Our ancestors must have been amazed that they could actually write things down, and that their thoughts could be preserved in stone, on clay tablets, on sheets or scrolls of papyrus or parchment. Just think of how astonishing this must have been to the first humans who first realised that their words could live, in a sense, forever. Of course, their actual preservation would often depend on the vagaries of history, and it must soon have occurred to those first writers that they could also make sure that the words of their competitors would not live on, simply by destroying whatever they were written on. At first, though, the wonder of being able to preserve words which, until that time, could only be spoken, and were as ephemeral as the sounds which carried them, depending for their preservation on their own and others’ memories, must have been overwhelming.
No doubt, by that time, phrases and common expressions, and even stories and tales of heroism, would have come to be remembered and repeated. Perhaps the wonder of language itself led to the incantatory repetition of certain words and phrases, and language may have developed pari passu with deeper resonances of originally undifferentiated experience, where dream and reality, trance and chemically induced transformations of consciousness bled into each other in ways that improved people’s ability to cope with a new-minted world full of dangers and opportunities. When and how modern Homo sapiens became consciously language-using animals is probably hidden in the past and unrecoverable; but most of us, who have very little idea of how many of the things in daily use actually work, and why they work — think of things like computers and aircraft, skyscrapers and spacecraft, computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging – live perpetually in a region of perplexity and wonder, may have at least some idea of how language must have appeared to our earliest language-using ancestors, and how, around ancient campfires, the mystery of living between dreamland, and altered states of consciousness, and waking, was lived out.
Think of Augustine, who was perhaps the first to realise with some amazement that one could read silently, and that sounding out the words was not something necessary to comprehension. He was amazed, as Alberto Manguel says, when he first met Ambrose of Milan, that
his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.
Apparently, until then, people read aloud. Written language was frozen speech, and frozen speech, in the absence of a speaker, seemed magical and uncanny. It is hard to think ourselves back into such a world, since ours is so replete with texts and imagery, though I think the experience of reading digital text may help us to recreate an experience similar to that of the first readers, who felt they needed to sound out the words in order to understand.
Let me try to explain. Last year, a Royal Society of Canada Expert Panel issued its report on end-of-life decision making. What I have been doing for some time now, when I download a pdf text from the web, is to transform it into Kindle or Sony Reader readable text. It’s saves on toner bills. I read the report when it first came out, and retained practically none of it. I had the same experience some time ago when I read Thomas Dixon’s Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Though I did a review of the book which Ophelia was kind enough to put up on Butterflies and Wheels, I said then that I had difficulty keeping the structure of the argument in mind. A few days ago, since finding the report of the Quebec National Assembly Commission on Dying with Dignity, which I printed, I printed the Royal Society Report at the same time. I was astonished to find so much that I had simply missed while reading it in an e-book format. The structure, the directionality of the argument, indeed the very logical structure of the argument of the report, came to me as something entirely new, as though I had not read it before. Digital text seems almost as ephemeral as spoken language. Which reminds me that when computers first came into common use it used to be said that we would now save on paper — an old technology! — and yet, in my experience at least, paper multiplied, because the task of writing had become so easy. In the church, at least, reports, essays, discussion documents, course materials, newsletters — all this multiplied exponentially.
Another thing happened as well, and this will bring me back to the original purpose of this post. With the digital multiplication of documents, party divisions multiplied and also solidified. In the church, every possible theological position came to extensive expression, was distributed amongst like-minded groups of people, so that there was no longer a broad central consensus, but an entire spectrum of views, each representing a point in the evolution of Christian belief, all existing now side-by-side in contemporary groups which hold their own understanding to be somehow the expression of a true or genuine Christianity, whilst all the rest are in (various degrees of) error. The very existence and accessibility of divergent texts supporting one’s own view tends to validate and confirm one’s own beliefs — or to form them as it associates those beliefs with a distinct party or subgroup. This is quite evident in online communities too, where people gravitate towards sites which reinforce their own thinking and the thinking of others who frequent the same sites, so that fairly narrow distinctions are capable of creating near orthodoxies which oppose each other in virtual space — so that, to take a simple example, when I disagree with something that Jerry Coyne says, people ask whether we have had a falling out.
