OK, so...this...went to an odd place...
As things are apt to do when krellin and Putin mix...but to get back on track:
@Octavious:
"The trouble I have with many of them is they tend to have a big focus on issues between whites and blacks which, living in a country where there is a 2% black population, doesn't really speak to me. I can see how to an American it's a big deal and all, but to me its all very tedious."
Hm, interesting point...and wow, only 2% of British citizens are black? I'd have thought it'd be more than that, what with immigration from previous colonies and such, and an increased amount of Muslim immigrants...unless by black we mean strictly those of African descent? (Which is technically all of us at some point, but anyway.)
@krellin:
"Yes, Obi, the "religious" attach value to exodus. And you are somehow making the assinine assumption that every human is religious and Christian? Uhhhh....NOT. And, as I have stated before, the sad majority of Chrisitans I meet haven't actually *read* the Bible....instead they sit in Sunday school and have pablum stories told to them."
1. Um...no, that's NOT my assumption, as you damn well know since you quoted the REST of my passage dealing with atheists and those of other views afterwards, so...thanks for taking my comment not only to the ridiculous extreme, but out of context as well? Always a sign of good reading.
2. I'm not disagreeing that the majority of religious folks probably haven't read Exodus for themselves--I simply said it had value to them, WHAT KIND of value is open to interpretation there. Obviously MLK read his Bible, but let's suppose he didn't, but still knew the basic plot of the Out-of-Egypt story in Exodus, as most people do (and by basic, I mean REALLY basic--Israelites/Jews enslaved in Egypt, Burning Bush, Moses says "Let my people go," Pharaoh says "Go pound sand," Plagues and then parting the Red Sea and then boom the underdog Israelite/Jews make it out to "freedom," just the absolute basic-basics) and he still used it as a recurring theme in his sermons, including the famous "Mountaintop" speech he have shortly before his death.
We could all agree that, even just knowing OF Exodus would have provided this alternate MLK some value, yes? Would have given him fodder for his speeches and inspired his people?
There are a LOT of different ways a text can be valuable...and sometimes, just knowing OF a text can be valuable. What's more, you may benefit from a text inadvertently--
Even if people haven't read a word of Shakespeare, they have--the man invented hundreds of words and phrases that we use every day, so whether they know it or not, there's still value in those texts for giving them the words they use every day.
"Now you are just getting stupid. So, to you, by your example, if I stick 100 monkeys in a room and each have them pound out a page and I bind them together and call it literature, it has value, and is therefore great literature. "Why do you say this, krellin? That seems absurd!" you say.
"Simple, my good friend Obi, because I called it literature, and I will now debate its merit with whomever I can find..."
THAT is the standard of good literature you have now defined by saying Exodus has value because the atheists think it's stupid."
...No...my point was a religious text can be of use to atheists in exposing the flaws of theism--not simply that you declare whatever you wish literature by fiat and then simultaneously declare it to be stupid.
And like it or not--the definition of "literature," unless we look to narrow it for our own purposes, is pretty broad...I'd argue your example doesn't work because your monkeys don't know what the letters mean and therefore aren't really "writing," they're pressing buttons randomly rather than trying to tell a story or write a poem or communicate via text in any way we'd normally consider permissibly.
THAT BEING SAID, there are those who WOULD call that literature.
I think they're complete moron, but to really clarify why we'd again need to come up with a working definition of "literature" that excludes some things...including, presumably, things that are written by beings who don't even know what they're typing or saying and therefore are at most pushing buttons for their own reasons or else are simply pushing buttons at random, and we'd then have to say that randomness isn't consistent with literature and say why--presumably because we imply a certain level of authorial intent when it comes to writing--and so on.
But presuming that Exodus is a text written by at least semi-coherent men and not by monkeys--there's a joke in there somewhere, but I'm just gonna leave that alone--we can therefore probably all agree that, in the loosest meaning of the word, it's "literature."
I don't think I need to explain why Exodus would have historical value (by which I mean that it's affected our political and artistic history, NOT that it's actually historically accurate) and I think I can assume that MOST theists and atheists would agree to this.
An atheist can admit that Exodus has had a profound impact on everything from painting to Cecil B. Demille films to MLK's speeches and so on.
If you want to argue that atheists using Exodus as a referential text on why religion is born of low means and what it's problems are doesn't work as an argument, how about the historical/artistic argument? AGAIN, there is value in a text even if you don't yourself READ that text, because if it's powerful and/or pervasive enough, it's going to impact the world and popular culture around you...and there's value in THAT.
"OK...people that don't place a lot of value in Exodus other than it's value as a fairy tale they may or may not know of: Atheists, HIndus, Buddhists, Wiccans, Christians that don't read their Bible (i.e. most), Muslims...shall I go on?"
1. Muslims take Moses as a prophet, so pretty sure they'd care about the basic Exodus story, whatever form it may take in their Koran, so, that's an example refuted...
2. I've already said why Christians that don't read their Bible and Atheists would place value in Exodus, unless you're going to argue that the historical/artistic point fails (which knowing you, you probably are, but I'll wait to hear why you think that with bated breath...)
