What do you reckon, dudes and females?

I guess this comes out of whether religious texts are responsible for atrocities committed in their name, either by encouraging them, or by not condemning them. Is there any reason why we shouldn't at least add a "warning: please note, this book is NOT telling you to kill anyone" sticker to the front of every Bible?

whocares

I don't think so.

I'm not religious, but if religious books are literally the word of God, who has the authority to edit God's word.

Maybe with those books divinely inspired, there's a case.

I dunno, if God wanted a new version of His word, surely he'd send down another prophet to tell us.

here i aaaaaaaam

We should burn them all and live in reality.

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Juices like wine, like the blood in the sands.

Revise, revise, revise! Make them relevant to the time we live in. I'll go grab my Qur'an and get revising.

The start of XXI, THE PROPHETS:

Yo, some men turn away from God and shit, and don't even, like, remember his tidings and whatnot, and totally pay attention to all this other stuff. Woahs.

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Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Way I see it, God already compromise His word's integrity a bit by going through human "interpreters". Plus we wouldn't be changing what God "wrote", just adding footnotes and stuff.

I don't know, it may be that God is totally down with everyone who's ever killed in His name. It'd be pretty fucked up though, wouldn't it?

revise?

how about recycling them into toilet paper for 3rd world nations

Who would put in the footnotes? The reason so many religions read from the same book is because different people interpret things differently. If you put footnotes in every bible and every Qu'ran etc then some opposing group or person would get angry and start doing something dramatic like burning them or killing people who print them or whatever anyways. The kind of revision I think you're talking about already happens though, doesn't it? 0 in the way different leaders of the churches preach, using different parts of the bible or twisting certain lines to mean whatever might be fashionable or what they think is appropriate or what they want to emphasise...I was brought up Catholic, like the rest of my family and when my mothers generation went to school and Mass God was this fearsome figure who was ever ready to judge you and condemn you to hell and told the priests and nuns to beat you because you were evil for writing with your left hand, by the time I went to school he was an all loving old man who thought of us as his children and was ever ready to forgive us, as long as we said sorry every now and then...?

Isn't most of the paper too slick? Or will the recycling deal with that? Frankly, I'd rather people in the third world didn't wipe at all than wipe with shitty 1-ply.

__________________
Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

They're already made out of that stuff!

sudanese cumshot in your eyes

Revising?

Or reinterpreting?

Big difference. I was under the impression that Ankara, assuming it inspired this thread, is reinterpreting.


Revising the bible or any other religious text would flat-out not fly, whether it was for good or for bad (and who is to decide that anyway?). People base their lives around these documents and they're ideally not to be meddled with like that.

The only exception I can think of is if it was a new (and, well, yet another) translation from ancient texts. But then you couldn't expect anything to be wildly different that way, save for maybe the odd word perhaps having different connotations attached to it, likely by modern society, and that could make some difference (and that's ignoring the differences between modern languages as well, which can be fairly vast), although fundamentally it'd be the same. But then I think people have a tendency to read things as they understand them, rather than how they're meant (however that is?), and then you arrive at the fact that everyone interprets it a bit differently.

A reinterpretation means diddly squat in real terms unless it is the basis for legislation. Just add it to the pile, really. Another sect if you will. My only concern is if people adopt the changed values without the appropriate change in legislation, because that might be a slightly scary prospect for some.

I don't know quite what the Turkish government intend to do with this reinterpretation that they've commissioned, but they're probably going to meet with some heavy resistance if it's extremely radical.

It looks pretty obviously like an attempt to Westernise their values a bit, and we all know why they'd want to do that. And it makes me uneasy, not because it's a blatant step towards EU entry (a whole nother kettle of fish in its own right, and not something I particularly oppose tbh) but more because this may have an impact on Islam as a whole and for everybody, not just for Turkey. To potentially be meddling with an entire religion for the sake of one country joining the "Christian Club" strikes me as horrendous.

__________________
Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

Q: Should we revise religious texts over the years?

A: I thought 'we' did? Hence the 'New James Version, et al.'

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ignorance is no excuse for stupidity

Sorta. There's a strong argument against the Bible being the immutable word of God. Not that I think that the mistranslation will have distorted the "original" meaning so much that a phrase which said "OK, just so we're clear, killing people = not cool. OK?" would have been rewritten as "killing people is fine as long as you think it is, but people killing you is still bad" or whatever.

Once we accept that a text is mutable, logically, preserving the spirit, the meaning of the original becomes more important than the specific words. Obviously you've then got to determine what the spirit of it is, and even the original text is wantonly obtuse, the implication being that God wanted it to be (mis)interpreted.


It didn't. What's the story there?

Oh haha. Mad coincidence. Looks like half my post is pretty irrelevant to your question then, but it's nice to have a recent example to examine.

Anyway, a section of the Turkish government that deals with religious affairs commissioned a reinterpretation by Ankara University of some Islamic text, basically. It sounds like they're looking at whether the words of the text in question are indeed those of Muhammed, and if they've been misconstrued or given a different slant based on the values (or the common sense) of the Muslim people.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | Can Turkey re-interpret Islam?

Edit: looking back at that story just now, the BBC seem to jump back and forth between "revision" and "reinterpretation" throughout that article, which is a bit annoying. I still feel there's a pretty crucial difference. I wouldn't class what the university have done, from reading that, as a revision, unless they're going to actually remove or change the words of whatever ancient texts they're working with..

__________________
Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

Revising = changing the text itself, reinterpreting = changing the "official" meaning, right?

Yeah, that's pretty much how I look at it.

__________________
Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.