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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.
If they were smart they would have tied this release in with the Evangelion rebuild series.
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2 Years though, at least this shows you how seriously people take preserving historical documents like this.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?
You've waited this long ... what's another two years?
What we need is for Google to develop an actual, physical spider that goes out and searches hard copies of documents for indexing.
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.
Confucius say "Now we can find out if the People's Front of Judea are a bunch of splitters."
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
Unfortunately they are claiming the project will take somewhere in the neighborhood of two years to complete.
Why will it take two years? Part of the problem is because they aren't made of paper. One of them is made of copper, and most of them are made of parchament, which is much more difficult to work with. Especially considering the age.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
'The Romans are bad'
'So are any Jews who don't do what we do'
'We don't like women'
'Why is is so hard to get a damn bath around here'
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
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.
Almost.
Religious texts have rarely been "translated many times", that I know of. That is, they haven't come down to us through a long sequence of translation from one language to another. (They may have been translated many times in the sense that Harry Potter has been translated many times, of course. The question is whether we still have manuscripts in the original language.)
The manuscripts have, however, often been copied many times, introducing textual variants. Such that if we have few manuscripts, we're less confident in the exact wording of the originals. (And if we only have a small number of manuscripts that were under the control of a central religious authority, then all bets are off.) But then if we have many manuscripts, we can become extremely confident in the original wording, through the wonderful world of textual criticism.
That does leave open the possibility of significant change during times of oral transmission. (Though there are limits there, too. Suppose that we only had orally-transmitted knowledge of the JFK assassination. We couldn't be too confident in some details of the events, but if the story is widely-disseminated & widely-known, that would tend to restrict the changes that would occur.)
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.
As for the older stuff that you mentioned (Creation, Flood, Destruction of Sodom, perhaps), I suppose that these stories would indeed either need to be passed by word of mouth or else given by direct inspiration from God.
Most of the later stuff in the Old Testament (really everything except for Genesis and parts of Exodus), though, was written down from the beginning.
Leviticus, for example, is recorded Ceremonial, Religious, Moral, and even Secular Law. This was VERY highly regarded and as such copied extremely carefully. In other words, when a priest or scribe was charged with copying a scroll, he was not allowed to copy line-by-line or word-by-word. Instead, he was required to copy letter-by-letter. All of the other scrolls were held in the same regard--they all either dealt with essentially History, Prophecy, or Law.
The scribes had some VERY strict laws on how to copy, which means that today, of the stuff that remains, there are fewer discrepancies among texts than with copies of any other ancient text.
I saw statistic once that compared Homer's Odyssey with the Old Testament. The OT is significantly longer and has more copies remaining. Statistically, that would mean there is a higher chance of error while copying as well as a higher chance of discrepancies among the surviving texts. This, however, is not the case. Homer's shorter work actually contains many more errors overall--not just per line, but over the course of a shorter book.
How you choose to interpret the Bible is up to you. But at least let it be said that the Bible was properly copied.
A few other interesting tidbits on OT scribes:
*If a scribe made an error while copying, he had to completely start over on that page. He was not allowed to blot out a word and rewrite it.
*When a scribe completed a page, it was checked against his original. Every line was counted to ensure that each line had the same number of characters, and each page the same number of lines.
*When a scribe came across the name of God, the vowel symbols were never written, leaving (a transliterated) YHVH.
*Even though the scribe was writing the full name of God, he was still required to ceremonially wash his hands and break his stylus before continuing.
Pretty cool, huh? :)
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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What's the rationale for atheism?
Inasmuch as the scientific method is concerned, the presumption of a controlling intelligence eliminates the need for some categories of investigation, which ultimately inhibits progress.
For example, if you ask, "why does a person get sick?" and one answers "because God wills it, either as a punishment for sin or as a test of faith." You have eliminated the incentive to investigate into things like bacteria, the immune system, and so on.
By beginning with the premise that there is no controlling intelligence, and that there is some kind of underlying mechanism behind all observable phenomena, you preserve the incentive to formulate hypothesis and test them. Of course, many of the hypotheses will still be wrong, but the process of testing them is what yields the understanding we need to improve our lives.
So, scientifically speaking, atheism is the most useful assumption for maximizing our efforts at perusing knowledge.
On a more personal level, agnosticism is more logically "safe" than atheism. Though many consider that the assertion of the non-existence of an entity for which no demonstrative test can be devised is more well-founded than the assertion of the existence of said entity...logically this is still just a variant of the "ad ignorantium" fallacy. It is clear that where no test can be formulated *either way,* the only warranted conclusion is no conclusion at all. "I don't know if God exists, and I won't know until we can cook up some definitive tests" is the most logically sound response to questions of the ontological status of the divine.
Oral tradition = chinese whispers = kids telephone game = highly distorted.
Debian FTW
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.
Citation
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These are all current rules for Torah scribes.
Blotting out ink on sheepskin parchment really doesn't work. The Torah scrolls are works of art, having messy blots all over would rather ruin that.
All words in the Torah are written without vowels. Hebrew pretty much never uses vowels, except for teaching children. The "name of god" is also written as Yid Yid and "Hashem" (The Name) in various texts, though the Torah mostly uses Yid Hay Vav Hay.
Not a sentence!
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
See my other post for one citation. We are not talking about ONE person or even fifty. We're talking about a village or an entire population of an area. Considerably different eh? Star Wars was created over thirty years ago and just like my example SOMEONE would correct it for me because most all of us have seen it and KNOW it. You can call BS until DNF is released but you're still wrong.
It wasn't just the village elder telling the stories at all. It was a group project, usually done with rhythmic devices or mnemonic devices as a group activity. EVERYONE in the village would raise their arm if the story went off.
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I think you've answered your own question:
Leave religion completely aside for a moment and ask yourelf what you meant last time you said you had faith in someone. If you are anything like me, you meant that you trusted them to deliver on what they had promised, and you trusted them to do that because of past personal experience with them, or perhaps a testimonial of them from someone else that you trust. Whatever it was, it almost certainly was based on some reason, and almost certainly was not just a shot in the dark.
For me, this is a pretty good definition of faith when applied to Christianity and God. The problem with this definition is as you say that it doesn't really correspond with the common use of the word when applied to religion, a use which has become completely divorced from the meaning I've described above and has come to mean something blind, irrational.
I'm not sure whether anything can be done about this, apart from patient explanation like I've tried here.