General > Biology
Crows are pretty damn smart
Numsgil:
Exactly, it's been cared for by a lot of people over a lot of time. There have been times where it was all but lost, ample opportunity for changes to be made to meet political necessity.
For example, the mention of Cyrus in an old prophecy used to convince Cyrus to free the Jews and let them rebuild their temple. Awfully convenient, and the Jews of the period were scattered enough that the written records could maybe be altered to meet an immediate need and no one would be the wiser.
There was another time, after a particularly lengthy hedonistic period in Israel (or maybe Judah, I don't remember), where literally no one knew about the records. A priest found a single copy in the temple. It is not beyond the imagination that parts of it could have been altered to meet the needs of a newly come to power priesthood. Specifically, to create a strong sense of nationalism towards the Hebrew religion.
Plus, the documentary hypothesis[url] suggests a time where political necessity required merging differing religious texts into a single new one (probably after the fall of Israel when many Israelites and Levite (ie: priesthood) refugees fled to Judah. Merging the new arrivals into the existing country was a necessity to prevent a situation like France and the disenfranchised Muslim youth). It stands to reason that these different Hebrew sects had some disagreements, and the resulting new text cherry picked where necessary to create common ground and forge a unification.
Add to that the New Testament, which in addition to being written well after the death of Jesus and the founding of the Church and the agreement on a core doctrine, was an outlawed book by a renegade sect for hundreds of years. Take the role of Pontius Pilate, the representative of Rome, who is not only innocent of Jesus's crucifixion, but unmistakably so. Then take the role of the Sanhedrin, who come across as mustache twisting villains ploting Jesus's downfall. The Jews weren't all that well liked by the Romans (witness all those rebellions), and Romans like Romans, so maybe the story was altered on paper to make Rome look good and the Jews look bad as a political necessity for the early Church. Maybe they did it with the understanding that they'd carry on an oral tradition of what really happened, and somewhere along the way all the church leadership was fed to the lions and all that was left were a handful of devout believers and the documents.
Then add to that the nature of the early church. There were many competing sects, some with quite different interpretations than the Christianity we understand today. Most notably the Gnostics, with the belief that the God of the old testament was a vindictive son of a bitch, and Christ saved us from Him by overpowering him and taking his place. When it came time to pick through the circulating religious texts and choose what should be canon and what should be part of the apocrypha, there was a definite agenda in place. Texts which were against what the church leadership viewed as true were actively destroyed.
Now of course you could view it that God watched out for the Good Book, and He refused to let it come to any detrimental harm, but I can only take that position seriously if you're Catholic or Orthodox Jew. If you're Protestant, you believe the church became corrupted, and if the church was corrupted why not the Bible? Likewise if you're a member of one of the reflationary Christian traditions like Jehova's Witness or LDS.
So when it comes down to it there have been too hands in the pie. I don't think anything's been changed in maybe 1600-1700 years. The Bible's become too widespread to change much now, beyond translations and the like. Plus the Protestant tradition of non priests actually owning and reading the Bible means there's just too many copies for changes to occur. But there were lots of times in the past where there was both opportunity and motive for some well meaning priest to change things to meet the needs of the present time. Maybe old prophecies were changed slightly to foster belief during times of apostasy. Maybe new prophecies were added. Maybe commandments were changed, and details altered. The end result is a text that has a very evolutionary history, and has changed exactly as much as necessary to be relevant across all those thousands of years to where it is today.
d-EVO:
maby....
maby not...
d-EVO:
--- Quote from: jknilinux ---D-evo:
1: Believing in multiple gods is not really self-contradictory.
--- End quote ---
It is (it depends on how you define a god)
--- Quote from: jknilinux ---2: Why can't you base your beliefs off of pascal's wager? You seem to be basing your beliefs on probabilities...
--- End quote ---
1 : I never said you couldn't, I said I dont believe you should base your religious stand point [you]only[/you] on pascals wager.
2 : I don't. I simply used probabilities to demonstrate the credability of the bible.
Believing because of pascals wager [you]is[/you] basing your beliefs on probabilities ...
--- Quote from: jknilinux ---Anyway, so long as faith isn't perfect knowledge, you'll remain religious in order to have the "insurance policy" that religion brings, not because you know it will make you happier.
--- End quote ---
1 : religion is not [you]only[/you] an ensurance policy. It is the way you live your life. A product of this [you]may[/you] be happiness
--- Quote from: jknilinux ---Just FYI, the LDS church does acknowledge that the bible was altered over time, and that this was detrimental to it's spiritual content. That's why Joseph Smith made the JST Bible.
--- End quote ---
not all churches acknowledge this though, ( even though it is a posability )
Numsgil:
I'm just saying that it's a strong possibility, so you can't look for material truth of the Bible from within the Bible. You can look for spiritual truth, believe it's true because of what it contains and judge it solely on its own merits, but if you want to examine it with a more scientific mind you have to take everything inside with a grain of salt.
bacillus:
You made it sound as though people were too lazy to worship many gods at once, so they chose one and gave him the credit for everything. Not so much a contradiction as an exxageration.
The problem with end-of-the-world prophecies is that no-one pays attention to them, because what do you do against them, and who's going to tell you "I told you so!" afterwards?
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