The vast majority of religious believers hold on to scriptures as sacred, as profound revelations, as precious guides to the mysteries of life and death. Believers believe that their stories are true -- for instance, that Moses was a real person who led the Hebrews out of slavery and received the Torah directly from God on Mount Sinai or that there really was a Prince Siddhartha Gautama who searched for and found enlightenment in the sixth century B.C.E. Moreover, they believe that contained in these ancient stories is information vital to contemporary humans.
The truth is, we really don't know much about the historical Moses or the historical Buddha. The evidence for these persons from the ancient past is quite sparse and filtered largely through centuries of oral history, mythological elaborations and sectarian biases, before they were even recorded in written form by religious partisans.
How, then, should we read these ancient narratives today? How do we understand the stories of religion, be it as outsiders looking in at foreign faiths or as thoughtful believers reconsidering our own tradition? As I discussed in my last posting, one of the implications of Big History -- the unfolding scientific story of our existence over some 13.7 billion years -- is that ancient religious cosmologies can no longer be understood to be literally true. Sacred scriptures are not to be understood as science. But scriptures are not actual history either.
Big History encompasses the history of religions, and it reexamines the interpretation of sacred stories, understood as "source material" by historians as they construct ever more accurate and complicated understandings of human history. Along with careful humanistic interpretations, this work is informed by archeology, anthropology, radioactive dating, medicine, genetics, philology and psychology.
Historical critical studies of sacred texts began in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and should be understood as an extension of the scientific method. The primary focus of these studies was the Bible, though attempts were made to apply these methods to other sacred texts as well. In this approach, the Bible is treated not as the inerrant work of God but as a text created by humans in particular historical and cultural contexts to advance different human purposes. Careful philological analysis of ancient languages is combined with archeological and historical research to decode the probable authorship and purposes of different material in the biblical anthology.
Historical criticism understands the Bible, and by implication all other sacred scriptures, to be a compilation of texts constructed intentionally from previous layers of Judaism, borrowed from sources in other cultures in the region, and containing portions deliberately inserted by unknown priests and scribes for political and theological purposes over many generations.
What begins mostly in oral transmission is eventually written down in bits and pieces, though further transformations occur in the hands of generations of scribes who recopy and edit the text. These fragments are then selectively remembered and preserved based on the interests of those who follow. Eventually it is redacted into a single authoritative sacred text. The redaction of the Bible is, thus, a kind of whisper down the lane in which real persons and events are mixed with fantastic elaborations and imaginations.
Politics, personalities and power play a role at each stage of this evolution. The authors and editors may be inspired, but in no sense should the Bible be taken as an accurate historical chronology or an actual account of ancient Judaism, first-century Palestine and the history of the early church. The Bible is as much a political and ideological document as it is a spiritual and philosophical document. It is of enormous historical import but is itself not an actual history.
If you are interested in the details of what scholars have learned about the actual history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam at the time their scriptures were written and redacted, I highly recommend Robert Wright's monumental survey of the literature in his 2009 book "The Evolution of God."
For many believers, historical criticism of scripture is simply heretical. Yet many pious Christians, Jews and others have adopted and adapted the insights of the historical sciences within their confessional framework. For instance, the modern Catholic catechism states:
In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.
Historical criticism does not necessarily lead to atheism, but it does make the hermeneutics of the sacred more complicated than the supposed transparency presumed by some fundamentalist readers.
I hope to convince you in this series that sacred scriptures are profound, but not true. At least they are not true in the way that science and history are true. I hope to further convince you that the whole of contemporary science, what we call here Big History, can be read as a kind of revelation. Today, we can encounter God anew from the bottom-up, working from science to the sacred.
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Believers bang on about interpretation and looking at scripture in context but however you look at it, these books were written in a tiny part of the world that had absolutely no idea about the vastness of the universe or the wonders of science.
Let us read these books but with the acute awareness that they are not divine, they just happen to be stories. Some inspirational, some gory, some interesting but just stories nonetheless.
A cave near Palermo, Sicily, was filled with many tons of remains, including the fossilized bones of deer, oxen, elephants, and hippopotamuses of various ages—even a fetus. In fact, 20 tons of fossils found their way onto the market in the first six months after the site was discovered!
In Southern England, paleontologist J. Manson Valentine discovered fossil beds containing massive deposits of splintered bones of many of the same animals as well as of hyenas and polar bears. What is the reason for these large beds of fossils in such diverse places?
Some scientists believe that the circumstances in which the animals died are consistent with a natural catastrophe. Whatever the cause or causes of such mass extinctions, their effects were felt over a large area that included mainland Europe, the British Isles, Siberia, and Alaska. Plenty of evidence for the flood of Noahs day.
