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@Mopac
@Deb-8-a-bull
And your scripture translations are mmmmmmm. They are absolutely 100% spot on.Fukin beautiful, you've a certain way of translating scriptures like no other.Your a scholar.
Hard to tell if that is sarcasm like most of the rest of your post clearly is, but since I know myself not to be a genius I am inclined to believe that anyone who claims I am a genius is either being sarcastic or sorely mistaken
More importantly... I am making this post to tag Mopac in it because I forgot to do so in post 10 where I responded to post 5 by them.
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@EtrnlVw
Why? are you not interested in the message of Genesis as a unique work?
Um, quite the contrary in fact. I am proposing to spend hundreds of hours of my own personal time reading pages of text from the bible specifically because the biblical view is what I am interested in studying. If I was interested purely in mythology as a whole I would make a topic about mythology as a whole, that doesn't mean I am going to avoid pointing out facts regarding the narrative simply because some people may dislike those facts, because I am approaching this from a neutral point of view. Facts are facts, and acknowledging facts that are true will help to further understand the context of the stories within.
Please refrain from claiming that I am biased against a certain story when the obvious fact is that if anything I am naturally biased very much in favor of it due simply to the fact that it is the only fucking story that I am reading out of thousands that exist. People will think that you are very silly if you do so.
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The Lilith theory is a creative explanation that to my knowledge has no actual factual basis.
Please clarify. Are you claiming that the Lilith story did not exist at the time that the original creation narrative did and was instead a later addition/explanation for something? That is what is seems like you are saying but I am not sure and do not wish to straw man your position by replying to that claim if it is not the one you are making.
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The orthodox bible is a bit different than the protestant bible. In fact, the base texts are different! There are more books in the orthodox bible too. The protestant bible chops the beginning and end of the book of Daniel off too... its also ordered differently... ah well..
Using a more protestant-oriented version is the natural choice for me simply due to the fact that the majority of people in my country are Protestants.
Anyway, if you are going to use a protestant bible, there are many reasons not to use an NIV. Even some protestant circles jokingly call it the non inspired version.Modern bibles remove a lot of scriptures. I use the King James online mostly because it doesn't have a copywrite, but also because the base texts are closest to what we use in the orthodox church(for the new Testament). The New King James uses the same base texts, and is a bit more modernized in its English.
I am aware that the KJV is, at least where I live, the usual go-to for people reading the Bible. Some get very emotional about it, with the more evangelical even going so far as to claim that Satan has tampered with all other English translations in an attempt to mislead people. Absurd. My decision to not go with the KJV as my primary subject of study was far from arbitrary, however. The old English tone simply struck me as something that I should not have to work around if I did not have to. People did not talk like that at the time that these stories were made or first written and they do not talk like that now either. The New KJV that you mention is something that I had not considered. Tomorrow I will do some research as to whether there are signifigant differences between that and the NIV and if there are I will consider switching.
Good luck. I'd write more, but I am on a break. When I can, I'll talk a bit more on Genesis chapter 1.
Looking forward to it.
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@EtrnlVw
Nobody is required to argue for a perfect Bible, especially if we really look at what the objective of the accounts are because after all this is a spiritual book not a science book and that is the nature of it.
As I said before I agree that reading the texts from the point of view of whether they are actually accurate is silly. Of course there will be inaccuracies since the people making the stories knew so little about the world around them. That is why I tried to brush over that and focus on instead learning more about the actual writing itself, such as looking at the similarities it shares with other mythologies and the evidence of the cut-out story of Lilith.
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I have recently undertaken to read the Bible from the beginning to end, something I have never done before in full. I suspect that if I just did so by myself then I would soon quit from boredom, so I decided to discuss my thoughts on the topic with others here in this forum to give me a motivation to continue along as I do so.
How this will work is I will read a few chapters and write my thoughts about the work as I read along, then do some minor edits at the end of the reading. I won't be copy-pasting the actual text itself here. For reference I will be reading the New International Version (NIV) but discussion of any other versions is welcome in the thread. With all that said, let's begin.
The first obvious things that we notice as we read the first few verses are of course how little the story matches with what we know of modern science. The obvious things such as day and night existing before the sun and moon, light and plants existing before the sun, etc. These are hard statements to ignore considering modern scientific knowledge. However, I am not reading this book to find things to criticize about it or try to prove some point. I want to try to get a genuine understanding of it. After all these stories were created thousands of years ago by ignorant people, for them it was natural to look at the blue sea and see it is made of water then look at the blue sky and assume it is made of water being held above us (Genesis 1:6) It makes sense that someone would look into the sky during a full moon and think that the moon produces light (Genesis 1:16) even if we know these things to be false.
So then ignoring the obvious scientific inaccuracies, let's look deeper into this. As early as the second verse we start to see something interesting. The biblical description of God "Hovering over the waters" and the later creation of land paints a picture of the early world being covered entirely in water. Scientifically nonsense, of course, but that isn't the interesting part. The theme of the early universe starting as a vast expanse of water is a common one in many mythologies. Ancient Egyptian, Hindu, and even some Native American Folklore share this concept. This would seem to give credence to the idea that early mythologies, including the oral traditions from which the biblical tales are descended, either borrowed heavily from each other or share one or several common ancestor mythologies from which all take inspiration.
