The Bible

but anyway, back to the point: the bible is useful if you're interested in the origins of many literary works and THAT IS ALL.

The gospels don't ring true for me anymore (I once believed) and Paul's torturous attempts to pull it all-together into some theological structure contains much to much cant and obscuration. James's disdain for power, wealth and privelege appeals to the socialist in me though:

'Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you' James 5:1

Revelation's madness and hallucinatory visions still intrigue:

"The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss. When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss." Revelations ch 9 v 1-2.

All-in-all a literary Classic. And if the Elizabethan english of the King James is off-putting get a modern translation.

genesis 1:2 is my favorite thing in the universe

the image of nothingness suddenly manifest as an infinite still pool of black water, now rippling gently as the spirit of god skims over the top

like

shit

that verse has always seemed strange to me in the best kind of way.

hard verse to beat though the end of the book of Jonah is maybe YHWH at His most merciful yet harsh, God as roshi -- love so much: "should I not pity also Nineveh, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

at a completely secular (and awesome) summer-camp i used to attend (bohemian dysody etc) the dude who ran it sat us all down and proceeded, after a brief character introduction, to read us, unedited, the tale of Absolom from the KJV

...it was an absolutely astonishing experience. way classic.

Growing up secular in the Bible Belt I've had a life-long hatred towards Christian dogma and its huge influence on politics. Around 5 years ago I started reading more religious writing and books by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, etc., then books on esoteric spiritualities, gnosticism, etc. I decided to give the Bible another chance and sat down to actually read The Old Testament.

The Old Testament had all the spiritual substance of a soap opera. No underlying philosophy was there, no meanings behind the famous myths, no intellectual substance whatsoever. It was a cut and dry explanation of a cult deity with a complete lack of ability to manage his whiny back-stabbing followers. Epic stories that in other traditions would be gloriously illustrated page after page are stated matter-of-factly in a few lines like a newspaper. There's nothing spiritual or literary to be gained unless you are already an evangelical.

If Christians would base their belief on something that actually explores mankind's relationship with God, that I could appreciate. As it is The Old Testament is about as deep as you'd think if you've ever tried having a philosophical discussion with a born-again Christian.

Still haven't read the New Testament.

Adam I say this with the greatest respect but a little exasperation: you are profoundly predictable. If you really think Ezekial or Isaiah or the Song of Solomon or the drama of Kings or the pathos of the Psalms are as "cut and dry as a newspaper" I'd really like to know what kind of newspaper you're reading.

the weekly reader

I apologize for the too-personal opening shot there, man. I am snippy today. xp

pretty dope paper imo, cuts it down to the point for adhd kidz like moi

some people just ain't cut out for HARDMAN status

I'd sure love to read an english version of the original texts - as they were writ back at the time. I assume such a thing doesn't exist.

the OT totally explores mankind's relationship with god, like in the greatest possible depth

i feel guilty i never read the bible

i have a bible but i never read it either

I mean dude

The Old Testament had all the spiritual substance of a soap opera. No underlying philosophy was there, no meanings behind the famous myths, no intellectual substance whatsoever.

It sounds to me like you're trying to approach the Bible as literature but expecting it to also do the work of literary criticism for you. That's not how it works.

ilx is the only scripture you need

also why on eartn are you talking about christians in relation to the OT, for the first thing, and for the second why are you blaming the OT for (your) retrospective ideas of religion, instead of appreciating whatever happens to be good in it, and understanding those things within their actual cultural context

The Book of Job, oddly enough, does not include a supplementary commentary on the meaning of the Book of Job.

i had thought for a while it was about an actual job

The Old Testament had all the spiritual substance of a soap opera. No underlying philosophy was there, no meanings behind the famous myths, no intellectual substance whatsoever.

for me these are all positives.

http://www.impactpublications.com/productimages4/5328.gif

i had thought for a while it was about an actual job

lol me 2. kind of like how the kama sutra teaches you how to be a courtesan, i thought that the boj teaches you how to do entry-level biblical jobs, shoveling donkey shit or something.

i mean, compare it with the upanishads. some powerful poetry, but inscrutably esoteric philosophy, and little involving narrative

and the lord said thou shalt be paid minimum wage

reading the bible is one of the top things on my list of things I know I should do but can never summon the willpower to do

while I have the ears of some bible people, should I go for the KJV or stick to whatever translation my oxford annotated one has

Luckily you never have to travel with it since it's available in every hotel room. I stole one of my copies.

yeah but don't they WANT you to take it with you?

where did cains wife come from?!?!

