This isn't specific to the Bible (although it's prevalent in that community), but I've never understood why it's seen as so important to understand what the original authors of literature meant or intended. They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong. To me it seems like it would make far more sense to focus on seeking the best conclusions using the source material as inspiration, rather than treating the source material as an authority and seeking to understand exactly what they meant.
In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory, and at their worst when they try to impose authority.
Understanding the original context/culture in which the literature was produced can be very helpful (although I'm not saying it's 100% necessary).
One illustration is that of a traveler. If someone was traveling to another country with a drastically different culture than their own, they would be expected to make the effort to learn the customs and differences in that culture before they went. This would help them understand and experience things in a whole new way, gaining a broader perspective of the world than just their own ways of thinking. Essentially, taking the time to understand this other culture will be the difference between a "good" vs "bad" travel experience for them.
I believe it's similar with reading and trying to understand ancient texts. It's the difference between learning something new that can grow your perspective on the world, versus reading your own perspective into the text and simply reinforcing the ideas you already had.
> To me it seems like it would make far more sense to focus on seeking the best conclusions using the source material as inspiration, rather than treating the source material as an authority and seeking to understand exactly what they meant.
But then why would you need the source material at all? You can just come to conclusions about things without relying on any source text, if grounding interpretation in the source text is not critical.
In that case, literature (and criticism in general) become about the cleverness of the interpreter rather than anything about the art itself: the effect is to first devalue the art, then to devalue the study of art. To the extent that appreciating and studying art is useful to a society, ultimately this diminishes the culture. This is more or less what we've seen happen in the post-Deconstruction era.
Annotations add great value for works where the reader would otherwise miss cultural context (or can even reveal inside-jokes, as with The Annotated Alice). I wouldn't try to read James Joyce or Shakespeare without them. In the case of the Bible, there are books that rely heavily on well-known allegories, Aramaic puns, or just features of everyday daily life in the ancient middle-east that a modern reader wouldn't have internalized.
For many (not all) their holy books are not seen as inspiration but devine instructions. Not as fallible words authored by men but as devine revelation transcribed my men.
I totally understand that many would argue against that but if you are trying to understand the motivations for understanding the authors intent this explains why some do it.
> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.
I think this is the misunderstanding. The Christian position is that God is infallible, therefore the Bible is infallible, since God is its ultimate author.
Since that's the case, we want to understand it as well as we can. Any position I hold that contradicts Scripture is by definition wrong, therefore I want my views to match what is taught in Scripture exactly. I'll never get there perfectly because I'm a fallible sinner, but the closer the better.
That is definitely true. For example there is widely held doubt that Paul wrote 1 and 2 Timothy despite that being the claim in its opening words. The content of the cannon,the books which make up the Bible were horse traded around 400 AD by fallible human beings. Before that there was no accepted Bible. I have a strong Christian faith in which the Bible plays it's part, but it needs to be read thoughtfully.
Serious question: why even call yourself a Christian if you don't believe that God is powerful enough to guarantee that his Word will stand, be known, and is final and authoritative? If we can't believe that minimal fact, how can we believe that Christ died for our sins, that we will be resurrected bodily in glory, that the Lord was conceived by a virgin, or that God parted the Red Sea, or made the world in six days?
"The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever" (Is. 40:8).
I don't wish to get into a 2000 year old debate about who is a true Christian. We do better to unite than to fight.
I was merely confirming that it is not necessary to consider the Bible to be infallible for it to be valuable. I do not need to call myself a Christian any more than I need to call myself a human. I am one, and luckily you cannot take that away from me.
Personally I don't see how this comment is at all relevant. I assume OP posted the project here to show it off as a technical project, it just happens to be about a religious topic.
when it comes to historically significant texts, I like having the ability to cross reference editions, esp. with translated works. translator annotations and marginal information are usually where I derive the most value. would love to see an "annotated king James" that contains information about potential linguistic issues migrating to English, as well as notes about translational ambiguities etc
I don't see how you can justify throwing away the original intent of the author with that reasoning without that also justifying throwing away the work entirely.
Surely the intent of the author when they were writing the piece, and the piece itself are both worth considering when analyzing the text?
I find this position understandable, but I can't imagine holding it myself.
I think reducing the consideration of the author's intention is tempting, but in fact it is a mistake to forget the human (or supernatural, for religious texts) element. This type of information is inherently relevant to understanding most any conclusions based on the work.
I need to pay more attention to a meeting, but your response is genuinely appreciated. I'll note that I agree with you on works of fiction, but what about religious texts (which claim to be pure/divine) or non-fiction (which usually claims to represent the truth).
Imagine Eeyore telling you, "You're a real friend." If you heard him say that, it'd be obvious from his intonation and mannerisms that he was being sarcastic. However, simply reading the quote, the meaning is unclear, or seems opposite of what was intended. How do you seek the "best conclusions" without understanding intention, or the illocutionary force, of the speech act?
The necessity of interpretation to understand written texts is what led to the Protestant Reformation. Later, Francis Bacon applied interpretation beyond religious texts to the "Book of Nature", which was the precursor to the Scientific Revolution. The cognitive effect of written language is fascinating and completely frames modern ways of thinking. If you find this interesting, check out The World on Paper by David Olson.
