Quote:
Originally Posted by Willravel
To be fair, religious texts such as the Torah, New Testament, and Qur'an are quite long and intricate. I've studied them for many years, and even with the benefit of not being in the religions (which means I come at all of them from the same perspective), and I'm still only a novice. While I can understand panties getting tied in knots over silly things like democracy or capitalism in the Bible, there are mistakes even highly educated people make.
And really, for many people there's no difference between getting their information from the original text and a pamphlet. It's all appeal to authority. Even if something is in the Bible, that doesn't necessarily make it true, case in point the stationary earth theory from Job chapter 38.
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It's all part and parcel of the same problem. Seems like a lot of folks don't even read the entire Tanakh (Bible) let alone learn how to read and interpret it properly. I can't speak for the Christian Scriptures or the Quran, of course, but the Tanakh, at least, wasn't designed to be read in a vacuum. It was designed to be read as part of an integrated oral corpus of traditional understandings; and barring instruction in doing so, reading it on its own is like reading every third line of "Hamlet" and then wondering why the play makes so little sense.
It's shocking to me not only how many people forget that they are reading a work that was composed in another language (one very, very different from English) over the course of a thousand years, incorporating numerous different viewpoints-- all generally different from the modern, Euro-American viewpoints; but who simply don't realize that things which we take for granted in other kinds of literature are also present in the Scriptures: metaphor, simile, hyperbole, idiom, allusion, allegory, poetic imagery, puns, and all the things we would expect from the great works. Somehow, many people think that those kinds of literary devices are somehow "below" the Bible. But there is nothing lowly about them: they make for great literature, and the Bible uses them freely. Not only are they often misread and overlooked, but often, as Xazy alluded to, they are not even translated properly, and then those translations are themselves retranslated and recast for modern readers.
It's a morass.