Luckily Adam and Eve had an extra sister they could all shag.

oh dear you're going to struggle with it if you don't accept the boundaries imposed on the reader right from the off.

man the curse of ham is pretty severe imo

“Hello, I'm a hardcore Evolution believer. I'm always telling my friends who are religious, that perhaps the Bible is just another story like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table… Even though I make some good points, in my opinion, against creationism, they still do not agree with me. That's OK, but there is always one question that always seems to stump them… ‘If Adam and Eve were the first people on this planet, then how did the population become what it is without incest? Doesn't the Bible state that incest is bad…?’” Sincerely, Yoendry.

Do literal Bible believers who think evolution is a lie also think human lived to be hundreds of years old? Cos it's there in the Bible...

^^ above bit of ventriloquism courtesy of www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c004.html

Adam, it's something about the further away we get from Adam/Eve, the less able people are able to live for centuries -- basically an analogue to the decaying civilization argument.

xp Of course they do. It's because the world was cleaner and humans were closer to the time of Creation so their genes were freer than ours of defects and tendencies to disease.

that was before all of the genetic defects started to accumulate as a result of the incest, you see. gah xposts.

so, people who know stuff, this new translation of the new testament: http://www.amazon.com/Restored-New-Testament-Translation-Commentary/dp/039306493X seems kinda interesting, but I can't tell what exactly he's doing that really necessitates it being a new translation rather than making the points through his own book. Anyone got any thoughts?

I believe that In the beginning, earth rotated around the sun (er, or should say, the sun rotated around the earth…) much faster than it currently does, so that years passed every 40 days. Therefore, some people lived several hundred "years". Amen.

XP Merdeyeux:
I had the Restored New Testament for a while, before gifting it to my stepmother, who has spent a few years in Episcopal (mainstream Protestant) Bible study. A few good things about it:

1) It includes 4 of the Gnostic gospels, hence saving the trouble of also getting a copy of the Nag Hammadi codices and the gospel of Judas.
2) William Barnstone has been a translator of classical Greek poetry for 50 years, so there is an aesthetic flow and personality to each of the original authors that isn't common in translations by committee.
3) Aramaic (and Hellenic/Roman, where appropriate) names are used throughout, so its Yeshua bin Yosef hanging there on the crucifix. This is also done in the Hebrew names versions of other translations, but I think it helps as a constant reminder of the context: these are texts written by colonized dark-skinned commoners, and not by blond-haired blue-eyed Northern Europeans of a scholastic bent.
4) The introductory notes are excellent, and there are about 120 pages of them (not including a few pages prefacing each chapter).

For my purposes, I found I didn't really need yet another copy of the texts for reference (I'm not a believer), and that my Oxford Study Bible with the Revised English Translation was really the best all-around (literary merit and accuracy) translation. I've got a KJV on the Kindle for when I want to throw down old skool.

Do literal Bible believers who think evolution is a lie also think human lived to be hundreds of years old? Cos it's there in the Bible...

prepare to smack own head

MORE EVIDENCE FOR MY EARTH/SUN USED TO REVOLVE MORE QUICKLY AROUND THE SUN/EARTH THEORY/LAW:

The Earth used to revolve around the Sun more quickly - UNTIL the day the earth stood still in Joshua. After that day, the speed of the revolution was messed up for good. FACT

However, vegetarian diets never allowed people to live to such ages as 900 years even today

EVEN TODAY, IN UR FACES VEGGIES

My life isn't over, I will prove the veggie theory correct yet!

yoof proof cooking, you love it

"Interesting" publication which may be obtained via that "prepare to smack own head" link above. Good grief...

http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh310/yodelagogo/37-6444-ImageEnlarge.jpg

wait is obama for or against?

guilty dumb pleasure: at sites like that, I like to enter terms like "people who can't tell their asses from their elbows" into the site's search engine, just on the off-chance that they'll review their search terms at some point

The Earth used to revolve around the Sun more quickly - UNTIL the day the earth stood still in Joshua. After that day, the speed of the revolution was messed up for good. FACT

My mother has an old, yellowed newspaper clipping somewhere from a religious journal in the '70s, where they reported that scientists calculated (somehow?) how many times the earth had gone around the sun etc etc from geological or astronomical evidence (somehow!) and found it to be, like, 1.5 days short of expected time. Bible scholars were positively smug in reminding them that God held the Sun still in two places in the OT. Scientific proof of miracles, hurrah!

