I answered the Q on where the textus receptus might be by referring to a book that has more info than I do.
I'm trying to talk to you Aq, not the church. Have you read the KJV? It's not complicated, but written for the average person, that's what the reformers taught. I never said that the Papacy kept religion from the people, as you said its all in the stained glass and music, but they did not want the general public have access to the Bible, unless it was interpreted by a priest. If you were caught with a piece of scripture, hand written, you were interrogated tortured and either imprisoned or killed. The Papacy killed well over 50 million innocent people over 1200 years. We were discussing the flood, how did we end up here? It is all connected, but it started with the questioning of my beleif in the Bible. Does it surprise you that the Bible predicted and identifies the Papal reign of over 1200 years?
Precious little actual archeological evidence of widespread child sacrifice exists, leading some archaeologists to propose that child sacrifice may have been less prevalent than historical documents may suggest. In the case of Carthage, for instance, the only reports of child sacrifice come from Roman sources. It is possible that, being mortal enemies of the Carthaginians, the classic historians may have engaged in a sort of propaganda against their enemies.This can also be seen in the Jewish case: as they accused others in the Near East of child sacrifice, they themselves would come to be accused of it in blood libel cases. And of course blood libel was part of the horrific persecution of Jews by Christians.
You are the church. I am the atheist. And yes, I've read the KJV and several other sources. I'm not sure what you mean. The KJV was written for native English speakers, principally, Anglicans. The Christian religion, which includes all of the religious doctrine before and after the Reformation, has always built itself around the Bible stories, the myths and superstitions, and the legends and fables that it contains. The pretense that there is this huge gap in loyalty to the Bible between the Catholics and Protestants, is pure fantasy. The belief that the Reformation cured Christianity of its fallacies is also ludicrous. The Protestants went from one failed form of authority to another. And the fundies are the worst of all, relying on idiots to promulgate their religion for them. You simply have a jaded view of your own doctrines and, evidently, its history. What's really absurd is your attempts to disconnect your religion from its roots, and to denounce the people who created your Bible (the canon). More nonsense, taken from the Creationist (or is this Jehovah's Witness?) propaganda. You simply have no clue about the history of your own religion. You are confusing the Inquisition with the Imprimatur. As I said before, until the advent of the printing press, the Bibles were all hand copied. Books of any kind were scarce, and very few people could read. You are somehow mixing all of these facts together to strike at the creators of your sacred text, the Catholic church. How nutty is that? Not your belief in the Bible, but your ludicrous interpretation of what it says, and all your nutty disavowals of science and history just to prop it up. You have little or no grasp of the history of your own religion. Here is a list of all of the popes. Notice how many of them were opposed and/or were anti-popes. Trying to lump them together as you do is ludicrous. Maybe when you get around to telling me which popes murdered people that read the Bible, we can get around to separating pope from antipope. Furthermore, the Bible predicts nothing. You confuse stories that were written after the fact, pretending to to be written before an event, as prophesy. This is because you lack any training in exegesis, and because your grasp of history is so poor.
Going by your responses, you have a very scant knowledge of the Bible, and do not know what it says about religious and political history. The correct understanding of the Bible comes from having faith in God, your own confession has put you on the outside trying to peer in, it doesn't work that way. Unless you want to humble yourself and read it you will never know the peace offered by God through the scriptures.
The King James Version is the product of 17'th century academic scholarship. It was a major project of the time, employing most of the theologians at Oxford, Cambridge and around England. So today's readers of the KJV have no choice but to trust in the judgement of the English Biblical scholars who lived at that time. So why should this 17'th century translation be given preference over subsequent translations, whose translaters had access to better Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and more knowledge of the ancient intellectual contexts and of how particular words were used in those distant times? I think that people who really want to study the Biblical text in depth should probably learn Biblical Greek and Hebrew. They shouldn't simply rely on English translations. But that doesn't mean that they should ignore the subsequent scholarly secondary literature either. There are authorities out there who are inevitably going to know a lot more about particular Biblical passages than you do. In many of your posts, you write about non-Christian religions and "eastern" cultures, claiming that they all agree with your rather bizarre and fanciful views. But I don't believe that you have read any of these "eastern" writings, certainly not in their enterety, and certainly not in the original languages. Yet you persist in posting your (factually inaccurate) imaginings about what those writings supposedly say.
