[lbo-talk] 1/3 of Americans believe Bible is literally true

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Sat May 26 11:04:12 PDT 2007



>On 5/25/07, BklynMagus <magcomm at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> > They were given three choices - literal truth, inspired
>> > word of God, collection of fables. I'm not sure what's
>> > excluded by that trio; it covers all the bases I can think of.
>>
>> How about: book of spiritual wisdom? I think that would fit nicely
> > between choices two and three.

All *four* choices have nothing at all to do with the *two* very different collections of diverse texts that most (nonjewish) Americans stupidly call "the Bible." The core of the Tanakh (stupidly called "Old Testament") and of the Gospels/Acts part of the Christians' "New Testament" is *historical*. The history is of course presented in an ideologically biased and distorted (and where the Paulines' rewritings are concerned, falsified) way, for instance referring to natural agencies as "God" or "The Lord," or presenting the course of Jewish history as determined by the refusal of the people to conform to the rituals demanded by the priestly hierarchy, or temporally transposing historical events into prophesies. Because this historical essence is denied and diaparaged,Christians and Jews (Muslims even more so), including atheists like Hitchens reacting purely negatively against their earlier indoctrination, fail completely to understand basic facts about human and natural history.

One example is Isaiah 14:12 (KJV): "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God..." Although the reference is very explicitly astronomical (Lucifer, heb. Helel, was a technical term for the planet Venus), who nowadays even knows that fact? And how much "Paradise Lost"-type nonsense about a fictional "devil" named Lucifer pervades our culture!

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



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