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RE: Is The Bible Fake News? Why It's So Difficult For Me To Ascribe To Religious Doctrines - DISCUSSION

in #life8 years ago

I do not know what you are asking here. I do not know what "it" stands for.

Are you assuming that the sacred texts all stem from the same original text?
Are you trying to ask if all the sacred texts are different tellings by different people who experienced the same phenomena?

Yes, ancient holy texts try to take the divine and distill it down into human understandable terms. Very similar to someone trying to describe an acid trip, of some importance, to a gathering of people. Humans are very linear. We think of time and space as linear. Even our math is linear. However, space is curved and time is a loop. However, humans don't really have ability to stop thinking linearly. So, the best of our books are attempts to distill what happened down into human understandable terms.

The bible has many good stories. It is not unique in that. Seek and you will find, and it may be a totally normal book that no one considers sacred, that gives you your answers.

Reading the Bhagavad Gita is difficult for western people. Because it assumes a Tibetan mindset. Such as, if you do not practice meditation you may think that many of the stories are euphemisms, when they are describing reality that a meditater intimately knows.

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@tommycordero

Sorry, no more nested levels to respond to your question "Is there anything unique at all to the Bible?" so I'll post at the same level.

It should be obvious that whichever text(s) are written by God Himself would be inherently unique and ... priceless.

The problem is that anything that good would be counterfeited a thousand different ways by people who think like most in this thread. (i.e. that their thoughts are just as valid as the words of our Creator.)

So our task is to sort out the wheat from the chaff. There is no substitute for study here. In some cases it's easy: a self-proclaimed prophet emerges, pronounces a bunch of teachings that only he can vouch for and these are used to enhance the persons own power, wealth, and glory and perhaps the earthly benefits of his followers. Nothing backs up his story.

On the other extreme, the Bible is a collection of 66 consistent and self-reinforcing writings from 44 authors over 1500 years covering 6000 years of past and future history. This is coupled with plenty of eyewitness testimony about those authors and the supernatural things some of them were able to do. Nothing else is like it.

So, if God did communicate with man, there are very few choices out there that can plausibly compete. And it's not hard to tell which one of those is real... if you do your homework diligently. Don't believe the statements that we can't be sure what the writings said. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Old Testament hasn't changed in over 2200 years.

On the other hand, if God wanted there to be certainty so that everyone would have no choice but to believe, he would give each of us our own personal copy etched in stone while we watched with lots of other follow-up miracles just to make sure we were certain.

Since He clearly doesn't do that, He clearly wants to leave room for those who don't want a relationship with Him to walk away.

We see those kinds of folks throughout this thread.

They will be allowed to walk away.

I am just trying to find whether there is anything unique at all in the bible. Is there any good lesson we can learn by reading the bible that we can't learn by other means?