Holy books

[bigdaddy1204]

One factor that could be worth considering is the concept of timeless wisdom. It's very easy to knock any religion but overlooked is the value to be found in some of the stories, sayings and so on. For example, someone once told me that most of the members here on the TWC are atheist, but everyone can appreciate the value of a quote such as:

"Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone". - Jesus, quoted in John 8:7, the Bible.

Jesus is making a point that since nobody is perfect and we all have made mistakes, we (as a society) shouldn't throw stones at each other, either literally or metaphorically. That's just one example; my point is that perhaps Holy books are valued not only because people believe they are holy, but also because they really do contain some valuable wisdom. I've read sections from the Quran, the Bible, the Sikh holy book the Guru Granth Sahib and the Buddhist teachings, and they all lead me to this same conclusion.

[DaniCatBurger]

I have read all of these:



The letters were larger than in the book about the horse.



The idea that there was a category "holy book" appears a bit seldom, doesn't it? Maybe, it's a pleonasm but not one that was very generalisable.

No idea, what the readers of horse novels find in them to give them a special place in their book shelf. It may have something to do with their self-perception, the horse in them to say so. Well, that's then probably ok, for them. I mean, it's not that readers of horse novels in general did things that I could say; it's so disturbing that I would have to be scared.

[RangerGxi]

"Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone". - Jesus, quoted in John 8:7, the Bible.

Jesus is making a point that since nobody is perfect and we all have made mistakes, we (as a society) shouldn't throw stones at each other, either literally or metaphorically.

Bit problematic that Jesus is supposed to be perfect and that the Jewish traditions prescribe stonings as a punishment. I'm sure that plays a part, its a good moral if you look at it that way and I'm sure some would say "golly, that's moral, that must be gods word" but that's not exactly a good reason to hold something as holy.

[Himster]

Holy books are absurd, they are incompatible with wisdom, logic and morality.
If they were compatible with those things then there would be no need for faith: as the acceptance of the claims in these books would be uncontentious and on par with scientific inquiry and would be universally accepted with little to no problems. Holy books are paradoxes where the only solution is blind obedience, or to put it in a more generous way: passionate commitment, similar to the manner in one dedicates oneself to a passionate love affair.
Kierkegaard put it quite eloquently when talking about the fable of Abraham and Isaac, he said what is required to understand this story is a teleological suspension of morality. The tale, like so many other religious tales, are utterly repulsive examples of immorality. But if we follow with the lover/commitment analogy we see there are somethings remarkably/essentially repulsive in love making. The most disgusting parts of human anatomy are precisely the most desirable and passionately sought after. It is the overcoming of repulsivity that makes commitment and love making so special and by analogy it is what makes religious commitment and engagement in the religious life so special.

Now this leaves he vast majority of "religious" people out of the loop as they do not commit in this manner, they pretend to be rational and logical in their religious affiliation, they are hypocrites and self deceiving scum-bags. They are not religious in any meaningful sense of the word, they're just part of the herd, induced to obedience like a trickling stream is induced down the path of least resistance.

[Prodromos]

Well technically all "knowledge" is faith. The scientific method is just one method of epistemology and has faults like the others. Faith vs science is a nonsensical choice. It's all faith. You're just being conceited.

[Sar1n]

Well technically all "knowledge" is faith. The scientific method is just one method of epistemology and has faults like the others. Faith vs science is a nonsensical choice. It's all faith. You're just being conceited.

There's one huge argument against what you just wrote, and you're viewing this post on it.

[RangerGxi]

Well technically all "knowledge" is faith. The scientific method is just one method of epistemology and has faults like the others. Faith vs science is a nonsensical choice. It's all faith. You're just being conceited.

Faith is believing something for no reason. Knowledge comes from proven science and experience.

[Himster]

Well technically all "knowledge" is faith. The scientific method is just one method of epistemology and has faults like the others. Faith vs science is a nonsensical choice. It's all faith. You're just being conceited.

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Conflating the subjective and objective realms as if there were no distinction between them.

[sumskilz]

Faith is believing something for no reason. Knowledge comes from proven science and experience.

I'm pretty sure that anything people believe in, they believe in for a reason, but that's not really the issue that prompted me to comment on your post, it's this...

Karl Popper:

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory. (What may occur, however, are refutations of scientific theories.) On the other hand, pure mathematics and logic, which permit proofs, give us no information about the world, but only develop the means of describing it.

