When I hear the word "evolution" I take in a generally positive way. It is a model for analysis and study that can be used by scholars to help them understand the world around them.kwrandolph wrote:It’s based on the standard evolutionary model.Stephen Hughes wrote:The documentary hypothesis that you two are mentioning in your discussion is something that I glanced over when I was in college, but now looks like something that I should be looking into further.
One of the first questions that springs to mind is, How does the documentary hypothesis deal with the pre-documentary period when orality?
"Conscience" and "guilt" don't exist within people, they are social constructs imposed on people to control them. You haven't called me an anti-semite yet, but I hold most of the views that you have said that you don't - I approach the study of the Bible through secular scolarship, the documentary hypothesis makes good sense - but is not a definative as there may be other viable models to explain the transition from oral to written form, my primary assumption in reading the Bible is that it is an entirely human composition which has undergone human transmission patterns, and when read it as an historical document we must assume the non-existence of God (no Deus ex machina), everything that is seemingly miraculous is a mythologisation of scientificly explicable natural processes, and all historical accounts must be assumed to be distortions of what happened for some literary purpose.kwrandolph wrote:Where have I called you an “anti-semite”?Stephen Hughes wrote:I'm not a literalist or fundamentalist and I see the Bible as a great work of human literature. ... don't call me an anti-semite.
To me this sounds like a guilty conscience calling out when I said nothing of the sort.
It may not be clear from what I have said previously, but in my mind a non-literate society is superior to a literate one. (I think that others involved in this discussion hold the opposite view). A society with oral history is a society with good communication within it - social cohesion, and good intergenerations communication - social continuity. To read here that such and so a people were inferior because they had an oral transmission of their history is non-sense in my world view. Textualisation of an oral tradition is the codification of power, where the recorders and recallers of history externalise that history that had once been kept personally by lore-keepers who in themselves were recorders - keepers - and retellers of a society's lore. That is to say that a scribe who needs to rely on pen and ink is something less than a wise woman (or man) who is the embodiment of historical and religious recording.
Your personal interpretation of life may not be shared by all.kwrandolph wrote:Religion permeates every facet of life. For example, when I write computer programs, they’re based on the philosophical expectations and thought patterns derived from Biblical theology. There’s no such thing as “non-religious”.
Literacy in a week or less??? Have you ever tried to teach literacy? How much do governments spend on trying to improve it?kwrandolph wrote:But in societies where the tools of writing can be picked up by almost everyone in a week or less, then whether or not people were literate depended on how much they valued it.