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Dead Sea Scrolls To Go Digital On Internet
mernil writes to mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls are headed for the internet. The Israel Antiquities Authority, custodians of the scrolls, plan on digitizing the 900 fragments to make them available to the public via the internet. Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
As a Rational Christian, I am excited about this material being released. Debates will be much more entertaining and edifying, with some good old material to validate certain arguments and invalidate others.
Regardless of your Religious background, the dead sea scrolls are very important and to have them readily available for those who speak the language is exciting for many reasons.
2 Years though, at least this shows you how seriously people take preserving historical documents like this.
My big concern is over the principle that once these are made publicly digitally available, they will be easily tampered with. How are we going to be able to validate the good copies from the publicly tampered ones? From a technical standpoint is there anyway to protect things like this so the average Jo knows which is real and which is not?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Not much has gotten published and many of the original scholars have died.
I'm guessing it was more professional jealously rather than some "secret revelation invalidating Christianity or Judiasm" that caused the delay.
Religious text is different from fairy tales. fairy tales could be a subset of the text where say a fictional story is used to illustrate a point. However for the most part most of the religious texts are attempts to keep historical records thousands of years ago.
A large meteor hits and destroys your city, that must be God striking down the sinners. As a guy who was just banished from the city survived and saw the destruction, he gets to make the details.
A merchant dealing with livestock builds himself a boat for easier trading with other cities. Luckally enough survived a food that covered the visible landmass. Whiping out thousands of people. It must of been God flooding the entire earth and his livestock and his wife and kids are whats left of the animal population. He survives so he can make the story.
Religious Texts do offer a good historical perspective if you read them with the fact that they have been translated many times, passed by word of mouth for a longer time. Truth = Beauty Art = Beauty so Artistic alterations have been placed it to make it easier to remember and pass on. Adding a few more lessons here and there... So when reading them many of the facts are right however the moral of the story has been changed.
Fairy tales are ficion just to prove the point. Religious Documents are the best history we have for the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
These may be the oldest fairy tales on the net when the project is complete.
You can at least the following genres among the fragments: Poetry, wisdom, legal code, historical narrative, genealogy, myth/fable, prophetic writing, construction schematics, census, apocalypse/vision.
Oral traditions are exceedingly reliable historical references. As the clan/tribe/village gathered to hear a story told it would be the same story that they had heard told from birth like their fathers and mothers.
Any error, addition or omission would have been corrected immediately.
If any geek arose to tell the story of Star Wars and claimed that Obi Wan said "Tashi Station, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany" they would be flamed, flogged and their geek card would be confiscated. It was in the writing that things broke down because for most of human history most of the humans couldn't read but they could all talk and listen.
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Oral tradition != telephone game. The telephone game occurs after just a few minutes with a small group of people. Oral tradition is a large group activity over many generations so your initial comparison is wildly off base. As my Star Wars example indicates, someone will fix a mistake in oral tradition.
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That's not actually how it's used in the Bible.
To quote James 2-19, Demons have this sort of faith but they're not welcomed by God: http://net.bible.org/passage.php?search=Jas%202:18-19&passage=Jas%202:18-19
It's actually not how it's used most often in real life. Simply put, faith means trust.
Let's assume you're married but it could equally be applied in other close relationships.
* Do you have faith in your wife?
* Are you faithful to her?
* If you close your eyes and fall backwards towards you wife, do you have faith that your wife will at least try to stop you from falling?
* If she says or does something that hurt you, do you still have faith in *her* or do you immediately assume the worst about her?
* If your wife were to try something new that she has no experience in, but you've seen that she's fantastic at improvising, so you have faith that she'll succeed?
On the flip side, if your parents tell you "I have faith that you will win the basket ball game" but you see them betting on the other team, do they really trust you?
> So, "faith in God" in the common senses could imply that one believes he exists, as described, without evidence (an arguably irrational position)
True, it is arguable, which in simple terms means, debatable. Ferocious former Atheist, Anthony Flew (credited for the "Invisible Gardener" parable outlining how stupid believers in God were), switched to Deism (the God of Einstein, Spinoza, Plato, Einstein, and Darwin) precisely because he determined that it was a more rational explanation of the universe and all that there is in it than Atheism.
None of these people are stupid. They looked at the evidence....all the evidence. Granted, there isn't a single piece of evidence that shows God's existence, but the bulk of it tells you that he's there.
It's no different in real life. Getting back to the wife analogy, *why* would you have faith in her? If you give any single situation to prove your point, I could just as easily argue that your interpretation is wrong. However, if you give the sum total of all your experiences, you can build a credible case.
Anyway, here's a question to ponder. Assume that the universe and everything in it is pure matter caught in a cause and effect chain. Essentially pure materialism. You are essentially a bag of marbles held together by natural forces caught in a causal chain that fully determines every move you make. A chair or a rock is no different....you're just composed of different atoms and are configured in different ways, but ultimately, everything is just a bag of causal marbles.
If you truly believe in pure materialism, you must accept the following:
a) There is no difference between you and a chair. What you perceive as life is just an illusion.
b) There is no fundamental difference between breaking your legs and breaking a chair's legs or smashing you to death or smashing a chair to pieces. All you're doing is breaking a few bonds and rearranging the configuration of atoms.
c) All atoms in your body get replaced every decade, so there is nothing that defines who you are other than your overall appearance and even that changes with time. Ultimately, *you* don't exist.
c) There is no such thing as free will....just atoms caught in a causal chain. Evangelical Atheists are thus wasting their time trying to convince anyone, but then again they can't help it, so there's no problem.
d) A consequence of all the above is Humanism or other morality has no foundation in pure materialism and it's actually pretty arrogant to be a Humanist because why are human's more valuable than chairs or rats? If you expand goal of humanism to reduce the total amount of suffering in the world (whatever "suffering" means in materialistic terms),wouldn't it make more sense to sterilize all humans so that animals might flourish in a hundred or so years?
e) Knowledge is irrelevant. What is kno