Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.
Interpretation
The Bible's compilation reflects a diverse and inconsistent nature due to its prolonged editing and multiple authors.
Steven Pinker highlights the complexities and inconsistencies found within the Bible, attributing them to its long history of compilation by various authors with differing perspectives and styles. This comparison to a 'wiki' emphasizes the idea that texts evolve over time, incorporating various viewpoints and occasionally conflicting narratives, which challenges traditional notions of the Bible as a singular authoritative text.
In practice
In a seminar discussing the interpretation of religious texts, this quote could illustrate the need for a critical approach.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.
If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
I am an absolute pacifist...It is an instinctive feeling. It is a feeling that possesses me, because the murder of men is disgusting.
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
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