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The Alter Bible

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Re: The Alter Bible

#31

Post by 0_gravitas »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #28
ohithereyou wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of course they are unrealistic - but so are the works of Shakespeare, or Dante, or Goethe, or any great poet in the last 3000 years. Last time I checked, there weren't nations willing to go to war and religious orders wiling to persecute and murder people based on the works of Shakespeare, Dante, or Goethe.

What about Hitler or Marx or Engels? It isn't just religious texts that result in wars.

But they do result in them often enough, dont they? Or are at least used to justify a lot of war-related actions.

Re: The Alter Bible

#32

Post by 0_gravitas »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #14
lqet wrote: post #11

Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me. The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context. > Perhaps the first person to openly suggest other…

A thousand years from now, perhaps Harry potter fans will be literally waging war on star wars fans

And that the star wars religion will be split into three sects, one for each trilogy (all hail the prequels)

Re: The Alter Bible

#33

Post by Retra »

pax wrote: post #27
lqet wrote: post #11

Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me. The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context. > Perhaps the first person to openly suggest other…

how else would/could be an atheist (or believer, for that matter) if not self-proclaimed? Does an atheist need external vetting to be a proper atheist? Also, what was the reason for the ironic quotation marks, do you imply those aren't real atheists?

To be fair, there is an argument to be made that a person's beliefs are better represented by their actual behavior under the conditions of life, rather than what they profess about them in hypotheticals. In that perspective, the best way to be an atheist would be to simply act like one.

Re: The Alter Bible

#34

Post by lisper »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #14
lqet wrote: post #11

Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me. The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context. > Perhaps the first person to openly suggest other…

A thousand years from now, perhaps Harry potter fans will be literally waging war on star wars fans

L. Ron Hubbard fans are already waging war on anyone who crosses them.

Re: The Alter Bible

#35

Post by tapland »

lqet wrote: post #16
gus_massa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that nobody was ever burn for proclaiming that Dante's work was just fiction. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, saying that these texts are "unrealistic" would get you in trouble.

You cannot blame the texts for being universal enough to be used as state philosophy during various times in the last 4000 years. And you certainly cannot use your point as an argument against religious texts in general. It was entirely possible to be executed for saying that Hitler's, Lenin's or Mao's texts were just fiction.

The Hitler, Lenin, Mao problems were temporary and not constantly ongoing for thousands of years while in essence defended pretty much world-wide. Not to mention the need for Hitler to have the support of the church.

Re: The Alter Bible

#36

Post by tome »

te_platt wrote: post #8
nestorD wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's just meaning. I found that preserving the style can be an equally hard thing to do from a language to another.

As well as sarcasm, emphasis, irony, puns.... I really like this sentence from Douglas Hofstadter: "Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word 'tomato'." There are so many ways a translator could go with that.

Could you share a few of them? Only one springs to my mind ...

Re: The Alter Bible

#37

Post by jackbravo »

krapp wrote: post #17
lqet wrote: post #11

Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me. The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context. > Perhaps the first person to openly suggest other…

>However, it makes me extremely sad if self-proclaimed "atheists" make fun of the the Bible / Torah / Koran by pointing out how unrealistic almost all of the texts are. I don't think atheists would have a problem with anyone treating the Bible (or any religious text) as literature, since there would be a lot less religious violence in the event that religious doctrine couldn't be cited as an absolute authority. But,…

> What Karl Marx meant by that is not that religion makes people stupid and compliant (although sometimes it kind of can,) but that people use religion to soothe the burdens of life in an unjust and cruel world... and that the illusory comfort offered by religion often stands in the way of making real societal progress. People who believe that God alone will punish the wicked and reward the righteous and that every event, no matter how capricious or unjust, is part of some divine plan, will simply tolerate the world and trust God to change it, rather than try to change it themselves.

This, a thousand times.

Re: The Alter Bible

#38

Post by DiffEq »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #19
lqet wrote: post #11

Very interesting, and although I have little to no experience with reading the bible, I have to say that everything Alter is quoted as saying in this article makes obvious sense to me. The difficulties translators have with any text should be a reminder of how painfully inadequate any language is as a mediator between two different brains. So much depends in context. > Perhaps the first person to openly suggest other…

"If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above." I generally agree with your take on how we should read these texts. However, nobody (that I know of) has been using Shakespeare to justify preventing me from buying whiskey on a…

Except nowhere in the Bible does it say that you can not buy whisky on Sunday.

Re: The Alter Bible

#39

Post by verylittlemeat »

otterpro wrote: post #22

Translating Bible is a difficult task. There are usually two camps of philosophy of Bible translation. There's the word-for-word style where words are translated literally, rather than its intended meaning -- such as the classic King James Version (1611 AD), and more modern NKJV, NASB and ESV. Then there's thought-for-thought style, where it is translated based on its connotation, intention, and geared for modern Eng…

Understanding the Bible by Stephen L. Harris is a great comprehensive textbook for any person trying to understand the historical and metaphorical meaning in the Bible. It's formatted like a college textbook but i found it very readable for casual learning.

Re: The Alter Bible

#40

Post by sleazy_b »

DiffEq wrote: post #38
scarecrowbob wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you just dismiss these religious texts as opium for the dull medieval masses, you might miss some deep poetical truths about mankind that just cannot be stated explicitly because of the shortcomings of any human language described above." I generally agree with your take on how we should read these texts. However, nobody (that I know of) has been using Shakespeare to justify preventing me from buying whiskey on a…

Except nowhere in the Bible does it say that you can not buy whisky on Sunday.

The prohibition against conducting business on the sabbath might be where this comes from.
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