And this brings me back to the idea of sacred texts. Early texts, or texts which originated in particular contexts and were reinforced by specific events of formation and transmission which gave them special salience for particular ethnic, national or racial groups, functioned like catalysts around which orthodoxies crystallised, and it is easy to see how, when writing was first discovered, something like awe must have attended the frozen speech captured within texts and those capable of interpreting them, that is, of rendering them back as spoken language. The discovery of the Book of the Law by Hilkiah during the reign of Josiah (2 Chronicles 34.14) exemplifies this sense of the awesomeness and communal power of texts. The same kind of thing is in evidence in the ”speaking in tongues” of which Paul speaks in the famous 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, where the importance of interpretation (of rendering tongues into intelligible speech), so that the church may be edified (1 Corinthians 14.5) is stressed. It is not surprising, in the light of this, that in Genesis 1 God’s creative power should be expressed in terms of the power of speech: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light!” (1.3) Speech, and written text (speech itself captured in symbols), was awesome, powerful, creative, so early writings took on the aura of the sacred at a time when what we now call religious experience and other altered states of consciousness was not clearly distinguishable from quotidian reality.
At the time when Christianity came to birth the process of sorting experiences into veridical and imaginary or delusional was already well underway. Early Greek philosophy, while still deeply influenced by religious thought, had begun the process, and this had been further developed by Hellenistic philosophy and its offshoots in Rome. Cicero and Seneca, for instance, both of whom thought deeply on questions about the gods, and expressed a restrained scepticism regarding them, flourished shortly before Christianity began to make an impact on the thinking of the empire, an impact which, as Charles Freeman has shown, was to close the Western mind for more than a millennium. As David Lewis-Williams suggests in his book Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion:
[i]t could be argued that the foundation of Paul’s difference of opinion with the Athenian philosophers was founded on different ways of interpreting the spectrum of human consciousness: he believed that visions and dreams imparted truth and he had experienced this on the road to Damascus; the philosophers, by and large, believed that truth could be achieved only by rational thought. [157]
Unfortunately for human thought, Christianity won out over Greek rationalism, and the idea of the sacredness of certain forms of speech and certain written texts, which dare not be questioned, survived to infect the world today. Imagine what would have happened had Greek epistemology and scepticism been given the upper hand over the desert superstitions of Christianity and (later) Islam.
This brings me back to my title: “The Absurdity of Sacred Texts.” A few days ago I jumped on the Bible bandwagon of Why Evolution is True, and, as it chances, of Jason Rosenhouse’s Evolution Blog. In a long series of lengthy comments someone from Australia, who at first called himself “Saviourbreath” (‘Save your breath’ — get it?!), and now “Antonio” (though his real name is Anthony), has explained in sometimes tedious detail that he believes the Bible reveals God’s plan and purpose for the world. But he also believes – according to one of his comments to Mike — rather surprisingly, that
[r]eading the Bible “through the eyes of faith” is to read it just subjectively, while holding your critical faculties at bay.
[This is actually not a quotation from "Antonio," but a criticism levelled at him by Mike (which "Antonio" then quotes). The accuracy of the criticism is not, however, in my opinion, in any doubt. I do think "Antonoio" sets reason and often the plain meaning of the text aside, yet considers his own reading to be true to the text, despite textual evidence. I do think he is confused -- something which, given his long religious quest, is not surprising -- and interprets the Bible idiosyncratically. Biblical scholarship is very complex, has not arrived at stable conclusions, and, except for some biblical scholars -- such as Gerd Ludemann, Hector Avalos, and a few others whose conclusions do not rest on faith assumptions -- is largely tied to doctrinal conclusions which are brought to the text, and are not the result of critical study.] How you can hold your critical faculties at bay and also “know” that the Bible reveals God’s plan, that is, something that, if it exists at all, must be something that can be determined in some objective sense, and therefore cannot be purely subjective, is simply beyond me! But the ways of faith have little to do with reason. Of course, I believe that “Antonio” is completely confused, and has not for a moment stopped to think what kinds of problems his holding the Bible to be sacred, and yet at the same time accessible only subjectively, has in store for him. Indeed, these problems simply multiply ad libitum as soon as you suggest that there is something sacred or holy about any particular text, for texts are, as postmodernism made painfully clear, always hermeneutically unstable, especially, as seems to be the case, when you want to base your own (subjective) understanding of the meaning and purpose of life upon them.
