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I think it was very deliberately put together to make people question religion. Perhaps not the Psalms and Proverbs. Not sure about the Prophets. But everything else, I believe was deliberately designed to help people recover from human religious authority by understanding what organized religion truly was and had always been
It's a thought. It may have been related to a similar concept at the time. Romans and their gods rule the area while Jews stood sternly by monitoring everyone. Slavery, stonings, you name it going on. They could have been the 99% of their time. I don't think it was with stern knowledge but I do think it became a mission as it rolled down the hill so to speak.
I think it was very deliberately put together to make people question religion. Perhaps not the Psalms and Proverbs. Not sure about the Prophets. But everything else, I believe was deliberately designed to help people recover from human religious authority by understanding what organized religion truly was and had always been
You are giving people waaaaaayyyy too much credit.
Conspiracy theories depend on the idea that large numbers of people can fool everyone without giving up the truth. Never gonna happen.
The bible is a compilation of oral stories, canonized by those in power who wished to retain and grow that power. It's very purpose was to be believed, so that the powerful could maintain control.
Maybe I didn't give enough options, but I'm surprised more people don't have an opinion on this. I feel like many people became atheists after reading the Bible, the greatest book ever devised to promote atheism, at least according to Isaac Asimov.
I consider it the greatest book ever devised to turn people away from religion. Because I am still a natural theist.
I do think a new is coming. In the cycle of life things sort of peak at some point. Right now religious wars, ISIS, Christian domination is coming to a head. Humanism, atheism, organic systems are slowly spreading to offset the terror people feel. I feel like human emotion flows similar to the tide of the ocean. You see a pull to one side or the other, back and forth throughout history.
You are giving people waaaaaayyyy too much credit.
Conspiracy theories depend on the idea that large numbers of people can fool everyone without giving up the truth. Never gonna happen.
The bible is a compilation of oral stories, canonized by those in power who wished to retain and grow that power. It's very purpose was to be believed, so that the powerful could maintain control.
I sort of see it as the opposite. I see Christianity as the flock that strayed from control. Enviably, the flock with freedom changed into a group who controlled others, gaining its own dictatorship with time, and suppressing its own crowd and those who oppose. That happens a lot.
I think the peoples who started and then developed over time the oral traditions that would later be written down and collected as the Bible did believe in what they were writing. They felt these stories were viable solutions to life's mysteries, just as an island culture would feel a typhoon having been sent because they did not sacrifice correctly was a logical answer as to why typhoons happen. No different.
I doubt they were lying, conspiracy-style.
Today we, with confidence, write informational books on all sorts of subjects. That information may later be proven to be wrong, and must be revised, but at the time of the original writing, the author was confident that the information s/he was giving was correct. So did the authors of the original Bible. We think that's silly today, but today we are coming from an age of science and a far lesser (hopefully, anyway) degree of superstition. This was not the environment a few thousand years ago.
I'm just always finding funny things in it. Some of the writers could not have been serious. Maybe they were just recording oral stories that already existed, but I don't see how that is possible when there is so much humor.
I'm just always finding funny things in it. Some of the writers could not have been serious. Maybe they were just recording oral stories that already existed, but I don't see how that is possible when there is so much humor.
It is a matter of perspective and what you grow up being taught is axiomatic "common knowledge".
Imagine that you grew up in Scandanavia in the era of the Vikings and the Norse deities. You have no idea what thunder is except that it is noisy and terrifying and produces storms that threaten to knock your grass and mud hut down and might kill this year's crop and leave you hungry and maybe dead before the next crop can be planted. It is easy then to buy your elder's story that it is a giant god-hammer that produces thunder and that the thunder god can be appeased in this or that way. From a 21st century perspective such a story would be laughed out of court because we now understand what thunderstorms are actually caused by and we are much more insulated from their effects anyway. But from your perspective in that era, you would be credulous about very different things because you would have a paucity of knowledge combined with much more vulnerability and a strong desire to render things explicable so that you would feel a bit more in control. And if you were literate and wrote those legends down for future generations, yes, you would be dead serious.
Besides, we often forget that the religious stories and legends and pantheons had ritualistic and symbolic value for the people of that era. People felt "in control" by participating in their cosmology and rituals, it was seen as a way of cooperating with and participating in the workings of the cosmos and interacting with the afterlife.
Maybe I didn't give enough options, but I'm surprised more people don't have an opinion on this. I feel like many people became atheists after reading the Bible, the greatest book ever devised to promote atheism, at least according to Isaac Asimov.
I consider it the greatest book ever devised to turn people away from religion. Because I am still a natural theist.
I think the people who wrote it believed it to be true, having heard the stories all their lives. I also think it had never occurred to them that genocide might be wrong, slavery might be wrong, rape might be wrong, etc. That is why the Bible condones all of that.
I think it was very deliberately put together to make people question religion. Perhaps not the Psalms and Proverbs. Not sure about the Prophets. But everything else, I believe was deliberately designed to help people recover from human religious authority by understanding what organized religion truly was and had always been
Well judging by the outcome, I would say they failed miserably at their task.
I'm just always finding funny things in it. Some of the writers could not have been serious. Maybe they were just recording oral stories that already existed, but I don't see how that is possible when there is so much humor.
Can you give an example of the humor?
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