I have said very little about this other than some generalities, certainly not enough for you to formulate such an opinion. You may recall I gave some specifics, such as the error of tying the Tigris-Euphrates to the land of the Kush, or the flat earth model given in Jeremiah, or the error in correctly reciting the order of the kings of Persia at the time of Cyrus. These three examples speak to specific errors in geography, geology and history that anyone will notice who tries to comprehend the context rather than reading it in an invented framework of grammatical literalism (which even Galileo called heretical and follied in my earlier quote). Contrary to what you say here, I've already listed various errors in political and religious history that would not normally be known to a person unfamiliar with the Bible. Even that doesn't comport with your hypotheses. What you're propounding here is that the correct understanding of God comes from a literal interpretation of superstition, myth, legend, and fable. If you mean being objective, instead of inserting personal opinion into the text and forcing it to conform to a nutty narrow view, then guilty as charged. This correctly explains why fundamentalism is a fallacy. No, in the aggregate I can say there is no peace in the book you call the Bible. The only peace might come from placing Psalms or Proverbs as the epilogue, to soothe you away from the horrific nature of the crazed minds that conceived of these explanations for natural law. But if you place it in a more correct order and put Revelations at the end, you are merely left in a hallucinogenic nightmare. In fact, this author appears to have suffered severe mental illness or perhaps ingested a near lethal dose of hallucinogens, and lived to tell it. Of course we can blame that on the Catholics, who decided to include it. Although it was certainly disputed in its authorship: The most formidable antagonist of the authority of the Apocalypse is Dionysius, Bishop of Alexandria, disciple of Origen. He is not opposed to the supposition that Cerinthus is the writer of the Apocalypse. "For", he says, "this is the doctrine of Cerinthus, that there will be an earthly reign of Christ, and as he was a lover of the body he dreamed that he would revel in the gratification of the sensual appetite". One thing this tells you is the the Apocalypse is a late invention, long after Christ, insofar as the first Christians themselves had not even heard of it until Cerinthus created the teaching. As for finding peace: for this I might turn to a telescope, or just perusing the wealth of imagery from the Hubble, and marvel at the craven fear of nature that led to stories like Genesis. Or I might listen to the Bach St Matthew passion and mark the pathos by some turn of the harmonic minor mode and contemplate the trauma of the Jewish rebellion against Rome that led to mass crucifixions of the Zealots. Or I might skim through the writings of Charles Darwin, expounding the complex inner workings of nature, reminded of the idiotic claims that a few sentences of his should not be taught in the schools. As for the poetry it contains and the proverbs, I would get just as much listening to my favorite beatnik or singer-songwriter, although I always kind of liked this song as a crossover between our two worlds [video=youtube;iUT4QpHcWGI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUT4QpHcWGI&feature=related[/video] In short there's peace to be found just about anywhere there is no violence or turmoil. That inherently precludes the Bible, even when read correctly as a metaphor.
You're the one who needs to be reminded to keep searching. You're mangling the Bible as badly as you're mangling science in your pretense that you know it all.
The KJV is not the only reliable Bible, but if you want to read the Bible in English, it is the most accurate. That's not just my opinion, I associate with people who can read, Greek, Hebrew and other languages, and who are renown scholars. About eastern religions and tribal folk lore, what you said about Buddhism in the thread on heaven, I did eventually respond to your comment. Sorry not sooner.
I did not want to discount your knowledge in those areas, but made the comments based on you missing some very basic facts in the Bible about world history. It is not only a reliable record for archeaology, but gives a panoramic view of the world's nations and empires, with specific time frames placed throughout. And these were written hundreds of years before they began to happen. The events in our world today have been foretold two and a half thousand years ago. The lack of knowledge, and the correct knowledge of these is as rare among the clergy as it is with those who have never had any contact with religion. The world's history, present state and the future are open for inspection.
