Congressman calls evolution lie from 'pit of hell'

[MerchManDan]

Indeed it was. And Samuel Johnson refuted it thus.

Except it's not a refutation, any more than the Bible is proof God exists to have weird ideas like Wapsi Square in his head.

======

EDIT to add further thought: That's properly a rebuttal, not a refutation. (Which Dr Johnson would surely have known.) "Refute" where "rebut" should be seems to be somewhat common among news headline writers.

I knew something about the anecdote I linked was bugging me - rather, my inner pedant. Truth be told, I only linked it because it was the first thing that came to mind when you mentioned Bishop Berkeley; the little story always amused me, even if Dr. Johnson didn't actually refute anything.

[Julie]

Well, i'm mildly embarrassed to admit that i didn't know that Broun's chances of re-election are 100% - he's running unopposed

What If They Gave an Election, and Nobody Came?

Actually, if you wanted to make a statement, get a large group of voters to vote for the same write in candidate, even if it is Micky Mouse. That would get on the news and be very humiliating to the incumbent in question.

I voted for Mickey as president and Minnie as vice in 2004. I think that was the last time I actually voted (yes, every vote counts, but it's hard to be motivated when you live in a state that is nowhere near being a swing state...and you wouldn't vote for the main two candidates anyway). That said, if I lived in this congressman's district, I'd make it a point to vote and drag my other non-voting friends to the voting booths with me.

[bmonk]

It's true that we're not the only country with people who believe in the YEC theory, but (from what I've read) we're certainly leading the world in number of followers (and how vocal they are about their beliefs). Heck...even the Pope has given a thumbs-up to theistic evolution (to think that most of the fundamentalist Christian groups I know would call Catholicism antiquated ), and while the Catholic church may be on the decline in the US (or at least I've heard it has been), it's still the largest church body in the world. That's a lot of believers whose leader has turned away from YEC...

"Did Adam hava a Navel?" is the hingepoint question for some theories similar to YEC - all humans have one, so Adam MUST have had one. A more extreme - and mind-hurting - example is the idea that we cannot PROVE that God did not create everything in media res a few microseconds ago, complete with memories of doing things five minutes 'ago', BEFORE THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED. This is impossible to test from within Creation.

Now my head hurts.

I don't worry about such solipsisms--if that's the word we want--because such a deity would be awfully close to deceiving us about what exists. And the God I believe in doesn't stoop to lying.

The same argument goes, of course, for those versions of creationism that imply the "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record was simply put there by God when he created everything 6000± years back.

[lake_wrangler]

Incidentally, Jesus himself was a Young Earth Creationist, confirming both the account of Creation as found in Genesis, and the global flood in the days of Noah (said flood which would account for much of the ' "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record' ).

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.

[Fairportfan]

Well, i'm mildly embarrassed to admit that i didn't know that Broun's chances of re-election are 100% - he's running unopposed

What If They Gave an Election, and Nobody Came?

Happened about thirty years ago here in Georgia - guy running unopposed lost. (more or less)

No - he didn't lose to a write-in.

Nobody at all bothered to vote (it was in a small county downstate, some of which have only one elected official) - not even him or his wife.

Nobody realised that Georgia law (at the time at least, may have changed since) said that the winner would be the candidate getting the "majority of votes cast".

No votes cast? Not a valid election.

Do over.

[Dave]

I don't worry about such solipsisms--if that's the word we want--because such a deity would be awfully close to deceiving us about what exists. And the God I believe in doesn't stoop to lying.

The same argument goes, of course, for those versions of creationism that imply the "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record was simply put there by God when he created everything 6000± years back.

Agreed - and to my mind, that's the biggest intellectual problem with "young earth" creationism.

The more we look at the physical universe - the more ways in which we study it - the more different phenomena we find that are consistent with an old Earth (and Universe), and are not consistent with a young universe (unless that young universe was created to look much older than it is).

