Re: [NTLK] [OT] Absolute power was Sex/morals blah blah blah

From: Anton Aylward (anton_at_the-wire.com)
Date: Sun May 16 2004 - 09:05:31 PDT


On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 12:26, Mike Burrell wrote:
>
> Sounds like you've done a lot of research on all the translations. Too bad
> you don't focus your study on the Bible instead.

Ah, but I have. Its amazingly full of inconsistencies and self
contradictions.
I don't need to list these, they are well documented by bible scholars
of many faiths.

> Don't you think God is capable of preserving His own word?

I'm sorry you think the Bible is the word of God rather than was
written, independantly, by his followers, recounting their experiences
and giving their advice and interpretations.

> Are you mightier than God to proclaim on your own that there is no exact translation
> available today?

One doesn't need to be mightier than God to observe that the various
Gospels, cannonical and non-cannonical, were written to address various
communities and audiences. One doens't need to be mightier than God to
realise that the community of Christian Sects today is different from
those of the 16th and 17th centuries, the time of the great push to
translate the Bible into the vernacular. One doesn't need to be
mightier than God to realise that many of the symbolisms and tokens such
as "camels", "sheep" and "goats" and "swine" and such like have a very
different meaning in a pre-industrial, pre-urban society than from the
one we live in now, full of automobiles, planes, synthetic fibres and
combines harvesting wheat fields that run from horizon to horizon.

And I'm sorry that your faith is so weak that you need the Bible to
bolster and justify and defend it, and I'm sorry you feel the need to
use it as club to berate others.

-- 
Anton Aylward <anton_at_the-wire.com>
-- 
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