How can we believe and trust censored Bibles?

CanadaPlus , 4 hours ago

Lemmy is, like, all atheists. You’re going to get a lot of “we can’t” answers.

jsomae , 3 hours ago

The orthodox would agree.

xmunk , 2 hours ago

So basically Predator handshake meme of religious extremists and atheists?

CanadaPlus , 1 hour ago

<span style="color:#323232;">     The Bible is lies
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Atheists   -o-   Christian revisionists
</span>

I don’t know if that’s what OP meant, though.

CanadaPlus , 1 hour ago

Yeah, Biblical inerrancy is specific to a subset of Protestants. They’re just loud about it. The Catholic church has also flirted with it, but their stance has always been that the church itself is the final authority on all matters, and in Vatican II they soften their endorsement of it with something like “inerrant for the purposes of salvation”.

It’s possible lay believers of other denominations sometimes take the same stance out of confusion, though. I’ve never personally heard someone say “I’m a Christian that doesn’t believe the Bible is all authentic”.

anarchoilluminati , 48 minutes ago

You haven’t met a single Christian that knew anything about their religion then.

Sad truth.

CanadaPlus , 41 minutes ago

Well, I know a lot of evangelicals too, so that skews it.

anarchoilluminati , 41 minutes ago

Yeah, that’s definitely a skewed demographic. Haha

DmMacniel , 3 hours ago

As religious people most often just pick and choose from scripture to make their point, it doesn’t matter to them that their version of scripture is edited/corrected/censored.

MentalEdge , 3 hours ago

You don’t.

Better yet, how do you know any modern religion is anything like what it should be like, generations later?

Religions seem very sure about their own teachings, even as they change. Within your own lifetime you’ve probably noticed that a priest or simply a believer you know has ended up changing their mind on something. Just a generation or two of believers and the current ones won’t be thinking and saying the kind of stuff the first ones were, and vice versa.

One pope says nay, next one says yay. If god is speaking through them, did god change his mind? If he is, why didn’t he just get it right from the start?

Religion isn’t like logic, which states 2+2 will always be 4. The simple passage of time and the broken telephone that is human word of mouth, means religion is incapable of staying consistent for more than about a decade, if that.

What’s more, the religions that exist today are the ones that were the best at spreading. If a religion isn’t appealing, people don’t stick with it. So religions tend to morph and splinter, evolving into whatever is just nice enough that a bunch of people will sign up.

They are the original meme, in the scientific sense. An infectious idea that gets recounted over an over, each person changing it slightly to be more appealing during a re-telling, empowering its spread.

Lettuceeatlettuce , 1 hour ago

There is no “original Bible.” Different sects of Christianity have different canons that they consider “scripture.”

Most Protestants adhere to 66 books divided into the “old” & “new” testaments. Roman catholics include several more books commonly called the “apocrypha” or “deuterocanonical” books.

Various traditions in the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox sects such as the Syriac Orthodox church or the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church include even more books and depending on the specific tradition, don’t even have a closed canon of official scripture. They don’t really think of scripture in terms of being officially canonized, it’s more of a spectrum from “more authoritative” to “less authoritative.”

There was no defined canon for any of the early Christians for several centuries. Early Christians circulated many different epistles, religious poems, stories, legends, sermons, and parables, often just by oral tradition.

Some, like the gospel of Mark, are considered fairly historical by many scholars, others are more fantastical or don’t have as solid historical attestation.

There is active debate amongst scholars about authorship of the now canonized Biblical corpus and the level of historicity.

Take the Bible for what it is; an impressive and important historical work, really a small library of ancient literature. It’s not a magical text though, it was written by people in very specific sociological and historical contexts and should be studied and examined with those in mind.

If you find it enlightening and inspiring to your life and it helps you be a better person to others, that’s great. And if you attach special spiritual or religious meaning to it, that’s your call. But that doesn’t change the nature of what the Bible is and where it came from.

unmagical , 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

The Bible doesn’t say that you shouldn’t edit or correct the Bible because the authors of the Bible didn’t have the rest of the Bible.

Moses gives some explicit commands to the Israelites to not modify the commands he gives in Deuteronomy, but that doesn’t really apply to the other books.

