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Comment by gnaritas | Hacker News Reader

Of course the Bible was made up, it didn't write itself; it's a work of fiction by men, nothing more. Nor is there a lick of evidence to the contrary.

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Do you mean that because a book doesn't write itself, which is an impossible task, it can't be true? That seems to remove the possibility to know anything from a written text including science, history, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction.

I've heard it described as confusion between cause and agency. Just because you know how something happened doesn't explain that thing's purpose or that it doesn't have intent.

I may have been in the Toyota factory and even met the engineers who designed the cars. That doesn't mean I understand the full intent of Toyota's board of directors.

The Koran and Dianetics didn't write themselves either. Are they true? If not, why not?

Any written text can be either true or false, fiction and mythology have always been wildly popular. The bible, like all works of fiction, was made up by men.

> That seems to remove the possibility to know anything from a written text including science, history, autobiographies, and other forms of non-fiction.

Things aren't true because they're written, they're true because they can be verified as true; writing merely adds the possibility to pass on the knowledge required to verify a truth. Absent re-verification, nothing is true simply because someone wrote it down.

That's not the point here. The point is whether the Hebrew bible is simply a transcript of tradition and religious beliefs that were previously transmitted orally, or whether some people wrote it Hubbard-style, with the express intention to scam and defraud people. Since stylometry has shown us that it is a document written by many authors over a longer period of time, and since Judaism was very much a tribal religion then, the former is much more likely. Then, there's no point in deriding the Hebrew bible as "just a made-up thing", since it served an important socio-cultural function, so strong in fact that Judaism managed to survive as a religion and culture to this very day, while most other cultures and religions of the bronze and iron age have long been forgotten, or have been assimilated or superseded by others.

LOLZ

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