Should the Bible be edited?

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Xelasnave.1947, Dec 1, 2016.

  1. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    22,910
    Except your premise is blatantly false. Contrary to your assertion, Buddhism is a polytheistic religion.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytheism#Buddhism_and_Shinto

    Well, here is the problem with that; words have meanings which have been codified in books called dictionaries. Religion is defined as believing in a higher supernatural power. Atheists do not believe in a higher power. They don't believe in a godhead. Therefore, by definition, atheism isn't a religion. What you are doing is repeating the right wing attempt to delegitimize atheism with a "they do it too" kind of argument.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion

    Unfortunately for you and your right wing fellows Wellwisher, we have dictionaries. Anthropogenic global warming isn't, by definition, a religion. It's a conclusion based upon overwhelming data spanning the course of centuries. Science isn't a religion. Man made global warming is no more a religion than is any other scientific conclusion like gravity.

    Again, this is just another right wing attempt to delegitimize science, because the evidence doesn't support right wing beliefs.

    Unfortunately for you and your right wing fellows, we have "dem" damn dictionaries. You cannot, by definition, have a godless religion.

    Well then you should have some evidence to support your belief, so let's see that evidence. Where is your evidence to support your assertion? You don't have any, because it isn't true. Science requires evidence, and that's a problem for folks like you because you never have any. Just because it says so in the Bible doesn't make it so. You need more than that.

    Evolution has been observed in nature and has been duplicated in labs. That's pretty hard evidence, and all you have is the Bible told me so. The fact is, if taken literally, the Bible is inconsistent with reality.

    This is nonsense.
     
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  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    That may be true of a modernist Western Buddhism. But generally in Asia, in historical Buddhism, and certainly in the Pali canon (the earliest extant Buddhist tradition) there are no end of gods, heavens and hells. Heavens and hells represent different states of consciousness one might say. They have historically been associated with meditative states and it was once believed (and some still believe today) that one could kind of peek into the heavens during meditation. Gods were imagined as very powerful and long-lived beings that had been reborn into the heavens due to their karma. Hells are the same thing in reverse.

    The thing to notice is that there is no omnipotent monotheistic creator god in Buddhism (though in some of the discourses Brahma purports to be such and the Buddha deflates his self-importance). The universe is imagined to be eternal, without a temporal origin, and governed by karma in much the same way that physicalism imagines the material world to be governed by causation. While gods and devils were thought to exist, they didn't exist forever in those states but rather grew old and died like the rest of us, except on a longer time-scale. So gods could, and typically did, fall out of heaven due to their karma while hell-demons could rise up out of hell if their state of consciousness justified it. Gods don't really define the path to enlightenment in Buddhism and are merely fellow travellers on that path, just like us. One cannot obtain salvation from a god and gods are in need of salvation too.

    The Buddha denies being either a human or a god. Both of those states are dependent on one being a self that is either human or divine, and the Buddha had come to the realization that he has no self.

    I think that's very true.

    Even religious-studies scholars often seem to behave as if religions are all about belief in a monotheistic God. That's because most religious-studies scholars seem to come from places like the United States where belief in such a God is traditional, and they want to comment on the sort of religion they see around them.

    I think that most (but probably not all) atheists share a belief in metaphysical naturalism that appears to be very similar to a religious belief. (Those who don't share that kind of belief are more apt to call themselves 'agnostics'.) Atheists often lean towards a crude sort of scientism. They often have great faith in something called 'the scientific method' that they imagine is the only intellectually acceptable form of reasoning about any subject. I would personally classify some (not all) expressions of atheism as edging very close to quasi-religious belief systems. Many atheists seem to want to tell us what reality consists of and how humans should relate to it.

    I'm personally inclined to perceive Marxism and Freudianism as modernist quasi-religions. I think that a great deal of UFO belief is an expression of modernist quasi-religious folklore in which traditional heavenly visitors are reinterpreted in "scientific" terms (spaceships!).

    I don't think that would be very successful.

