Cherrypicked religion - A set menu vs buffet

[stuffandthings]

Modern religious thinking was basically kicked off by men like John Donne. They read the Bible in every possible language and couldn't reconcile the old testament with the God they had in their gut. They literally decided to just discard it all and use the King James because it felt right. It's not too convincing to people not already believing but it keeps believers beliving.

The reality is that the Bible has been inconsistently translated and its origins are entirely political. A bunch of Roman aristocrats gathered at Nicaea, Chalcedon and Carthage and hammered out the original Christianity. Eastern Orthodox was structured by Emperors and Czars. Catholism was structured by Emperors and Popes from corrupt Italian mob families. Protestantism by the needs of the German princes and later local interests.

I definitely see where you're getting at. And theologians from way before John Donne had trouble reconcilling the OT God with the NT God. Marcion who died in 160 and several hippie dippie gnostics said they were two different Gods. And the Councils of Nicea and etc weren't a bunch of Roman aristocrats, but a bunch of Greeks speakers from all over the Roman Empire.

I see where you are coming from that the INTERPRETATION of various verses in the Bible changes over time and have been very politically motivated. That is going to be an issue with any authoritative document, from the Torah to the Vedas to the Constitution. No argument there.

But I take issue with the idea that the TRANSLATION ie words themselves have been 'changed' somehow significantly by people with political motivation. Like I said the number of manuscripts that we can compare to each other, and the age of those manuscripts, and the distance those manuscripts were apart means that even secular scholars are in agreement that what we have is almost exactly what was written down by the original author of whatever book. And the translations we use now are not translations of translations of translations. Any futzing done in the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages or Reformation doesn't effect a papyrus buried in 200 CE.

The political motivation, if you want to make that argument, comes when the book was written, and if that person lied. Did the Exodus not happen in any sense at all, and was it a tribal narrative written down after Israel already existed with no basis in factual events? Were the Books of Kings written as a hagiography of history by a tiny blip of a nation-state pretending to be big? Were the NT books of Peter written by a liar attempting to sway the church in his direction by faking letters from Peter? Those are questions lots of secular scholars answer in the affirmative. Because it is the more logical, plausible, and evidenced conclusion for the non-religious to take. There are smarter and more informed ways to be atheist or agnostic.

People that want to pretend like the words of individual books that make up the Bible have been changed by political conspiracy are the ultimate cherry pickers, because obviously the things they like can stay 'true scripture' but the inconvenient or hard stuff can be 'political lies'. It's not Harry Potter, you can't just headcanon away Dumbledore being gay because it's stupid and you don't like it, but keep the rest of the series. Unless you're treating the entire religion as a pleasant fantasy land you get to control.

 

[Slap47]

INTERPRETATION

The interpretation is everything though. The whole point of religion is that it is supposed to be objective morality that guides society. Even then, it isn't just interpretation. People debated what books made up the Bible and the losing side always had their books destroyed. Heretics were murdered and their ideas eradicated by the powerful.

Christianity didn't start with a bunch of people interpreting an agreed upon set of books. They decided on what books counted by killing people with state power.

 

[stuffandthings]

The interpretation is everything though. The whole point of religion is that it is supposed to be objective morality that guides society. Even then, it isn't just interpretation. People debated what books made up the Bible and the losing side always had their books destroyed. Heretics were murdered and their ideas eradicated by the powerful.

Christianity didn't start with a bunch of people interpreting an agreed upon set of books. They decided on what books counted by killing people with state power.

You're compressing hundreds of years of history in your 'past tense'. What you're talking about DID happen, but, it's not like 'orthodoxy' put on a unified decisive and totalitarian front from the beginning. It's not the Church of Scientology.

Christianity didn't START with a bunch of people being murdered for heresy with state power. It wasn't until Christianity was used as a tool of the state after being adopted by the late Roman Empire that the government started murdering over heresies. And you can still find plenty of heretical texts that made it through. The ideas still exist. Go ahead and read the Gospels of Thomas, or the Infancy Gospels, or the Gospels of Judas. They're important historical documents and interesting to study. But there are logical reasons they weren't, and still aren't included in the Bible. They were written hundreds of years after Jesus instead of merely decades. It was widely known then, and there's no academic debate about it now. Any book that was seriously considered for the canon still exists even if it didn't make the cut. Shepherd of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, Clement I and II.

The government has a vested interest in keeping a monopoly on the hearts and minds of it's people. Any overarching philosophy that a majority of the population ascribes to will be used and abused by those in power for their own gain. It doesn't matter if it's a religion or the Communist Manifesto or Confucianism or Darwinism. You can find Militant Buddhists in history, in direct contravention of the five moral precepts of Buddhism, killing heretics.

No wonder the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was constantly stomping out various 'heretics' some of which we would now call Protestants. The New Testament is a profoundly pacifistic and subversive work. Just read it and compare it to how violent groups calling themselves 'The Church' have acted throughout history. But that's not a defect with the book itself, rather the book seeks to correct the natural tendency. There are verses that indicate that you shouldn't even prosecute someone if you're robbed. And the worst it calls for The Church to do to heretics is to shun them. God will punish them, the apostles could foresee curses from God on them, but they never laid a hand on a heretic. But even the Catholic Church didn't dare go in there with scissors and cut out verses when it would have been advantageous to do it, instead they tried to monopolize the interpretation.

So like you said, interpretation is everything. But it's a far cry from cherry picking out major foundation blocks of a religion laid down and repeated numerous times in books thousands of years old.

That being said, I would be plenty happy if all the Muslims decided to cherry pick out all that stuff about infidels and the caliphate and under what circumstances they can take slaves. That's a religious text I wouldn't mind Thomas Jefferson taking a box cutter to.