One example: radioactivity and isotopes. If you take a pure sample of, say, Uranium 238, and measure it, you can determine how fast it decays into lighter elements. This decay takes place in steps... U-238 decays into thorium-234, then into palladium-234, then into uranium-234, and so on, until the final decay occurs and you have lead-206, which is stable. Each of these decay steps occurs at a different speed (a different "half life")... some of these elements have a half-life of less than a second, others have a half-life of millions to billions of years.

The differing half-lives (which we can measure pretty accurately) implies that if you start with pure U-238, and wait long enough, you'll end up with a mixture of these elements, in a predictable ratio - each element will be present in amounts which are inversely proportional to its half-life. These elements will be in a stable equilibrium - the rate at which an element decays into something lighter, will be balanced by the rate at which it's being created by decay of the next-heavier element in the chain. For example, there will be far more U-234 and thorium-234 (half-lives of tends to hundreds of thousands of years) than there will be radon-222 (about four days).

Now - here's the kicker:

(1) The decay chain won't reach stable equilibrium until several half-lives of the longest decay daughter have passed... at least a million years.

(2) When we measure natural uranium-bearing rock, we consistently find the radioisotopes in stable equilibrium.

So, if the Earth is very old, (2) is exactly what we would expect to see. If the Earth is young (e.g. 10,000 years or so), we would not expect to find stable equilibrium, unless the elements were initially created that way (and there's no process known to physics which would have that behavior).

This is just one example. There are numerous others - astronomy is full of them, for example. If the Earth (and the "firmament") are only 10,000 years old, there's no way in which we could see things which are more than 10,000 light years away - and yet our telescopes consistently show us what appear to be distant galaxies similar to our own, where our best estimate of their distances (based on phenomena we can initially measure within our own galaxy at much closer distances) being high in the millions of years. If those "distant galaxies" truly do not exist, or are truly not at the distances they appear to be, then they're a very very good illusion!

Genetic study of the plant and animal kingdoms is another big area of this sort of thing. The more we learn of the way DNA and RNA work, and the more animals and plants and microbes and viruses we study, the more evidence we see of the complex inter-woven "tree of life" descending from common ancestry. Either we (life in general) evolved, or the whole system of life-as-we-observe-it was recently created with a massive amount of (false!) embedded evidence of common ancestry and evolution.

Geology is another example. Yes, some people have proposed that the geologic layering of rocks is a result of The Flood, and that dinosaur bones are simply from animals which were wiped out in that cataclysm. These proposals fall apart badly upon real study, though. If you study how rocks and sediment are actually laid down during a flood (e.g. floods occurring today when we can watch them), you find them layering out in a consistent way - largest chunks on the bottom (they sink faster), pebbles and sand and clay above (they settle out more slowly). That's not what we find when we look at actual rocks (e.g. the Grand Canyon, seashores and cliffs, etc.) - we see beds of large boulders and conglomerate on top of beds of silt-stone, clay, chalk, etc. and often multiple sets of these stacked one on top of the other. Some of the layers (e.g. chalk, from diatoms) appear to have been formed through physical processes we can see occurring today in the oceans... and which occur at a rate of thousands of years per inch, or even more slowly. There's no consistent way to see these as all having been laid down in a single catastrophic Deluge.

And those, really, are the problems I have with the Young Earth hypothesis and with Young Earth creationism. If you accept them, you either have to close your eyes to a huge amount of physical evidence, or develop a whole huge fragile patchwork of alternate explanations, or you have to conclude that the world's creator chose to be incredibly deceptive and tricky. I'm not personally comfortable with having to put my fingers in my ears and humming really loudly all the time, nor do I like the idea of God as a liar. (The latter idea is somewhat akin to some of the ideas of Gnosticism, which held that the material universe was created by an imperfect, inferior "demiurge" and that the true spiritual God would and should eventually destroy the natural world in order to free mankind.)

[Mark N]

I don't worry about such solipsisms--if that's the word we want--because such a deity would be awfully close to deceiving us about what exists. And the God I believe in doesn't stoop to lying.

The same argument goes, of course, for those versions of creationism that imply the "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record was simply put there by God when he created everything 6000± years back.

