Sunday, December 6, 2015

applause.

this is the right way to criticize religion.

of course, muslims view the koran as a kind of "third testament" to begin with. it's an addition to the bible. same god. so, you should expect very large overlaps.

i know that my own story is that religion isn't something i thought about much until i was about 10 or so. and, when i started thinking about it, i took the initiative to pick the book up and actually read it. and, i did read it - from genesis through to revelation. i had to take the first part of it pretty skeptically, even at that age, but i'd heard the argument of non-literalism so i knew how to do that intelligently (seven days need not literally mean seven days). it was the book of job where i started to really recoil. by the end of it, i was convinced it was utter nonsense. if this god actually exists, it should be struggled against. but, it struck me as most likely that it can't exist at all. the level of assholery was just too much. if this god existed, it would have had to have already destroyed itself.

something that defined the era of christianity before the reformation was actually a restriction on reading the bible. you'd be in a lot of trouble if the monks caught you reading the verses - excommunication, and perhaps even a death sentence. only official church representatives were permitted to read it. as you can see, there's reasons for this: the threat of heresy through independent interpretation, the threat of people finding contradictions and the threat of simple revulsion of it's contents.

if there's a difference across cultures in today's world, it isn't that muslims are less educated. it's that most westerners are entirely clueless as to the nature of our own history. we have a year zero set at 1945. nothing relevant happened before that date. and, so we can't place anything in context.