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Digitized Gutenberg Bible Available
Prince_Ali writes "A digital copy of the Gutenburg Bible, the first major Western book printed from movable type, has been made available by The University of Texas, available through the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The Ransom Center's copy of the Bible is claimed to be the finest in the world, and is now freely available to anyone who would like to examine it. More information can be found via this CNN.com article."
Of what I heard, Gutenberg made the movable type so he could make books cheaper. But he also made the "Publishers' Guild" and wreaked what he could have made known to the public.
He put back knowledge for 100 years by allowing of such a guild that muchg power.
... Imagine the time spent on a project like this. By doing this, it opens wide the possibility for a younger generation (the "internet generation" as it were) to really consider going into history, anthropology and many other studies that could easily be drown out by this IT boom, which is going on now.
Kudos to all involved in the project
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The Library of Congress (Jefferson Building, IIRC) has a copy on display. (Yep, that's me). Closeup available here
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Personally, I think it was a mistake to translate the gospels from Aramaic, too.
Realistically, this Bible is less useful for the study of modern theology than it is other things -- art, the history of print and bookbinding, the evolution of the scriptures, etc. I mean, look at the cover of the thing -- it's a stunning piece of work.
If you are truly serious about studying the Bible as a living book, and not as a museum piece, then pick up a New King James or NIV version.
IMO, the King James versions still suffer from their poisioned past. The NIV makes a good effort, but I disagree with some of the interpretations they make (although I do agree with the need to draw those interpretations).
The key to really understanding the Bible is to understand its sources and inspiration, examining the roots of the mythology being presented and the way in which things would have been intended. This isn't easy to do, but IMO is worthy of at least ameature study.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It isn't just your eyes. I think it was meant for you to look on the beauty of it, not read it, unfortunately.
I tried enlarging the image, but to no avail. However, I'm sure that larger resolution images exist; one of the photos of the person scanning it in has it projected up on the wall in a legible size.
Maybe if you asked nicely...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's a good thing to have school pride, but don't let it run away with you. UT Austin gets the recognition it deserves (e.g., it's rated highly, etc.). However, the tendency of Texans to give themselves too much credit for stuff like this is all too common, and is a turn-off to the rest of the nation and to those who come to visit. Listing a couple of obscure accomplishments and mentioning that it's "waaay underrated" is only going to invite deign laughter from those in positions similar to mine.
Just letting you know...you may mod me down now.
...just my 2 gil.
"deign"? what do you have, a chauffeur? Does your maid butter your toast for you? Do you wear your sweater around your neck and play polo? Let the insane people go to MIT and Stanford after spending their first 18 years in and out of high dollar private preppy schools and taking expensive test prep courses. Then they can go broke pursuing graduate education in some Top 5 school so they can owe $100,000 in loans unless they were lucky enough to be best of the best and get a fellowship. Of course, this is if they don't commit suicide. These robodroid people can do that all they want.. I'll stick to trusty number 14 (or whatever the very intelligent people at US News & World report rate UT in general at this year). I don't really understand what mission you're on to keep school pride from running away with people but.. dare not to deign!
The numbers are much much higher. Check today's news stories. There are reports of 800, perhaps a thousand cases that the church knew about. As an organization, the Church learned of these problems, and never considered that pedophilia was a problem. If an equally large government or corporation had 800 to 1000 cases of child molestation in their ranks......
It's just hard to fathom how an organization like the church--given their mission of honesty and healing--could have failed on such a massive scale.
The Pope's quote you mentioned is precious. Precious because it's the only reference from the Pope that comes close to an apology. I know several people who are victims of priest abuse (several... just think about that... How often do you know several people who have in common being victims of such a terrible crime? It's a pattern). I have to say that there are two groups of people who received these words from the Pope. One group said the equivalent of "thank goodness; well gosh, there's your apology; let's move on". The other group said the equivalent of "Oh my goodness, is that all? I was anally raped as a child repeatedly by a man I was told to trust. That much I might learn to forgive, because my tormentor was human after all. But when his supervisors learned of his conduct, they merely moved him to another parish to inflict harm on others... this leadership failure cannot be forgiven, since it's a problem of an organization and not a person."
On the whole, I appreciate your thoughts, but I think they can be summarized as:
The funny thing to think about is this... I went on a rafting trip with 9 of my friends last year. We each have different stories about what happened - even to the point where there are major conflicts and differences - and we weren't even drinking.
So, that was only a year ago. How accurate can a story be, handed down for almost a 100 years before it is written down? The authors of the gospels did not witness Jesus first hand, so the stories had to have been passed to them. We've all played "telephone", so how close can the stories of the gospels be to what actually happened?
As for this story, I think it's marvelous that this GB is now available for anyone to look at. A neat extension of this project would be to have side-by-side text (like that distributed proof reading project). One could then easily build an index and concordance, or even add parallel translations!
You can probably safely ignore it. If it's simply an accurate scan of the pages, then it is simply a reproduction of someone else's work (namely, Gutenberg's), not an independent creative work, and as such is only subject to Gutenberg's copyright, not an independent copyright. As the original copyright has obviously long expired, you can safely reproduce the work.
A similar principle applies to ignoring claims of copyright on digitized paintings painted before 1923 -- if it's simply an accurate copy of the painting, only the original (expired) copyright is in effect.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Erm, actually there are several different versions of the Quran. Just like the Torah, the Quran was originally written without vowels or diacritical marks. Consequently, differences have emerged over the centuries as marked-up text with vowels and diacritical marks have been produced. For instance, surah 5:54 has yartadda in the Quran according to Hafs, but yartadid according to Warsh.
In general, as well, your contention about the universality of Islam implies that you are closing your mind to the bewildering diversity of Islamic belief and practice, from the Sunni/Shia split to the four traditional Maddhabs to Wahhabism. Not to mention the many religions related in some way or derived from Islam, including but not limited to Sufi'ism, Ahmaddiya, Druze, Nation of Islam, Sikhism, Yazidi, Ismailism, Babism and Bahai'ism.