Why is the Bible so important anyway?

[Gwendolyn]

I was just wondering.......

Why is it that the Bible is so important? I know it's a question everyone would answer with the statement: "Duh...It's the Bible!" But what other reason than that? Why is it held in such high regaurd? It's absurd to think that the tales the Bible holds are literal truths; it's obvious that it is a book of fables with (for the most part) a good pretty good message, but God didn't write the Bible. Man wrote the Bible. So, I guess my question is, if man wrote the Bible, how can it be representative of God's (if indeed God exists, that is) thoughts and feelings and advice?

Thoughts, please. Also, if you quote Bible verses in this one, please give explainations of how they relate to your post.

[MSG]

Well the bible does a good job of teaching morals and values to children through example (the stories, and theres a reason they're called 'stories'"), and by treating it loosely the children they are trying to raise might treat the morals loosely. I personally believe that god was once more like santa claus, told to kids by parents but then later the truth esposed. What if everyone agreed to never tell the truth to the children? if there were no records, no documents, then this would have been easily acomplished. Maybe they realized that it worked so effectively that they decided to make it permanent... this most likely would have occured in a small group such as a single town, because there are no perfect people in this world. I dont know much about the history of the bible, and if any of my theories are unlikely then suck my beanstalk.

[Gwendolyn]

While I understand that the Bible is a great moral reference, I do not know why people choose to use Bible verses for justification for religious opinions and beliefs. I mean, why does it matter what the Bible says in relation to opinion or fact?...So many people claim that God is against something merely by what the Bible has in it, but how does anyone know what God really thinks (again, if there is one)? I mean, aren't Christians followers of God's word? Isn't that the basis of it all?! What is the word of God, anyway? The Bible can't be God's word because God didn't write it.

[Rakkantekimusouka]

The only reason the Bible gets more recognition than, say, Moby Dick, is because more people put their faith in it for a longer period of time. It's kind of like how some movies become popular and some bomb: it all depends on the audience.

[Gwendolyn]

Yeah, I guess that is true. If I started quoting veres from Douglass Adams' books, people would think I was crazy, but I think it's crazy that when religious texts are quoted, people sigh, and say "Oh, I guess he's right; The Bible said it."

[kimpossible]

Hey - "the bible" (all few thousand bazillion of them, all claiming to be the only one...) is a great work of fiction. It's full of intrigue, action/adventure, and sex sex sex and more sex. It has villains, and good-guys so villainous as to be indistinguishable from the villains.

"God" is like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, and Moses is a regular Indiana Jones.

It's a great epic adventure tale. (Emphasis on "tale".) By the same token, just like Tolkien or what's-his-face, the guy that does the Eye of the World series... Robert ____ - anyway, just like them, this great epic adventure tale has some utterly boring and poorly thought-out filler. You flip past that, and it's not a bad read.

The problem comes when you start believing you're a Hobbit, errr, I mean a christian, errr, I mean an Aes Sedi. Then you need to run out and get your head examined and making take a little swig from the fountain of reality...

[Ex Nine]

The Bible's "importance" has everything to do with history and little to do with its actual content.

You have to realize that thousands of years ago there weren't very many people who could read. And there were fewer people who could write. And there were even fewer people who did write, much less have paper to write on. And that meant there weren't very many books.

All of the Bible goes back to the Jews. Why is that important? The Jews were obsessed about their cultural history. Utterly and totally devoted to their collective traditions and identity. You know all that business about one God? They only had one temple at which they could worship, too. And they loved, loved the idea of having one book. And that's what they did, but not without a couple hundred years of argument and conflict.

Jesus didn't make people stop being Jews after all. So that obsession carried forward, "look, we have all this new stuff now about the Messiah... this is really big... we need to bring it all together." And that's what they did, but not without a couple hundred of years of argument and conflict. Keep in mind information didn't travel very quickly.

How did this one book become so widely adopted? An old fellow named "Constantine." He sort of became emporor of the entire Roman empire and told all of the citizens to convert to Christianity. But Rome is gone, so that doesn't explain why people still think it's important.

Well, that thing about not a lot of people being able to read... and even less people knowing how to write? That didn't change for a long time. There weren't very many books, especially after leaders decided to burn things they thought heretical. For a long time, people learned to read by learning to read the Bible, and they learned how to write in order so that they could copy versions of the Bible for people, since most of the educated people were monks - those people who didn't slave all day on the farms or in the mills.

