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- From: christen@astro.ocis.temple.edu (Carl Christensen)
- Newsgroups: alt.atheism
- Subject: Re: How much should we read?
- Message-ID: <1993Jan22.034815.19776@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu>
- Date: 22 Jan 93 03:48:15 GMT
- References: <1993Jan21.211926.3642@blaze.cs.jhu.edu>
- Sender: news@cronkite.ocis.temple.edu (NetWork News (readnews))
- Organization: Temple University
- Lines: 22
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-
- Ken Arromdee (arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu) wrote:
- : A religion is barbaric if it teaches barbaric things. If it teaches
- : non-barbaric things based on misinterpretations of a Bible that, interpreted
- : properly, should instead be read as teaching barbaric things... well, that
- : doesn't count.
- : If the scholar discovers that the Bible teaches cruelty, all that means is tha
- : modern Judaism has made a mistake in giving passages a non-cruel reading, but
- : it does _not_ mean that Judaism teaches cruelty. Anti-semitism probably _is_
- : a motive for such a leap.
-
- I don't see how someone could give Deuteronomy, Numbers, etc. (as posted
- elsewhere) a 'non-cruel' reading. Perhaps modern Judaism doesn't follow
- the proscribed rules in these books exactly (luckily for us :) ), but these
- rules and laws must have been what was once taught and followed. So this
- scholar translating similar scrolls could have found this repugnant (by
- todays standards) and may not necessarily have been steeped in anti-Semitism.
-
-
- Carl Christensen christen@astro.ocis.temple.edu
- Department of Computer Science
- Temple University
- Philadelphia, PA 19122 USA (215) 735-6787
-