What's sad is that there's a non-zero probability of that paper getting published in a journal somewhere. (Warning: NSFW language)

http://www.theguardian.com/australia...m-mailing-list

Best response yet. I'm sincerely regretting having felt that I didn't need to qualify my OP.

One can dream....

(I can't really see what type of "qualification" would make the OP successful in any way.)

This is comedy gold.

Blatant errors in your OP:

1. You laughably insinuated that this news article would be a problem
with bible literalists
2. You clearly have no clue what a biblical literalist is, which was further
confirmed by your subsequent posts which conflated the KJV-only fringe group with actual biblical literalists

What's even more funny, is that this has been pointed out to you already, but you insist that your OP is actually thread-worthy.

For someone who purports to be somewhat intelligent, you sure come
across like an obtuse bozo.

You guys are too harsh. It's true that the claim in the OP is misguided but the topic of authority and inspiration (in the Bible or even just in general) is interesting, as are textual criticism and biblical hermeneutics. It's historically interesting that they found some early drafts of the KJV. It's definitely true that lots of Christians could benefit from having a better understanding of those topics. Having a thread that allows for some discussion of any of those things seems fun to me :P

At best, the Bible is a piece of literature. It should be seen as historical narrative, a snapshot of temporal morality, and ideas full of whimsy and a hope for an observer who gives a **** about humanity.

I troll for fun in some of the threads, but I'm happy to lock on and blast away the careless bits of granite when needed.

<3 Take yourselves less seriously. This forum is common ground and no, many of you don't know as much or are as smart as you would like to think others think you are.

The harshness is in response to the OP's continued snarky and condescending responses to any criticism.

My initial attempts to correct were very cordial:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=32

Fair enough I suppose. Kumbaya etc etc

Not pointing anybody out in particular, but some of you take positions of aggression that are uncalled for.

If you found a design for solar panels from one of the single-digit Egyptian dynasties and the author was Ra, how untenable would your smug atheist positions be then?

Don't assume the burden of proof is on theists.

I would think aliens gave it to them since God (if their is one) hasn't given us any technology afaik.

epistemologically speaking, to the extent that we're discussing the existence of some kind of divinity, or the authority or inerrancy of a text, then the burden of proof is on the theists, and I don't think there's really any coherent theory of knowledge that would relieve them (us) of that burden

That is true to an extent. What some atheists are doing here aren't encouraging apologia, but what they consider to be authoritarian positions that they can abuse at will.

It is worth considering that there is also no formal disproof for the existence of Deus.

And considering again. Of course, the majority of atheists really, really hope such doesn't exist.

And human history is rife with examples of why they would want to reinforce and confirm their position.

Such muddled thinking.

leaving aside the problem of the applicability of "formal proof" to this kind of question, I would say that the abductive arguments against many common theological concepts are much stronger than any of the positive arguments, including any of the so-called proofs of God.

That is the idea, yeah.

Marxism is an ideal model until applied to human beings and their natural instincts.

The common concepts might have worked for the eras (and including current ones for the era this is) but like everything humanity discards, they do go obsolete.

Certain moral standards, though... Mostly are immovable.

And yet many are deserving of the labors, especially the Herculean ones.

It's not supposed to be a fixed concept, or a fixed idea, the thing that is God. Think of it as the boards containing a roller derby or ice hockey game (I'm Canadian; both are huge here...) and there is a distinction between 5 v 5 and pond hockey, and a play-off derby and a Friday night party.

One's morality will surprisingly enough more often than not shape one's existence. It surprises me how easily forgotten it is that the imagery of the Christian God (and to a lesser extent, the other two Abrahamic Gods that make up the troika) is little more than a bastardization of Zeus.

Zeus, Deus, Jesus, it ain't just us. Perhaps this century we can collate and simplify the idea of postmortality instead of depending on the idea of an unreachable God.

Either way, I are in no hurry, and neither am we.

Jumping all over me is just fun for them, and some I think genuinely don't understand how they come across. Whatever, I really wasn't expecting anything else.

How is it misguided? Yes it's possible literalists could just move their 'it's divine' cross hairs to the most recent version, or to any version, but there may be some who might find evidence of translators experimenting with various translations 'potentially problematic', which is all I ever said. I never claimed that this would bring the world of biblical inerrancy crashing down around the heads of believers everywhere, as you might think from reading some of the replies in this thread.

And yes, I think it's just an interesting subject anyway.

If one were to hazard a guess, one could speculate that the error might potentially be that you've decided that raising the specter of distant possibility as being relevant to a broader discussion. Especially when your OP is exactly two sentences long when you ignore the quote.

When combined with your extremely defensive and reactive post #10 in which you provided an irrelevant justification for your position, combined further with your bizarre definition in post #15 of Biblical literalism that includes the concept of "unaltered" that does not exist in any concept of literalism that I'm aware of, and you have the makings of a thread in which you don't really make a lot of sense to anybody.

