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Igel

(35,300 posts)
5. I've spent too much time watching religionists try to wrest their books to mean secular things.
Tue Feb 27, 2018, 09:12 PM
Feb 2018

For the ability to claim that their writs are in accord with current science.

It gets tedious, the contortions that they subject their holy writ to. I harbor a kind of low-key split personality. I figure that my beliefs are my beliefs, my scientific method provides observations, and if they don't agree, meh. It's not like either's been infallible in the past, or that the interpretations of OT passages in the NT are necessarily what's obvious. Doesn't mean I'm going for the unobvious interpretations of Tanach or OT scripture, or insisting on the obvious. Strikes me as getting distraught over the price of onions in India a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Indian_onion_crisis), or having sleepless nights over branes and multiverse collisions (https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1218&pid=273049). Nice to piddle with in a detached, intellectual way, but please bleach out all the fervor being commencing.

I will say, though, that most of the time the only people I see adding words in parentheses to make sure that irrelevant words gain relevancy are Muslims. Usually Xians reserve that bit of lunacy for the exposition that follows, or at least segregates their writ in " " with the *real* text that their deity intended carefully non-fenced. Then again, I don't have wide exposure to a lot of religious texts; keeping up with my own should be a nearly full-time job these days. Perhaps it's a standard Taoist or Mormon trope, or all the rage among pop-theologistic rantings.

I still wonder, though, based on a very incomplete dataset, if it's because Xians tend to consider their writ sort-of holy even in translation, while strictly orthodox Muslims have a tendency to consider all translation unauthorized paraphrase. (Sort of like that strange thing known as the "Living Bible" that I've heard cited as authoritative writ in the plethora of all its multitudinous pleonasms.)

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