Should the Bible be edited?

[joepistole]

One thing that most atheists fail to realize is, or cannot or will not admit, is not all main stream religions worship deities. Buddhism is a good example. There are no gods and no heaven and hell in Buddhism. Buddha was a special human, who developed techniques to realize his full human potential. What this means is, religious behavior can occur in people, independently, of any belief in deities. Religions, without deities, are not as obvious, as deity based religions, since most people assume deities is the litmus test of religion. Buddisn shows this is not the case for over s billion people.

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

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

I often say the atheist religion. This is denied, based on the premise that it can't be a religion, because they have no belief in God. But as I have shown, not all religions worship deities. There is something else all religions share in common.

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

ManMade Global warming could also be called a godless religion, since it induces blind devotion to something most of the flock is not expert enough to fully rationalize on their own or derive independently. They depend on the prestige of others; priests of doom, to induce the feeling in their religion. It is one thing to go into climate change as a thinking person and another thing to go into using blind faith in prestige.

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.

If you were to purge the bible of all deities, this does not mean a new godless religion cannot appear in its place, since you do not need deities to have a religion. The question is, what is the difference between religions based on deities, and religions not based on deities? In the case of Buddhism, although the doctrine has no outward deities, the worshippers will nevertheless project onto Buddha, to give him a super natural aura. The unconscious mind of the religious, will add a layer of personal and/or collective mythology. In man made global warning, they have mother earth or we are killing the earth, slogans, to make inanimate earth, appear more like a mythological character that has feelings. This is not in the doctrine, but it is part of the worship service.

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

What I also noticed is evolution is the only area of science, that feels a need to be enforced, socially, like a dogma of a mainstream religion. I can think of no other area of science, besides climate change, where reasonable arguments are taboo, and all opposition, including reasonable arguments get lumped as Creationist or denier religion. You will not see Chemistry or Physics getting insecure about the bible, since these are not religions that feel competition from another religion. Evolution uses a god of chance, that is not called a god, but who like a god, can nevertheless make anything needed, happen.

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.

What needs to be done is define religion in terms of brain activity, so we can point out the godless religions. The current criteria is too superficial to include all the godless religions. Brain activity will give us an objective way to override the verbal word play used to disguise godless religions.

This is nonsense.

 

[Yazata]

One thing that most atheists fail to realize is, or cannot or will not admit, is not all main stream religions worship deities. Buddhism is a good example. There are no gods and no heaven and hell in Buddhism.

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.

Buddha was a special human, who developed techniques to realize his full human potential.

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.

What this means is, religious behavior can occur in people, independently, of any belief in deities.

I think that's very true.

Religions, without deities, are not as obvious, as deity based religions, since most people assume deities is the litmus test of religion. Buddisn shows this is not the case for over s billion people.

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 often say the atheist religion. This is denied, based on the premise that it can't be a religion, because they have no belief in God. But as I have shown, not all religions worship deities. There is something else all religions share in common.

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.

If you were to purge the bible of all deities, this does not mean a new godless religion cannot appear in its place, since you do not need deities to have a religion.

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!).

What needs to be done is define religion in terms of brain activity, so we can point out the godless religions. The current criteria is too superficial to include all the godless religions. Brain activity will give us an objective way to override the verbal word play used to disguise godless religions.

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'.

 

[joepistole]

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 represents the only acceptable form of reasoning whatever the subject. I would personally classify some (not all) expressions of atheism as quasi-religious belief systems.

I don't think that would be very successful.

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

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'.

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.

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!).

And who is the godhead in this Marxism and Freudianism you perceive as quasi-religions? What is supernatural about Marxism or Freudianiam? What differentiates them from Libertarian or any of other right wing ideology? Thank God for dictionaries.

 

[Yazata]

Buddhist do believe in higher beings, i.e. gods, and supernatural powers.

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.

That, by definition, makes it a religion.

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

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.

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

 

[wellwisher]

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

The conclusion from that link reads as follows:

Conclusions

Apparently there is no general consensus among anthropologists and other students of religion on the definition of religion, despite more than a century of study, discussion, and debate about religion in comparative perspective. Perhaps the best one can do is to develop a working definition to test and progressively rework against one's own personal experience and/or field observations with one or more religions. Furthermore, in the final analysis it should be realized that a definition is only a means to the end of facilitating study and understanding, not an end in itself. Still, wrestling with terms and definitions may facilitate understanding as Klass (1995) argues.

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.

 

[river]

The bible should never , ever , be edited .

 

[joepistole]

The bible should never , ever , be edited .

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

 

[river]

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

Any edit , gets us further from the truth .

 

[Xelasnave.1947]

Any edit , gets us further from the truth .

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

 

[Michael 345]

The bible should never , ever , be edited .

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

 

[Michael 345]

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

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

 

[Randwolf]

Why not?

 

[Michael 345]

Why not?

You should franchise this

 

[joepistole]

Any edit , gets us further from the truth .

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?

 

[timojin]

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

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 .

 

[joepistole]

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 .

I suggest you read the Bible.

 

[Michael 345]

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 .

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

 

[Dinosaur]

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.

 

[Oystein]

Edited? No. It's no sillier than most other fairy tale collections. It just needs to be put into the proper library section.

 

[joepistole]

One thing that most atheists fail to realize is, or cannot or will not admit, is not all main stream religions worship deities. Buddhism is a good example. There are no gods and no heaven and hell in Buddhism. Buddha was a special human, who developed techniques to realize his full human potential. What this means is, religious behavior can occur in people, independently, of any belief in deities. Religions, without deities, are not as obvious, as deity based religions, since most people assume deities is the litmus test of religion. Buddisn shows this is not the case for over s billion people.

I often say the atheist religion. This is denied, based on the premise that it can't be a religion, because they have no belief in God. But as I have shown, not all religions worship deities. There is something else all religions share in common.

ManMade Global warming could also be called a godless religion, since it induces blind devotion to something most of the flock is not expert enough to fully rationalize on their own or derive independently. They depend on the prestige of others; priests of doom, to induce the feeling in their religion. It is one thing to go into climate change as a thinking person and another thing to go into using blind faith in prestige.

If you were to purge the bible of all deities, this does not mean a new godless religion cannot appear in its place, since you do not need deities to have a religion. The question is, what is the difference between religions based on deities, and religions not based on deities? In the case of Buddhism, although the doctrine has no outward deities, the worshippers will nevertheless project onto Buddha, to give him a super natural aura. The unconscious mind of the religious, will add a layer of personal and/or collective mythology. In man made global warning, they have mother earth or we are killing the earth, slogans, to make inanimate earth, appear more like a mythological character that has feelings. This is not in the doctrine, but it is part of the worship service.

What I also noticed is evolution is the only area of science, that feels a need to be enforced, socially, like a dogma of a mainstream religion. I can think of no other area of science, besides climate change, where reasonable arguments are taboo, and all opposition, including reasonable arguments get lumped as Creationist or denier religion. You will not see Chemistry or Physics getting insecure about the bible, since these are not religions that feel competition from another religion. Evolution uses a god of chance, that is not called a god, but who like a god, can nevertheless make anything needed, happen.

What needs to be done is define religion in terms of brain activity, so we can point out the godless religions. The current criteria is too superficial to include all the godless religions. Brain activity will give us an objective way to override the verbal word play used to disguise godless religions.

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.