From: doug@uuisis.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Subject: Re: Proof: God wrote the Bible
Organization: International Shared Information Service (Ottawa)
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 92 20:41:51 GMT


>I challenge you Doug.  Here it is:  You get together all of the verses in
>the bible that state that the bible is a document that kills, and I'll
>put together all the verses that says that it is a document that speaks
>truthfully.   I'll be happy to do this by email.

And what would that prove? It would prove that the document contains a
good number of both sorts of assertions along with a more important set
which you point to:

>>You see? The Bible can never be more than a pointer, a guide, a witness,
>>a source of information and insight. It cannot be an arbiter of truth
>>because it's meaning is dependent on the reader's understanding.
>>
>
>Jesus said that is why the Counselor would come, and that he would
>never leave us and be with us to the end.  The Counselor is obviously
>the arbiter of truth.

EXACTLY! The letter killeth, while the Spirit (Counselor) gives life.

If one wants to know what is true, the Bible is a tool, one that is
COMPLETELY useless without spiritual understanding and sensitivity. And
likewise the tool is only as good as the spiritual awareness of the
person using it.

I am not saying there is anything 'wrong' with the Bible, rather I am
saying that a narrow and literal interpretation of the Bible by a reader
who is a fool will result in a lot of non-truth.

Actually I don't think we are arguing at cross purposes at all beyond my
reluctance to agree to the statement "The Bible is 100% true and
reliable". I really choke on that because it is so often used to lend
authority to a completely bogus interpretation. It MUST be remembered
that what you think it means - and this goes for anything you read - has
as much to do with *your* capacity to understand as it has to do with
the actual thing that is written. And therefore the idea of the Bible as
some external yardstick or arbiter is a silly one. It is never anything
other than the reader makes of it.

It is really just an argument for intellectual integrity and against
over-simplification of the rather large and subtle problem of textual
interpretation *AND* spiritual insight *BOTH* of which determine what
the reader supposes the text to mean. And these determinants *bias* the
interpretation and saying that the text is true says nothing at all
about whether any given person's understanding of the text is true.

The text and the reader are inter-dependent. Except as it is read and
understood by people, the text has no meaning. So discussions of the
text cannot take place without discussions of the biases of the readers.

Therefore to say "The Bible is True" *requires* one examine the
interpreter as closely as that which is interpreted.

The Bible does not contain or consist of truth or ideas. It consists of
bleached woodpulp and ink. A clever person discovers that the ink marks
can be interpreted as words. The words may evoke or elicit ideas in the
mind of the reader.  Those ideas may be true or false depending on the
quality of the reader. 

The "Bible" is not an abstract external thing. It is no more and no less
than what each of us understands of it - the sum total of ideas we've
each had while reading it. I know for a fact that in many cases two
people can read the same text and derive precisely opposite and mutually
exclusive 'ideas'. Each argues "The Text is True". Each is a complete
fool because the issue has much less to do with the text and the author
and much more to do with the silliness of the respective readers.

The text may well be 'true', but it doesn't follow that every idea that
every fool derives from a reading of it is true.

I dunno what there is to argue here really. It seems so basic and
obvious and self-evident to me that what an author intends to convey
when writing certain words and what readers pick up by way of understood
meaning when reading those words are *not* always identical and depend
just as much on the understanding and effort of the reader as they do on
the accuracy or truth of the author's words.

=Doug