OT: What's your religeon?

[Azselendor]

On an aside, but didn't the Greeks and Egyptians determine the curvature of the earth long before the bible could be created?

[Kevin Arisa]

Let's try to remember that the purpose of this thread is to simply state ones beliefs. We are straying dangerously off course.
For example: Arguing that evolution states that life appeared in a certain pattern that does not agree with the bibles chronology and is therfore innaccurate. This is dangerously close to stating that evolution is right and the bible is wrong. How do we know if this person even believes in evolution? Statements like these could injure someones feelings and must be avoided in order to keep this thread civil. Let's cool down this topic and get it back on track. Okay?

[Renegade 13]

Or we could just let this thread die a not so natural death, since it seems like the same people are stating the same opinions over and over. Let me tell you something....you're not going to change anyones mind! We're all going to continue thinking what we always have, since religious beliefs are often deeply ingrained. Let it go!! It's pointless!

(Sorry, but it really annoys me when people continue argueing about the same things over and over again. It seems rather foolish to me.)

[Will]

Just to nudge the OT thread even more OT...

I picked up a copy of "Stranger in a Strange Land" in the airport during a layover, and finished it a while ago at home. It certainly has an interesting viewpoint on the whole aspect of religion and culture, and I find that my viewpoint more or less falls in with Jubal's throughout most of the book. For those who haven't read it, the short Version: atheist beliefs, but doesn't claim to know beliefs are true, and accepts that any religion could have it right, while positing that none of them have hit it yet.

[deccan]

Klvino [ORB] said:
On an aside, but didn't the Greeks and Egyptians determine the curvature of the earth long before the bible could be created?

Yes for the New Testament, generally no to the Old Testament. Fundamentalists, in line with tradition, claims that the Pentateuch was written approximately in 12th century BCE. Academics disagree, and date different portions of the Torah to different dates, generally dating the Pentateuch to around 7th century BCE.

The first person to measure the circumference of the Earth is generally agreed to be Eratosthenes of Cyrene who lived in approximately 250 BCE.

[Gozra]

Well My dad claimed he was half Jewish and Half Hillbilly so I have wandered the hills ever since.
I wish this religious thread had not been started by one of my brothers but it was. I hope that we all recognize that we must seek out the truth. And understand that some of us will find it and some of us won't. One thing I have learned in this life is that you should take and judge people as individuals and the huge majority of people are basically good and just like you trying to do the best they can. And before anyone screams "Judge not lest ye be Judged" read the whole line in context.
Good luck and God bless everyone and if you don't Believe in God or Luck then all the best to you.
PS
How many angles or demons does it take to make the talisman work? And does the talisman take energy?
Oh wow maybe we should modify the talisman to take Gobs of energy so it can only be fired 3-4 times. Hmmmm.

[Fyron]

Gozra said:
Oh wow maybe we should modify the talisman to take Gobs of energy so it can only be fired 3-4 times. Hmmmm.

The only way to do that is delete the component and add a "talisman" mount (or several, for each size of normal mount, as you prefer) that increases supply usage drastically.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

/me eats all the supply.

[AMF]

I haven't read all of the article below, but it directly addresses the original topic of this thread I beleive:

Translator Takes the Word at Its Word
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
from NYT

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES
A Translation With Commentary.
By Robert Alter.
1,064 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.

In the beginning, God did not create the heavens and the earth. The King James Bible puts it too neatly: "In the beginning" could mean that the creation was God's first act, or that the creation was itself the beginning, but wasn't something there before? The sentence also reads like a topic sentence, bluntly introducing that account that follows.

Things are actually far more mysterious and inchoate, as Robert Alter keeps reminding us in his astonishing translation of the original Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible. There are so many accretions of meaning and assumption layered over the Biblical text, so many commentaries, so many doctrines; even the English language has been influenced by the glories (and errors) of the 17th-century King James translation.

Return, then, to the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch - the Torah - where pronouns are often ambiguous, words are compacted with multiple meanings and clauses can begin to make sense not in the ordinary sequence of reading but only in the course of doubling back and rereading. Here is how Mr. Alter renders that first sentence of Genesis:

"When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, 'Let there be light.' "

That sentence unsettles. The creation is not a completed act, but part of a process. The act of speaking is the focus of attention, coming after an almost breathless catalog of elements in a world "without form and void" (as the King James Version puts it), in which "welter and waste and darkness over the deep" and "God's breath" are components of a primordial earth.

It isn't likely that this rendering will soon replace the old. It doesn't easily scan. But it is so weirdly convincing, and so evocative of matters beyond conventional understanding, that it anticipates not just the story of Creation but the epic enterprise of translation and commentary into which Mr. Alter leads us.

