"God needs to be back in our schools" says Texas...

[Dice]

The far left is not as tame as it may seem to outsiders. The far right are just really outspoken and sometimes overtly ridiculous, which makes for better news topics. This also applies to the suppression topic, it makes better news headlines.

Sorry, that's on me. I meant "Your far left politicians." Burnie is just a run of the mill tankie in EU circles. In the US he's some kind of Boogeyman.

[stormwyrm]

These Religious Right folks, for all their talk of God and all resemble much more the people whom Jesus himself condemned most harshly in the Gospels. The disconnect between what they say and do and what the Gospels themselves actually say and prescribe one to do is rather startling. I imagine that someone could write a tract in the vein of Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor and put Jesus on the streets of middle America, and he'd be derided as a commie pinko wokester.

[Missy]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnQGz7BdfI

[stormwyrm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnQGz7BdfI

Jesus literally told a rich young man to do exactly that: "One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me." Mark 10:21 The response was, well, pretty much the same.

[Oniya]

Followed by 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to enter heaven', if I remember right.

[Hades]

On the one hand, I'm reminded of a quote from Issac Asimov: 


The more people are exposed to what the bible actually says and not just what their preacher/priest/insert other fancy-smanchy title here tells them that it says, the more you see belief in it decline.  A Gallop poll from 2022 found that 20% of Americans believe the bible to be the literal word of god.   And while that number has declined by half since Gallop started asking the question back in the 1960s, I say that's still a depressingly high number in this age.  So the more exposure unfiltered by someone else's interpretation is a good thing, especially for young minds.

But, this is Texas we're talking about.   There will be no impartiality involved.  Hell, if they were being impartial they'd be talking about setting up a comparative religions curriculum for the state instead.  This is a blatant attempt to indoctrinate by a dwindling segment of the population that knows it's declining and is desperate to hold onto power by any means possible.

[GloomCookie]

Something I think should be pointed out is that, as far as the literal word of God, the Bible is not it. As a source of parables and guides on how to live your life as a good person around the time Jesus lived? Absolutely. And some of those parables and stories do stand up. I saw something many years ago about how a volcano eruption might have caused the events in the Exodus from Egypt, such as ash falling and turning the waters of the Nile red. For people who had no idea that these events were occurring, they could seem like miracles. Books like Deuteronomy are about keeping food clean in an age when refrigeration didn't exist and people had to be very careful about spoiled and rotten meat and seafood.

Something also I find interesting is that the Bible is supposed to be taken literally, while in Judaism, it's treated similar to a book of laws and is thus open to interpretation. That's why there is a stereotype of Jews becoming lawyers, because they learn from an early age to read texts and develop interpretations of the words similar to how we practice law today. Christianity, meanwhile, has almost since its beginning held various councils to determine what is and isn't correct (or canon) per the text. Many early Christian thinkers were actually expelled from their communities and labeled as heretics for having such radical ideas that God and Jesus are two separate entities, or that Jesus was a mortal man until his death when he became divine. Such thinking means the Bible is treated as a hard truth instead of being open to interpretation.

To further muddy the waters, there have been a lot of religious warfare over the centuries as different groups developed their own interpretation of how much authority the church has compared to the Bible. Most churches, even Baptist churches that place the power of the church itself extremely low, put the Bible as the ultimate authority when it comes to how they practice their particular flavor of Christianity. The Pope was also for many centuries following the collapse of Rome himself a major player on the political stage of Europe as an equal to emperors and princes, hence why technically the Papacy is an elected monarchy since the Pope is literally the king of the Vatican, but his power is ordained through the Holy See, basically the Office of the Pope.

Explanation of the politics of Rome in about 5 minutes

https://youtu.be/OPHRIjI3hXs

Religious reformations happened long before Martin Luther nailed his 95 complaints to the door of a church, but what set his reformations apart was the invention of movable type by Gutenberg, which allowed his ideas to be spread rapidly across Europe. It's a common misconception that most Europeans were illiterate. Most could read to some degree, but they couldn't read Latin, which was considered the bar by which everyone measured literacy. By printing pamphlets in the language of the common man, suddenly people could realize that the fancy words being said by the priests for all these years didn't always line up with the actual Word of God, which is why a lot of protest-ant (hyphen to point out the name) place far less emphasis on the power of the church itself and more on the Word of God.

