The majority of the main arguments and sources of hate against LGBT individuals for the most part trace to one document - the Bible. A book that the anti-gay Christianists claim is "inerrant" and "the inspired word of God." The truth, of course ,is something very different. And, as biblical scholarship progresses, the supposed reliability of the Bible as "the word of God" becomes increasingly shaky if not totally destroyed. The reality thus becomes that over the centuries untold thousands - if not millions - have died over differences arising from a book that is a man made work with little or nothing inerrant about it. That's not to say that the basic Gospel message is not a moral guide to live by. Merely that the Old Testament and the New Testament passages that relied on precepts from the Old Testament should be afforded little or no credence. The News Observer has an article that looks at ongoing research on the Bible's evolution that confirms the Bible quoted today by the Bible beater set is far different than the original not to mention the one from the time period of Christ. Here are some highlights:
JERUSALEM -- A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.
An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.
Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies - publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia. And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.
For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable. For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue's Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.
But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.
Bible Project scholars have spent years combing through manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek translations on papyrus from Egypt, a printed Bible from 1525 Venice, parchment books in handwritten Hebrew, the Samaritan Torah, and scrolls in Aramaic and Latin.
Those who build their worldview on the Bible are likely building their world on sand or out of a deck of cards because what they claim to be the inerrant truth is anything but.
2 comments:
The definition of "inerrancy" as used by them is crazy. They have to add all sort of additional things to counter a logical counter argument. For fun, google the term and see what you find.
Your bringing logic to a fight of faith, and you lose. You can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the bible was written by man but that is not going to stop a believer. With someone that believes; telling them, showing them, and proving to them that what they believe in is not what they think it is, does no good, unless they can think for themselves and question their own belief. Sadly, most people don't think for themselves, and are content to be led along in their blind faith in a book, written by man, intrepeted by man, but told it's the word of god.
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