The biggest issue with the Bible compared to similar ethics oriented literature is that it doesn't do a good job of providing explanations for why things are immoral. This makes it very difficult to correct the mistakes that the authors made and update them to the modern era.
The best example of this is probably the kosher rules in the Old Testament that banned shellfish. Those rules might have made a lot of sense back when they were first written (back when seafood was very risky due to poor refrigeration), but are probably not very useful now. The issue is that because the Bible doesn't explain that reasoning, it's not possible to easily update those rules to adapt to modern food safety techniques.
I'm not going to do this concept justice because it takes a while to get into this mindset but I'll try to share what I can.
Something people get out of religion is that not everything can be understood. I believe this to be intellectually true - whether because creation cannot understand the more complex creator, or because we simply evolved to understand what we need to survive but there's no reason to think we can see objective truth (see Kant's Critique of Pure reason)
Religion embodies this humility (recognition that I can't understand it all) To use your example, we follow kosher laws not because they make sense to us but because they are commandments of a higher power which we are too humble to know better than. The fact that some of these commandments also "make practical sense" almost undermines that point. Ie - just because pork is now USDA-inspected doesn't empower is to decide "oh we know better than G-d"
I have grown from an atheist to someone who tried to embody the above, but it works even if you treat it as a pure metaphor for recognizing that some things are beyond us.
The idea that a higher power would care if we ate shellfish, but is ok with us beating our slaves (as long as they don't die straight away), is really hard to rationalise.
The humble position, when faced with something you don't know, is to say "I don't know." Too often the religious position seems to be "I can't know, therefore I will believe something someone else has told me" which seems entirely non-humble to me.
> I've never understood why it's seen as so important to understand what the original authors of literature meant or intended.
How could you even begin to understand the text without knowing what they meant? Surely not by free association! Recall those ancient epics you've likely read in school. What were they? Translations. Someone rendered the original text into your language for you. To do that, they had to first understand the original text. To do that requires understanding the language(s) of the original text. To understand the language(s) of the original text, you need an adequate familiarity of the culture at the time. This is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish competently because of the breadth and depth of background knowledge required. It is incidentally why there are multiple competing translations of ancient texts (it is said that translations aren't truly possible).
Now consider again the knowledge you need to interpret text in its historical context. If you've just unearthed some text from an ancient civilization no one knows much of anything about, this is going to be damn near impossible and full of speculation even when you manage to produce a plausible translation. There's also the question of the status of the text: what is it supposed to be? In the case of the Bible, you need the continuous Tradition through which to interpret it. You need to interpret it synoptically or run the risk of making ad hoc judgements unhedged by other parts. (This is why Sola Scriptura fails; not only is it self-refuting, as in, nowhere in the Bible is this principle declared, not that this would lend any credence to the claim, but you lack the interpretive apparatus to interpret the text in the first place, leading to all sorts of weird claims and inferences. Not only that, but the Bible itself was compiled in the fourth century in light of this Tradition. How else would you establish the canon if not by drawing on the Tradition?)
> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.
Yeah? Check out the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The Catholic Church states that Holy Scripture is free from error[0]. So your view is not universally shared.
> In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory
What is your view of religion, of Christianity? Its purpose? What is this "inspiration" and what is it for? What does it inspire? If your answer is "to become a better person" or something of that sort, then we must ask: how so? Either some truth is being communicated which makes you better by virtue of knowing it as well as the change it effects in you, or whatever is being said is fraudulent and useless and ought to be discarded (put aside partial truths for the moment). And because Christianity concerns the ultimate things, it means that all of your life is oriented by it, and it means that it must help you with respect to your ultimate end, something you can fail at attaining.
As I have written elsewhere, everyone has a religion, so the question is "is it any good?", which is to say "is it true?", and not "do you live by one?". Man cannot do without religion because he cannot live without an orientation or a direction in life, he cannot live without an Ultimate, so much so that he will fill that void with all sorts of garbage. He needs to know at least the necessary part of the big picture and a way of living in accordance with it. You may find bits of pieces of truth scattered among the religions, valuable insofar as they contain the truth especially about ultimate things, but Man does not subsist on religious dabbling. And here the Catholic Church asserts clearly its claim to the fullness of truth.
> and at their worst when they try to impose authority.
This seems to misunderstand the purpose of authority. The purpose of authority is to safeguard teachings from corruption and manipulation and make them available over the centuries so you don't end up with a proliferation of confusion and error. Don't let the centuries of caricatures of the Big Ol' Mean Church fool you!
Usually originalism is used to defend some desired status quo, justifying persecution of some "other". Whether it's the Bible or the Constitution is largely irrelevant; the interpreters are the real gods here, not some bearded zombie carpenter skydaddy.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar, regardless of which side you're flaming or defending. It leads to extremely poor quality internet discussion (not to mention some of the nastiest) and that's what we're trying to avoid here.
I didn't say avoid discussion, I said avoid flamewar. You could start by dropping snark, name-calling, and cheap shots.
The idea that "the topic made me do it", i.e. that the appearance of some topic compels internet commenters to sink straightaway into internet dreck, is unconvincing. On HN, we want thoughtful, substantive, respectful conversation. Other users are doing it, so it's clearly doable.
In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory, and at their worst when they try to impose authority.