Yes, your views of science and the Bible are both wrong. You're trying to reconcile them by mangling both. You'd be better off just accepting what the Bible says and throwing science out the window.
The Bible has very little to say about world history, and when it does, it is often incorrect. It's does contain a few facts from local history, and even in this it is largely wrong. This is why historians do not rely on the Bible to write a world history. You will notice this if you ever read any world history from a scholarly source such as a textbook. The Bible is not a reliable record for archaeology since it is largely myth and fable. And the reason for this is obvious. It was written long after anyone could accurately remember their own history, and the writers had a very narrow view of the world, since they had never traveled very far at all. There are very few ancient artifacts that have surfaced that correlate with any of the stories told in the Bible, and nearly all the artifacts that have been found are largely not discussed in the Bible at all. It is certainly not a panoramic view of the world's nations since it is ignorant of the Far East and Oceania, the Americas, Europe and most of Africa, not to mention the oceans, geography or topology of the world. In other words, it only speaks of facts from the Middle East, and those are often incorrect. This is why archaeologists rarely, if ever, turn to the Bible as a guide. The error in your statement is merely the result of your assumption that the Bible serves as source material for archaeology and world history. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's factually false to say the Bible text foretells events when those events took place hundreds of years before it was written. What you really mean is, you simply assume the Bible was written before history, and you'll simply deny that facts that prove otherwise. The anthology you call "The Bible" ("The Holy Bible") wasn't finished until 1611. The oldest extant Bible was written around the time of the fall of Rome, shortly after Jerome completed the first agreed-upon canon. But your anthology lacks many of the writings found in the Vulgate. So already you're disputing your own book's legacy and therefore its accuracy. And the oldest extant scraps of any kind are from about 100 years after the conquests of Alexander the Great. It's exactly the opposite of what you think. The writings were made long after the settings of the stories they tell. You simply cling to the assumption that if a story pretends to take place in a certain era, then the storyteller is recording events in real time. Like most assumptions of yours I've read so far, this one also collides with the vast set of facts available to anyone with even a passing curiosity about the subject. The fact that the writings occur so long after the events they describe is the reason there are so many mistakes in the retelling. The authors simply didn't have a way to research their own history, so they just made it up as they went along. This is like what you are doing - inventing as you go, filling in the potholes with assumptions. The difference is, you have the information at your fingertips. They only had oral tradition and imagination. So they filled it with myths, legends and fables, a very poor knowledge of history and geography, and virtually no knowledge of science whatsoever. That's absurd. You just imagine that this is true. Besides the fact that it can not possibly be true, there is not a grain of factual basis for believing this. It requires inventing a huge amount of fiction, and then, with this fabricated framework, stretching a huge canvas of superstition across it on which the assumptions are painted. It's ridiculous to claim that clergy have little or no "correct knowledge" of the Bible. In the first place, you've already established that you have no sense of history or science and no idea what the texts are that you're reading and where they came from or who wrote them and when. You've interpreting all the myth and fables as inerrant fact, even when the facts you impute are contrary to the world body of knowledge. In other words, you're throwing out all teaching and all expertise along with the clerics. Secondly, since the Bible was written by clerics, you've created a huge paradox for yourself. Should you believe the writings of clerics as inerrant when you're so sure they do not have "correct knowledge" of the text they wrote? How can you say the world's history is open for inspection when all you've done so far is to reject it--lock, stock and barrel? Fundamentalism is not so much a belief as it is a general denial of all knowledge.