Likewise, some guy named “John” warns against anyone adding or removing from the account of his acid trip in Revelations, but that doesn’t really apply to other books.

The “Bible” was constructed over a long process and while what many think of as the “Bible” was finalized by 400AD there are still disagreements today (See Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Pentecostalism, Mormonism, and many other smaller sects).

The original authors wrote disparate works for distinct purposes at distinct points in time. They were not writing with the goal of manufacturing a multi-thousand year story bound as a single volume.

How do we know the full story?

We don’t. We use archeology, biology, anthropology, and other scientific disciplines to determine a likely path of the story of humanity as a whole. Some disciplines use the books of the Bible and other contemporary accounts to guide areas of future study, but if you want a single source for the history of the earth, humanity, or even the Israelites the Bible isn’t going to offer an honest perspective.

conciselyverbose , 2 hours ago

There is no original Bible.

The Bible is an assortment of works from a variety of authors arbitrarily selected by the Church, then made into a whole bunch of translations that aren’t super consistent with each other and aren’t all that faithful to the original works.

scrubbles , 3 hours ago

Ah you’re starting to see the cracks that finally gave me the distrust to leave the church. The church has thrown out entire books of the Bible because they didn’t agree with the messaging. How can I go to a church to where they literally threw out gospels just because they didn’t like it?

gravitas_deficiency , 2 hours ago

How can we believe and trust censored bibles?

FTFY.

And you can’t. The Bible is a bestselling work of fiction.

For the record, I was raised catholic, though am not one anymore.

sndmn , 3 hours ago

The Lord of the Rings is more believable.

jsomae , 3 hours ago

Which bible is censored?

sndmn , 3 hours ago

Everybody Poops

scrubbles , 3 hours ago

Pretty much any version we know now has taken very liberal translations to change the meanings. Most scholars agree that the translations were not accurate. Then on top of that entire books of the Bible were debated and thrown out, the gospel of Mary magdeline is the most famous. They picked and chose what message they wanted.

skullgiver , 2 hours ago

There are different translations for this very reason. Very few people can read the original Hebrew and Greek originals, let alone understand the classical poetic customs.

It’s not exactly written to be read easily, either, large parts of it were written using text complicated even for the native speakers back in the time.

There are plenty of mistakes in the translation, the funniest one being the translation mentioning unicorns, and some of them try to hide the sea monsters from the old testament and use flowery language to talk around the vile things described on the old stories.

Bonifratz , 2 hours ago

Pretty much any version we know now has taken very liberal translations to change the meanings.

That’s not true. Bible translations differ wildly on the approach they take, but there exist many (at least for English) that are focused on offering a rendition as close to the original meaning as possible. Also, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic as well as Koine Greek have been deeply studied over centuries and are well understood, so accurate translations are possible with the exception of a small percentage of rare vocabulary. Obviously, perfect translations aren’t a thing, but that’s a moot point and not exclusive to Bible translations.

Most scholars agree that the translations were not accurate.

Which scholars? Which translations? These blanket statements make no sense. Again, many translations have been made or reviewed/proofread by scholars of the Bible’s languages, making your claim dubious at best.

Then on top of that entire books of the Bible were debated and thrown out, the gospel of Mary magdeline is the most famous. They picked and chose what message they wanted.

It’s no secret that settling on a canon was a process that took centuries both in Judaism (for the Tanakh) and in early Christianity (for its New Testament), and was never really finished in the latter case, considering the different canons in use in the major Christian churches even today.

That said, I think this process was a necessity. In early Christianity, there were hundreds if not thousands of Jesus-inspired texts floating around, so if the new church was to have any sort of guiding document(s), they had no choice but to pick and choose. Of course, if you think a text (like the Gospel of Mary you mention) is an important witness of the early church, or a more accurate reflection of early Christian thought than are the New Testament writings, you have every right to make that argument. But I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against early Christians that they “picked and chose what message they wanted”, because that’s kind of the whole point of founding a new religious movement.

anarchoilluminati , 1 hour ago

First of all, as others said, the Bible is a book composed of many books and letters written by many people over an incredibly vast span of time. Consistency is almost impossible. But, for what it’s worth, where does the Bible say “that no one should make a dare to edit or correct” it?

