Measuring religion

[Asmodean]

interesting man. reading on the origin of species is strrange, like watching motion picture previews of a film youve already seen, because darwin anticipates the highlights of the next 150 years of evolutionary biology in offhand remarks and brief speculations.

Indeed.

I suppose that when one works on... Let's call it the "intellectual baggage" of an idea, one may get some intuition and foresight as to where it could and might and must lead, or in what form it may withstand the winds of time.

[zorkan]

Quote: There are over 450 known versions of the Bible in English alone. Here are some of the most recognized versions:

King James Version (KJV)
New International Version (NIV)
English Standard Version (ESV)
New Living Translation (NLT)
New King James Version (NKJV)
The Message (MSG)
American Standard Version (ASV)
Good News Translation (GNT)
New American Standard Bible (NASB)
Revised Standard Version (RSV)
Contemporary English Version (CEV)
New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
Amplified Bible (AMP)
Christian Standard Bible (CSB)
Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB)
New Century Version (NCV)
New English Translation (NET)
New Jerusalem Bible (NJB)
New Life Version (NLV)
New World

Do they all agree?
Not according to Bart Ehrman in his book Whose Word Is It?
With the OT written in Hebrew and the NT in Greek, there were any number of copying and translation errors.
Scribes would also doubt a passage and alter it.
Ehrman also points out the the King James was based on the worst available manuscript.
Where are the original manuscripts and why would they have been destroyed in the first place?

All fiction of course.

[Asmodean]

Different translators translate different source material differently.

There is a pattern emerging from that postulate.

[Icarus]

The most widely used bible in the US is the King James Version (KJV). That one was assembled by a group of 54 English scholars at the behest of James. It was to be published in the English language so that it could be read by the common man, if the common man could read. The bible immediately preceding the KJV was written in Latin. It was Queen Elizabeth's choice as she was a Catholic while her sibling, James, was of a different mind. When she died, James inherited the throne and the power to commission a bible different from the previous Doual-Rheims bible.   

The bottom line is that the KJV was written by a committee. It was first published in 1611. I suspect that the original has undergone some tweaks, or more likely, some significant changes.

There is a long list of bible predecessors..........beginning at about 500 B.C. with the Hebrew writings through the Septuagent to the new testament writings, the Latin Vulgate translations, the Alcuin, the Paris bible of about ca 1200, the Wycliffe, the Gutenberg, the Erasmus, the Luther, Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew, the Geneva, the Bishops, and a few more until we arrived at the King James.

Aesop's fables were not really given much credibility in terms of theological importance. I suspect that there may be more wisdom in the Aesop's book than in the free Gideon bibles that we find, free, in U.S. motels.

[Asmodean]

Those free motel bibles though... Are they like to take, or motel property to be used for the duration of stay? Because in that latter case... Well, there may be semen, or so I understand?

[The Magic Pudding..]

It was Queen Elizabeth's choice as she was a Catholic while her sibling, James, was of a different mind.

I don't think QEI was a Catholic nor that James was her sibling.

[zorkan]

Quote from Wiki re. Tyndale's translation of the Bible into English:
"Tyndale was accused of translation errors. Thomas More commented that searching for errors in (the first edition of) the Tyndale Bible was similar to searching for water in the sea and charged Tyndale's translation of The Obedience of a Christian Man with having about a thousand false translations. Bishop Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible."

[billy rubin]

the english bible mass-produced just prior to the 1611 was the 1560 geneva bible, and it remained a popular english text for a long time after the 1611 was first printed.

the 1611 used the textus receptus for a primary translation, and then an eclectic collection of available texts for tweaks. modern KJV bibles are very different from the original book authorized by king james. they are always missing large sections ofthe original, including the very important instructions to the reader, all the original cross references, and the apocrypha.

there are lots of fairly minor variant passages and vocabulary between the miscellaneous texts used to compile a modern christian bible, but the ewrrors are mostly historical typos and dont affect the meaning. not including 1 john 5:7

what results in major differences are th ehuman decisions as to which books to include in the text. nobody agrees about the canon, and so there are differences in what christians believe. the roman cathjolics pray for the dead, the protestants ignore the archangels named in the apocrypha, nobody accepts the book of enoch and its stories about the nephilim, and so on.

ive been to russian orthodox services where we all stood around and prayed for the soul of czar nicholas 2. you wont ever see that in an assembly of god.

[zorkan]

This is where I get confused between the bible and koran:
koran: "Then it speaks in particular of the creation of man and his origin: "created man from clots of blood." He is created from a dried drop of blood which sticks to the womb: a cheap and unsophisticated substance.

But Jesus was a man who was created from water and blood.
How much blood has been spilt over whether Jesus was god, man or a god-man hybrid?

If Jesus in his infancy really brought clay models of birds to life then I can only think of him as being a god or an alien.
Would people in those days have thought UFO's were clay birds?

 

[Asmodean]

Oh yeah, that's right! they did believe that blood was one of them... Building blocks of life, I suppose, rather than a product of life.

[zorkan]

I see the miracle of the birds is also in the koran.
"And ˹on Judgment Day˺ Allah will say, "O Jesus, son of Mary! Remember My favour upon you and your mother: how I supported you with the holy spirit1 so you spoke to people in ˹your˺ infancy and adulthood. How I taught you writing, wisdom, the Torah, and the Gospel. How you moulded a bird from clay—by My Will—and breathed into it and it became a ˹real˺ bird—by My Will".

Add to that Jesus beaming up to heaven after rising from the dead adds to the idea he really could have been an alien.
The immaculate conception could be a story of an alien mating with a woman.
Am I off my rocker?

[billy rubin]

thats not an uncommon belief in the  kook fringe. ive met people who believed in that.

[zorkan]

I'm always curious as to where places like heaven and hell exist.
They imply a flat earth where heaven is above (the city of god) and hell is below in an underworld.

So religions' places of the mind would include:

Up above:
Mount Olympus - Zeus.
Mount Kailash - Shiva.
Heaven - home of the god of Abraham.

Down under:
Hell - home of the devil of Abraham?

Unclear as to where:
Paradise - land of clear running water, green meadows and virgins.
Purgatory - Catholics' waiting room.
New Jerusalem - somewhere in the 'Holy Land' or could be in North America awaiting construction.

[zorkan]

An example of the number of adult and child abuse victims now come to light.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-67749215

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_TmpEsUjW8

He was regarded as being divine.
If religion is measured in victims when something like 100 billion humans have ever lived,, then it is anyone's guess.

[Asmodean]

Ah, but did he "rape and torture," or did he perhaps "bestow them with his divine seed?"

Divine law is a matter of religious perspective. As such, you could very well do things like be a genocidal maniac from the social perspective, while at the same time being "divine."