Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Where is the Holy Land? I can't figure it out.

I just got an offer from the Tea Party folks to learn biblical Hebrew so I can read god's word first hand. "Learn Biblical Hebrew online! Read the Bible first hand and deepen your understanding.", the Christian Zionists tell me. The teachers are from the "Holy Land". But isn't the "Holy Land" in Mecca?  Oh no, it's in the Punjab.  No wait, it's in Nepal isn't it? But surely it's in Japan.  No, I think it's in Utah.  But there's no way it's not in India. I'm perplexed.  Who's right.

What makes it hard for me to figure out is this god character, this supernatural being.  How come it chose to speak Hebrew when so few people spoke it compared to Chinese say?  It would have had a wider audience.

I wonder if the educated classes that translated the original myths in to English kept the original language.  Like when the biblical tract said something about how bad rich people were, I wonder if they tweaked the translation a bit.  Karl Kautsky wrote a very good book, The Foundations of Christianity.  He suggests that they might have if they were smart.

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