As long as rather renal and pointless posts like the one above are ones you learn to walk around and focus on germane discussions on the subject, hell, yeah, it is.

And this is unlikely to be the earliest extant of Christian literature, just the latest discovery of something that moves the chains on literature a little further back.

Updates to the KJB might themselves be inerrancies or refinements. It is a tricky thing to remain objective yet presenting a subjective agreement by committee about such things.

Take the Torah or hadiths within the Qu'ran. They are still going to be worked over on Triton, and yes, not just for youth being raised in these faiths in future centuries.

Which is the essential point of such documents.

The person who says "You're wrong because..." is themselves in a position of wrongness. Knowing one isn't inherently objective about something is the strongest asset one can have about... anything.

I try to better at that, but this time I got down in the mud.

I think I'm going to enjoy discussions with you, when I can work out what you're saying.

So, yes, I didn't imagine that this discovery would rock the religious world, I did think it might be problematic for some.

Why do you believe this? Your first response was lacking in meaningful content.

I've said it before and I'll state it again here: I do troll, but as a method of dismissal designed to induce natural unfettered outrage.

We don't see eye to eye on everything, but as far as constructive discussion goes, yeah.

The fact that sometimes I nonchalantly set the bar way too high is not for it to be caught on the first attempt. It'd be pointless otherwise, because "showing your work" is so essential to self-reflection.

It's not on a scientific depth with the h. naledi discovery, but that is a different field of contemplation. Physical archaeology has barely wiped the dust off the surface of humanity so far.

Spiritual archaeology is much further well along. Awkward as the discovery is, it's little to do with what faith and belief is for most and the people who do acknowledge and want to take apart this document well should.

Take Francis' extremely recent invocation the other day: Chill, we're all people here, try to be a little more understanding.

And besides, the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity in particular) have splintered so far that you now find sects that have more to do with Islam and/or Judaism.

I saw a Jews for Jesus billboard this morning on my way in. Well, yeah. But the most comic aspect of it (not ha-ha funny but...) was the historical context and misinterpretations. After all, Isa is a reasonably important figure in Islam.

So the expansion of understanding comes not only into accumulating complexity of intellectual grounding on doctrine, but assessing documents like these and figuring out which parts fit into the overall picture.

Probably won't bother fly-by-monthly-commercial-lease-keep-the-reverend-in-BMW churches none, but that's the lot.

The OP uses the term "biblical literalist" which is a pejorative and inaccurate term, as no one interprets the Bible completely literally. There are literary types which are clearly symbolic: apocalyptic, poetry, proverbs, parables...

Why not delineate using the term "divinely inspired?"

Also, there are different levels of "KJV-onlyism."

- Someone who simply prefers the KJV because they think it's the best translation
- Someone who believes that the Greek text family that the KJV is based on
(Textus Receptus) is better than the families that most modern versions are based on:
(Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus)
- Someone who believes that the KJV is actually divinely inspired and should never be changed <---- these is the fringe whacked position that no reputable scholar, theologian, seminary takes

I'll repeat myself. The news article in the OP is not problematic for any of the above groups.

I tend to prefer the term "fundamentalist" rather than "literalist" because, as you say, literalism is something of a misnomer if taken literally

On the other hand, as a way of referencing a roughly identifiable religious culture and its associated hermeneutics, it is still descriptive and we know more or less what we mean by it.

MB: You asked me why the OP was misguided, and festeringzit more or less said it above. In practice none of the KJV-only fundamentalists have a view of the bible for which the existence of a draft would create a problem. I was just saying I think you don't quite understand how fundamentalists think about the bible in this regard

I like the following quote on Biblical literalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism

How can you know this? If by 'none', you actually mean 'an insignificant number' then you may be right, but if you actually mean 'none', I don't think that this is true. And stranger things than it being demonstrated unequivocally that you can't actually trust a translation have turned people away from religion before. And, at this point we don't really now what specific nuggets of truth that draft contains, hence my use of the word 'potentially', but you're dismissing it as if even the concept of a conflict raising draft can be hand waved away by every fundamentalist out there.

I know how some think, what is it that you know?

By "in practice" I do really mean "an insignificant number", but I'm also not making absolute population numbers the criterion here, but rather published dogmatic views. Obviously it's impossible for me to establish that some exact number of real people will be troubled by this news, but what I can establish is that, if you read what KJV-only fundamentalists have to say about their own views, they are not sensitive to the existence of a KJV draft.

As far as how I know what those views are, I have actually read some of their books, as well as a lot of other material about textual criticism, biblical authority, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. I've never encountered a version of KJV-only fundamentalism that would seem to care about a draft, and given that I think I've had a fairly good survey of the literature, and since some brief internet searching didn't turn anything else up, I conclude that such views, if they exist, really are insignificant.