'Pulling the rug' from under the feet of "peacecful believers"?

[Ben Davis]

It's a good point. How can interpretations "change"? It's the same frigging book, and now suddenly you're gonna start doing something totally different to what you were doing a minute ago.

Religious change happens all the time because, as any comparative theologist can tell you, religions are man-made and mankind is a vacillating species, indeed! Think of Christianity and all of the denominations which sprang up as believers needed less literal versions (one per believer?). Although the various churches used every means at their disposal to stop change from happening, the views of the common christian resulted in the modern, less toothy versions we see today.

You have no way of verifying the previous way was the right way, nor the new way. I guess some new scrap could turn up or something, or they find stuff in other ways that "may change the meaning" of what it says. Bullshit. The assumption it's divinely inspired is the stupidest thing I could imagine. If it was divinely inspired people wouldn't need to kill each other over how to read it.

They claim they can justify their new beliefs. That's why it's important, in my view, to ask believers to do so, and to ask why they don't accept other interpretations.

So how do you convince people of the new interpretation when it's all arbitrary? You can hardly use a reasoned argument.

People will follow a new interpretation when it fits their value-systems; it would be rare to find a pacifistic jihadist. So to have a greater chance of a successful religion, you have to be able to read the crowd and 'intelligently design' your doctrine to fit popular opinion.

I'd say the only people qualified to give the right "interpretation" are the authors, and since we have no originals of anything (I assume this is the same with the Kerrang) we've just got copies of copies. And really, for all we know they wrote these books to be stories; fiction.

That depends on what you mean by 'right interpretation'. If you mean 'original' then yes, the original authors would be the best source however if you mean 'most successfully propogatable' (most memetic?) then public opinion's definitely the way to go. In which case, everyone's qualified to interpret. That's both a boon and an indictment: a boon because we're not permanently stuck with harmful interpretations and an indictment because it highlights the lack of divine inspiration required for religion.

So how do you do it? History seems to point towards telling people that's how they're going to do it, and killing them if they don't. Science doesn't seem to work that way. Einstein didn't need to slaughter the previous scientists to get his new theory into place. Well, I haven't heard about it if he did.

Historically, violence has been the most effective inducement. It still is for non-enlightened Islam. For other religions, now o'days, social exclusion and isolation tends to be the most common tool

These days everyone has their own interpretation. It's just words on a page that some douche bag wrote ages ago. If you think it has all the answers to life, or even any of them, you're starting with a very fragile premise.

Yup. That's why I call bullshit, too.