In fact it was commissioned by the Church of England and the translation took place under its auspices between 1604 and 1611. Catholics in those days still used the Latin translation exclusively. But remember that even though the technology of printing had been invented, the technology of motors had not, so all printing was done with hand-turned presses. This meant that, by today's standards, there were not very many copies of any book in existence. Due to this lack of textbooks, public education as we know it was still a couple of centuries in the future, so except for royalty, aristocrats, monks and scholars, almost nobody could read and write. So within any religion, as you already pointed out, only the priests had "the word of God" at their fingertips. Everybody else had to rely on their skill and integrity. The Jews of course were a glaring exception. Every man in the community was encouraged to learn to read the Torah and interpret it for himself and his family, rather than relying on the skill and integrity of the rabbis; this was a requirement for passing their bar mitzvah. Just to make this rite of passage a little harder, it had to be read in the already-dead Hebrew language. This is still true today, although the language has been revived in Israel. The ability of Jewish butchers and farmers and blacksmiths to read was one of the many things that pissed off the European Gentiles and established antisemitism as one of the defining attributes of Christendom in Europe.
And how are we to know whether anyone has faith in God, rather than just claiming to in order to win our confidence and accept his interpretation of the Bible as worthy of respect? I have already notified the moderator of this subforum that this discussion should be moved into the Religion subforum. That is the ghetto where we allow evangelism. This subforum is for scholarship. It is for discussion of religions, not the advocacy of any one of them. If you want to preach to us about the alleged joys of belief in the supernatural, this is the wrong place.
Thankyou for helping to draw the line of demarcation, so that the heavenly intelligences can finalise the account for humanity.
That's not at all what I said. It's immaterial to this discussion, and it says nothing about the exegetical material countless people like me have read, but yes, I have read various versions, including the one you are thumping on, the KJV, cover to cover. I assure you, it's just as infuriating to read it that way as any other. (Lately I don't have many covers as almost all of my reading materials are in digital form.) The best part of the KJV is the prologue written by scholars of the day who understood at least a few of the facts concerning exegesis. Obviously they were not sophisticated enough to do as thorough an analysis as needed, but they certainly understood the roles of the Septuagint and St Jerome with regard to the institutions that decided what to leave in and what to leave out. If you think the Bible was not hammered out by committee, then you're simply ignoring history. Au contraire, it was not even written at all until institutions took on the task of capturing the lore and recording it in various forms. Investigate the status of the Christian Bible prior to Jerome and you'll see what I mean. It was two institutions - the one you call the Catholic Church, and the Septuagint - which captured and recorded the materials that the King James committees relied on. And that was another institution. Your belief that you've escaped institutionalization (the doctrinal equivalence, that is) is absurd. Nothing could be further from the truth. No, the Bible was NOT written for the common man at all since only a very few people could read and write in the early Christian era - and they (Christians) certainly did not possess the common knowledge of Jewish people to even understand the basis of the Old Testament. This is another example of your treatment of the material in a complete vacuum, as if nothing ever happened before, and there is no history to compare to your ideas of historical events. Your statement that the Bible was written for average people to read assumes average people can read at all which is still not true in many parts of the world. Even sophisticated readers need all kinds of tools to decipher the meaning. This is yet again another reason why it's such a fallacy to treat it like special text. The rise of Fundamentalism via tent revivals in the American pioneering era was entirely successful merely because settlers were largely illiterate. This is apparently still the case today as far as many of the folks you rely on for guidance. Some of them actually propound their claims of scholarship, but they exude illiteracy in their writings. Perhaps they are 50% illiterate - they can write but not read. One thing is for sure, they are WOMs - write-only memories. All institutions are not bad. A few of them are essential - for example, you'll rely on the medical institution when you're sick, and on the banking and/or government institutions when you're broke, and you rely on every king of commercial institution just to buy a loaf of bread and to take it to your hovel, and bless it, and break it, and give thanks. And the list goes on. But the pretense of blaming religious institutions for all error just won't fly. You've fallen into one of the worst of them, especially as far as having to sacrifice your intellect. It's called Fundamentalism.
I am fairly convinced of my lack of whatever, after engaging with others in this thread, that's why I am no longer continuing the subject. I could not present my views without being cornered into a confession of my faith, after which the noble fraggle sent me a message of congratulations from the ghetto.