That’s one reason why the church tried to insulate the Bible from the possibility of lay interpretation, and why people were killed for translating the Bible from Latin, or Greek and Hebrew, as the case may be, into a language (or tongue) ”understanded of the people,” as Article 24 of the Anglican 39 Articles of Religion said of the English liturgy. After he was condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance (1415), the bones of John Wycliffe (1320-1384), who was responsible for an early translation of the Bible into English, were exhumed and burned. While not absolutely forbidden, because of the danger of (supposedly) false interpretations due to the accessibility of the Bible to untrained lay persons, the translation of the Bible was strongly discouraged and often persecuted. While that particular horse has already left the barn, the church — a singular noun almost always used for a plural reality that – still tries its best to keep people in the corral, trying to stop them from wandering too far away from standard interpretations; but this, of course, only encourages the creation of communities of interpretation (denominations or churches), where these divergent interpretations are accepted and institutionalised. And this should long ago have ended the absurd practice of treating particular texts as vehicles of the word of God, and therefore as appropriately or even intelligibly set apart to be considered as sacred or holy. The absurdity of this arbitrary process — and, as “Antonio’s” idea that reading the Bible must be done “subjectively, while holding your critical faculties at bay” shows us, it is perfectly arbitrary — is made clear in Jerry Coyne’s latest post on the Bible, where he quotes in detail from the Jewish Times the account of the development by a group calling itself “Kosher Innovations” of Kosher bathroom tissue, which avoids the problem of working on the Sabbath involved in tearing off sheets of toilet paper. (Kosher bathroom tissue, as I recall, used to be available in Britain long ago: single sheets of wax paper textured “tissue” folded pop-up style like Kleenex.) As Jerry says, just in case the whole thing should be thought too silly to be believed: “I am not making this up.” Absurdities like this abound wherever supposedly holy texts are involved.
Should it really need to be said? There is simply no way of establishing the oft-repeated claim that a text is holy, that it contains the words or expresses the purposes or will of a god. The claim is absurd. Language, which may have struck its first users with awe, and written text, which seemed to come from and exemplify mysterious power, is simply one more product of the evolutionary process. Of course, as Dawkins has pointed out, cultural units or “memes” (as he called them — see The Selfish Gene, and also Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine), constitute a second replicator, and initiated a new evolutionary process not dependent on genetic mutation and replication. The very fact of the mutation and replication of new meanings and new configurations of meaning — “memeplexes” as Blackmore calls them — makes fixity of meaning impossible to achieve, just as there is no general fixity of species. Individuals like “Antonio” will continue the process of hermeneutic manipulation of meaning so that standard interpretations will simply wriggle off the pin and fly away. This fact makes “Antonio’s” claims for the reveletory significance of the Bible both quixotic and absurd — though no more than the Pope’s or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, no matter how sophisticatedly expressed.
There is no real Christianity or Islam or Judaism for the simple reason that cultural meaning is not fixed, cannot be fixed, and is constantly evolving. Arguably, in this process of cultural evolution, as Singer pointed out in his classic text, The Expanding Circle, as Philip Kitcher argues in his latest book, The Ethical Project, or as Steven Pinker claims in his controversial The Better Angels of Our Nature, there is a genuine history of progress and improvement that makes the morality expressed in sacred texts seem not only primitive and foreign but positively repugnant. This progress is evident, as many commentators on the Bible have pointed out (see, for example, C.H. Dodd’s The Authority of the Bible), within the supposedly sacred text itself, but this can only be evident if the text itself is not regarded as uniformly sacred, and we can only do that, as Plato showed in his Euthyphro, if we bring (external) values to the text which stand in opposition to and judgement on the text.* In other words, the text itself cannot be sacred or determinative, no matter how hard the attempt is made to keep it outside the ongoing human conversation, because, as soon as we address ourselves to it, it becomes part of that conversation, and often, as both Coyne and Rosenhouse so clearly show, part of the conversation that has long ago been superceded. The continued attempt to impose sacred texts on the contemporary conversation almost always tends to deform and destabilise the processes of rational thought by introducing claims that have no obvious contemporary relevance based on processes of thought without epistemic warrant.
