this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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What sparked my "hmm" neurons the most in your comment is that there are canonical parts of the Bible that sound like someone was having a bad trip too - The book apocalypse or however it is properly called. It describes in detail a vision of death, destruction, animals morphing into animals, has a barely coherent plot, everything is soaking in mystic symbolism - it has all the parts of a bad trip, and yet it's always treated by religious people as at least a valid metaphor of things to come, and not ramblings of someone who ate the wrong cactus in the desert
why make a special exception for this bad trip, and not the other one with an evil yahwe? It really feels to me like the church is cherry picking things to suit their own narrative, instead of somehow dealing with all the apocryphal sources they just ignore them
They have very literally added, removed, and edited all of the major religious documents, and have been doing so since the very beginning. Its the ultimate game of telephone.
Its interesting too how many changes were made purely by mistake, in addition to those likely done on purpose.
If you look into the historical study of the changes to religious documents over time, there is a ton of stuff to read and lectures and such.
I don't agree. If anything right now we have the opposite problem where the English world for instance pretty exclusively uses a more than 500 year old translation of the Bible, despite much more modern-English versions being translated from some very early Greek versions of the texts (therefore being more readable and less telephone-y). The reasons for the KJV being preferred are many but none make any real theological or linguistic sense.
What really happens though is not so much a game of telephone than the fact that every culture gets to decide on its own (usually provably incorrect and inconsistent) interpretation of the texts, because the whole thing is so internally inconsistent it's basically a Rorschach test no matter which way you translate it. Progressive Christians will basically tell you that literally none of the Old Testament is to be taken literally which... okay? Extremists sects will do the opposite. Then there's the whole dogma around Lucifer and Hell, whose existence is clearly an inconsistent amalgamation of old polytheist religions and no matter which way you read or translate it doesn't translate to the Lucifer or Hell that most Christians ever think about when they say "Lucifer" and "Hell". That part was just straight up made up over the centuries because it was a convenient scarecrow, yet is is absolutely load-bearing to the dogma of almost every Christian sect. And let's not even get into the feminists and queer people who'd put Simone Biles to shame with their mental gymnastics justifying the Bible being an Ally, Actually™. That's not a game of telephone, that's just Weapons of Mass Denial.
The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion... who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.
Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn't...
And surprise surprise, this didn't even achieve a unanimous consensus!
Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.
It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that ... isn't canon, in that particular tradition.
dang that is fascinating! Amazing to see someone with vast knowledge on what seems to be a deeply confusing topic, thank you!
also, goodness, no offence if you're religious but i have no idea how Christianity is treated any different from Greek mythology and the sort - the sources of faith for both are all over the place. Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
and sure you could justify it with various logic like - Satan spreads misinformation, and it's up to the chosen of God to pick out the truth, but if the God's alleged chosen disagree what then? How is one supposed to follow this religion and learn from its teachings if every sect/denomination claims they're the only correct one?
Its maybe less confusing than it is just not talked about. Churches dont like to bring up how mortal people have been sculpting the documents that they say came from god. Its a hard contradiction to swallow, to the point where I think most religious people would change how they worship if they realized the books in their hand are entirely the word of men, written with all of the biases any human has.
Even if we accept it originated from some holy place, the firsthand accounts of those that were with Jesus, we have to accept that that has been translated and copied so many times, by hand, that the words there are no closer to god than Harry Potter.
Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.
One of many reasons: They don't do the whole Trinity thing.
According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.