Daily Irreverence: Biblical Changes

My old pal Stu posted this on his blog today, and it continues on a certain thread we've been having on his blog Daily Irreverence, which really is worth a read. I've brought up the debate with several people outside the blogosphere but I thought it was about time to bring it to the World.

"Biblical Changes

This article raises an interesting point about the Bible: it has changed a lot over the years. Which is to be expected, in the times of hand-copying all works did. One book I’ve read (I think it was The Ancestor’s Tale) even used different copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to illustrate how mutation works.

But back to the point: the Bible changes. The percentage of Americans who believe that the Bible is literally true is large, but hard to pin down. I’ve seen numbers as high as 60% and as low as 10%, which raises a bunch of questions about those polls, but they’re beside the point. I’m curious as to how those people, however numerous, would respond to the fact that the Bible is different, in some cases very different, now than it was two-thousand years ago.

Because I can only see three possibilities:

1. God inspired the Bible then inspired the changes.
   
2. God inspired the Bible but men changed it.
   
3. Men created the Bible and men changed it.

None of those possibilities bode well for literalists. The first is the best, but why would God change the book that he wrote? Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t make much sense. If God is perfect then why would his works need editing? Possibility two is worse, given that it means that man messed up what God wrote, but the basic message is probably still there. This is still problematic, because why wouldn’t God stop man from mangling his works?

The third possibility is the absolute worst, since it takes God completely out of the equation, and makes the Bible no more important than The Epic of Gilgamesh or the proverbs of Ahikar the Wise, or Moby Dick (the first two were picked as they predate the parts of the Bible to which they bear striking resemblance). This is also the most plausible, and it’s the conclusion that most Biblical scholars, like Bart D. Ehrman, reach. Ehrman wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus about this very topic.

The Bible is undoubtedly an important book, but not because it’s the word of God."

To which I'm responding:

"Oh yeah, totally. The actual words have changed many times in translation. That's a clerical issue. This is what religious people argue about amongst themselves and it makes for very interesting debate and has in fact been the nature of theological debate since the Greeks, and the Hebrews before them. The Judeo-Christian, Western tradition- including Science -is predicated on a belief that reason and rationality are the source of wisdom. God is what we term the ultimate source of wisdom. Therefore if one believes in reason as the source of wisdom and morality (on a personal or social level), one believes in God.

You believe in God, Stu. The principles that you've been talking about "as a godless source of Morality" are God as defined. We believe in exactly the same thing. the society in which we live is a fundamental product of our history and in turn, our history is tied to the civilization in which we live, and that history has always been predicated on exactly this philosophy. I'm trying to build a word for this, but for now the best one I can think of is "Us". This perspective acknowledges the flaws of mankind on individual and social levels and begs man to subdue his flaws (or sins, if I may borrow a term) with his reason and rationality, hard work and sacrifice. We know that we can never be completely pure, but we must every moment of our lives strive to be closer to purity.

There is no way to derive morality outside of God because God is, means, expresses, and verifies morality. I think I have to take a mathematics course to write this out better, but I know that I am right. If reason is the only thing that means anything to you than you ought to admit that you believe in God. Things will start to make a lot more sense.

The Scientific method is a tool among many, and this new atheism that you're buying into and Wired is writing about is nothing but another hypocritical authoritarianism. It's a self-contradictory fraud."

Which it is.