The next verse that catches my attention that I would like to talk about is Genesis 1:27. In most teachings of the biblical creation story Eve is presented as being the first human woman. In this verse, however, it states that man and woman were created at the same time. This is not an obscure translation error that got missed, the NIV is not the only English version to say this. For those of you that do not know there are many books and stories which existed within the same tradition as the original biblical stories but were later removed from the narrative and this verse is an example of a vestigial remnant of one such story. In the original story the first woman on earth was Lilith, and she was made from the same dirt that Adam was made from. She refused to be subservient to Adam however and she left the Garden of Eden prior to The Fall. This story does not exist in the Bible today because of mankinds tinkering with the stories over time, but it existed within the tradition at one point and this verse is one piece of evidence for that.
Well, that completes the first chapter of Genesis and I think that is a good place to stop this OP. I expected to get farther along than I did because I did not think there would be this much to comment on but I think this is enough to induce a dialogue for now. Looking forward to seeing if anyone else is interested in this topic and if this does lead to an interesting conversation perhaps I will continue to read the next few chapters and we can discuss that as well.
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@PGA2.0
That is my point. There is no evidence for these deities or others such as Shangdi or the Demiurge. The fact that the universe and life exists and there are stories giving these deities credit for that is not evidence.
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@disgusted
I may have misconstrued your POV.
Probably not. You may have incorrectly assumed that I am a theist, but the fact is that I intentionally avoided mentioning that I am an atheist because I think that is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. A Jew or Christian could easily make the same point. They could then go on to say that their god is real and I would disagree with them on that point, but it would be internally consistent for them to say that the scriptures were written as allegory rather than history.
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@PGA2.0
How can the earth be further from the sun and still support life? Please give your evidence for this statement.
It can't. Not in the real world anyway. But if there was an omnipotent creator such as Ahura Mazda or Eiocha then it would easily be within their power, would it not?
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@disgusted
Oh do get into it.
I wrote posts 59 and 63 prior to reading the entire thread, since I was at first responding only to the OP and not the thread as a whole. Now that I have read through the thread I noticed your mention in post 41 regarding the Babylonian captivity, and as it happens that is what I was alluding to when I mentioned that the stories were put to paper for a specific purpose. A way of maintaining cultural identity and all that. I suspect based on your mentioning of it earlier that you probably already know at least as much about that aspect of it as I do. Certainly enough to understand the rest of what I said in my previous posts in context.
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@Mopac
The Ultimate Reality is God, and the fact that there is any perceived order or reality at all is all the evidence you need to believe that there is a way things truly are.
I guess if your definition of god is reality rather than referring to some form of supernatural being... well, I am not a solipsist so I believe that reality exists. Seems like a pretty useless definition though and I doubt that is actually what you mean when you use the word god.
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@Mopac
Because God could do it, that means God has to do it?
No, I do not think that. I do however think that the fact that we happen to exist in the one place that it is naturally possible to do so is something that should not be ignored considering how unlikely that is given how indescribably small the portion of the universe we are capable of inhabiting actually is.
If the universe was fine-tuned for life, we would be able to live in it. For the most part, we aren't.
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@disgusted
What makes you think that? The authors definitely wanted to be believed. I know it was fairy tales but the authors weren't after that interpretation.
What I mean is that the specific stories within were not meant to depict a literal history of the world and founding of the tribes of Israel. The stories of the Old Testament were a collection of oral traditions that the people had which were written down and recorded at one time for some specific reasons that I won't get into here.
The Hebrew authors certainly did believe that their god really does exist in the real world, but stories such as for example the story of Adam and Eve have a definite fable vibe to them which is very evident when looking at the meaning of the names Adam and Eve in the original Hebrew which the story was written in. The from which Adams name is derived translates as 'man' and Eve as 'living' or 'to give life'. These names have very clear meanings in light of the story itself. This continues for other Biblical stories as well. Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, etc. Many Biblical Characters have names which very directly related to their stories within the book.
Again the people that made the stories clearly did believe that their god was real, but the stories were created to convey certain messages rather than saying that the things in the stories literally happened in history. Biblical literalism is a relatively recent phenomenon which I think gets in the way of those messages from the authors by trying to shoehorn ridiculous narratives where they clearly do not and cannot fit.
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@EtrnlVw
Life on this planet is fit for its inhabitants.
I do not understand how this should be the case in a fine-tuned universe. I once made a thread to this effect on DDO:
I think the idea I try to get across in the OP of that thread went over the head of most that read it, despite it being such a simple idea. Life as we know it cannot exist in most of the universe.
Even if every planet in the entire universe were miraculously made to be perfectly fit for life most of the universe would still be incapable of supporting life.
Even if our solar system was all there was in the entire universe and hundreds of thousands of earthlike planets were added to it the vast majority of the universe would still be incapable of supporting life.
One has to ask why our civilization just happens to exist on a planet, and not only that but a planet where the conditions for the natural development of such a civilization are physically possible. Please stop reading this for about thirty seconds and just think about that for a moment. Why is it that our civilization exists in the one place we know of that it is possible for it to naturally exist?
Surely if a creator being capable of designing the universe such as Aten, Gaia, Ymir, Vishnu, Ngai, Zamba, Atum, Pangu, Xamaba, or any of a dozen others were responsible then our civilization could exist anywhere. Earth could be, for example, several times further from the sun and still support life just fine. We would hypothetically not even notice a difference until we developed astronomy and began to better understand the physical laws of the universe. Would this not be within their power?
So why instead do we happen to be in the one tiny part of the universe where the development of life is physically possible? Some people would say that such is the case because this is the one tiny part of the universe where life is physically possible. Of course we would develop here. Others would instead choose to believe that the entire cosmos exists literally for their benefit alone.
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The Bible seems to become significantly less interesting when viewed in the light of interpreting it as literal and historical truth rather than literary metaphor such as was clearly the intent of the various authors of the Old Testament.
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