3. Hindus and Buddhists I'll give you, but in fairness, I AM mainly talking about the WESTERN literary/historic/artistic tradition here, krellin, so I'm not sure that's an entirely fair way to critique Exodus or any Western text...the Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita are HUGE Eastern texts that many in the West have not only probably never read, but chances are have never even heard of and, if they did, might think were just strange and discount them because, well, the Eastern and Western traditions are just that different. That doesn't mean every Westerner has discounted them (maybe most famously T.S. Eliot alludes to those Eastern works, and of course the Beatles have their own connections to India and George Harrison especially got into that) but I don't think it's fair to use Exodus' lack of value to Buddhists and Hindus as a point of criticism because really that's an East/West thing...Homer and Shakespeare and all that may not matter to them, but I don't think many would hold that against the authors or claim that as a reason to say they lack value, it's just that the Eastern and Western traditions and cultural ideals are so different it's hard to get Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare and other such Western inventions to "work" in the Eastern tradition, and vice versa.
4. ...I honestly don't know all that much about Wiccans...I used to have a friend whose mother was Wiccan, but aside from that, yeah, I don't know, so I guess I can't say. That being said, A. I don't think they're that big a part of the population, so it's not a huge counterexample the way Buddhists/Hindus might have been, and B. Since they still LIVE in the West (at least mainly) I'll venture to say that at least most of them have heard of Exodus/Shakespeare, and if they live in the English-speaking world, they use Shakespeare's words and have probably heard of MLK, so if they value the Civil Rights Movement, they may value his influences, one of which would be Exodus. A stretch, but that's the best I have, as yeah, they probably don't care, I grant you.
"The Bible, as literature, is a rather dull, drab work. It is disconnected, often time confusing and even seemingly contradictory ( to the un-studied, the studied would say). It's prose is choppy, it's poetry is mediocre...as literature goes, please do not attempt to duplicate if you wish a career as an author."
Well, only a fool or prophet would ever try and write down the Bible...
I leave it to the folks here to decide which of these options is more likely for the original.
;)
But I'm going to (partially) disagree with you on the Bible being bad literature. Kind of.
There are a lot, a LOT, A LOT of stories in the Bible that are bad. I completely agree.
If I were to (hehe) play Devil's Advocate for the Bible, however, I'd say:
1. Discounting the idea that this is a perfectly-ordered and ordained list by God (and I don't think I need to say why I'm throwing out that option) the Bible is basically an anthology--but worse, it's an anthology put together by people who are compiling these stories LONG after the original authors died off. As such, yeah, the Bible's a choppy, plodding mess...but I can't entirely fault the authors since they weren't the ones who decided the order--I fault the editors, as it were. that doesn't change that fact that it IS a choppy, plodding mess, except
2. I think the Bible works better when you "take it apart" and pick and choose stories rather than take it as a single Canon. (Again, this DOES NOT work if you're viewing the work theologically, but ONLY if you're reading it as fiction.) I think there are certain parts certain Books of the Bible--I'll cite Exodus, Job, and the Psalms as three examples--that are at the very least "passable" for various reasons
The Out of Egypt/Moses story is very, very, VERY rough around the edges and filled with plot problems, but that's the case with a lot of old oral legends/epics...Beowulf has some odd hiccups in logic too, but we still treat it as a great epic and one of the major starting points of English literature. That being said, after they get out of Egypt, Exodus gets pretty bad pretty fast...but for all I know, the original author/oral performer told a cool made-up story about the Jews getting out of Egypt with flashy miracles and all that, and decades later it got fused with rabbinic dogma and became what it is today. There's the SEED of a good story in Exodus, at least, and the seed of one of the most influential stories of all-time at that, the sort of people-rising-up-as-underdogs story, and so that, at least, gives the book some value, I think, as a work of literature--it's at the very least salvageable in a way that, say, Deuteronomy or (to take a story) 1 Samuel isn't.