    I'm not convinced that we can precisely define the word 'religion'. 'Religion' seems to me to be more of a family-resemblance term. The things that we label 'religion' possess lots of different distinctive properties. Many of those properties are shared with other things that we call 'religion'. But there probably isn't any single essential property that is present in all of the things we call 'religion' and can be said to be definitive of what religion is. Many of our concepts seem to behave like this. (An example might be 'good'.) The later Wittgenstein seems to have thought that all words work this way and his famous example was 'chair'.
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2017
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  5. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Buddhist do believe in higher beings, i.e. gods, and supernatural powers. That, by definition, makes it a religion.

    Well, that's why we have a dictionary; every individual doesn't have to redefine every word in the lexicon. The word 'religion' is an old word, it doesn't need to be redefined.

     
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  7. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Or at least some of them do. I agree that most Buddhists have traditionally done so, and that denial of the existence of gods, hell-demons, ghosts and heavenly bodhisattvas is a modern innovation both in the West and in Asia. But it's indisputably a Buddhist innovation and the innovators are still universally considered to be adherents of the broader Buddhist religion.

    Which assumes that a universally accepted definition of 'religion' exists.

    I don't think that one can solve philosophical problems by consulting dictionaries. Dictionaries don't reveal the essences of things (assuming that things even have essences).

    Regarding 'religion' I'm more inclined to follow contemporary scholars in thinking like this.

    http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/sponsel/Religion/Definition.html
     
  8. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    5,160
    The conclusion from that link reads as follows:

    My approach assumes, you can't depend on definitions, that are based on the superficial observations of behavior such as connected to deities or not to deities. However, I believe that if brain activity is similar it should be called a religion.

    As an analogy, some people laugh, others cry, others get angry and others freeze up when they are under lots of stress. If we look only at the superficial, it may not be clear that all of these are expressions of stress. One may not normally associate laughing with stress, and therefore not include this. However if you could crawl inside their skin, or do a brain scan, they are all feeling the same thing.
     
  9. river

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    The bible should never , ever , be edited .
     
  10. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    You are too late; it has been edited numerous times throughout the last 2,000 years. What's another edit after so many edits?
     
  11. river

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    17,307
    Any edit , gets us further from the truth .
     
  12. Xelasnave.1947 Valued Senior Member

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    What is the truth River.
    Say you are driven to edit it and be convinced that God was guiding you.
    You realise you are charged with the mission.

    Alex
     
  13. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    13,077
    Your waaaaay to late for that

    But you can try to get a copy of every version now in existence and contact the publishers to request it not be edited

    Good luck

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  14. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Are you holding out for The River Version to be redeemed?

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  15. Randwolf Ignorance killed the cat Valued Senior Member

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    Michael 345 likes this.
  16. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    You should franchise this

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  17. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    You do realize the Christian Bible was compiled some 300 year after he walked the Earth? If the Bible was so important to Christ, then why did he not compile one during his lifetime? It's believed he was educated and could write, and he had followers who could write. So why didn't he leave a text if it were so important?
     
  18. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    3,252
    The whole bible versions are based on the meaning "Love thy God with all your heart and whole your sole and love thy neighbor as yourself. "
    How can you change the meaning by editing . If you change the meaning . That is not the word of God anymore .
     
  19. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I suggest you read the Bible.
     
  20. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    My reply was to river who posted it should never be edited

    His response was his answer to the Original Post

    Edits can easy change the meaning

    Claim the original transaction of a word was incorrect

    The ancient text in truth did not say

    Love thy neighbour

    but

    Kill thy neighbour

    Give a blah blah blah 10 page explanation as to why your correction is the correct correction and you have created 2 years worth of argument in publications interested in such matters


    As to

    If you change the meaning . That is not the word of God anymore

    that presumes that the original text was in the first place

    Which is unprovable

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  21. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    This question is like asking if stories from Greek (or other) mythology should be edited.

    Regardless of what you believe, the bible is an existing document written a long time ago. What is the point of rewriting it?

    Would you rewrite books about alchemy or merely claim that they are erroneous? I vote for the latter.
     
  22. Oystein Registered Senior Member

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    890
    Edited? No. It's no sillier than most other fairy tale collections. It just needs to be put into the proper library section.
     
  23. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    As is typical of your posts, that's all nonsense based on false premises. For starters, Buddhism is a polytheistic religion. Buddhists don't believe in a single god or a personal god. But that doesn't mean they don't believe in higher beings, because they do.
     

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