Ask HN: What nonfiction books do you keep rereading?

The Alignment Problem

I've not personally read "Misquoting Jesus", but I've listened to Ehrman on YT a bit. Based on that, and having spoken with a few biblical scholars who have read Ehrman, the general impression I get is that he has a "select is broken"[0] attitude toward the reliability of the Bible.

Much like GCC, and the Linux kernel, and the PostgreSQL query planner, the Bible is a battle-tested historical artifact. There may be a slew of yet-to-be-discovered "edge cases" in its interpretation (and perhaps Ehrman is the man to discover them). But in the main, it's an incredibly reliable witness to history.

So, while I wouldn't want to discourage people from starting their study of Biblical textual criticism with Bart Ehrman, I would definitely discourage them from concluding it with him.

    The one who states his case first seems right,
      until the other comes and examines him.
    Prov. 18:17

[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-first-rule-of-programming-...

"Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. About Adams and Carwardine travelling the world to document several animals on the brink of extinction (by then 1988). Very entertaining and raising questions about the responsibility of human globalization. An all-time favourite.

"Never In Anger" by Jean Briggs. About her living 17 months among Inuit in the 1970ies, documenting how the Inuit see emotions and raise their children without any shouting or violence.

"Shots in the Dark - Japan, Zen, and the West" by Shōji Yamada. About the culture exchange between Japan and the West in the early 20th century and how several perceptions of Zen got constructed in the process.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstaedter. About core ideas in logic, music and art, and their connections. I always find something new there.

"In Praise of Mastery" / "芸談" by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. An essay about the japanese pursuit of mastery. It's a fascinating window into the arts perception in late 19th century Japan.

Webster's Dictionary of 1913. A great resource for looking up original meanings of words. I find it very useful for naming stuff in programming.

"Woe Is I" by Patricia O'Conner. A witty grammar book. O'Conner's entertaining style makes it easy to grasp the grammar topics and come back for more.

Thinking Forth. It's one of the few nonfiction books I've actually read completely, let alone revisited.

I used to look at dictionaries and a few reference books fairly often, but these days I use dictd and chop up the electronic versions of the reference books and pull up the page I'm looking for from the command line when I can.

I think you are making the opposite error that you're accusing Ehrman of making, specifically that you seem to be taking (what survived of) the Bible at it's word, putting the benefit of the doubt on everyone/everything else to disprove it, rather than giving it the burden of proof on its claims. You seem to be giving it more credibilty because it is old, but there are plenty of similar aged or older books that are clearly not accurate/true just because they are old and can't be disproven. If that's your standard, then you must also accept the existence of a lot of Pagan gods as well. Even if we just limit it to "the Bible" then you have to accept that Asherah and other early Hebrew gods really existed, and had priests and prophets capable of doing miracles and curses/blessings, etc.

Of course there is historically accurate stuff in the Bible, but there's also a ton of supernatural claims that can't be proven or disproven (aka they are non-falsifiable). For that matter The Odyssey has survived a long time and has some accurate historical things in it, but we don't take the Odyssey's stories about supernatural things at face value.

It's also not hard to show that The Bible is not historically reliable just by comparing different sections of it that contradict each other.

For example, what were Jesus' last words on the cross? Mark, Luke, and John all disagree on this and have different words. They can't all be his last words.

What day did he actually die? Was it the day after passover as in Mark, or the day before as in John?[1]

We absolutely agree though on reading lots of perspectives on it. There is no shortage of PhDs who debate these things, so at the end of the day you'll have to either choose the stay agnostic on it, or go with what seems "most likely" to you.

[1]: https://ehrmanblog.org/why-have-i-stopped-explaining-how-i-l...