So there you have it. A whole lot of people doing nothing but being obsessed about one book, to reinforce the idea of one God, and not having anything else to read.

Thank God for the Renaissance.

[kimpossible]

Harry Potter series is still better. I figure that's the *real* reason the christians are all up-in-arms about it. More current readership and better written tale.

So, related to your post, Ex: Ever read Snow Crash?

[Ex Nine]

No I haven't. But I sense that I will someday, now that you've mentioned it. ;)

Why?

[kimpossible]

I can't really tell you without ruining the book... But it has some relation to your opinion expressed above about the importance and origins of the bible. (wow. Freudian Slip... I wrote "bile" the first time. And, of course, it passed the scrutiny of the spell-checker)

It's also an awesomely amusing tale and a page-turner to boot. I think it may be out-of-print, but I'll bet you'll find it on interlibrary loan at the least.

[AirRick101]

I honestly have a difficult time seeing it as just merely a work of fiction. It clearly wasn't intended to be such a way. It's because I grew up with the indoctrination of it, a part of me will perhaps always see it as mysterious and authorative to some degree. But just as aggressive is the part of me that questions and even mocks it.

the bible is either captivating or a real sleeper. I've experienced more of the latter.

[Ex Nine]

I'll read after Tea-Time of the Soul, then, Kim! :)

AirRick, first, don't start looking at it as one book. It's like 80 books or something all squished and edited, originally written hundreds of years apart from one another, by different people, different places, etc.

[Gwendolyn]

I really liked the Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul. I'm glad to see someone's reading it. :P

Anyway, I am sure that the Bible is a work of fiction just like any other. I mean, yeah, it's a pretty good book if you're into those kinds. I agree with Kim though that the Harry Potter series is better.

[Awaken4e1]

The Bible - is the only book ever written which can reveal the one true invisible God, and man’s relationship to Him. It is a graduating formula through which will bring all of Mankind to his fullness of maturity, through experience of the natural realm and of the senses, in full contrast of the Spirit.

It is true and accurate record of man’s history in the flesh on the Earth. It is a precise culmination of mathematical perfection, down to the last jot. It is the God breathed word of truth to man. It is the mind of God. It is all wisdom unto man until the end of the age. It is the Door to Eternity.

The Rev.

[Ex Nine]

[i][size=24]Gag me.

[bradybaker]

Originally posted by Awaken4e1
It is true and accurate record of man’s history in the flesh on the Earth. It is a precise culmination of mathematical perfection, down to the last jot. It is the God breathed word of truth to man.
Sigh.

[AirRick101]

They only mean the mathematical accuracy because of the "surprisingly matching" coordinates concerning the prophecy of Jesus's birth, or the dimensions for Noah's ark, or for AD Jesus related events.

Actually, I don't know the big deal about the Bible in the end. I don't personally know if it does or does not make a difference in people's personality for the worse, or the better. Whatever.

[InTheMoment]

The Bible - is the only book ever written which can reveal the one true invisible God, and man’s relationship to Him. It is a graduating formula through which will bring all of Mankind to his fullness of maturity, through experience of the natural realm and of the senses, in full contrast of the Spirit.

It is true and accurate record of man’s history in the flesh on the Earth. It is a precise culmination of mathematical perfection, down to the last jot. It is the God breathed word of truth to man. It is the mind of God. It is all wisdom unto man until the end of the age. It is the Door to Eternity. [/b]
And it doubles as a great door stop.

[eXistenZ]

The Church and some other religions do not pretend that the Bible is literally true. This stage of the interpretation of the Bible is not applied anymore after the Galileo's trial. After the Galileo's "eppur si muove..." ("Anyway, it's moving..." referred to Earth circulating around the Sun) the Church doesn't dare to claim that everything in the Bible has to be taken as literally true. Some forms of Protestant religions adopt a more literal view on the Bible.

It is quite clear when the Bible claims that a story is a true rendition of real facts (first: when it states to recount the real life of Jesus) and when it speaks with metaphors and allegories. Then is up to the reader to believe or not the first ones and to try to get some benefits from allegorical tales.

Confusing the ones with the others doesn't help the understanding of the text. One cannot say that the Bible is fake just because it contains "fables" too. One should claim that it is fake on other grounds.

The problem is not the text, but the use that we make out of it. If we fight because the "Bible states so", we're reading that book in a quite unfair way. It's like pretending to fly because of Harry Potter does it.

eXistenZ

[Ex Nine]

[quote]It's like pretending to fly because of Harry Potter does it.

And he needs a broom.