Agreed - and to my mind, that's the biggest intellectual problem with "young earth" creationism.

And those, really, are the problems I have with the Young Earth hypothesis and with Young Earth creationism. If you accept them, you either have to close your eyes to a huge amount of physical evidence, or develop a whole huge fragile patchwork of alternate explanations, or you have to conclude that the world's creator chose to be incredibly deceptive and tricky. I'm not personally comfortable with having to put my fingers in my ears and humming really loudly all the time, nor do I like the idea of God as a liar. (The latter idea is somewhat akin to some of the ideas of Gnosticism, which held that the material universe was created by an imperfect, inferior "demiurge" and that the true spiritual God would and should eventually destroy the natural world in order to free mankind.)

This is the reason that the young creationists say that all of the scientific proofs are the work of the Devil. It lets them blame anything that fights their belief as evil and therefor it must not be looked at or accepted. It has been the secret of religious zealots since the inception of organized religious zealots. This is the same reason that the Dark Ages started. They were dark because all reason was squelched by religious extremism. If you had a scientific proof that said threat they were wrong (the Earth is not in the center of the universe) they would take that person as a heretic and either make them recant through fear and torture or just outright kill them and take their property.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Religion is a funny thing. People can't even agree on a definition of the term, it seems, since it means different things to different cultures or socioplitical entities. Generally, however, it involves the veneration of one or more divine being(s).

Personally, I find the Creationism vs Evolution debate to be quite silly, considering they can be quite easily resolved by stating that one or more powerful divine being(s) started off the environment in which the Big Bang could take place. Not saying that it/they caused the big bang, but something even more primal. How did matter OR energy come to exist in the first place? It had to come from somewhere, after all. Why not from a divine being(s)?

I happen to believe that there seems to be two guiding factors involved with how life develops. One, as Darwin observed, is Evolution. However, evolution can't explain everything. For example, let's look at Bats.

Now then, a Bat's echolocation system requires three distinct systems in place:

First, it requires a means of emitting a supersonic pulse capable of getting a good 'ping' off of solid objects. Such a system, however, is completely worthless by itself.

Second, it requires a means of receiving the supersonic pulses, which is not only worthless to them but actively dangerous without the third part

Third, it requires a means of interpreting the supersonic pulses into a map of the surrounding area which is accurate enough to provide them with a better odds of finding prey than any of their other senses.

Without the ability to interpret supersonic pulses, it would be actively dangerous for a bat to hear them, because it would just confuse and disorient them. Net sum: dead bat, won't pass along this genetic mutation to future generations.

Without the ability to detect the supersonic pulses, the ability to emit them is meaningless. Net sum: zero gain. According to Darwin, this would not be passed on with any particular bias, so unless this was a dominant trait, it would not appear often enough to be able to impact evolution of the species as a whole.

Without the ability to emit supersonic pulses, the ability to detect them is meaningless because none of their prey items emit them. Again, net sum: zero.

So you have two net sum zero and one actively detrimental combination. So the odds of them evolving separately is remote to nonexistent. The odds of all three occurring simultaneous as a set of mutations is roughly equal to a tornado hitting a scrapyard and putting together a functioning airplane. According to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, then, this animal could not have evolved.

Yet it did.

Therefore, there's more to how animals develop than can be explained by Evolution. Mind you, I'm not saying Evolution is disproved, merely that it is probably a part of a bigger picture. Evolution perfectly describes the refining of certain qualities which makes the creature more suited to its environment, but for such drastic changes, there's got to be something more. It's possible that there might be one or more divine being(s). Or it might be something else entirely, that we simply haven't been able to quantify yet. We don't know. We won't be able to know, because it's currently impossible to quantify it, much less measure it, to prove or disprove it.

Some would simply call Science to be 'trying to figure out the rules by which God made everything'. Generally, this is meant to mean that God is trying to teach us, by providing us with a grand puzzle. Teaching us with the socrataic method, by giving us puzzles and the curiosity to figure them out. Puzzles within puzzles, each solution providing access to new and more baffling puzzles. One wonders if he is grooming his successors by teaching us how he did it. I suppose one day we'll find out... assuming we don't kill ourselves out bickering about which pieces go where.

