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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.
Access to the Dead Sea Scrolls was carefully guarded for decades. Think proprietary database formats.
Back in the '80s or '90s, a scholar published a very detailed index. It was so detailed that other scholars were able to reverse-engineer the text of the scrolls, breaking the data monopoly for those scholars who were only interested in the text on the scrolls rather than the scrolls themselves.
Since then, the keepers of the scrolls have been much more, what is the work I'm looking for, open.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wow. Yet another ignorant boor ranting against religion, and while demonstrably WRONG, getting modded by other ignorants.
Listen, there are a LOT of reasons to criticize religion. Take your pick. Hateful violent groups, both internally and externally. In many cases religions encourage people to turn away from knowledge and discovery. Blah blah blah. There are many fruitful, and many flame-ish discussions you can have about religions. But, one of the things they have a very good track record on is maintaining the integrity of their key books.
So, for instance, there are fairly minor differences (generally several letters different) in the First 5 books of Moses, between the Bible that the Ethiopian Jews, and the rest of the Jews had, in spite of these groups having virtually no contact for several thousand years.
Now, the Ethiopians had in their cannon several books the rest of the Jewish world has as Apocrypha (I.E. they largely ignored). And, they did not have many later books, or traditions of the rest of the Jewish world.
Different groups have been funny about how they pick and choose which books get INTO (or taken out of) their cannons.
And there are a whole mess of interesting things that come up when a religion starts TRANSLATING texts.
But to just say that religions have had their primary texts re-written many times? Well that is just wrong. And wrong from a hateful disposition (assumed from tone) really doesn't belong in an exchange of knowledge. Propaganda? Sure, but an educated conversation? No. Shame on you, and anyone modding you up. If you want to decry the wrongs of religion, there really are enough out there to pick on. Disseminating untruths is really unnecessary.