I believe you are referring to Revelations which is, arguably, one of the oldest if not the oldest book in the canon (I don’t remember for sure but I believe it is) and also not universally appreciated. Luther famously criticized Revelations, and I think rightly so. There was also some contention at the time of canonization in Nicea around Revelations. So, just because one book says it, doesn’t mean it’s the final word on the issue. There are Christians that don’t see much weight or value in Revelations. I certainly don’t, I don’t believe it’s an eschatological text revealed by God. I think the only way Revelations makes sense is to read it as an historical text and critique of Nero that was written post hoc to rationalize and comfort Christians for what they suffered by explaining that they will soon be rewarded for their faith because they are in “end times”. Of course, we now know, thousands of years later, that they weren’t.

Besides, I’m not entirely sure I know what you mean by “edited” or what “life” you’re referring to, although I’m assuming you’re talking about Jesus. Have you read the Scriptures in their original languages? I have at least read and translated the Christian Scriptures in and from Greek, and they need editing. It’s not possible to have a transliteration of it that reads well, it takes some finesse and art. Even the Scriptures in the Greek are compiled from different manuscripts and codices because there often are errors or damages in manuscripts so you can’t just find the one “Gospel of Marx” manuscript, for example, and use it to translate it perfectly. You need to find several to get the whole story of one gospel together and then translate them into a single text, so you’re using several sources to put the story together in Greek and then translate into a different language thousands of years later. Naturally, this creates issues and makes it so that the Bible isn’t an unaltered text in its final form. Unless you read it in its original language, this is unavoidable—and, as I said, even if you do read it in Greek, you will still have an “edited” text.

Does it matter? I think it creates issues and one should be able to critically examine these textual criticisms in order to form a better picture of the origins of their belief and better parse what and how to believe, but I don’t think editing or inconsistencies inherently invalidate Christianity nor Judaism.

anarchoilluminati , 58 minutes ago

I meant Gospel of Mark, but I’m not going to change it and no one better dare edit or correct it or a spectre will haunt them.

LaGG_3 , 3 hours ago

IDK, convert to Islam if you’re that worried about reading your holy texts in their original language?

CanadaPlus , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

It does have the nice feature that the holy book as it exists is definitely a faithful copy of the one dictated by the known, independently attested historical figure.

Of course, most of the actual practices derive from the Hadiths, lol.

anarchoilluminati , 59 minutes ago

That won’t help. Qur’an was also edited and altered over time.

Personally, I don’t see a need for Christians to covert to Islam, especially for something so trivial. The religions are so similar already, and Muslims already believe that Jesus was a prophet and other aspects of Christianity. If a Christian has some deviating opinion from mainstream Christianity, I am willing to bet good money that there was already a sect or group that had the same idea a long time ago. There’s no reason not to just consider oneself part of that group without having to convert religions and still hold Islam in high regard.

I know too many people that converted to Islam from Christianity for silly reasons like this that were already addressed by some other Christian group or whatever, in my opinion. I understand if someone is coming from a totally different religion and wants to be Muslim, that’s okay to me I guess. But Islam and Christianity are already so similar, there’s almost no point. I think some people just got caught up in the anti-Islamaphobia wave (good thing) and then fetishized Islam as the better or politically acceptable religion among Leftists that doesn’t have similar issues to Christianity (not good, in my opinion).

LaGG_3 , 30 minutes ago

I’ll admit that I was making a bad faith suggestion lol. OP’s concern over censorship and Lemmy profile makes them come off kinda reactionary. Plus, the question seems kinda goofy.

anarchoilluminati , 29 minutes ago

For sure, I do think it’s either a bot or a troll fishing but it’s a subject worth discussing. Haha

midnight_puker , 2 hours ago

How can you believe and trust the bible at all?

JimmyBigSausage , 2 hours ago

How can you believe an uncensored one?

CaptainBasculin , 2 hours ago

An answer for this in Muslim’s book Quran is that all the previous books god itself sent were edited by humans as time went on.

Though its defence on whether Quran would be edited by humans is that god will not let it happen, there’s the argument that which in that case why did God let the previous books get edited in the first place?