[Dave]

Personally, I find the Creationism vs Evolution debate to be quite silly, considering they can be quite easily resolved by stating that one or more powerful divine being(s) started off the environment in which the Big Bang could take place. Not saying that it/they caused the big bang, but something even more primal. How did matter OR energy come to exist in the first place? It had to come from somewhere, after all. Why not from a divine being(s)?

That's along the lines of what's referred to as a "Theistic evolution" model... which is a quite common belief in many religions (I think somebody just pointed out that even the Catholic Pope has supported this line of thinking).

I don't think it's either provable or disprovable by science... but neither is it inconsistent or incompatible with scientific inquiry. In that respect, it's very different from "Young Earth" creationism and "Biblical literalism".

So you have two net sum zero and one actively detrimental combination. So the odds of them evolving separately is remote to nonexistent. The odds of all three occurring simultaneous as a set of mutations is roughly equal to a tornado hitting a scrapyard and putting together a functioning airplane. According to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, then, this animal could not have evolved.

Yet it did.

I think you're making an unwarranted assumption here, Skneekey. You're assuming that each of these three things (ultrasonic hearing, ultrasonic chirping, and ultrasonic interpretation) would be the result of a completely novel mutation - that it would have to appear suddenly and instantaneously.

If that were true, I'd agree that the odds are infinitesimal. However, there's no reason to assume that any of these three capabilities were the result of a single "sudden jump". That's the problem with the line of argument you're pursued here (and which I've read, fairly often, over the years)... it's trying to "refute" an overly-simplistic straw-man model of evolution and mutation.

Just as an example: a bat's ability to hear ultrasonics in general (not just echolocation chirps) isn't actually a surprise, nor is it detrimental. It's not a surprise because they're small - small ears, small eardrums, and thus a high (by our standards) range of sound reception by the eardrum.

It's not detrimental for them to be able to hear ultrasonics in general. Many insects make quite a bit of ultrasonic noise, both when resting and especially when flying. It would be quite advantageous for insect-eating bats to be able to hear ultrasonic noise from insects, and to be able to interpret what they heard and home in on the locations of the insects. A bat which had slightly better ability to hear ultrasound, or a slightly better ability to interpret what it was hearing and locate a flying insect, would have a selective advantage over those which did not... it might be able to hunt later into the evening, for example, when other bats could only hunt by eye during the day (and be in competition with birds and at greater risk of being picked off by predators).

If bats evolved in this way which had good ultrasonic hearing and good ability to interpret the sounds of flying insects, then the ability to echolocate using their own clicks would be a fairly small step... since they already have voices and could easily be yelling "YUM! YUM! MOSQUITOES! GONNA GETCHOO!" to one another

The fossil record, and what we're learning about the way genetic information works (which is a lot more complicated than we thought a few decades ago) strongly suggests that evolutionary change is a mix of gradual "drift", and the occasional sudden mutational jump. It now appears that a lot of the jumps (and the drift as well) aren't due to changes in the protein-coding parts of the DNA (which is what used to be seen as all that was important). Rather, changes can occur in the non-coding "regulator" parts of the DNA - which are, in effect, "switches" that can turn on, or off (or "way up" or "way down") the amounts of proteins that are created by coding genes. A gene which was once creating protein on a small scale, or only during a small portion of an animal's life, may be super-activated by a change in a regulator DNA segment... and this can lead to a novel "use" for that protein within the body.

It turns out that a very large percentage of our genome consists of regulators... and these can be turned on and off during a lifetime by chemical changes to the DNA (methylation). Methylation changes in regulators can be triggered by the environment (diet and chemical exposure and etc.), can be inherited, and can be reversed one or more generations later.

It's complex, and I don't pretend that we understand it all. But, I have yet to see anything which requires (or even strongly implies to me) that divine intervention was required anywhere along the way.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It's complex, and I don't pretend that we understand it all. But, I have yet to see anything which requires (or even strongly implies to me) that divine intervention was required anywhere along the way.