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*I do not want to claim that the idea of progress in morality is unproblematic. As an example of the type of problem involved we may take C.H. Dodd’s The Authority of the Bible, for he sees religion as progressive in this way, leading ultimately to Christianity, “which for the first time exhibits a religious life and religious institutions inherently universal in their scope.” (268 in the first edition, London: Nisbet & Co., 1928) How to identify progress, without importing our own local values in the attempt to identify it, is indeed, a problem not easily overcome.
Ancient reading and writing is fascinating…. I think too often we presume anachronistically that reading then was the same as reading now, when it wasn’t the case at all. One of Bart Ehrman’s books showed nicely how the older Greek manuscripts of the Bible lacked punctuation, or even spaces between words, for instance. Perhaps that’s why Augustine was so shocked to see Ambrose reading to himself…. doing such a thing would perhaps require more work to format your sentences out of what are essentially streams of letters. Thissentenceishardertoparcewhentherearenospacesforinstance. And you have stuff like the Koran, where there were originally no vowels in the Arabic, so there were a few different versions made with the vowels added in. So… I find it really troubling when someone says you’re supposed to approach these books unskeptically, since religions spend a lot of time hiding the various issues with their books behind expensive schools, fancy book bindings, and plain ole freaking lies.
Ah, Sajanas, touché! I had to sound out your sentence in order to discover what it said — though I think you meant parse. But was that true, I wonder, of most contemporary texts in Latin? I don’t know. Certainly Augustine had no or at least very little Greek.
Yet another fascinating article Eric. And I spotted the important distinction between progress in understanding and progress in morality, of which the first must obviously be true. I wonder if you’ve ever come across the work of a fellow Canadian, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, who was hugely influential in media studies? Unfortunately, he converted to Catholicism, but I don’t hold that against his genius (geniuses are allowed their insanities!). He put forth just how profound different mediums affected society, rather than their content or message. It might make us look at the medium of the blog and how it affects the atheist community in a different way.
The few books/scrolls/tablets were objects of power and veneration ‘back then’.
Now Amazon UK lists 869,534 Results for a search on books about Religion and Spirituality. No wonder the implicit authority of the One True Text is slipping.
There is a late-1980s film directed by Bruce Beresford, Black Robe, filmed in Canada and set in the 17th century, in which the seeming “magic” of readable written words (in Eric’s apt phrase, “frozen speech” in the absence of a speaker) is cleverly illustrated. in an early scene, some Indians watch as a French colonist quietly speaks some words, which are written down on a scrap of paper, carried many yards away, and handed to another colonist, who could not have heard the writer and who reads the exact words aloud from the paper, to the amazement of the observing Indians.
MacDonald referred to a book by by historian Charles Freeman, without mentioning its title. It is: “The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason” (Vintage, Feb. 2005)
Serious readers interested in the “Origins of Christianity” could turn to the same historian’s other three books:
- A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State (Overlook TP, Jan. 2010)
- A New History of Early Christianity (Yale Un. Press, 2011)
- Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (Yale Un. Press, 2011)
In particular, “A.D. 381″ focuses on the remarkable years of the Emperor Theodosius (reigned 379-395) who created and established the Catholic Church as the only legal form of Christianity in the Roman Empire; and who initiated the persecution of all other Christians as “heretics”, subject to the threat of execution.
He later embarked on the suppression and persecution of “pagans” in the Roman Empire, which turned into a raging mania of destruction over the next few centuries that culminated in the annihilation of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization, its monuments, its buildings, its libraries and books, its art, its science, philosophy, its knowledge, even its olympic sports.
This is a fundamental period when the Emperors created a military Catholic Church as an additional agent of their spiritual “control” of the Empire, alongside the imperial administration and the army.
The Catholic Church survived as an institution created by the Roman Emperors. The Church became a rich secular power thanks to gifts and donations, and it adopted the same Roman imperial style — splendid palaces, rich garments, grand displays of pomp and protocol — incredibly removed from the humble figure of Jesus Christ.
Alfred Loisy commented: “Jesus was announcing the kingdom of God, but it’s the Church that came!”
A history that most Christians don’t know or simply ignore.
Roo caused me to open the Kindle Store and see whether the books of Charles Freeman are available in Kindle format. I couldn’t help noticing that he had given a lengthy (22 Kindle page) 5-star review of “A.D. 381.” I don’t see a way to link to that particular review on Amazon.com, but it is the next to last in the 5-star category.
