(November 12, 2015 at 6:42 am)robvalue Wrote: I totally agree. Since there is absolutely no way to test which is the "correct" interpretation, they are all arbitrary. There are no original copies in existence either, so we're dealing with unknown levels of inaccuracy. Simply stating that "this part isn't meant to be taken literally" is bogus since there is no guide at the start of the bible telling you when to do this, or notes by the author. This is not a fact based book. It's not even written in anything like the style of a fact based book. It's a series of anecdotes, mostly not told by anyone actually present in the story, even when the characters may represent someone real.
I said this before in another thread:
If I need anyone to help me interpret what the bible says, god has failed to communicate with me effectively.
Absolutely, robvalue. I love that last sentence - gotta remember it and steal it from you.
We have at least three different languages, with no existing originals. We have thousands of translators. We have stories of cultures separated by millennia. And we have preachers using these stories for their own ends.
For example, I enjoyed a preacher's recent interpretation of Matthew 19:24: "And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.", describing a gate into Jerusalem that was called "the eye of the needle" because it was so low and narrow that they had to unload the camel to get it through.
However, it takes only a few google searches and comparative commentaries to learn that this gate never existed. Other commentaries say it's a translation error, the word should have been "cable" instead of "camel" - not even closely related words, that makes no sense either. And these confusions exist on every page. (Getting a large animal, sometimes an elephant, through the eye of a needle was a metaphor for IMPOSSIBLE in the Mediterranean 2000 years ago.)
And there are people who look at these facts and still declare that the book is god's word.
"The family that prays together...is brainwashing their children."- Albert Einstein
