Quote:
Originally Posted by devilsadvocate
$50 bonus question:
Would any of us know this pastor's name (or that he even existed) if he hadn't threatened to burn a Koran?
Mission accomplished.
L. Ron Hubbard once said, "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion." Having read from both the Koran and the Bible, I wonder if religion and science-fiction (or what passed for it before Jules Verne came along) are not one and the same. They each contradict themselves (and each other) by the way, so I'm not sure reading the Koran will answer many questions for the unenlightened.
In any event, religion was developed as a form of crowd control back when the Earth was flat and we could barely start a fire to keep from freezing. It still persists today because many people feel they're not in control of their lives/destinies. Education in the U.S. has taken a major turn southward over the last 20 years and simultaneously we have Creationism museums popping up, the lawsuit-trolls from Westboro Baptist Church, and this jackass in FL. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy behind it but it wouldn't take much to convince me it wasn't a coincidence.
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I feel I must preface the following remarks about
The Book of J with a bit of explanation.
Modern Bible scholars believe that the first five books of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Moses, were in fact written by four different authors, and later combined into a single narrative by editors. One of those authors is simply called "the J author" (AKA "the Yahwist") because this person consistently used the Hebrew equivalents of the letters YHWH for the name of the God of the Hebrews (it works out in German). Attempting to separate the four interwoven threads is not always easy (it was the Yahwist who penned the Adam and Eve story, for example), but in a book published in 1990, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg attempted to do just that with the J writings.
Among other things that make
The Book of J by Harold Bloom (author) and David Rosenberg (translator) interesting reading is the speculation they raise raised as to the possibility that
The Book of J was originally written not as Holy Scripture, but as a work of fiction by a woman in King Soloman's court.
Needless to say, not everyone agrees, but it's an interesting possibility to consider.
If anyone is interested in learning more about the Documentary Hypothesis, Wikipedia has an article on it
here.
The Book of J (paperback) can be found on Amazon
here.