Eric I’m a little reluctant to point this out, it’s such a beautifully written piece (not saying I accept everything you say in it), but that quote you attributed to me was actually by Mike. I trust it was an honest mistake
Here’s what he said on 24 June 2012 at 06:47 (with much of it excised):
And I said the following to him in reply:
This bit is I think what I was referring to as “what I’d said above”:
“tedious detail”?
What Sajanas said is something I’ve heard, too. Keep in mind that lower case letters were a medieval invention, so the situation in the time of Ambrose was even worse than his example.
Worse yet were the ancient Greeks, who inscribed letters in whatever order pleased them. It takes some patience and an open mind to read the inscriptions on some old works of art. At some point they adopted the convention of boustophredon, where one line of text read left to right and the next ran right to left.
Over at Slacktivist, Fred Clark once gave two bits from the Bible, one I think in James (written in Greek and perhaps quoted from the Septuagint) and the other in the Old Testament (translated from a Masoretic source), which though utterly different were based on the same ambiguous Hebrew text. Sometimes the vowels are critical.
The Australian Parliament is soon due to take a vote on legalising homosexual marriage (it probably won’t pass, but on current trends another attempt should make it in a few years). Several commentators on the Online Opinions site have attempted to reconcile Christian beliefs with condoning gay marriage, and one has tried to back her assertions up with Biblical quotations. Considering the obvious ‘kill all gays’ message of Leviticus 18 and 20, it demonstrates the lengths to which theists are happy to twist their beliefs, while insisting that they are somehow remaining true to the original message of the Scriptures.
The evolution of literacy is a fascinating topic. I am aware of the danger of anachronistically assuming that people in ancient times read like we do today, but still I have a hard time believing that everybody before the time of Augustine read aloud. First, I guess it would have to depend on how much somebody reads, e.g. some researchers at the great library of Alexandria may have already read silently but 99% of people had so little access to scrolls and books that they would never have gotten the hang of it.
Then there is my observation that I find Sajanas example actually easier to grasp when I parse it silently letter for letter than when I start by saying syllables out loud, because English has the quality that the same letter-syllable may be pronounced very differently depending on the word it is part of. Consequently, I would be downright unable to read it out loud to listeners (including my own ears) before having parsed it silently. It would be easier, however, in a phonetic representation of the language or in a one-symbol-per-word alphabet like Chinese script.
All this quite apart from the possibility that any transition from loud to silent reading may have happened earlier in India, China, Korea or Japan than in Europe.
I find these ideas of ground-breaking changes in mental practices having occurred so recently and then spread so quickly generally quite suspect; the worst example, is also religion-related, by the way. It is the hypothesis that tries to explain the origin of religion by claiming that until ca. 3000 years ago all humans were schizophrenic, interpreting their own thoughts as the voice of spirits or gods. And then they stopped doing that. All over the world. Around the same time. The problem here is that the world is a huge place, and something like that – better communication between the halves of your brain – sounds like the kind of thing that you would have to inherit, and the Japanese and Indians are not actually all descended from some guy living in Turkey in 1000 BC.
The problem is not quite the same but similar for the idea that everybody in ancient times read aloud and then around 400 AD people suddenly realized, hey, you can do that silently. Surely it must have happened at least thousands of times in parallel, and in many cases much earlier or much later, depending on how much of a reader the person in question was. The thing is simply that there were fewer prolific readers the more you go back in time.
Antonoio, I do indeed apologise regarding the quote. I can now see that you were quoting Mike. Attributing it to you was, as you say, an honest mistake. Now that you are using blockquotes it is much easier to see what you are quoting and what you are not. However, I am duty bound to say, I think, that, even though Mike said it, he was right on the money, and characterises your technique of biblical interpretation accurately. I was going to point out exactly this at one point, that you give no epistemic basis for reading the Bible or interpreting Christianity as you do. Yours is, if I may put it this way, a kind of New Age Christianity, interpreting things freely to accord with your own view of things, and you do, indeed, as Mike said, put your critical faculties aside, and simply free associate as you read the Bible so that it says something with which you can agree. The Bible itself, needless to say, gives no support, or at least scant support, for a reading which contradicts practically all of critical biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, I will indicate that it was a misquotation in the text.