Of course Popper is still building his argument off of an assumption about the nature of the world. All our foundations are based on assumptions.

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Conflating the subjective and objective realms as if there were no distinction between them.

If the objective exits, and I believe it does, it can only be accessed via the subjective.

[chriscase]

I do wonder if our notion of subjectivity isn't simply the experience of an objective process occurring with a frame of reference located in the interior of the process itself. If so it's merely another object with an experiential flavor that fools us into thinking it's deeply different when it's not.

[fkizz]

Faith is believing something for no reason. Knowledge comes from proven science and experience.

Well he is correct from a philosophical point of view. Knowledge is just the neuronal patterns stored in your brain, which is/are just product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Ultimately you have to believe your brain isn't lying to you.

Is there any single logical proof that solipsism is fake? The brain in a cog hipothesis has no proof of being fake due to the nature of your senses.

[Sir Adrian]

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Conflating the subjective and objective realms as if there were no distinction between them.

There isn't. Objectivity doers not exist in nature, not in the manner you talk about it.

[Emperor Arcturus Mengsk]

The difference between a history book, a scientific book and a religious "holy" book, is that people who read history or science seriously might believe what is written in there, but those things can and are questioned, and many times rewritten and reworked when further evidence is found.

Holy books are meant to be the literal word of god so people reading them and believing in them will not accept that there could be something possibly wrong with them.

That's my only problem with said books, nice piece of writing but it makes people act in a dogmatic way that has only caused harm.

[fkizz]

Holy books are meant to be the literal word of god[...]
That's my only problem with said books, nice piece of writing but it makes people act in a dogmatic way that has only caused harm.

You've been consuming too much Baptist/Protestant sect propaganda possibly because of English language in Internet. In Catholicism it is taught it is Divinely inspired (hey we speculate that some classical music art pieces may have some misterious "inspiration") and thus needs special training to be decoded and interpretated.
In a Roman Catholic mass (or cathechism) Paraboles are often used and mentioned as Paraboles rather than "direct word of God" for a reason.

That's why for 1500 years only highly trained Clerics were allowed to decode or translate what was written in the compilation of Holy Books known as Bible. Protestantism with Printing Press changed that.

[Sar1n]

You've been consuming too much Baptist/Protestant sect propaganda possibly because of English language in Internet. In Catholicism it is taught it is Divinely inspired (hey we speculate that some classical music art pieces may have some misterious "inspiration") and thus needs special training to be decoded and interpretated.
In a Roman Catholic mass (or cathechism) Paraboles are often used and mentioned as Paraboles rather than "direct word of God" for a reason.

That's why for 1500 years only highly trained Clerics were allowed to decode or translate what was written in the compilation of Holy Books known as Bible. Protestantism with Printing Press changed that.

Which is why Catholic church only accepted evolution after nearly 1600 years of its existence, while persecuting anyone who presented evidence against any of its dogmas which have since been proven untrue.

[fkizz]

Which is why Catholic church only accepted evolution after nearly 1600 years of its existence, while persecuting anyone who presented evidence against any of its dogmas which have since been proven untrue.

I have quoted twice on EMM an excerpt from 231 AD (before Roman Empire colapse, from 1736 years ago) where organized church members have a text on how they do not take Genesis creation literally but conclude it is a coded divine mystery to be interpreted as a parabole.

Irony of the destiny, when Bible was avaliable to the average person with printing press the literal reading of Genesis got fanatically popular (rather than parabole) and fervent denial of Evolution theory start to appear. Seems something kinda backfired..

When Darwin appeared with theory of Evolution the printed and translated Bibles were already around. Don't blame typical Protestant problems on Catholicism. Catholicism warned you for this.

Plus theory of Evolution does not explain origin of life, it just explains that species have gradual acumulated differentiation and that after a behemoth amount of time they can appear as totally different.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say species don't differentiate or crossbreed among themselves... What you're rising is more of a Political Dispute than a Theological dillema.

[Emperor Arcturus Mengsk]

Hey I'm not claiming I know where life started or why it exists. But neither does "religion"

If I claim that "a being" appeared to me or talked to me in my head, and it told me how it started, everyone will call me crazy and if I insist like a lot I will likely get locked up in an institution.

I don't like that organised religion has monopoly on selling the genesis story.