how many times the earth had gone around the sun etc etc from geological or astronomical evidence (somehow!)

counting tanlines, obv

esau is kind of a chump! I wish I had gone to school with him, I would have traded my celery sticks for his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

Esau would have been the dude in 6th grade who already had a goatee

That site is pretty amazing. There's actually alot of discussion on some of those pages, most of it batshit insane, but some of it quite entertaining. However in this rebuttal of the Big Bang:

This story of origins is entirely fiction. But sadly, many people claim to believe the big bang model. It is particularly distressing that many professing Christians have been taken in by the big bang, perhaps without realizing its atheistic underpinnings. They have chosen to reinterpret the plain teachings of Scripture in an attempt to make it mesh with secular beliefs about origins.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/wow/does-the-big-bang-fit

They forgot to include that this 'atheistic' origin story was originally proposed by a Roman Catholic Priest.

They forgot to include that this 'atheistic' origin story was originally proposed by a Roman Catholic Priest.

Many fundamentalists don't think of them as real Christians, though.

Yeah growing up as a Catholic in the south I was reminded of that many times

growing up catholic elsewhere, we insisted that a distinction was made.

It really hurts my head how people can talk about "defective genes that were passed to their sons" and yet declare evolution a terrible and unthinkable heresy

but not as much as the Conservapedia section on "baramins" hurts my head

It really hurts my head how people can talk about "defective genes that were passed to their sons" and yet declare evolution a terrible and unthinkable heresy

Some people believe that God created human beings as they are now, but everything else evolved naturally. In short, it's the evolving of humans from higher primates that offends them.

God created humans as they are now, sort of, except they picked up some genetic defects which shortened their lifespan by 500 years and God kinda shrugged and said, "well, sucks to be you, you've pissed me off too much already with your homosexuality and mixed-fibre shirts and believing in fossils and shit"

Starting tomorrow -- for two days only -- the full Common English Bible and Common English Bible with Apocrypha will be available for free on your Kindle and Nook. Here: http://www.commonenglishbible.com

Mordy, you'll like this

Ten year-old Islamic student of mine just now: "God in the Old Testament is like a strict teacher, God in the New Testament is like a cover teacher who comes in and says 'ok, I don't know what's going on,let's watch a movie'"

The Commandments according to Jesus (Matthew 19):

You shall not murder,
You shall not commit adultery,
You shall not steal,
You shall not bear false witness,
Honor your father and mother, and,
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.

Omitted OT Commandments (Exodus 20):

You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.

The OT God appears to have a frail ego.

makes sense considering man was made in his image and that is one of our fundamental qualities

i was such an idiot in this thread. since then i've read been reading illuminating commentary (partic. "Everyman's Talmud") and yes there is nuance and beauty and a rich history of debate to all this stuff.

Hebrew as a language is really fascinating and complex. from what i have read (and correct me if I'm wrong here or this is just a thing esoterics use) is it true each letter of a word can itself stand for another word, or sometimes multiple varying word structures, creating multiple alternate sentences possible within words? this seems like a holographic cryptology, which is a fascinating way to describe an infinite thing.

each letter has a number attached, and the numbers provide a context for the sentence, each sentence producing a fractal of scalable concepts.

yes however a lot of that stuff is parlor tricks. when it's good tho it can be sublime. i think the technical term you're looking for here is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/museum-of-the-bible-dead-sea-scrolls-forgeries/

"The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s."

Last week, I was bemused by Thomas Römer's The Invention of God, where he concludes the most likely historical pronunciation of the tetragrammaton יהוה was "Yahô", more or less "Ya-hoe". A later prohibition on the name's enunciation ensured the 2nd Commandment couldn't be violated in practice. Following Pascal, perhaps for the best to stick with "Yahweh".

https://i.imgur.com/5F8YQSt.png

Of 16900 objects in the hobby lobby connection, all but 26 from before 500 AD were looted or were otherwise lacking in provenance documentation.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/museum-of-the-bible-looted-art-track-record.html
you might need to open this in a private window.

And the other 26? Just completely made up by some guys

love to tax deduct my stolen and fake artifacts

these same folks will try to convince you that Jesus was in fact a Christian

I love the Bible and songs alluding to it.

If we could drive simple-minded biblical literalism into complete and utter extinction it would be much easier to embrace it as having a measure of value added for humanity.