Of course not. I'm not saying that it was (although where the matter and energy required to start the Big Boom in the first place came from is still quite the puzzle that may or may not have required divine intervention). I'm simply saying that the two big competing theories aren't necessarily in contention, and pointing out that Evolution still hasn't revealed all of its secrets yet.

As far as the bat analogy and your rebuttal, that's a discussion for a different place and time. Suffice to say, it is quite a bit more complex than either of us stated, and the topic of debates of people with far more alphabet soup than either of us have.

You are quite correct in that we have made great leaps in realizing how genetic coding is quite a bit different than we realized even a few short years ago. However, the more we discover, the more we realize how much left we have yet to learn on the topic.

I never stated that the development of creatures on this planet was definitely guided by Divine Intervention. However, there's still quite a great deal of unknown. And really, how do we know that what we discover isn't simply the switch which some divine being uses to encourage the development of species? Oh, I'm sure we'll eventually come up with the whys and wherefores, but I wonder what kind of questions those answers will leave in their wake...

After all, at least to my mind... religion isn't there to answer questions, it's there to ask them. It's the discovery of the answers for yourself that is important, and the most important part of that is the journey you undertake to get those answers. Doesn't sound a whole lot different from science when you put it that way, does it?

[shadowinthelight]

Thanks for stating what I was going to in more detail, Dave. Echolocation isn't even very special. Humans can do it too with practice, bats are just better at it.

A good example of sudden, very dramatic change (well within a human lifetime) was shown in the Russian silver fox experiments. Breeding is basically forced evolution where people decide what trait is successful instead of natural forces. They selected foxes solely on the basis of which acted more tame. Within only a few decades the physical and behavioral changes were so extensive that they had basically made dogs out of foxes. This fits pretty well with the hypothesis wolves, although appearing suddenly, evolved into dogs naturally instead of being domesticated by man. As humans created the first permanent settlements, they started leaving trash to scavenge from. The wolves who were more curious and less likely to run were able to take advantage of this new niche and survive. Moral of the story, sometimes a small internal change can cause large external changes creating the illusion of the inexplicable.

Darwin's idea of incremental change over long periods of time doesn't cover every case, but that doesn't mean he was wrong.

[NOTDilbert]

Part(s) of the problem:
1) King James wrote good prose. Accurate Translation? Not so much.
2) He wasn't the only one.
3) Which Bible? Once upon a time, the elders of the Catholic Church all got together to decide what books to include in the 'official' Bible. This is where much of the apochryphal texts come from; the so-called books of Magic, some of the contradictory stories of Jesus' early life, etc. They made sure that 1) there was no internal contradiction (or as little as they could get) and 2) that anything they didn't want people to know was left out (and burned if they could lay hands on it).

Ah, editing and censorship - stray too far from the one, and you have the other.

(Note: I have a King James and several modern translations of the Bible; I think the important parts are in there; any real questions are mysteries that I will not know the answer to in this life.)

[Mark N]

Part(s) of the problem:
1) King James wrote good prose. Accurate Translation? Not so much.
2) He wasn't the only one.
3) Which Bible? Once upon a time, the elders of the Catholic Church all got together to decide what books to include in the 'official' Bible. This is where much of the apochryphal texts come from; the so-called books of Magic, some of the contradictory stories of Jesus' early life, etc. They made sure that 1) there was no internal contradiction (or as little as they could get) and 2) that anything they didn't want people to know was left out (and burned if they could lay hands on it).

Ah, editing and censorship - stray too far from the one, and you have the other.

(Note: I have a King James and several modern translations of the Bible; I think the important parts are in there; any real questions are mysteries that I will not know the answer to in this life.)

Let us not forget that Rome had continually changed its own belief system to make the newly acquired territories accept Roman rule more easy. This is believed to be a reason that several different religions share similar pantheons (Examples are in the old Norse, the Roman and the Greek) Many religious
observances also have similar roots. Look at Easter. It used to be an observance of the spring by Paganism. It is possible that when the Romans accepted Christianity they made the change. How many other things have the same roots.