And then along comes King James, also known as Jamas acaca (James the Shit), who was a Catholic in England at the wrong time. While he wasn't very popular, he did commission something unique: the first translation of the Bible from Latin into English. While James would eventually be run out of England by his eldest daughter's husband William of Orange, the King James version of the Bible survived, and in so doing introduced a lot of parables into the Bible that are unique to that version (Video for quick info). And, because it was the first translation most people had that they could actually read, it became insanely popular, so much so that people forget that it's a translation and thus not the Word of God directly (which would have been in Hebrew or Greek anyway, not Latin).

History of English, the Bible

https://youtu.be/kN7-EvgKAsk

Religion is super complicated because it does not exist in a vacuum. Like the nation states that adopt religion, religion spreads and shrinks, waxes and wains, and all based on the cultures and history that take place around it. You have documents that are misunderstood both in their own time as they are now like the infamous Malleus Malificarum (The Hammer of Witches) that was denounced by church leaders in its own time but is still held up as a textbook example of why religion is bad and dumb because they burned people at the stake for witchcraft, which is ironic because the church's official position is that magic doesn't exist because it would not be in keeping with God's rules.

So, where am I going with all this. I think that a lot of modern Christians don't have a firm grasp on the history of their own religion and how it was shaped and molded by history. They're content to point to a book as a justification for countless idiotic ideals and beliefs for no other reason than they can, which has been the case of both religious texts and non-religious texts for thousands of years. I don't think it's as simple as saying "Religion is dumb superstition" when the Bible has also formed a foundation just as strong as the Roman Empire did in shaping modern Europe and the Americas. But, it also shouldn't be accepted blindly as a source for events that may or may not have happened thousands of years ago and could simply be interpreted as a narrative of certain events with a dash of fables and stories tossed in for flavor.

[Beguile's Mistress]

When something is presented to you there is the option to choose to believe or not to believe.  You are also given the chance, if you wish to take it, to pick it apart and study it and fact check it so it can be interpreted in your own "what they really mean is" thinking.

What you can't do, no matter who you are, is force someone to agree with you or fault them because they don't.  We also have the responsibility to study religion from a historical perspective as comparative religion studies teach.  Comparative religion lets us look at all religions in a way that allows us to find common ground.

[stormwyrm]

And then along comes King James, also known as Jamas acaca (James the Shit), who was a Catholic in England at the wrong time. While he wasn't very popular, he did commission something unique: the first translation of the Bible from Latin into English. While James would eventually be run out of England by his eldest daughter's husband William of Orange, the King James version of the Bible survived, and in so doing introduced a lot of parables into the Bible that are unique to that version (Video for quick info). And, because it was the first translation most people had that they could actually read, it became insanely popular, so much so that people forget that it's a translation and thus not the Word of God directly (which would have been in Hebrew or Greek anyway, not Latin).

That's not what I remember. The translation of the Bible to English from the Vulgate, St. Jerome's 3rd century Latin translation of the Bible, was the Douai-Rheims Bible, and predates the King James Version by a few years. It is somewhat harder to read than the KJV because it seems to have been a much more slavish translation that includes many Latinisms that are no longer common English vernacular. From what I know the King James Version itself was translated direct from the Hebrew Tanakh (what Christians call the Old Testament) and the original Greek New Testament, with only fairly minimal input from the Vulgate or the Septuagint (3rd century BCE translation of the Tanakh into Greek). This is not to say that either was a particularly accurate translation.

Also it doesn't seem that the KJV introduced any new books into the Bible, in fact the reverse is true. It in fact reduced the number of books in the Old Testament to what was included in the Hebrew Tanakh canon. Catholic Bibles, including more modern translations that go to the original languages such as the New American Bible Revised Edition, tend to include such books as the Maccabees (the omission of this is a little curious, since the events chronicled there are the basis for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah), Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Book of Baruch, etc., which are only included in the Vulgate and the Septuagint.

That leads to the question of which books should be included into the Bible. It's a thorny one, hotly debated since at least the Ecumenical Councils of the 4th Century, and had even led to wars. It definitely was not as clean a process as people seem to think.