Then you have Job, which is honestly in my opinion the weirdest book of the entire Old Testament, just because it's so different from everything else in there...Lucifer just strolls up to God as if they're at the water cooler--"Hey God, old buddy, old pal," "Why hello there, asshole, wanna make a bet and totally screw up a guy's life as well as kill his kids?" "You know it!" ;) It's so different from the rest of the Judeo-Christian works in the Bible I'm half-tempted to say it had to have been written before the Jewish tradition was "set," at a time when there were a lot of different and conflicting ideas about God and people were still talking about and debating about God and theology in a more philosophical way rather than "Here is the book, The One Book to Rule Them All, the book is always right, shut up." So I appreciate the book and author for at least trying to be different and, to its credit, at least trying to answer what's arguably the oldest argument against God's existence as a divine entity--"If God exists and God is good, why do bad things happen to good people?" And Job and his asshole friends talk it out...kind of. It's the closest you get to a Socratic Dialogue in the Old Testament, and that combined with the way that God and Lucifer act a lot more like the Greek gods would--ie, making bets, just strolling on up to each other, etc.--makes me wonder if this was written around the period where Jews were living in close proximity to the Hellenized world, and maybe a Jewish author tried to combine the two traditions as best he could and take Jewish theology and Greek philosophy and their conception of how gods interact and throw it into a blender. The answers that are still given to Job are still crap (and so over the top I wish I could say this was the job of a covert atheist, because Job does a really good job as a text of showing off what a huge dick atheists claim God to be...and before you challenge that, Mujus, God makes Job sick and kills his kids and then doesn't even bring them back, he gives him "new" kids at the end, so, yeah, God killed innocent kids to prove a point and win a bet with Lucifer...he's a dick) but I appreciate the book for at least trying, and I get the impression this comes from a writer who was genuinely trying to square the circle in more ways than one and combine both the Greek and Jewish traditions as well as try and find some explanation for the cruelty of the world...it's one of the only times in the Bible you see a book step back and try and actually answer some criticisms the reader might be having--and if the work was written alone (as it almost certainly was, given the huge difference in its style from most anything else in the Old Testament) then that means someone somewhere saw the need all the way 2,000+ years ago to try and answer some criticisms against God and at the very least they seem to have at least tried. They fail...and their answer basically boils down to "Because he's God, you shouldn't doubt or curse Him even when you seemingly have every right to do so," so the ending is easily the worst part of the story, sadly, but AT LEAST I can give them credit for doing what seemingly no one else was either brave enough or insightful enough to do and at least take time out to address the fact that maybe, just maybe, there was a genuine philosophical objection to God via the Problem of Evil, and that maybe they ought to try and address that point. I'd like to think it took at least some courage to write a book where the idea of God as less than perfect or on par with Lucifer is even entertained, albeit briefly, so I give it credit there.
And then we have the Psalms, and there are so many that chances are you're bound to find at least a few you like, even if you dislike the rest. It's poetry and for once it seems to clearly be MEANT as figurative poetry, so it's OK to be interpretive...I don't have to get hung up on the fact God's being a dick because, for once, we're focusing on the figurative language. Sure, they're meant to praise God, and it gets to the point where it almost starts to sound just a bit creepy in terms of how psychologically-dependent the authors (I'll assume it wasn't "the historical David" who wrote these, and by "historical David" I mean whatever figure gave rise to that legend, since it seems, much like King Arthur, there's some evidence to suggest there WAS a fairly prosperous kingdom in Judea at one point, and there's been a lot of scholarship on that, so chances are there probably was an actual figure who inspired the David myth, the same way there very well might have been an actual leader in Britain who fought the Anglo-Saxons and won briefly which may have inspired King Arthur) are on God. I mean, they really, really, REALLY seem to love and need God, don't they? ;) If you wrote that kind of poetry to a girl, and said you loved her and needed her THAT much, if that girl had any brains she'd slowly back away from you, un-friend you on Social Media and maybe get a restraining order out. xD But since they're just poems and NOT meant to be taken as theological fact, I can take them in the context of their period and say that, in the same way we see some conventions of love in Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare and so on that would not fly today, we take these claims of love for what they are and in the context of the time they were written. For those who ask "Why don't you allow that for OTHER Biblical texts when you criticize them, Obi, in the way you repeatedly bash 1 Samuel?" I say, again, the saving grace of the Psalms is that they are DESIGNED as works of fiction. Since that's the case, I CAN cut them some slack, since they're not arguing "this is how God defied science and logic and create the Earth in 6 days," or "And this is why killing all the Amalekite men, women, and children was totally 100% the moral thing to do." Most of the rest of the Bible is made up of things I'm (presumably) supposed to take as either fact or dogma, either "this really happened, no matter what science/archaeology says" or "this is moral, no matter how disgustingly-awful it seems." The Psalms, by contrast, are just poems--I can cut fictional poems some slack because they're not claiming to be universal truths while simultaneously urinating on moral, logical and scientific objections to the contrary. There's some decent examples of poetry's humble beginnings in the Psalms, so for me, at least, they're worth a pass on those grounds.
And as one final addendum, to answer the (fair) question, "What about the New Testament, Obi, all three of your examples come from the Old Testament?" I say...
Eh? I didn't grow up with the New Testament, of course, being a Jew, and so while of course I knew the Jesus story, I didn't read the Gospels or Revelations or the Letters or Corinthians or any of that until college. And...well, really, I don't feel qualified to say whether or not those are good stories or not yet. I can tell you that of the Gospels I hate John the most (and you can probably guess why, the damn anti-Semite) and I have a soft spot for a part of Luke just because I heard Linus give a speech from it every time I saw "A Charlie Brown Christmas" growing up (so that'st the one passage from the New Testament I can quote, lol, and all because of Linus saying "Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about") but yeah...I'm not qualified to argue whether it's good or bad or salvageable literature.
Is it valuable? ...If you live in the West, I have to say yes, because, well, we're founded on the four cornerstones of Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian thought and ideology, and the Jesus story's one of the biggest tenants of that. Chances are you already know the Jesus myth. Chances are you've seen movies or read books inspired by or influenced by that myth.
Aaaaaaaand that's about as much as I care to try and play Devil's Advocate for the Bible as Literature. :p Thank you for joining me on another edition of Obi's TL;DR Show, and I'll see you next time (if you're foolish enough to tune in.) :p