[Fairportfan]

A good example of sudden, very dramatic change (well within a human lifetime) was shown in the Russian silver fox experiments. Breeding is basically forced evolution where people decide what trait is successful instead of natural forces. They selected foxes solely on the basis of which acted more tame. Within only a few decades the physical and behavioral changes were so extensive that they had basically made dogs out of foxes. This fits pretty well with the hypothesis wolves, although appearing suddenly, evolved into dogs naturally instead of being domesticated by man. As humans created the first permanent settlements, they started leaving trash to scavenge from. The wolves who were more curious and less likely to run were able to take advantage of this new niche and survive. Moral of the story, sometimes a small internal change can cause large external changes creating the illusion of the inexplicable.

And then there were the cats, who discovered that man's grain stores and such were natural sources of mice and the like, and then realised that if they could domesticate humans, the humans would give them warm dry homes and pay them to do what they were doing already - chase mice.

(Incidentally - a story i read in Scientific American said that, essentially [based on genetic comparisons], all domestic cats could be traced back to wildcat stock in one (relatively small region.)

For an example of the same sort of thing without direct human intervention (but due to human actions), consider peppered moths in London (and other places in the British Isles).

[Fairportfan]

A hah:

A genetic study in 2007 revealed that all domestic cats are descended from as few as five female African wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) c. 8000 BCE, in the Middle East.[9][11] Cats are the most popular pet in the world, and now found almost everywhere where people live.

<full article>

[bmonk]

I don't worry about such solipsisms--if that's the word we want--because such a deity would be awfully close to deceiving us about what exists. And the God I believe in doesn't stoop to lying.

The same argument goes, of course, for those versions of creationism that imply the "apparent" millions of years of history encoded in the rock record was simply put there by God when he created everything 6000± years back.

Agreed - and to my mind, that's the biggest intellectual problem with "young earth" creationism.

And those, really, are the problems I have with the Young Earth hypothesis and with Young Earth creationism. If you accept them, you either have to close your eyes to a huge amount of physical evidence, or develop a whole huge fragile patchwork of alternate explanations, or you have to conclude that the world's creator chose to be incredibly deceptive and tricky. I'm not personally comfortable with having to put my fingers in my ears and humming really loudly all the time, nor do I like the idea of God as a liar. (The latter idea is somewhat akin to some of the ideas of Gnosticism, which held that the material universe was created by an imperfect, inferior "demiurge" and that the true spiritual God would and should eventually destroy the natural world in order to free mankind.)

This is the reason that the young creationists say that all of the scientific proofs are the work of the Devil. It lets them blame anything that fights their belief as evil and therefor it must not be looked at or accepted. It has been the secret of religious zealots since the inception of organized religious zealots. This is the same reason that the Dark Ages started. They were dark because all reason was squelched by religious extremism. If you had a scientific proof that said threat they were wrong (the Earth is not in the center of the universe) they would take that person as a heretic and either make them recant through fear and torture or just outright kill them and take their property.

Well, at least religious zealots who reject reason.

I do feel I have to reject the statement about the Dark Ages. Reason was not squelched by extremism--it started (in Western Europe) as an economic collapse, which led to ignorance, since few could afford education--which had unfortunate results for those who did have unconventional ideas. The fallacy is further demonstrated by the fact that, in the Byzantine Empire, which survived the collapse with a functioning economy and money system, the education was never lost, and indeed the Westerners gained much learning from the East during the Crusades. And other forms of travel, like the Varangarian Guard that continually brought experienced men back to Scandinavia.

[bmonk]

Darwin's idea of incremental change over long periods of time doesn't cover every case, but that doesn't mean he was wrong.

In fact, Stephen Jay Gould developed his theory of "Punctuated Evolution" to better fit the fossil record of long periods with little apparent change, and short bursts of intense change. As I understand it, when a species is stressed--and particularly when it is splintered into small groups, or reduced to just a few individuals--that's when change tends to happen, often rather quickly, as with the Russian Foxes. When a species is well-adapted to its ecological niche, there is little pressure to change.