No need to apologise Eric, though thanks for doing so. Really it’s of no consequence to me, though I confess it would have devastated me a few years ago. As I said once before, I feel an uncharacteristic affection for you and the others on your site that I’ve been engaging with – very strange for me. Your comments on my writing and scholarship are no doubt accurate and deserved. Hopefully we’ll see an improvement soon if the amount of practise I’ve been getting here counts for anything.
I admire your literary skill btw. Not at all tedious
I read Dennet’s Consciousness Explained some years ago, and as an interesting aside it has been speculated that there was a time when people could not even capture sentences of thought in their heads without vocalizing them. One of the landmark advances was to vocalize a question and find that you could answer it yourself, leading later to completely internal mental “exchanges”.
I do not have the book available to cite Dennet’s sources, I suspect this may be largely speculative, but it is somewhat mind blowing to think that there were people who struggled to do what modern people do almost constantly and reflexively. We snicker at those who must move their lips while reading as very rank amateurs, while there may have been a time when people could not even ponder silently!
It’s a very human thing to make things sacred. Before the printing press, books or scrolls were most likely held as objects with high value, and religious texts were texts held to be sacred.
Before books and scrolls, objects were sacred, or places like springs or waterfalls, each had their gods and shrines made in their name. And of course the sky was sacred.
We still make things sacred, but now they’re consumer products like the ipad, or they’re special edition signed copies of a book, or a designer pair of shoes, and so on. What was once part of religion has now evolved into something else. Religion is not dead at all, it’s the relics of the past that are dead.
Well, I suppose having a typo in my strung together sentence just makes it more accurately reflect what ancient Greek would have been like
I don’t really know about Latin… it may not have been quite so bad, but I’m honestly not sure. But I do know that most of my friends who took Greek, Latin, and Sandskrit in college ended up sobbing messes after a point. Ancient literacy took quite a while to get to modern levels of ease, so I could imagine people having great difficulty. Also, I get the impression that there was a huge variance in the degree of literacy. Alex SL is quite right to point out that China, India, the Middle East, and Mesoamerica all had their own traditions too… its easy to imagine the Chinese reading quietly to themselves while Augustine’s group of friends happened to have problems.
In one of my online Koine Greek classes, the instructor made a comment that ancient Greek was apparently a more “sing-song”-like language than modern Greek (or most modern languages). So for example, the Greek word δοῦλος (doulos; slave) we would pronounce with just an emphasis where the diacritical is at (DOU-los). However, ancient Greeks would pronounce it closer to how you would sing it in a song, like “ddooOUUuu-los”; more like a wave instead of a sharp peak/drop. Hence, it probably was more entertaining/pleasing to hear yourself read a text in antiquity out loud instead of reading it in your head.
But you’re right, the concept of a sacred text is nonsensical. This becomes apparent if we compare it to any other media: Sacred movie/ movie script? Sacred comic book? Sacred blog post? Sacred YouTube video? (there’s actually an episode of the TV show “Supernatural” where a series of books that an author is publishing will one day become the new New Testament!) It’s laughable that someone could think that a blog post could be “sacred”, yet this is analogously what we are doing when we consider that a text like the Bible (or in the case of Homer for the ancients, a poem/song) could be “sacred”.
Sure, the Bible has historical value, but that’s only due to the accident of history. There’s no reason that some other medium couldn’t have historical value as well 2,000 years from now like Citizen Kane.
John K. It is largely speculative, but the source in question, Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, is quite a fascinating bit of it. I read it years ago. Consciousness occurred, he thinks, if I remember correctly, when the two hemispheres of the brain began communicating with each other, so that one side of the brain/mind would hear the other side vocalising, thus giving intentionality to what had, up till then, been simply informative signals. However, it’s a long time since I read the book, so don’t hold me to this too strictly!
It’s not just texts.
Nothing is sacred.
Nothing. “Sacred” is quite literally a meaningless concept.
I don’t see the bible as the truth, I see the truth as being what happened throughout earth’s, the universe’s history, and before. And the bible, the OT especially, is what you’d expect it to be if it was a written account from ancient peoples of essentially, amongst other things, what they believed happened. And in a lot of cases what they saw happen too no doubt. Seen in this light it makes sense that it would be the way it is.
