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When we compiled the bible we found historical accounts that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time they were written, but later didn’t really convey the values we wanted to propagate. Some were quite confusing and unclear. When this happened we simply excluded these accounts from the bible and selected alternative accounts that expressed our current vision for Christianity. At the time I justified this by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the religion should be like.
But I was wrong. A divinely revealed text isn’t a cherry picked selection of man-made narratives and stories to support a particular ideology and currently fashionable set of values. It’s a beautiful articulate and comprehensible celestial dictation of the mind of an all-powerful supernatural entity that transcends current knowledge and confirms subsequently discovered wisdom. If you want to simply compile a cannon of man made ideas, histories and laws there are conventions to let you do that. You write, “The best explanation at the time was” rather than “And so it came to pass”, and instead of “Thus said the Lord” you write “So said some bloke or other with voices in his head”.
If I had asked some of the other deities they would have told me how best to chronicle my myths. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask.
Software developed by an Israeli team is giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible. The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
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Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the "priestly" author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The rest is "non-priestly." Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.
When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the "priestly" and "non-priestly." It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent - effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.
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The places in which the program disagreed with accepted scholarship might prove interesting leads for scholars. The first chapter of Genesis, for example, is usually thought to have been written by the "priestly" author, but the software indicated it was not.
Similarly, the book of Isaiah is largely thought to have been written by two distinct authors, with the second author taking over after Chapter 39. The software's results agreed that the book might have two authors, but suggested the second author's section actually began six chapters earlier, in Chapter 33.
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That focus on the deity, Mr. Grayling believes, distracts from seeking the good life in the short time we are allotted.
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Mr. Grayling finds Judaism and Christianity almost self-evidently absurd: “I could never believe the sin committed by Eve in the Garden of Eden was all that serious,” he said. “It would seem to me that knowledge was a good thing to have.”
And he does not fret that we need divine commandments to ensure that we treat one another well: “All the stories that fill the newspaper — war, chaos — they are there because they are unusual. They are not as great a story as the millions of acts of human kindness throughout human history.”
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The Bible is the source of truth, the standard for meaningful life, the revelation of Jesus Christ, the key to true freedom and liberty, and true food for man's soul.
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Add Sticky NoteThe Bible can be read as great literature, or as a history of Israel, or as a source book of theological information. It is all of these things. But none of them does full justice to the purpose of Scripture as set forth by the Bible writers themselves. This amazing book, the Bible, is the source of truth, the standard for meaningful life,
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Weiye Loh on 2009-08-19The Bible has often been claimed as the source of Truth. Why then are there so many different interpretations of it? (Mis)information? truths versus Truth?
Is it ethical for people to claim it to be the Truth?
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I don't know what the author meant when he/she said that the Bible does not do full justice to the purpose of the scripture. You should direct the question to the site owner. =) That was the quote I picked out from the website.
My question was and still is, who decides the truth? What gives the Vatican the authority to decide it? In your case then, does belief = truth? I doubt many people will agree. But as you have argued though, it is ethical for people to hold their own beliefs as truths. So perhaps truth is not really that important after all. - Weiye Loh on 2009-08-30