It just annoys me when atheists do the same thing. “The Bible condones genocide.” Parts of the Bible do, and parts of the Bible don’t. Picking and choosing which parts of the Bible you think are more accurate is good critical analysis. We know some of Paul’s letters were forgeries, we are pretty sure about the agendas of some of the authors of the Pentateuch…
So many take a lazy Reddit tier atheist “it’s all stupid and useless” that is just so fucking boring than struggling with what the document actually is. Because it is fascinating. Parts of it are inspiring and compelling, parts of it are boring instructions for constructing shit, some of it is brutal and evil. But it’s much more than “lol stupid goat herders.”
If a part of the Bible condones Genocide, the whole book condones it. Its inspired from God himself. Did God change his mind from chapter to chapter?
Happy to do critical analysis of it, but you must forgive fundamentalists believing Genocide is ok in certain contexts due to it being written in the bible
it’s a compilation of books by multiple authors with multiple perspectives, and treating it like it’s supposed to be a cohesive text that’s supposed to have a single message makes it impossible to understand as a historical text…
I do not accept the fundamentalists claim that the book was directly inspired by God himself - and many Christians would not agree with that fundamentalist claim either. Different books of the Bible were written by different authors with different purposes. This is a necessary jumping off point to do any critical analysis of it.
The entire point here is that it is stupid as an atheist to accept the fundamentalist’s argument, to treat the compilation of books like it is even supposed to be a unified Voice of God.
Notice how the compilers of the Genesis often included two versions of a story next to each other. Were Adam and Eve created at the same time, or was Eve made from Adam’s rib? How many of each animal did Noah bring on the Ark? These things contradict, because the compiler was trying to include all versions of the story available. I suspect a big purpose is to legitimize a unified political identity - that you have a merging of different groups, different tribes, and you don’t want to piss anyone off by leaving out their traditional story.
Then later, different authors are compiling stories of historic kings, and they include stories of behavior that was genocidal and awful. They throw in some justification, because at the time these books are serving as political history.
Then you have the “prophets” post Exile trying to cope, trying to understand what went wrong and coming up with different explanations.
By the time you get to the New Testament, you have a strong influence of Greek philosophy, and again, political tensions in relation to the Roman Empire.
Saying “the Bible condones genocide” is meaningless. Saying something like “the authors of Samuel condone genocide” is more accurate.
Thats interesting. The history does explain why it jumps around a lot.
My main thinking however is from the point of view that God intended to bring about his message to the world, whatever that would be. If the Bible is humanities’ attempt at interpreting whatever that message is, we didn’t appear to do a very good job at all.
I understand and agree that there are many things to be learned from the Bible, but its only humans teaching other humans in my view.
Bible scholars who are aren’t apologists start from the baseline assumption that it is not divinely inspired. Academic biblical scholarship which comes out of most mainstream universities treats the books of the Bible as they were written by human hands without divine intervention. It’s not even about trying to get some sort of moral message - it’s about understanding the world that ancient Hebrews lived in and how it changed through different periods of time. Gods existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to the process of analyzing the historical text. A good scholar is looking for biases in what the human author wrote. This is going to be the case for anyone that isn’t at like Moody Bible college.
The thing about literary analysis is you can do it if you want to. But expecting everyone else to also do it to your satisfaction is a recipe for frustration.
It’s not just literary analysis - it’s historical.
A text being historical does not mean it is a 100% true telling of the events. That is the entire point of analyzing your sources.
Herodotus tells us that a guy got a person escort of dolphins to port when some treacherous sailors threw him overboard and other insane bullshit. That probably didn’t happen. However, he is really really useful if we want to understand the rise of the Achaemenid Empire and pretty accurate there.
If I want to analyze the beliefs and politics of post Exilic period Hebrews, the Bible is an excellent resource. Even things that are mostly mythological are extremely useful. Eg, King David was a historical figure - there is independent corroborating evidence of this. The stories in the Bible about him are probably mostly mythological because they were written a few centuries after his rule, but they are useful in that they indicate a desire to create a shared cultural history - to unify the tribes into one polity.
Every time the Bible comes up on lemmy, it feels like everyone here must have failed every high school history class they took. History has a different methodology than science does, because it is a different field and way of understanding.
