Personman - Latest Comments on What if

Doug [Visitor] in response to: What if

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:06:08 +0000

I realize this isn’t exactly the point of your experiment, but I’ve actually always found it surprising and admirable that the church has, as a whole, rarely tried anything like this, even when it would seemingly have served its purposes (Jesus’s predicting the apocalypse within a generation, for instance, is transmitted in most manuscripts). Course, we don’t know exactly what did disappear along the way (the ending of Mark comes to mind), but enough stuff was left in that could have been quietly excised.

dan [Member] in response to: What if

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:15:22 +0000

Exactly. That’s part of the goal of the thought experiment. It’s a situation that forces someone to choose between fighting for a Bible passage that condones slavery and admitting that maybe the Bible isn’t inerrant. You and I both fall into the second category, but if someone takes the first choice, then they have to come to terms with what they believe.

Kyle [Visitor] in response to: What if

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:14:05 +0000

I think my answer is still the same.

The presence of outdated ideas in religious texts is only a problem when people insist on only interpreting those texts literally.

The way to solve that is to get people to develop a more well-rounded view of scripture, not to just get rid of the offending passages.

dan [Member] in response to: What if

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 06:06:39 +0000

One of my followup questions was to turn the question to Islam. I wonder what would happen if a group of clerics released a Qur’an with some of the bad verses removed. It would have been more clever to start with that question, then spin it around to the Bible.

I agree with Kyle that we always need to preserve the history of the Bible. I think the book people use as an object of their faith is another matter. Shouldn’t religious ideas improve over time and become less barbaric and more useful?

Matt [Visitor] in response to: What if

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:12:39 +0000

Because you say you have a follow up question, I’m reminded of the, “What if I get hit in the head and need a chip implanted in my brain. Does that make me a robot?” path.

I don’t know how anyone can answer how all Christians would react. How would all African Americans or all sci-fi geeks react?

I probably wouldn’t care much. Unless I was trying to look up those verses. Then I’d just be frustrated.

EdB [Visitor] in response to: What if

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:12:53 +0000

Depends on how you package the product. Biblester would probably not work as adding “ster” is pretty much played out. “Bible 2.0 - web enabled social thumpery” would probably do real good because people dig on anything with a “two oh” in it. Specially if you gots a cool tagline. Or even better, take it from the public domain and give it a new name so you can copyright protect it and bank the proceeds from those willing to say “hell yeah this is the truthiest truth out there". Maybe call it … I dunno … “E-bible 2.2″. Yeah that’d rock: an “e” for no reason at all and .2 better than 2.0. Totally awesome. Instant gazillionaire.

Didn’t something like this go down when the Catholic Church decided using a dead language was stupid? Didn’t the “faithful” have a hissy fit because they wanted their sessions to be unintelligible to any living human? And then each time the Pope Dude does the … what do you call it when they have a big todo over what the deal is … ? When they decide that yeah okay so some stuff is different now but hey we gotta keep most everything the same so here’s some change that people can have a hissy fit about even though nothing’s really gonna change and young boys just gotta man up and shut up? Every 10 or 12 years it happens. Damn but I can’t recall the term for it. Oh well. At any rate I’d guess the same thing would happen with a ‘modernized’ version: total freak out by those more into the habits of procedure than that which is actually available to anyone willing to think through a belief system.

Kyle [Visitor] in response to: What if

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:44:09 +0000

I don’t think anybody would react favorably.

The folks who think the Bible is the holy and perfect word of God would obviously object loudly.

But I think people who see the Bible as a historical document, as a set of human-written spiritual insights, or as a combination of the two, would not want to see any of it taken out either. For these people the “bad stuff” is easily understood in a cultural context, and is an important part of history.

I recently finished reading a translation of Psalms by Robert Alter that looks at the book in a purely historical and cultural light. Even he shows a great unwillingness to alter (sorry, I couldn’t resist) the received text, even in cases where he said there were clear scribal errors. He occasionally “fixes” such minor mistakes as a single miscopied letter, but otherwise he wants his translation to reflect the message and content of the Hebrew text as it has been used by Jews and Christians for thousands of years, not necessarily as the original writers (or God, if that’s your view) may have intended.

I think I prefer it this way too.