[fkizz]

Hey I'm not claiming I know where life started or why it exists. But neither does "religion"
I don't like that organised religion has monopoly on selling the genesis story.

Religion (at least Roman Catholicism) does not sell Genesis story as you think. Catholic Church can be much more Elitist than one would like to admit. The Divine Mystery regarding Genesis has likely been solved ages ago by Clerical Elite but not avaliable to public I would wager. What is told for interested public to figure out is that God is the Prime Mover (see: St Thomas Augustine) and Omniscient.
Due to being Prime Mover, all the rest comes implied.

If I claim that "a being" appeared to me or talked to me in my head, and it told me how it started, everyone will call me crazy and if I insist like a lot I will likely get locked up in an institution.

That's a tad disonest. There is complaints of lack of proof, when proof appears it is repressed/censored. I guess this is why only miracles with a big mass of people are uncensorable (like Fatima)

Well regardless this psychiatry theme on cultural/spiritual dissidents is well explored in movies such as the famous one with kid "I see dead people", and the Psychiatrist trying to convince the kid he was just mentally ill, while in a twist in the end the Psychiatrist was really dead and the suposed mentally ill kid was correct.

Or a Flying over a Cuckoos Nest. Mental Hospitals are very failible institutions. Don't forget they prescribed Lobotomies as 100% scientific respectable cures just a few decades ago. And some of them still prescribe Shock Therapy as a respectable fairly acceptable thing.

Lobotomies were deemed such an advance in Psychiatry they even literally warranted a Nobel Prize! So be careful where you tread.

[RangerGxi]

Hey I'm not claiming I know where life started or why it exists. But neither does "religion"

Most of the big religions do just that in their holy texts. The book of genesis, etc. For many people, origin stories would be included in their definition of religion.

[Cyclops]

Regarding OP, I think people love stories. I think we love to listen (and more recently read, literacy is a bizarre and brilliant technical development) and we have inquiring minds, most of us.

At a certain point we resist new information, maybe when we are children we are most receptive to instruction? Anyway religion is in many instances about describing the world and how we should behave in it, and who gets the extra bit of food.

Holy books usually contain stories which are used by religions to tell their own stories. Sometimes the stories are taken from one religion and recycled by another. For example the second of two contradictory creation stories, which in Judaism is used to understand marriage, in Christianity has been clumsily adapted into a phony blackmail threat. I am unsure of the exact details but I believe the Eden story is also used in Islam perhaps for some other purpose?

Some parts of holy books seem to have been accidentally collated together, and then assumed to be holy by association or something. The history sections of the Bible are sometimes racy, cynical inside stories about how sinful David and Solomon were, completely contradicting other versions of these mostly revered kings. David arranges to have guys murdered after he dies, Solomon has a guy sent into suicidal battle so the king can bang his missus. The Song of Songs is about sex, but the church pretends it is a dialogue between Christ and his church. This nis not just a Christian trait, there are weird intrusions into Taoist thought starting with the boo that probably preceded historic Taoism, the Tao Te Ching ("The Classic of The Way and Power"). Some of the text is mystical stuff ("The Way that can be followed is not the Eternal Way" or more properly "The Tao that can be Tao'd is not the Eternal Tao") but some (especially in the second part on "Te" or power) is ruthless legalist political instruction about keeping the peasants fed, ignorant and placid, and how not to take any blame.

We see a lot of "Hindu" (for want of a better word, I suppose we could say Sub Continental religious traditions including post Vedic) intrusions into Buddhism, as it morphs from an agnostic austere self abnegating philosophy into a riotous full blown religion with heavens and deities and extra Buddhas so when they contradict the real one they can just cite an "earlier" one. The Bhagavad Gita is a digression the size of the Bible that grows out of a post-Vedic/pore Hindu Epic Poem (also pretty long) that responds to the Buddhist notion of Dharma (a direct attack on inequality) by corrupting (or adapting) it into many Dharmas (for the various social classes or castes as needs be).

Very few stories can stand the test of time, so parts of our holy books seem bizarre extraneous or irrelevant. As we see with the Genesis 2:2 creation story (so bad that another writer added another conflicting version in font of it at Genesis 1) probably began as a simple explanatory myth, becomes a descriptor of Jewish marriage, and is transformed in Christianity into a universal damnation con job. I'm not saying prune them though: it would be silly to discard the useless bits as future believers may need them for unforeseen moral situations that arise.