyes. And I don't think they were the sole recipients of God's attention and guidance before Jesus came.

And I'm Norman ;)
 

SolitaryWalker

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Why is it that a lot of Christians believe that the Bible is infallible, especially when it has been translated so much? Why is it that they are so sure, that even after it has been translated, and possibly lost much of its original meaning, that each verse truly invokes God's intentions? How can they be willing to literally interpret something that has changed human hands so many times and that they have to say, "well maybe back in those times" in order to justify it for modern thought.

Ultimately, who are are they trusting more when they put their absolute faith in the Bible, God or the translators?

The reason Christians believe the Bible is infallible because they were inculcated to do so by their religious authorities. There rarely is a reason to treat the document as such. One shall ask, what about St.Thomas Aquinas, didn't he prove the existence of God by virtue of unaided reason?

No he did not. He may have proved that there are things in the world that the Bible refers to as the work of God, but he got the name 'God' strictly from testimony.

The teachings of the Bible were concocted by highly intuitive individuals who perceived their visions in terms of amorphous perceptions. Most of them were either INTJs or INFJs.

When we interpret their teaching literally we miss their point when they teach us in parables of goats and donkeys, which were symbols for some abstract truths. We envision literal goats and donkeys which were far from the essence they wished to communicate.

This is where our spirituality turns into superstition as we begin to worship the words in scripture which in themselves have no meaning, are no more but ink and paper.

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Moreover, there is no good reason to believe that the teachings of the prophets about spirituality is incontrovertible. As they were no more than highly imaginative people, they were no more qualified than our modern day prophets like Napoleon, Nietzsche, or Lenin.

You and I, shoud we cultivate our Extroverted Intuition enough would be able to make better prophecy than they'd ever hope to.
 

Nocapszy

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That is the thing. They decide that, if God is God, then he has the divine power to ensure that the meaning is conveyed correctly through every translation.

(Of course, that's a priori reasoning -- "The Bible conveys God's will because the God we know from the Bible makes sure that it conveys His will.")

My translation of the bible:

Do whatever the fuck you want.

Oh wait, is that translation or interpretation? I always get those two confused...
 

SolitaryWalker

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Well, hey... good luck with that.

He isnt far off as the distortion of the original spiritual notions of Biblicat hermeneutics are rampant to the point where the text has become hardly more than an empty vessel for anyone to fill in with whatever spiritual and political notions serve their purpose.
 
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Oberon

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He isnt far off as the distortion of the original spiritual notions of Biblicat hermeneutics are rampant to the point where the text has become hardly more than an empty vessel for anyone to fill in with whatever spiritual and political notions serve their purpose.

No.

There may have been some drift across transcriptions and translations... the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts are not absolutely identical, it's true... but to say that "...the text has become hardly more than an empty vessel for anyone to fill in with whatever spiritual and political notions serve their purpose" is unsupportable.

It is true that various people have abused biblical texts in this fashion, but it is not true to say that the texts lend themselves to such abuse. In fact, to make the claim in itself might be evidence of an agenda.
 

SolitaryWalker

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No.

There may have been some drift across transcriptions and translations... the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts are not absolutely identical, it's true... but to say that "...the text has become hardly more than an empty vessel for anyone to fill in with whatever spiritual and political notions serve their purpose" is unsupportable.

It is true that various people have abused biblical texts in this fashion, but it is not true to say that the texts lend themselves to such abuse. In fact, to make the claim in itself might be evidence of an agenda.

We may have similar words written down on the piece of paper in comparison to what we had 2000 years ago, though, I'd bet they are now interpreted radically differently from what they were intended to be by their initial authors.
 

Totenkindly

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We may have similar words written down on the piece of paper in comparison to what we had 2000 years ago, though, I'd bet they are now interpreted radically differently from what they were intended to be by their initial authors.

You should either make a case or stop conjecturing.

The question is not whether it might at all be possible that the interpretation is different (I don't even think that's an issue we disagree on -- it's obvious that our culture brings a different framework to Biblical understanding than a culture that existed 2000+ years ago), it's whether or not it actually IS far different. And to do that demands you make a case... Oberon's actually offers up a few details in his response.

So far you've only offered a stance, not an argument.

And really, look at your other contribution:

He isnt far off as the distortion of the original spiritual notions of Biblicat hermeneutics are rampant to the point where the text has become hardly more than an empty vessel for anyone to fill in with whatever spiritual and political notions serve their purpose.

I know you're fully aware of the haphazard nature of this statement -- you're going out FAR on a limb here, without providing any hard evidence as to your reasoning -- and obviously you need to provide some foundation for such a comment if you want it to be taken seriously.

This isn't the sort of [philosophical] discussion where you can escape digging into concrete detail.
 
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