It just annoys me when atheists do the same thing. “The Bible condones genocide.” Parts of the Bible do, and parts of the Bible don’t. Picking and choosing which parts of the Bible you think are more accurate is good critical analysis. We know some of Paul’s letters were forgeries, we are pretty sure about the agendas of some of the authors of the Pentateuch…
So many take a lazy Reddit tier atheist “it’s all stupid and useless” that is just so fucking boring than struggling with what the document actually is. Because it is fascinating. Parts of it are inspiring and compelling, parts of it are boring instructions for constructing shit, some of it is brutal and evil. But it’s much more than “lol stupid goat herders.”
If a part of the Bible condones Genocide, the whole book condones it. Its inspired from God himself. Did God change his mind from chapter to chapter? Happy to do critical analysis of it, but you must forgive fundamentalists believing Genocide is ok in certain contexts due to it being written in the bible
I do not accept the fundamentalists claim that the book was directly inspired by God himself - and many Christians would not agree with that fundamentalist claim either. Different books of the Bible were written by different authors with different purposes. This is a necessary jumping off point to do any critical analysis of it.
The entire point here is that it is stupid as an atheist to accept the fundamentalist’s argument, to treat the compilation of books like it is even supposed to be a unified Voice of God.
Notice how the compilers of the Genesis often included two versions of a story next to each other. Were Adam and Eve created at the same time, or was Eve made from Adam’s rib? How many of each animal did Noah bring on the Ark? These things contradict, because the compiler was trying to include all versions of the story available. I suspect a big purpose is to legitimize a unified political identity - that you have a merging of different groups, different tribes, and you don’t want to piss anyone off by leaving out their traditional story.
Then later, different authors are compiling stories of historic kings, and they include stories of behavior that was genocidal and awful. They throw in some justification, because at the time these books are serving as political history.
Then you have the “prophets” post Exile trying to cope, trying to understand what went wrong and coming up with different explanations.
By the time you get to the New Testament, you have a strong influence of Greek philosophy, and again, political tensions in relation to the Roman Empire.
Saying “the Bible condones genocide” is meaningless. Saying something like “the authors of Samuel condone genocide” is more accurate.
Thats interesting. The history does explain why it jumps around a lot.
My main thinking however is from the point of view that God intended to bring about his message to the world, whatever that would be. If the Bible is humanities’ attempt at interpreting whatever that message is, we didn’t appear to do a very good job at all. I understand and agree that there are many things to be learned from the Bible, but its only humans teaching other humans in my view.
Bible scholars who are aren’t apologists start from the baseline assumption that it is not divinely inspired. Academic biblical scholarship which comes out of most mainstream universities treats the books of the Bible as they were written by human hands without divine intervention. It’s not even about trying to get some sort of moral message - it’s about understanding the world that ancient Hebrews lived in and how it changed through different periods of time. Gods existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to the process of analyzing the historical text. A good scholar is looking for biases in what the human author wrote. This is going to be the case for anyone that isn’t at like Moody Bible college.
Ok.
The thing about literary analysis is you can do it if you want to. But expecting everyone else to also do it to your satisfaction is a recipe for frustration.
It’s not just literary analysis - it’s historical.
A text being historical does not mean it is a 100% true telling of the events. That is the entire point of analyzing your sources.
Herodotus tells us that a guy got a person escort of dolphins to port when some treacherous sailors threw him overboard and other insane bullshit. That probably didn’t happen. However, he is really really useful if we want to understand the rise of the Achaemenid Empire and pretty accurate there.
If I want to analyze the beliefs and politics of post Exilic period Hebrews, the Bible is an excellent resource. Even things that are mostly mythological are extremely useful. Eg, King David was a historical figure - there is independent corroborating evidence of this. The stories in the Bible about him are probably mostly mythological because they were written a few centuries after his rule, but they are useful in that they indicate a desire to create a shared cultural history - to unify the tribes into one polity.
Every time the Bible comes up on lemmy, it feels like everyone here must have failed every high school history class they took. History has a different methodology than science does, because it is a different field and way of understanding.
Yeah… people online prefer easy cliches and pithy remarks to original thought and effort.
Its not just the bible that gets this treatment, its literally everything.