| Will the stupidity never end? |
[Apr. 13th, 2011|06:49 pm] |
I'm feeling particularly grumpy today so take this post with that grain of salt, but I am so freaking goddamn bloody tired of religious fanatics, particularly the unique brand of Christian idiots this country seems to produce. Day by day, year by year, the number of fanatical Christians in this country rises steadily and I feel like I'm slowly being surrounded by a flood with no way to escape the tide of ignorance.
I have found a VERY good blog post by an atheist who captures my views exactly. To summarize, this writer states that Christians are not stupid, they are irrational. They may be completely rational and intelligent in all other aspects of life, but when it comes to religion their rationality shuts off and the sheep-brain temporarily takes over.
Now, I want to make something very clear. I do not consider myself either an atheist or anti-Christian, nor do I believe that I am one of the most intelligent people in the world. Far from. Neither do I claim to not have my own type of "sheep-brain" that sometimes kills my rationality temporarily. I've been on anti-depressants for 11 years for frak's sake, so no, I am not 100% rational. I'm not sure anyone in fact can be.
So what am I talking about? Something that irritates me to no end and in fact often triggers my irrational (i.e. angry, frustrated) responses to the world.
It's not that Christians can't argue properly or think properly or that they are not capable of basing their beliefs on fact. In fact, many of them are VERY good at arguing and logical debate based on facts, some simply because they have to defend themselves so often.
What I can't stand is the absolute insistence of Christians on using the Bible as the SOURCE OF THOSE FACTS. THIS is where the fallacy lies. THIS is the flaw in the logic. THIS is what destroys their rationality. This idea that the Bible is fact, and that all Christian logic and rationality stems from it, is what is utterly fucking goddamn bloody STUPID.
On one level it makes sense. If you are talking about Shakespeare, it is better to include his works as a source of argument than only using what someone else said about him.
The mistake here is that The Bible is supposedly the source of EVERYTHING. ALL of life, birth, death, morals, etc. can be found somewhere in the Bible and it applies to EVERYTHING. This is like saying Shakespeare's histories are perfectly accurate versions of history or that Romeo & Juliet is a perfect model of how modern relationships between teenagers should be. You wouldn't say this, you know better.
Shakespeare wrote for his time, his audience. We poor translators have to adapt his stories to fit our time in order for them to be understandable and appropriate. This is exactly what happened to the Bible. It has changed hands, cultures, and languages, so many times that while the essence of the stories may be the same, or close to, the cultural nuances have been completely lost.
Perhaps this is a good time to mention that I am a language person. I can't call myself a linguist since I have not yet graduated from my program, but I have a pretty fair amount of knowledge about language. The argument from Christians that gets me every single time is how it doesn't matter that the Bible was written in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc, the Bible is still, even now, in modern English, SOMEHOW the divine word of God, solid and trustworthy enough to use as fact. This argument can ONLY possibly come from people who have never studied non-western languages or from people who are, as described above, completely irrational when it comes to religion.
Now, some of you might say, what difference is there between using one word or the other in a passage? What difference is there between two words that, in modern English, mean essentially the same thing? This again, can only come from ignorance of language. Languages are subtle, fluid things. Just think about how much modern English has changed in just the last 50 years alone. How short a time it has been since "gay" meant something other than "homosexual," for example. The Bible was written THOUSANDS of years ago. Only a complete fool would think that the languages of the Bible did not change immensely during that time, that EVERY translation was perfect, that EVERY scribe was infallible in their copying of the text. THIS is the irrationality that burns my tolerance away.
One of the first things you learn when learning a foreign language is that language is ENTIRELY dependent on the culture that created it. Even closely related languages like Spanish and Italian are still massively different. One word can change the meaning of an entire sentence. One sentence can change the meaning of an entire passage. One passage can change the meaning of an entire book. And I'm speaking of things written at the same time NEVER MIND things traveling through the ages, changing cultures and languages over hundreds of years. The Hebrew culture was not the same as the Aramaic culture, the Greek culture was not the same as the Roman culture, at any time in their histories. They share many similarities but there are fundamental differences that CANNOT be ignored. Nor are they in any way similar to modern cultures.
On top of that is the cultural divide. So many Christian songs are about the River Jordan and Bethlehem and other such Biblical places. These places have no meaning to us! They are places far, far away that most of us have never seen and will never see. But the writers of the Bible knew these places well and thus why they spoke of them. Why would you sing emotionally about life in Detroit if you have always lived in Houston? Do you honestly believe you have any concept of Detroit life from your Houston home, to say nothing of life 4,000 years ago and half-way across the world? Why do you believe this has　ANY relevance WHATSOEVER to modern life? That's why you adapt it, you say. Create a modern Christianity. Well, when you adapt it, you change it and it's no longer the Christianity that's in the Bible, it is something else entirely. Why do you not get that?
I have not myself had much opportunity to study the languages of the Bible in depth, nor do I really care to without good reason, but I do know this. There is more than enough evidence of the multiple changes, additions, and omissions made to the Bible for the modern versions to be extremely suspect and not worthy of basing entire logical arguments on.
So, I will put this challenge on those of you who disagree with me. Do some research, REAL, HONEST, IN-DEPTH research into the history and evolution of the Bible and the history of the cultures and languages that used it. Find some bits of the Aramaic. Read the "lost gospels" written by Greeks that were not included in the Bible. Put your irrationality aside for one bloody moment and THINK. Is this book, in any form, really so perfect and infallible that it be trusted as the source of rock-hard fact? Until the answer is unanimously 'no' among you all, you will continue to be seen as ignorant and irrational by the majority of non-Christians in this world. |
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