Geologists studying the landscape of the northwestern United States believe that as many as 100 ancient catastrophic floods once washed over the area. One such flood is said to have roared through the region with a wall of water 2,000 feet [600 m] high, traveling at 65 miles an hour [105 km/hr]—a flood of 500 cubic miles [2,000 cu km] of water, weighing more than two trillion tons. Similar findings have led other scientists to believe that a global flood is a distinct possibility.
The premise for reading ancient religious texts is that we have learned nothing. That we have fallen farther from that time before sin. And there are people who actually believe that. But what does the Bible describe? A world where women are property. Where slavery is an encouraged practice. Where in war it is OK to kill all the inhabitants of a conquered city including women and children expect for the women the army wants to "use." Where the punishment for a rape is for the victim to marry the rapist. Where the punishment for not being a virgin on your wedding night is death.
Some people tend to say that this stuff doesn't count anymore, so they just don't pay attention to the disturbing parts. Some believers say that this was just and appropriate in its time. If God was talking back then, he could have made any social structure or rules he wanted. But, of course, we all know that God never talked to anyone.
First, the author sets up a false dichotomy between "scientific" textual analysis and fundamentalism. I would remind the author and the readers that neither Jewish nor Catholic, nor many mainstream protestant denominations approve of a literal interpretation of sacred texts. Indeed Jewish sources have for thousands of years understood the written, or "revealed" text, as only a fraction of their sacred inheritance, and one which can and will be abused if not understood in light of the entire tradition.
Second, The author's assertion that textual analysis is scientific, is true only to the extent that it is an alternative to traditional interpretations. To be scientific, and academic endeavor must adhere to the standards of the scientific method as evolved from Locke, Bacon, and Galileo. This method involves conducting prospective research with independent variables that are manipulated prior to measuring dependent variables, and the employment of random sampling, random assignment and various types of experimental control. The goal being the establishment of causal relations, while mitigating the influence of confounds. I challenge the author to present evidence that biblical scholars adhere to these standards, thus producing evidence for hypotheses that can supplant the claims from within the traditions. Without such evidence, the claims of "natural" evidence for the text is exactly as valid - or invalid - as the traditional claims of the supernatural.
As one might expect from a book inspired by the Creator, the Bible contains scientifically accurate information clearly ahead of its time, though it never gets bogged down in scientific explanations that would have been meaningless or confusing to ancient people. The Bible contains nothing that contradicts known scientific facts. On the other hand, the Bible contains much that disagrees with unproved theories, such as the theory of evolution
The first wholly new interpretation for two thousand years of the moral teachings of Christ is published on the web. Radically different from anything else we know of from history, this new teaching is predicated upon a precise, predefined and predictable experience and called 'the first Resurrection' in the sense that the Resurrection of Jesus was intended to demonstrate Gods' willingness to real Himself and intervene directly into the natural world for those obedient to His will, paving the way for access, by faith, to the power of divine transcendence.
Thus 'faith' is the path, the search and discovery of this direct individual intervention into the natural world by omnipotent power to confirm divine will, Law, command and covenant, "correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries." So a new religious teaching, testable by faith, meeting all Enlightenment criteria of evidence based causation and definitive proof now exists. More at http://www.energon.org.uk
http://soulgineering.com/2011/05/22/the-final-freedoms/
Like anyone who reads anything that self-proclaims its own divinity: with a very critical and skeptical lookout for nonsense. And prepare to be underwhelmed. .
I'm suddenly hearing Colbert talk about "truthiness" in my head.
I have listened to the whole Bible all the way through in the neighborhood of 25 to 35 times, having had it in recorded form from the early 60's.
There are many things one can only understand from the Bible if they truly want to. One might think the Jews would have painted themselves to be a glorious favored people. Listen and see if that is the case.
How much of it is without error? How much of its wisdom will one miss out on if they don't listen to it enough to get its full advantage? When I was a kid and my dad would fix something to eat I was not familiar with and didn't want to try it he would say, "Go ahead and cheat yourself, and see if I care".
The whole Bible can be downloaded free from the net or purchased for $10 on DVD or from $33 to $50 from ChristianBook.Com plus $4 - $6 postage.
So when I get to his closing line, "Today, we can encounter God anew from the bottom-up, working from science to the sacred." I get nervous. The only way to find God in science is to begin by assuming He must be there, then cherry-pick scientific findings that support that idea. If you don't already believe Jesus is Lord or Muhammed is Allah's prophet, nothing science has ever discovered would lead you to that conclusion.
A person with faith may retain it despite learning science, but learning science will only lead you away from gods, not toward them.