On the subject of Hell and Salvation

[Abaddon_ire]

Well, this is technicolor precious

Abaddon_ire


Um no. Fredds link gives a date of approx. 1300 BC slap bang in the middle of the bronze age. 

Here are some quotes from the wikipedia page:

<snippage of bovine crap>
Nice dodge. Instead of addressing the issue at hand, hurl a wall of irrelevant quotes. That is so lame.

In our own time this tradition continues. Off the top of my head I can name Adam Phillips, Slavoj Zizek, Pierre Badiou, and Martha Nussbaum as interesting thinkers who have retold stories from Shakespeare or Greek drama to get across their own contemporary messages.

So did JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling and GRR Martin. Doesn't make dragons real just because they wrote about them.

You don't have to be Derrida to think that no one can read the original story -- we all read the story plus all the interpretations which have come since. 

So why have you not? Because it is quite obvious that you have only the superficial understanding from whatever sunday school you attended.

Thus even if the redactors of the Torah were using older stories, there is no reason to think of them at the intellectual level of illiterate Bronze Age goat herders. They were clearly not like that. You don't have to like the stories, or give them any importance in your own life, but condemning the redactors for being something they're not is bad scholarship. 

OK that passage has so much stupid in it that it is a challenge to unpick it. First, you claim that the holy word of your god had human editors. This alone puts you at odds with roughly 30% of christianity. Next, my claim (backed by evidence I note, unlike yours) was that people were literate long before you magic book. Of course they were not "like that" I claimed that literacy long predated the bible. You constructed a stupid strawman and promptly failed to even knock that over. Well done on the double fail. And in a final flourish you give...

You don't have to like the stories

Sure, there is nothing to like.

or give them any importance in your own life

Theres your problem. I am legally all signed up to a code of ethical practice. In addition to that I have a personal moral code. If I were stupid enough to believe in your bumper book of magic, I would have to chuck both by the wayside. You are quite happy to toss aside your own morals in favour of a magic sky fairy as described in a magic book. I am not. Which of us is the more moral?

but condemning the redactors for being something they're not is bad scholarship. 

See now you are claiming that your magic book is actually not the holy word of gunderscored. I hope you are intellectually suitably equipped to spot the glaring problem with that without needing me to paint by numbers. Or possibly crayon. How low can we go?