I personally also believe that God exists and that He played a part in influencing the recording, verbally and later in writing, of the public historical record, whatever public record there was being kept, which originally was the (oral/aural) bible. I don’t expect God was too worried about writing style nor even erudition. It was just a quick and dirty record of events and influences. Its main value to me, as I expect it was for Josiah, lies in the use God made of it in His plan for guiding us to whatever it is He has in store for us.
So I agree with you Eric that the reverence/sanctification thing has been grossly overplayed, and probably deliberately so, more in the interest of profits than prophets.
Antonio: So…what’s the plan?
Your claim appears to be that the bible lays out a plan.Inquiring minds want to know.
It is rapture, apocalypse, death-and-destruction, judgment, the pit, eternal life but only for the believers?
You realize that it’s all made-up crap, right? Complete and utter crap.
Revelation was written by a guy who lived in a cave that was filled with magic mushrooms. He was tripping.
It doesn’t even rise to the level of “fiction”. It’s the ravings of a drug-addled lunatic.
I’m not going to base my life and behavior on that. I suggest you refrain from doing so yourself.
Oh yeah. There’s no such thing as a prophet. Period.
‘Cuz there’s no god. Not even yours. So, someone claiming to speak on behalf of an imaginary creature would either be 1) batshit insane, or 2) a con man of the first order.
Just so we’re clear.
Antonio, now you really are verging on the ridiculous. To take the Bible as in some sense the word of god is at least, if not entirely intelligible, something that religious people might find vaguely reassuring. But to suppose that the Bible is not the truth, and yet was influenced in a dark and dirty way by god, is, strictly speaking, unintelligible, for then, in order to find within it a word from god you need to bring critical faculties to bear on the text. There must be some criteria by which you can distinguish god’s word from the human word. This problem has already plagued the idea of sacred texts, making the notion pretty empty. But to start off from the premise that it is the work of man in which god intervened from time to time, seems to make a nonsense of the idea that there is any intelligible way of discerning that word, and you are simply thrown back on your dependence on human intelligence and judgement — as of course is only just. It is hard to see in what way you could consider it a word from god, and how it can support the kinds of experiences you value so much. As I say, I believe you are hopelessly confused. You want to do justice to the critical problems that faces anyone faced with the Bible. You have experiences that you consider of great (perhaps even saving) value, and yet you have no idea at all how to ground those experiences in something objectively verifiable. How do such experiences differ from plain delusion, and why should you think they do, if this is the way you regard fountainhead of “information” (for now it’s not really unquestionable information at all, is it?)?
Kevin, I appreciate your question. Hope I’m up to answering, I’m not that good at this as you might’ve noticed.
What I read in the bible, amongst other things, is God trying to alert the humans to the fact that they would one day soon be living in an eternal realm, and there were adjustments they needed to make to their basic human natures, their inclinations and habits and emotional maturity I guess, their characters, to equip themselves for this new life beyond their earth-bound one.
You can find this message in many places in the OT, Leviticus is one in particular where it’s really hammered. Like a lot of the messages in the bible it’s not lying around on the surface, you have to finesse it a little.
But what I just said will be a disconnect for you straight up, since you believe there’s no God. So we need some common ground to start this with.
Something everyone can relate to is death. We both believe we’re going to die one day, that’s something we can agree on. We’ve seen it happen to those we love, we know it’s coming for us. So lets start with what happens when we die.
I believe that life is not a material thing, a physical thing. I don’t believe it’s a property of the chemicals that make up a human cell. I believe all we know about death is how it affects the physical. Sure we can assume it affects the whole of us, physical and metaphysical alike, but is that assumption helpful?
Do you agree with my view that life is not a material/physical thing Kevin? That the “you” I’m having this discussion with is something else, something that is associated with, that is supported by, your physical person, something whose activities and feelings manifest in your physical body, but is not actually your physical body?
If you don’t agree with that then can you explain what you, the real you who’s having this conversation with me, are? How a bunch of cells made up of physical molecules can think and be aware as you are and formulate such pertinent questions?
If you do agree that you’re more than, other than, your physical body, do you then believe that the death of your physical body must also mean the end of your non-physical? When you’ve seen someone die, if you have, did you believe that they were really experiencing annihilation, or just leaving their body?
There’s no way we could know that it was the former, we have no facility for observing a person and determining whether they’re alive or not, apart from their physical aspect. So it must be an assumption made by those who don’t believe in an afterlife.
