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The Forum > Article Comments > The Bible is a mainstay of Western life > Comments

The Bible is a mainstay of Western life : Comments

By Greg Clarke, published 24/3/2017

Social media last week was peppered with comments such as 'why care about that old book?', 'it's all fairytales' or, more constructively, 'the Bible's teachings are evil'.

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Interesting comments about the 'Bible'.

No Bible scholars here though. Not one Bible historian writes here, and it is, a historical book.

No-one here seems to know, how we arrived at the collection of manuscripts, now known as the Bible, and all the manuscripts, left out, of those chosen to be 'Bible material', and why.

The Abrahamic religions, all have, very nearly, the same Bible as their fundamental book. These three religions, have been single-handedly responsible, for so much death and torture. All of this set in God's name, of course, as we see with Jihadists.

What folk, of course, don't realize, is that though language can stay the same, as is carefully kept the same, the meanings actually change, sometimes rapidly. No linguists here, of course.

You are looking for guidance, and meaning in places, that are simply echoing, your lostness.

But then, who am I to offer anything, this is up to you, alone.
Posted by fool on hill, Friday, 24 March 2017 7:56:43 PM
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fool on the hill,

Your post was one big Courtier’s Reply fallacy - a form of ad hominem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtier's_Reply). None of us need to be Biblical scholars, historians, or linguists to know that the Bible fails as both a moral guide and an historical record.

The Bible, particularly the book of Genesis, fails on both a scientific and historical level. Science debunks the story of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and the exodus.

As for morality, one need only be a human whose mind has not been poisoned by religion to understand that slavery, genocide, sycophantism, the rewarding of belief over deeds, and scapegoating (the idea that people can throw their bad deeds on to someone else and have them die and take your “sin” with them) are immoral.

The above are self-evidently immoral. We don’t require experts to tell us that, and anything that could qualify as a god should be an effective-enough communicator to write an instruction book for us that didn’t require experts to interpret it.

How hard could it be to say, "Slavery is wrong"?
Posted by AJ Philips, Friday, 24 March 2017 8:57:28 PM
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The well known German philosopher and atheist Jürgen Habermas - quoted in the article from his Time of Transition (Polity Press 2006) - provides in the Part VIII (called “Jerusalem, Athens, Rome”), of that book, a very good reading for atheists (and others) interested in a scholarly serious evaluation of the Bible’s input into the cultural formation of the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian West (as he calls it).
Posted by George, Saturday, 25 March 2017 2:06:01 AM
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The Gnostic gospels and Dead Sea Scrolls show that the Bible was a heavily edited text that left much of the writings of the period on the cutting room floor. The final Bible product rejected egalitarian concepts in favour of promoting the agenda of the early Christian patriarchs – with dashes here and there of philosophical wisdom to maintain its profundity credentials.

It has always been the tragedy of Western civilisation that the Roman Empire and later Holy Christian Empire forced Old Europe to submit to a sacred script that was totally at odds with its own history and environment. The monotheistic, hegemonic, desert-based Abrahamic religions were at odds with the temperate-climate, pantheistic, polytheistic, egalitarian religions of Old Europe.

But the new world order of the time needed a monotheistic biblical base to cement its right to rule. The Holy Christian Empire waged an all-out war on Paganism that raged for a thousand years, the effects of which we are still feeling today.

The Bible is basically a 2000-year old book of rules for forcing an Abrahamic, patriarchal, hegemonic order on European societies that have continually railed against it.
Posted by Killarney, Saturday, 25 March 2017 5:09:42 AM
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Killarney,

Agreed, the Christian Church and its 'Holy Book' closed the Western mind for nearly a thousand years. The ancient Greeks demonstrated that we don't need a sacred text dictated by a sky fairy to establish a system of ethics. The fact, Ignored by most believers, is that Bible has been continually reinterpreted in the light of contemporary ethics. It's irrelevant.
Posted by mac, Saturday, 25 March 2017 7:40:29 AM
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I agree with AJ.

The bible is a horror story of murder, manipulation, lying, genocide, and evil. There is no "morality" in the bible. It is all "bow down and lick my boots or ill torture you. Forever". So much for the "god of love" More like the god of "love me".
How insecure and vain is this god thing? To want all these toadies constantly "worshiping" it?
Strange behavior from the supposedly most powerful being ever.

Your morals dont come from this most immoral of books.
They come from many years of human experience that have taught us that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, comfort is preferable to pain. That treating others with respect gets respect in turn and generally leads to harmony and peace. A preferable state to conflict and violence. For all of us.

Nothing to do with your stupid book. Just because we occasionally reference nazi culture (jackboots, concentration camps, hitler references in general) does that mean they were an important "mainstay of western life"? Bollocks it does.

You godbotherers need to learn you can believe any freaky crap you want just dont try to push it onto the rest of us and keep it the hell away from our schools, science and government.
Posted by mikk, Saturday, 25 March 2017 8:04:54 AM
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