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Religious Rant.
Feb. 2nd, 2005 | 11:03 pm
What strikes me most about the Snow Crash excerpt is how absurd the whole thing is. People told this to their kids?
The Red vs. Blue guys did a "Public Service Announcement" a while ago - a point/counterpoint on whether one should get a tattoo. Private Church sums up the "don't get a tat" argument thusly:
It's funny, but I think it's also some pretty insightful social commentary, and it applies to more than whether you should cover yourself in permanent ink. If we go back to the Enki myth, the same thing sort of applies; it was written 4,000 years ago, and the immediate reaction that most people today have to it is something along the lines of "What the hell? Did people actually believe this?" I'm sure they did. I'm sure they took their stories literally, just as so many of us do today.
We have the benefit of hindsight. We can see that they - we, in that they were our ancestors - were idiots. It just tooks us 4,000 years to figure it out. So when anyone wants to take the Bible at face value, a part of me absolutely wants to slap them. You will learn nothing from the Enki myth if you take the story literally, other than perhaps that if you are a water-god, to not be so selfish with your "water of the heart." If you actually stop and think about it, though, that story's got lots of interesting morals hidden in there.
The Bible should work the same way.
Instead of just reading the *words* in your Bible, for example, you could look at the history of the Bible. You'll learn that the precursor to the Old Testament was just a series of stories told in Yahwistic cults until the Deuteronomists codified them into the forerunner of the Torah (they also wrote the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings). And, knowing that, the next time you look at that half of the Bible, you'll adjust accordingly how you read it, with some understanding of the particular biases of the Deuteronomists and how they must have applied those in the editorial process of the creation of this document.
You could learn that these kinds of things happened over and over in the history of the Bible (Old *and* New Testaments), even leading up to today; even the best translations will reflect some intentional or unintentional cultural bias. So you could learn about all of the different versions of the Bible leading up to, say, the King James Version, and then you could read some of the scholarly diatribe writtem by whoever edited your revision of the Bible (which we'll say for the sake of argument is probably based, to some extent, on the KJV), and try and understand all of their social and cultural biases.
But knowing this doesn't change the text of your Bible. In fact, all of this study will not change one word in your Bible. And if every word in the Bible is there by God's decree, why does it matter? I guess a literalist would tell you that it doesn't. I'll argue that it does matter, though. It helps you understand the meaning.
[Wrap it up already! - Ed. Okay!] In conclusion, just like the Enki tale, the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. It may take us a few thousand years to figure it out, but we, too are idiots.
God may have created the Bible in some vague philosophical sense, but God sure as hell didn't write it. It went through, and continues to go through, lots of revisions and reinterpretations, and that's fine. So while I recognize the importance of the document and the lessons that can be learned from it, I choose not to take it literally. It doesn't make sense to. Instead, I choose to take the lessons I can learn from it, and then I choose to spend my time studying God's other great creation. You know, the one that hasn't been revised, reinterpreted, or translated.
The universe.
The Red vs. Blue guys did a "Public Service Announcement" a while ago - a point/counterpoint on whether one should get a tattoo. Private Church sums up the "don't get a tat" argument thusly:
- Tattoos are permanent.
- You are a god damn idiot.
It's funny, but I think it's also some pretty insightful social commentary, and it applies to more than whether you should cover yourself in permanent ink. If we go back to the Enki myth, the same thing sort of applies; it was written 4,000 years ago, and the immediate reaction that most people today have to it is something along the lines of "What the hell? Did people actually believe this?" I'm sure they did. I'm sure they took their stories literally, just as so many of us do today.
We have the benefit of hindsight. We can see that they - we, in that they were our ancestors - were idiots. It just tooks us 4,000 years to figure it out. So when anyone wants to take the Bible at face value, a part of me absolutely wants to slap them. You will learn nothing from the Enki myth if you take the story literally, other than perhaps that if you are a water-god, to not be so selfish with your "water of the heart." If you actually stop and think about it, though, that story's got lots of interesting morals hidden in there.
The Bible should work the same way.
Instead of just reading the *words* in your Bible, for example, you could look at the history of the Bible. You'll learn that the precursor to the Old Testament was just a series of stories told in Yahwistic cults until the Deuteronomists codified them into the forerunner of the Torah (they also wrote the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings). And, knowing that, the next time you look at that half of the Bible, you'll adjust accordingly how you read it, with some understanding of the particular biases of the Deuteronomists and how they must have applied those in the editorial process of the creation of this document.
You could learn that these kinds of things happened over and over in the history of the Bible (Old *and* New Testaments), even leading up to today; even the best translations will reflect some intentional or unintentional cultural bias. So you could learn about all of the different versions of the Bible leading up to, say, the King James Version, and then you could read some of the scholarly diatribe writtem by whoever edited your revision of the Bible (which we'll say for the sake of argument is probably based, to some extent, on the KJV), and try and understand all of their social and cultural biases.
But knowing this doesn't change the text of your Bible. In fact, all of this study will not change one word in your Bible. And if every word in the Bible is there by God's decree, why does it matter? I guess a literalist would tell you that it doesn't. I'll argue that it does matter, though. It helps you understand the meaning.
[Wrap it up already! - Ed. Okay!] In conclusion, just like the Enki tale, the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. It may take us a few thousand years to figure it out, but we, too are idiots.
God may have created the Bible in some vague philosophical sense, but God sure as hell didn't write it. It went through, and continues to go through, lots of revisions and reinterpretations, and that's fine. So while I recognize the importance of the document and the lessons that can be learned from it, I choose not to take it literally. It doesn't make sense to. Instead, I choose to take the lessons I can learn from it, and then I choose to spend my time studying God's other great creation. You know, the one that hasn't been revised, reinterpreted, or translated.
The universe.