My Antichrist Lecture
astralcodexten.com
astralcodexten.com
If the rest of his etymological analyses are on par, they can't be taken seriously.
Unless the author wanted to demostrate that by playing with words one can prove anything.
I think that roughly is what Scott is going for here. It's not one of his more interesting pieces, I ended up skipping the latter half, but my understanding is he's angling to show that given some fuzzy descriptor, with enough imagination and wordplay you can take an idea pretty far. He's written before about esoteric numerology and gematria, I think it's just something he finds fascinating, from a secular POV.
This is Scott's sense of humor, it's not meant to be taken seriously.
not to be facetious but what hes doing is what most of the popular religions do - come up with your own "interpretation" or "reading" of the text. how popular would any major religion be if it was stuck with its original BCE values, ethics and beliefs? They would be dead. They must change with the times.
Why is any "reading" of the bible more valid than the next? This guy is a pastor
If you're asking earnestly, I'd imagine the "validity" of a reading of the bible to be judged the same way we judge interpretations of other books or documents with levels of ambiguity.
There have been innumerable pastors over millennia who've preached their own perspective on the book; your intuition's correct that the more popular readings survive and the less popular ones do not. If Scott wanted to say his unique interpretation makes him a pastor, that seems reasonable to me. He wouldn't be the first, nor the last.
They’re all dead, of course. Hmm.