Re: OT: The will of God

[Stephen A. Lawrence]

Merlyn wrote:
Of course I'm being nit-picky Stephen,
I believe the bible to be a good book, and to have
some excellent lessons for our society, but I do not
believe it to be the revealed word of God as you
obviously do.
The main point is that the bible you and I read is not
only a translation of a translation, but the original
written text had been passed by oral tradition for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Fundamentalists always cite that God influenced those
keepers of knowledge so that the translation is just
as accurate as the original, but I have problems
believing that.
Right ... among other things, that belief makes it hard to understand 
how there could have been multiple editions of the King James version, 
with corrections in the later editions.  (I don't recall exactly how 
many editions it went through; more than two, for sure; possibly several 
dozen.)

It's also hard to see why leading rabbis felt it necessary to add 
checksums to the Masoretic text, if we discount the notion that they had 
observed copy errors in extant manuscripts.  (Don't recall the exact 
date -- some time in the vicinity of 1000 AD, I think, well before the 
King James version was compiled using, in part, the Masoretic text of 
the OT.  This is the earliest use of checksums for the purpose of 
preserving data integrity of which I'm aware.)

In any case, my post was not entirely serious and even a bit sarcastic; 
your response is far more level-headed.  But this has gotten so far off 
topic that it's hard to see any connection at all to alternative energy 
sources so I should probably go back to lurking until I have something 
more useful to say.

History abounds with examples of men
misinterpreting scripture to justify heinous acts.
 

Yes.  It's worth emphasizing the "misinterpreting" part:
Considering the actual words of Jesus, as recorded in the Bible, when 
Christians do bad things, they do them _in_ _spite_ _of_ the teachings 
of Jesus -- not _because_ of them.

The same could be said of Buddists, I expect, though I haven't read more 
than a few paragraphs of the Buddist scriptures.

And now I really will shut up :-)
Cheers...