Zeitgeist, the bible, Hegel and the true word of god

Please take a moment to read and respond to this post! I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and feel as though people on ATS will, actually, get it!

I'd like to use the bible as a lens to understand history, tho I'm not particularly religious. Why? its, for lack of a better term, pretty meaty! The history of the bible, as a text, is immensely more illuminating from a cultural standpoint than the words written themselves, which have been translated far from their original meaning.

Keep in mind translation, even by our modern communications standards, endangers and distorts context, fundamentally disturbing the message of the original (especially when dealing with highly contextual romantic languages like latin/English/italian/etc). Now, try to imagine the accuracy of translation in the world circa 100bc, around when the septuagint brought the canonized herbrew texts (what comprises the Christian old testament) into Greek, for mass consumption by the literate classes. Multiply this process, and its inherent flaws, times 10 (which is a conservative accounting for the amount of major translations) and you'll have a decent impression of how disconnected our bible is from the time and teachings referred to as those of Jesus Christ.

The king james revision in 1765 (est) contained 24,000 edits alone, from typos the the removal of entire margin/footnote sections included in the septuagint. In fact, the most massive of institutional bible revisions were commisioned in response to Church paranoia over margin notes found in older translations.

Why be paranoid? Because christians, with the emergence of education and literacy, began to understand Latin, study the text/accompanying notes, and found within them ideas considered very dangerous by those leading the political structure/hierarchy of the Catholic church. Modern anthropological study of tattered, antiquated texts have allowed many of these notes to be understood today.

Why is this important to our discussion here? Because these notes explained, both from a literary and historic perspective, many of the myths contained within the bible. In reading them, we observe the logical progression of cultural ideas and belief: from Sumeria and Babylon to Egypt, to Judaic societies onto Greek, Muslim, and the Christian idealogy we associate with the church today. In reflecting on the Crusades, the inquisitions (and other forms of historic anti-antisemitism), colonization, imperialism and all the way to today, we might understand why those controlling the church might find such elements of the bible threatening.

The church, especially in medieval/renaissance times, is a political organization, with sovereign control much like nations in our time. They benefited, rather directly, from the pillaging in the crusades and xenophobia of the inquisitions, in material and cultural capital (nothing keeps people paying taxes like crippling fear of jews/muslims/insert whomever else here). Without doubt, such benefits would be quickly lost if those enabling them (the followers), began to realize their preachers were perverting and deliberately covering up essential details of their faith's universal text. So the church revises the whole thing, removes insightful notes and decries any prior translation as unacceptable heresy.

(CONTINUED BELOW)


[edit on 19-4-2008 by chaeone86]

Everyone-- Religous and cultural difference, often the key which turns these type of discussions, is the true falsity contained within the Bible. The bible is NOT the word of god as we understand words and literature. We are conditioned to understand texts like novels, linear progressions of ideas contained within an easily consumed format. Novel form did not emerge until the 19th century, and we must read anything before this outside of our own reference, as best we possibly can.

HOWEVER, the bible, in a rather Hegelian sense (ps> Hegel= the philosopher who coined the zeitgeist dialectical ideology), is the word of god (the GEIST or SPIRIT of collected conscious), as it documents the progression of cultural and spiritual conscious of entire civilizations across time and space. Read Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit and you see the emergence of these concepts. Today, Hegel's same philosophy echoes within the spirit gradually manifesting through the internet.

In this, the bible represents the word of god, the disembodied collective of many civilizations. That is the "sacred truth" our society very much needs to understand. The stories themselves are ancillary, and explain ideas like astrology, passage of time, econmoics, ethics, philosophy, etc (astrology being the most important and, sadly, most poorly understood of all). The Bible, often used as a premise to discuss religious difference and "who has it right" hides the true teachings of Jesus, Moses, Budhha, Dionysus, Horus, and all the various Christ figures who have been since exalted:

WE ARE ALL THE SAME! not in a cute, hug your Muslim neighbor afternoon special diversity week tolerance museum BS way. Quite literally, rather. We are the same. we do not achieve universality through religion or church or community or through diversity awareness (as we think we do today)-- we have it, inherently, within us to begin with. The bible, as a text, illuminates this connection. Unfortunately, the Church DID remove the footnotes, references, and citations that would most effectively communicate this en mass.


PEACE!



[edit on 19-4-2008 by chaeone86]

[edit on 19-4-2008 by chaeone86]