That enterprise, as Mr. Alter explains in an invaluable introduction, means avoiding the "heresy" that translation can be used to explain the Bible, which in the worst cases becomes "explaining away the Bible." He cultivates instead a scrupulous attention to the Hebrew text and its multifarious meanings. Another recent translation of the five books of Moses by Everett Fox (Schocken, 1995) is even more radical, so preoccupied with emphasizing the strangeness of the Hebrew that it creates a self-consciously strange English. But Mr. Alter seeks both English fluidity and Hebraic accuracy. That means paying attention to the large and the small: the way, for example, imagery of the hand, with all its deeds and misdeeds, works through the tale of Joseph and his brothers; or the way the Bible's use of the letter vav (meaning "and") creates accumulations of acts and events, reiterating the extraordinary. God really is in the details.

It also reflects a different approach from the one that has guided so much bland modern translation, which has tended to seek clarity and simplicity above all. For more than 20 years, Mr. Alter, who is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, has been arguing for a more literary approach to the Bible that would not blanch at its intricacies.

Religious belief has traditionally treated the Bible as a coherent, divinely inspired historical document. But in the 19th century, German philology began an archaeological excavation of the text, discerning in its varied styles, its different terms for God and its expressions of opposing interests, the hands of four authors who wrote their accounts over the course of centuries - multiple sources out of which redactors created the pastiche we now read.

For a century, philological research laid bare the biblical text, illuminating its crevices, dating its shards, explicating its contradictions. After millennia of religious commentary by Jewish and Christian scholars, this was a form of secular compensation. Philology turned the Bible into a text about its own construction.

But Mr. Alter, beginning with "The Art of Biblical Narrative" (1981), undertook an extraordinarily powerful project of restoration. The redactors, he claimed, were not merely curators: they were creators. Their choice of words, their juxtaposition of passages, their respect for ambiguities - nothing was arbitrary. But the Bible is not just a religious masterwork, Mr. Alter argued; it is also a literary one: pay close attention to the text and it will yield its secrets. Out of perceived patterns, analysis of word usage and attention to rhythm, insights into character and narrative and purpose will emerge.

In Mr. Alter's new Versions of Genesis and much of Exodus, this literary approach proves its considerable power. But it seems much less effective or convincing in the compilations of law and ritual in Leviticus and Numbers. For there, literalness and precision are more the point than allusion and suggestion. The literary becomes secondary. The text may even demand sacrificing effulgence and grandeur - a demand with its own dangers.

The Liberty Bell, for example, is inscribed with a phrase from King James's Leviticus: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto the inhabitants thereof." Mr. Alter says that passage does not deal with liberty but with legal arrangements regarding the disposition of property in the Jubilee year, when slaves are to be set free. In his translation that sentence rather awkwardly calls for a "release in the land to all its inhabitants" the "release" referring, he explains, to "debts and indenture." This is too pedantic, particularly since Mr. Alter is prepared to let a familiarly resonant phrase like "Am I my brother's keeper?" stand, instead of choosing less poetic and possibly more appropriate alternatives to "keeper," like "watcher" or "overseer" or "guardian."

But out of Mr. Alter's close reading and translation, something grander really does take shape, along with a conviction that the Bible is not just incidentally mysterious, posing challenges because of its antique references and sources. It is essentially mysterious.

The Bible's redactors, for example, deliberately included fragments that may have been puzzling even in their own time (like an interpolated account of God's trying to kill Moses). They also incorporated texts that explicitly carried an aura of times past, creating what Mr. Alter calls an antiquity effect. Invocations of ancient events and primal rites, along with allusions to the rise and fall of earlier empires, add to the ineffable nature of the story told. The Israelites are thus placed not at history's beginning but in the very midst of its maelstrom, struggling to make sense of it, as we, today, struggle with these accounts.

The Israelites' struggle is unrelenting and it is urgent. How is a civil society to be constructed out of its willful, desirous tribes? How are reluctant and faltering leaders to be guided? How are they to be disciplined? What makes this society's existence worth preserving? What makes it different from those that threaten it? And how does it relate to forces beyond its ken?

These are the fundamental questions asked by every people of every age into the familiar present. The structure of law and ritual offered in Leviticus and Numbers is the Bible's primary response, demonstrating, Mr. Alter believes, a "pervasive spiritual seriousness."

But there is no explanation offered for the law. Its statements are as firm and beyond disagreement as "Let there be light." They attempt to create order out of the welter and waste and darkness of humanity whose disruptions, jealousies and dissatisfactions erupt even in the midst of the Bible's sober, legal expositions. "The ritual implementation of the monotheistic vision," Mr. Alter explains, "was a battle against the inchoate."

That enterprise, as the Bible shows again and again, is always threatened, always incomplete. So, as Mr. Alter knows, is the literary enterprise to translate and interpret the biblical epic. Welter and waste and darkness remain, in any act of creation, which doesn't make one any less grateful for what has been accomplished.

[msnevil]

summery of Alarikf "robert alter" dialogue.

Man made a literary "god" to help him with his social problems around him.

So its not important that "god" was there to make creation. (since the denial of that premise is already agreed upon.) But that "man" made the text to help organize the chaos of mankind's existence.

So religious "supernatural" experience is divorced from the equation and the literary explanations of the Authors is emphasized.