[DinkyInky]

Part(s) of the problem:
1) King James wrote good prose. Accurate Translation? Not so much.
2) He wasn't the only one.
3) Which Bible? Once upon a time, the elders of the Catholic Church all got together to decide what books to include in the 'official' Bible. This is where much of the apochryphal texts come from; the so-called books of Magic, some of the contradictory stories of Jesus' early life, etc. They made sure that 1) there was no internal contradiction (or as little as they could get) and 2) that anything they didn't want people to know was left out (and burned if they could lay hands on it).

Ah, editing and censorship - stray too far from the one, and you have the other.

(Note: I have a King James and several modern translations of the Bible; I think the important parts are in there; any real questions are mysteries that I will not know the answer to in this life.)

I've always been fascinated with what makes religion tick. My Mother encouraged this(much to my Father's families displeasure, as I was raised Old Polish Catholic). I've visited many Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, Temples, etc. in my short life. I've studied the Asiatic Philosophical religions. I've read many versions of the Bible, the Quran, the Torah. Most have a similar doctrine underneath all the fancy words. I don't believe any of them are totally right, nor wrong. Catholics are not the only ones who have doctored their Biblical text. The Muslim faith is notorious for changing things on a whim. The versions I've glanced at today are horrible compared to the beautiful writings I read as a child. Same with most bibles and Torahs. As they make things "politically correct" or translate them to have less Old English or older languages, they remove some of the contextual lessons and verbiage that made them great.

Altashheth is a neat word that appears in several bibles and the Torah. Loosely translated it means, "Do Not Destroy". It can be translated as, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" as well. I could go on for a long while on the various meanings of that one word. Hebrew is a powerful language in that one word can have pages of meanings. Translators can therefore have many different versions of the same passage that are totally different, yet mean essentially the same thing, but based on personal beliefs, can change the whole vibe of the passage and the original composers intent.

I could go into Arabic phraseology as well, but that kind of derails the original thread waaaaaay more than it already is, so I'll leave it with the above. Most of the Muslims I know think, feel, and act similar in nature to how I was raised. Food for Thought. Just that folk that believe the nonsense that came out of the extremists mouths to be truly what they believe in is wrong. Same goes for any explosive branch of any religion, and need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Just my 2 cp.

[Mark N]

I could go into Arabic phraseology as well, but that kind of derails the original thread waaaaaay more than it already is, so I'll leave it with the above. Most of the Muslims I know think, feel, and act similar in nature to how I was raised. Food for Thought. Just that folk that believe the nonsense that came out of the extremists mouths to be truly what they believe in is wrong. Same goes for any explosive branch of any religion, and need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Just my 2 cp.

And that is the root of the problem. The vocal few can cause such major alteration into the way a culture works that is is frightening. From the Muslims I have known in the U.S., Islam is a peaceful loving religion, but the extremists (the ones running countries), it is a system of absolutes (including the concept that women are little more that childbearing furniture) that must be followed or die. That is where the danger is. It also answers a deep troubling question of how can a religion based on love and understanding have inquisitions that will put a person to death for not believing in that particular form of religion.

[NOTDilbert]

Altashheth is a neat word that appears in several bibles and the Torah. Loosely translated it means, "Do Not Destroy". It can be translated as, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" as well. I could go on for a long while on the various meanings of that one word. Hebrew is a powerful language in that one word can have pages of meanings. Translators can therefore have many different versions of the same passage that are totally different, yet mean essentially the same thing, but based on personal beliefs, can change the whole vibe of the passage and the original composers intent.
Just my 2 cp.

Which leads to another example of mistranslation: "Though shalt not suffer a witch to live." The word translated as 'witch' by King James (sorry, my Google Fu is weak tonight) has been more recently translated as 'poisoner' - and if you really want to put a loose-fitting spin on that, you wind up with 'drug dealer.'

More fitting somewhat, eh?