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Comment by _pfxa | Hacker News Reader

The bible, cover to cover: if reading western literature or philosophy produced in whatever year A.D., the bible is required reading for comprehending many the references and various rhetorical modes. I'm irreligious from a muslim background myself but I'm reading it now. Same goes for the qoran, my family is not a practicing muslim family and thus I never read it, but it's a part of the canon, must be read. I'm not sure if I would like to have read these earlier tho, as now I have the consciousness to not be fooled by the stuff in these books.

Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth is a very nice guide into mythology and what that and religion are. It's like a vaccine for any sort of fundamentalism or bigotry, if read with some accompanying knowledge of mythological traditions.

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I read a passage (Revelation 8) that could very well describe a nature catastrophe instead of godly will. Also other stuff like Job 26:10 ("He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.") which describes day/night boundary on earth quite well.

That made me think. What if there is other stuff that could actually be related to secular events and knowledge.

And so I started to read from the beginning. Genesis is very interesting actually. I noticed it is mostly inspired by earlier literature, like Arthasis, Gilgamesh and the like. Now I am totally into reading mesopotamia literature and origin stories all over the world. Maybe someday I am done with that and I can backtrack to advance further than Genesis in the bible. Time will tell.

So far it has certainly enlightened my view on early mankind.

edit: typo

Myth is science. It's how people transferred knowledge from generation to generation, and it's always based on observations of the world. Thing is though, in the ancient times they didn't have the access we started to have in the last centuries into the structure of things, so all they could do was to interpret that which they saw and that which they learned through earlier myths. Dismissing religion and myths as fairy tales because they are not relevant anymore is wrong, for one even fairy tales are, or were, tools for sharing knowledge along generations. Yes, we have better means of knowledge today, but we wouldn't have came here without religion and myths, they have been an important step in cognitive evolution of humankind. And still today important as part of our history and also a still-comtemporary sociological phaenomenon that directly affects us in every way.

Myth is certainly not science. Transmission of belief occurs through myths, not knowledge.

And belief is not necessarily orthogonal to knowledge. You can belief in something and it can still be knowledge.

eh, i sure as hell will dismiss a 8-bit processor for general computing nowadays though, despite it being state of the art not that long ago.

just because something had value before doesnt mean it still does.

Neither does it mean that it has no value anymore.

Taking your example "8-bit processors": it still has value. Even if it is only for learning purposes.

Equating myth and science will focus discussion on that statement. But the important part comes after that first statement:

Myth and religion are the giants that todays science is standing on.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -- Newton

Todays universities where born out of the church. I will just gonna quote wikipedia[1] here: "These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date at which they became true universities, although the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide."

Dismissing our past is certainly not the way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_university

I don't know how people can read it, for me it's a pain to read more than a page.

>the bible is required reading for comprehending many the references and various rhetorical modes

I'm sure there are modern book about rhetorics

Why is that? Some of the language isn't all that easy to get through but, taken as a piece of literary work, I don't find it that unreadable.

It's hard for me, feels like totally unrelated parts are patched together. Tons of contradiction and archaic views even on a single page. But I never read more than a page at a time I always put it back as something I should not waste my time with deciphering what they meant.

It's difficult if I take it as something I'm meant to believe. I always get that tug in my stomach.

It's interesting as a reflection of culture, of which religion takes a prominent part in much of history.

I see it like viewing the works of a renaissance artist. Perhaps not as brilliant but similar in that a lot of works have religious themes but your beliefs, what they may be, look past the religion to consider it as part of the work itself.

The English bibles are just unreadable, with all those archaisms. I have a New World Translation that a JW gave me and it seems more pleasant to read, but many say there are problems with opinionated translations. Mine is a CEI Bible, a modern translation in Italian. Tho if you're not into it, it'll be boring nevertheless.

I was referring to the contents of rhetorical modes (allegories, metaphors, etc.), not their definitions.

I felt the same. But if you want to understand the whole bible I would recommend The Bible Project : https://m.youtube.com/user/jointhebibleproject

I think the secular perspective about the bible, Quran, and other Abrahamic sacred texts, is far more interesting than the contents within. This is the perspective so rarely visited by athiests, agnostics, or religious folks.

Certainly, but it's nice to at least have read the corpus before learning what others think about them. It's a long read, but rewarding.

Is it really necessary to read it cover to cover? A lot of it seems quite drawn out, and there seems to be a lot of overlap, particularly between the four gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).

It depends on what you want to get out of it. My reading is a philological/historical one, I'm aiming to become a scholar of literature (I'm a humanities student with a passion for computing), and also I'm looking for literary prompts in it, so a deeper understanding is important for me. But if you just want to know what it's about, then you can peruse the book and rely on commentaries and recaps. But all in all it's about 2000 pages, which equals to 4-5 novels, and does not require a linear, uninterrupted reading, so I guess it's worth it. I'm still reading the old testament (1Sa), but AFAIK the gospels do overlap in the story but views and interpretations are different.

Those 4 gospels offer varying perspectives and are worth reading as well. They each offer something different and can be helpful when studying. For example, Luke's account offers insight as to what was going on during the time of Christ's birth(see Chapter 2, the decree from Caesar Augustus) while Matthew starts off with the genealogy of Christ. So I believe that reading cover to cover is worth it.

Can you recommend a good English translation of the Qoran if it exists? I've asked Muslim friends but they seem adamant that it must be read in Arabic or, at least, only know of the Arabic text.

Also, do you know of a good annotation of it which provides context to the text and provides information on how passages are interpreted by at least one school of thought?

There is this one http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp, which offers seven parallel translations of the Qoran.

I can't unfortunately, but many translations exist, some from academical background. I don't think it must be read in Arabic, especially if the reading is a secular one.

edit: Saheeh international seems to be a nice translation with heavy annotations, there are pdfs online. I myself will consider this one for my readings.

You can read this one from Muhammad Asad, it's very good. http://muhammad-asad.com/Message-of-Quran.pdf

> I've asked Muslim friends but they seem adamant that it must be read in Arabic

Not sure if these are practicing Muslims but that's simply wrong.

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