Kevin, if you’re going to assume something like that, you really should have something to base it on shouldn’t you. It would help e.g. if you could say where that person’s life, the start of that real person, came from. Where do YOU think they came from? Where do you think YOU came from?
You know how your physical body came into being, but what about the real you? We don’t find anything about that in Tortora & Grabowski.
OK I don’t want to be unnecessarily cluttering up the blogsite with this crap. If we’ve already crossed a line of disagreement there’s no need to get into the existence of God or an ultimate purpose in life yet.
If you can’t accept that there’s something more for us after death then why talk about what follows? I’ve never been able to understand exactly why atheists spend so much time arguing about the nature of God and whether or not the bible is really His word, when they don’t believe He exists.
Why argue about whether the bible is used by God if, as you say, there’s no God? Are you thinking that maybe if everything, life after death, God, the bible, Jesus, the exegesis of Revelation, if they all make an elegant enough package you might just be tempted to jump in and buy the whole lot?
That’s not likely is it Kevin. So we can save a lot of time and screen space by just dealing with one difference in our views at a time, starting with the most fundamental. There’s no way I can explain or prophetably discuss the meaning of Revelation when you believe that you cease to exist after your physical death?
Peace brother
Eric for some reason I haven’t been getting notified of your last couple of messages to me. I just came across this one when replying to Kevin.
Thanks for this one, it looks really good. I look forward to getting it on with you later, right now I’ve gotta get to work. Maybe you could read what I said to Kevin in the meantime, it might be relevant.
Cheers mate
Yes I didn’t express that very well I’m afraid. When I say I don’t see the bible as the truth I mean “the truth” with block capitals. I don’t mean it’s fiction or lies, that it’s not truthful, just that it’s an account of what is The Truth, as distinct from The Truth itself – that which it’s reporting on. I apologise for my sloppy prose.
As an account of what really happened, as perceived and recorded by people 3500 years ago, or 6000, give or take, depending on what we see Moses’ source as being, you can expect it to reflect the mental filters they saw events through back then. I understand some theologians regard the bible as being, every word, dictated by YHWH to a temporarily zombified scribe. I don’t see that as fitting in with His MO frankly, though no, if I might anticipate your objection, I can’t prove it.
Eric I’m willing to tell you about how I go about studying the bible and its truths, but what’s the point? I feel like I’m explaining my deepest most heartfelt discoveries to Jasmine, my whippet/border-collie cross. No disrespect intended, she’s a lovely animal.
As I tried to say to Kevin, if you don’t believe in God, how can we argue about whether or not anything in the bible is from Him, and come to any conclusion other than what you’ve been saying is right and I’m deluded? If you ever come to the point of being able and willing to allow for the hypothesis of the existence of God, then we can both profit from a discussion of the things that might or might not follow. The way it is now I’m on a hiding to nothing. And so are you I believe.
And please don’t claim that you ARE allowing for the possibility of the existence of God, an eternal, all-powerful, transcendent being responsible for the existence of the billions of stars and planets and every life form that we can see exist. If you were willing to believe in the possibility of that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to believe it’s possible He would communicate with humans, by something like the bible or anything else He wanted to.
While we’re on that, I don’t see any point in wondering if there might be a “God” if you’re convinced the material physical world of science is all there is. Until that changes no one will ever convince you that God is real. What’s in it for me to try if you won’t allow for the possibility, and try out the hypothesis, that we, our non-physical selves, might not be annihilated when we “die”; that we – and perhaps whippet/border-collie crosses, who knows – continue to exist in some form after our physical parts stop functioning and turn to compost?
I don’t know if my answer so far covers that. I acknowledge that you think I’m hopelessly confused, and I’m sincerely touched that it bothers you and you’re trying to help me see the truth.
My experience over the last seven years has indeed been a great blessing. As I said to my teenage son recently, I don’t know anyone who has a life as enjoyable as mine. Every morning I lie in bed and am overcome with gratitude and anticipation of what fresh adventures the day will bring.
The contrast with my pre-God life is profound. It’s not something that’s had double-blind, placebo-controlled, peer-reviewed confirmation, and hence it’s absolutely worthless to an atheist except as proof I’m delusional, but I’m happy to file it under “Miracle”.
God bless you Eric.
Btw I eventually found your last message notification thanks. My Mac unaccountably treated it as “Junk”. Go figure ☺