The Bible, The Torah and The Qu'ran is ancient fiction?

Post Reply New Topic

They're amazingly silly works filled with contradictions, is what I was implying. Make whatever you want out of that statement, and then make fun of me for it and feel superior to me.

Heh, I remember seeing a graph of contractions of the Bible, it was a beautiful mess. You'd think god would be very concise and elegant with his supposed work if it were truly written by him.

yup it is from project reason

also includes all the biblke verse numbers, something some christians put enormous wheight on is verse so let them read.
some might be taken out of context but not all.


the full one has about 50 times the amount of lines, the brightness of a single line is invisible in the low res version, the lines you see are dozens bundled together


link to the full pdf for high resolution

I think they are ancient defunct cosmologies rather than fiction, because at the time they were written they were at the cutting edge of cosmologies of their times. They are not fiction because unlike fiction they were not intended to be fiction. An author of fiction knows his/story only exists in his/her imagination, but many of those unknown authors of the Bible or Koran believed that was the best way of understanding the world around them, no matter how mistaken those ancient authors may be, as further scientific discoveries discredit their theories.

I think those religious books are just full of ancient stories people told before we invented writing. They have been embellished and romanticised over the years. I reckon you could be right in a way. When writing first came about the people of the time probably rushed to set down all popular stories told by word of mouth down in writing so there would be a record. There is likely to have been no consensus at the time that any of the stories were true.

And yes, over the years people have attributed truth to them. So now people will regard them as true. But also because they are ancient makes them more intriguing and compelling for us.

Perhaps if the people who wrote these words could see the world now they may be amazed at how much credence is applied to them.

Do you care to recommend an alternative?

ruveyn

Indeed



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pK0BQ9CUHk[/youtube]

hehe

i love seeing the human brain's quirks exposed
visual phenomena are also interesting

So true!


Good point: Our own abilities to analyze the text can be even more unreliable than (our perceptions and opinions of) eyewitness accounts.

Not making fun of you, nor feeling superior.

What I was going to say [except that bedtime interrupted, I can only go so late] is:

It has become very clear that "making sense" depends to a large extent on the shap;e of the mind of the audience.

I, for example - in Lit classes I was very handicapped. Most poetry acceptable to schools, most "short stories", and quite a few novels [take Ulysses, for example, or almost any science fiction from the late 60s through the 80s] make no sense. The film 2001 is utterly opaque to me. 90% of all philosophy, 99% of all literasry criticism.

Over time I came to realize that certain types even of poetry DID communicate - and that things I appreciated some other people simply could not get.

If the various writings collected in the Bible genuinely make no sense to you, that simply says your head is on a different track. Not better, not worse - you will understand some things that are a meaningless puzzle to me. Bible contradictions are another issue, you will get that in any set of books you randomly put together, I have on my shelves books about human evolution that seriously disagree, including the one that still trusted Piltdown Man]

----------

The Qur'an is a very different work, sort of the Book of Isaiah very much expanded, and has its own problems.

Someone who knows more than I about philosophy answer this one for me: Has there ever been a codified informal fallacy along the lines of "It looks really impressive, therefore it must be true"? The "aesthetic fallacy," or argumentum aesthetica?

Yes, the chart LOOKS impressive, and so it would appear that the Bible is, in a literal sense, FILLED with contradictions. But I've never met a Biblical difficulty I couldn't resolve, save for ONE apparent discrepancy on either a Judean or Israelite king's reign. And I mean a TINY, really insignificant note about when that particular king was on the throne. Doesn't change the point of the books of Kings and Chronicles, though. Either the kings did what God wanted or they didn't. And there were consequences for disobedience. We're talking ONE error out of the entire collection, and it's not even an error that challenges the traditional view of Biblical inerrancy.

What impresses me, and at the same time disappoints me, is how quickly some are to copy/paste a string of supposed contradictions knowing full well nobody has the time to go through in a single forum thread to address ALL of them at once. Admit it or not, that's a bully tactic. It's intellectually lazy and dishonest. It shows no discernment as to whether those contradictions really are contradictions. And you've admitted SOME, but not all, are out-of-context. I'd say, as a general rule, what isn't out of context is just gross ignorance of the Bible.

Look, I could cite anyone who posts to WP out of order and out of context so that every single one of us contradicts ourselves in the most benign statements. But deconstructing every single thing a person says strips the words themselves of their authority. If words have no authority, there is no effective, coherent communication. So I say look again at those "contradictions" the Bible is filled with. Pick TWO, and I'll gladly show that they are not the problem you think they are, and I'll be more than happy to explain why that is.

This is why I despair of the minds of those who swallow and those who spew the myth of "literal interpretation". The shabbiest sixth grader ought to be able to spot if nothing else the conspicuous, long, and incompatible "genealogies" in Matthew and Luke. And I would not think much of the sixth grader who, told that Matthew "adjusted" his genealogy to increase its symbolic impact, could then hear without question the preacher saying every word has to be taken literally.

Still - they exist. They make up a large proportion of the populace and Oprah and the National Enquirer are deeply in their debt. I have met, them, I have tried to teach them, I have had them complain bitterly when I try to make them think. Their unexamined life is not worth living for me. And they could not stand my constantly examined life.

Either way it still proves humans wrote it or is God fallible? I mean seriously, God should hire a better writer.

Agreed.

The last three books feature things like plots, character development, believable dialog, and clearly-defined boundaries between "Good" and "Evil".

The first three are merely collections of largely apocryphal stories - with commentary - that have been passed down by illiterate tribe-members since the end of the most recent ice age.

Wow! 1.61 Megabytes of data on one page!

If there is a second page, would it show the outright lies that are written in the Bible? That should be worth a few kilobytes, at least!

Most of those megabytes are caused by saving it as an image rather than as text. As text the page would take around 40 Kilo bytes tops.

Text usually takes few kilobytes.