(January 12, 2017 at 12:35 pm)Rhythm Wrote: An attribution of genesis is impossible without reference to content. We can't know the name or names of the people who came up with that gem, the content of the story, however, speaks volumes about them. The same is true of every book in the bible. Understanding the content (and I sure as hell don't mean that the way the faithful mean it, lol) is the only way to approach the who and why of the originators. For another example, the "prophetic" books of the OT are gibberish if we take the content to be an attempt at prophecy in the religious sense. As social commentary of then-current political realities, or the ideological affiliations of the author, they're immensely informative.
The narratives do hold water, it's just not the water that the religious think they're trucking (nor is it the water that many atheists, responding explicitly to religious claims, are objecting to). /2cents
Cool. Fair enough... I know content can be informative of author as well, but I was hoping to start at the top of the root as it were... if that makes sense; dismiss that which can be dismissed easily without much further inquiry, and then what remains, analyze more thoroughly, but always working outwards from source as highest priority to content as lowest priority. A bit like how I do my tidying (KonMari if you've ever heard of that)... discard everything unless it gives you 'joy'... so drill down to what's important in your life and get rid of everything else.
So have you done a lot of this then? Taken a reductionistic/reverse engineering approach to the Bible?
